Looper

My 1 year of learnings from work place

  1. A workplace without micro managing is where you thrive and where you innovate, creative, balance, and heal. Making worst timelines, being idle for months, and suddenly fast forwarding work is the worst thing I have ever experienced. Asking things a manager can do herself, the tasks which take often 5 to 10 mins, is just stupidity. Also not giving margin deadlines at all. They delay the process of notifying an issue, and they wanted the solution in just hours. It's more like keeping a pillow on your face and pressing hard while sleeping. That's the emotion it carries after all.

  2. Working with a company that have full of managers, and all they do is outsourcing their work to service based companies or making their employees pay roll to third party. This is the worst position to be, because you are dealing with people who don't innovate or novel but just wanted to end things up. They stick to that same company, build an empire of employees sticking there itself, and they just start inner politics to whom to hire, they are very stubborn with what should happen, giving permissions, access, or anything regarding the ownership. The stagnation of technology, working methodologies, timeline delays are out of this world. I am surprised that not even my college projects have delayed or idle for this long.

  3. Most of the problems, errors, or stagnations are due to the source of the solution point. This is one of the key learning for me. Because this just compounds your working times, processes, methodologies, efficiency, and much more.

I have written similar to this way beyond actually here you go: https://medium.com/@phanindra_sai27/the-impact-of-system-design-tech-stack-and-tools-on-workplace-productivity-98711db2524d

So basically when you start a company, you follow few stuff, and from all of them, the most important stuff is how you make your company SOPs work & Hierarchy. How you define them, how you make them work for you, and this impacts your companies, mission, vision, and values to the core.

  1. System Design: So if you are tech first, then how you structure your agile development and what tech stacks, tools, and pricing systems and cloud you choose is very important, you should not get stuck in a loop forward in future which is not an optimal solution for you in terms of money, traffic, optimization, or time. So you keep things under your own ownership as much as you can. Keeping chances for easy pivots, transfers with easy progress that you can scale your future easily in the same setup you are standing, or else you can easily upgrade, and there are no or not many serious bottleneck.

  2. Data Capture: What data you capture from consumer usage and more is very much important after all, because in not tech first companies, this is the main issue, as in an initial stage they commit to this operations with an outsourcing company, and as the company is not tech first, you just don't consider this domain of leverage and just keep on dragging the CTA. The problem is data capturing is history capturing, and until you do not take an action around it, you are just collecting garbage there. As initially tech seems useless, you focus on your product, sales, business strategy, and more. But your competition squeezing you with technology from behind.

  3. Not having Clear SOP for Numerous Tasks: There comes a moment, where a high Manager wants something to be completed, and all they know how to proceed with is nothing. I had a scenario where a dashboard which I am making have a specific need from business team to have a column which is a primary key by which we lookup to other tables. As the column is not present, I went on to business team to discuss, then data pipeline team, then cloud team, then SAP source team, and then we go to know that column is never enabled to capture at all. All this went on for more like 2 to 3 months to just figure out that column is not present and not been captured in the source point of the SAP as well. The simplest way is to have an SOP or documentation of this kind of scenarios from previous and to really care about their craft and process. Every time, for every problem, this loop continues. And I am talking about a 100 years legacy motorcycle brand and more than 30 years Indian operations from Head quarters office.

  4. Not being around same energy people: I am obviously large minded. I know many domains and how they work end to end exactly and details of them often. But the company I work for do not have many multi skilled or diverse minded people. I often manifested to have great discussions on Tech, startups, strategy & how companies are built, and all I got is nothing. Also it's me as well expecting something great & diverse minded people in a large Org is completely my mistake.

  5. Not working under detail oriented managers: In the hierarchy of companies, if the person next below you or above you did not know how you complete your work in detail, then it's a complete mess, and I don't think you are under a reasonable manager at all. Because this will never make them know the complexity, estimated timeline, delivery date, or not even explain then the blockers or bottlenecks which will delay the timeline further. If they can't help you with some guidance or mentorship around tools, process, methodology, either theoretical or execution, often your work experience will be fucked up.