This past year I finally made a big leap in my career and joined on of
the leading companies in this the software industry, it's been one of my
lifelong dream to join such a company and now it happened.
It's been quite a journey and I noticed a lot of things so far that I would
have never imagined.
Firstly, the scale of things is something that completely blows my mind. I
never thought that I would be part of tens of teams, just in my local division
in geographical region. Everything is massive and scattered around the globe
with hundreds of teams out there. And getting so many teams to work together is
really a challenge, especially making sure that they don't constantly reinvent
the wheel.
Or another very challenging aspect is the fact that no team is actually
alone and depends on the work of many others teams. Here I noticed several
skills that are really useful which I never though of before. One of the skills
is getting the right information and reaching the right contact to offer you
the information, technology or tool that you need. It's quite a skill to
navigate such a massive company and get to the right person that you need. And
something really important, I think you can't really advance without this
skill. Another skill is something related to this, and is just general
networking and building relationships in the company. Honestly I am a bit
lacking in these skills and I need to improve them. And these are just one of
the basic skills here. A true master should be able to also influence people and
how things are done in such a company.
One more aspect that I noticed here, is the fact that quick thinkers seem to
have a great advantage here. A lot of times you can get things the way you want
to do if you are quick enough to show and sell your ideas. Or at least if you
prepare ahead of time a bit and you have a clear picture of your ideas inside
your mind. Here comes in my mind a quote from the Art of War, "Every
battle is won before it is fought". It is kind of true.
Another thing related to being a massive company, with probably thousands of teams, a lot of things seem to happen all at once which can be hard to manage in the beginning and might even seem really overwhelming. It's another skill to start to follow so many threads going on at once in other parts of the company that are related to your daily job. It also requires you to know how to filter the key relevant information from the entire stream of information that you constantly get bombarded with. So yeah, keeping up to date with everything.
Another thing that I noticed as I embarked on this journey, is the fact that
somehow it brought out a bit the kid inside me. I think the simple fact that it
was a long time wish, caused be to lose a bit of my logical and adult mind and
so a bit of stupid things that normally I wouldn't have done. It was way more
critical of me than I usually am because I felt the need to impress everyone
and I may have pushed myself a bit too hard. I felt a bit insufficient I think
which triggered this. And because I was stressed out with this, I made other kind
of mistakes, like having some trouble acknowledging when I was wrong or over analysing
things. I think it was better if I kept my cool and calm, and didn't think too
much about anything. It was a bit too easy to get carried away by my emotions.
The processes seemed much more mature at such a company and seem more
refined. Even more basic things like HR there are well defined processes put in
place. I didn't think too much of diagrams so far in my career but they are
really useful in such an environment. Or writing technical documents in general
or technical design proposals. The better you are at these things, the more you
can influence others and get your ideas across. To be honest I was pretty rusty
at such skills and I did have a bit of trouble polishing them. I think I am
still not done with them. As an employee you have an entire massive platform at
your disposal full of things to take advantage of. I don't think I even started
to scratch the surface here.
In the end, I think I just have scratched the surface and things are a lot
more complicated than what I have noticed so far.
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