11 years of learning and still counting..

An Idle mind is a devils workshop – the saying goes. But most often it’s this idle mind which ends up creating the best of innovations and techniques to make a process faster. But if you take your “Work as Fun” and try to reenergize your brains on those idle days you end up kindling some of your grey cells. In every firm I worked people thought or believed I had an eye for optimizations – Probably because “Work” has been my first wife (which my wife also believes so) but the intriguing fact was that every day I wake up in the morning and think what can I do best for my firm and what’s the learning in store for me today.

Yes, no day goes without learning’s. In my early years of my career and with an expertise (I thought I was very good) of 2.5 years (8 years back) I thought I was too good for the industry in India. Natural & Adabas was considered a niche skill and even more there were only a handful of IT companies in India which had projects and even more clients which were running in Natural & Adabas Skills.  So I ended up in another company and got them the same client I had been associated with in my previous organization and trained a good load of guys in the second organization and henceforth in my career.  Not that my previous organization lost the project but the client was huge and there were now multiple IT companies vying for the same. Now industry is different every IT company has atleast 2 big clients who has Natural & Adabas as their mainframe environment and there are more players in the market vying for the expertise roles.

Armed with expertise from my first organization and ego (I thought I was the best!!) I decided to venture into the world of Natural & Adabas in my second organization. Well the world came crashing down on me when I started interacting with the client, I realized by now that I knew only 10% of what the world knew on the technology. The moment you stop learning that very moment your growth stops – that was the hard realization the second organization gave me. I trained a lot of people, but I never ventured out of comfort area and experimented or try to learn new features that came with new releases. Yeah I started with Natural 3.1.4 and gone till Natural 4.2.7 till date. But now I know of people who worked in 2.2.1/2.2.6/2.2.8 and the drawbacks and features which are enhanced by new versions of Natural.

The growth factor (it was not growth but it was the stopped learning which made me stagnant) made me realize that I need to shift again, or else I will be stuck in oblivion for a long time before I know that the people whom I trained are far ahead of me than where my career path is. And I was in my third organization (another IT company) with some more knowledge gained from second one (a 5% increase), the circle to start again. But the difference was I was learning – from expertise in the best of industry and people who have designed systems smartly trying to use the best of technology. That’s when it dawned on me that it was never growth or monetary benefits or monotonousness which was causing me to shift organizations – the smart realization that I wanted to take independent decisions and do what I like to do most – reengineering and doing optimizations that I could bring down some Critical path time or save on MIPS or save on Adabas commands, not because it helps the organizations meet its SLA or reduce mainframe cost but to the sheer factor that it brings an achievement in me.

And I waited for the call. It came after 4.5 years in my career and 3 jobs. The moment I attended the interview I knew I need to get into this organization (my first Ibank and first non-IT organization) and knew that I would at last get to a decision making position. I had a good manager in UK and a good counterpart (Brian Conway of SSS). I learned a lot on Natural & Adabas – more than I learned in the first 4.5 years in my career. I exactly knew where/how/what to look and change. Brian & I started optimizing the systems. Brian C was with 20 years of experience in Natural & Adabas and has worked with punch cards of coding and compiling!!! I knew I was with the best people in the industry and learned a lot more. We did a lot of optimizations – even cutting our main batch stream by half! It was like an opportunity galore in the system – everywhere we looked we knew what exactly was wrong and how it is to be corrected. In our side of the world we have a saying – it’s like an Elephant running amuck in the sugarcane field (err, it doesn’t sound good in English but just means that there was opportunity everywhere and we crushed them like hell and blind)

Soon my dreams became a reality – decision making was happening and I was enjoying what I was doing and more over I was developing to be a good programmer writing the most efficient code and optimizing any code that I had to change and more importantly I never stopped learning. High volumes were no longer an issue nor cost on MIPS (we may have caused IBM a run for their money because we optimized the system very well ;-) on mainframe MIPS reduction. Early 2008 crisis brought a lot of likeminded force together for the organization which was an overwhelming success.

The global meltdown in 2008 came crashing down on the reality and I took up another job at another Ibank in the same technology in the same role. But the system was far more advanced than my previous organization and my manager and counterparts were really good (best in the industry would be an understatement). I was doubtful if I would be able to do justice to the role, or meet management expectation or if I would be able to do any optimizations at all! But my forte was reengineering and optimizations and I couldn’t let an advanced system hinder it. Someone had said – if anything can go wrong it will, I slightly changed it – if anything is going wrong, then it can be found.

And there we started the journey ………