Life @ Persistent

When I started this piece of writing, I thought ‘Life after engineering’ as the title. But then I realized that bulk of the events in last year or so have taken place in Persistent itself. So decided that ‘Life @ Persistent’ would be an apt title.

This is 6th Jan 2007. I just completed a year and a half at Persistent. Since I joined in July 05, it has been a wonderful journey. Very different from some 18 years that I had spent in various schools and colleges. I can split it into three parts – the initial phase, an eventful year in my team and my immediate future.

Getting inducted in Persistent along with other 200 freshers from all over India was a bit nervous experience. All of them were brilliant in varying degrees. My training batch consisted of 20 people and for some reason or the other every one of them appeared superior to me. Throughout my training period, I struggled to keep pace with them. I had started to realize that I have some serious tasks in hand – to start believing in myself, to raise the bar significantly, to reinforce faith in my abilities which I had hardly done during my college days.

Once my training was over, it was time to meet a person who would act as my mentor for a mini project before I could have joined any real project. The person whom I met is a real genius with excellent technical skills, amazing communication skills and an awe-inspiring personality. Fortunately, I later ended up being in the project of which he is Project Manager.

When I joined his project ‘Corbis’, I again realized that I am going to be among people who are very proficient technically. But being amid people with great caliber did help me a lot. When people around you are such highly capable, you first try to match them. If you do that successfully, you strive to excel them. I did exactly the same. With utmost determination, dedication and sincerity I have been able to come close to at least match them if not excel them. I am extremely fortunate to be a part of such amazing team where I don’t have any colleagues but only friends. Yes ... regarding them as colleague would insult the bonding that we all share.

I honestly feel that I have started to rediscover myself as an effect of being in this team. Had I shown the same amount of dedication and seriousness during my engineering days, my mark sheets could have had a bit more weight. However, today I can proudly say that I have left behind the initial nervousness that I went through during my training and I have done well over the last year; probably better than many of the 200 people that joined with me.

The work assigned to me in this team, the responsibility that I have been given, the client calls that I participate in; around 100 mails that I have written to clients so far have indeed helped in building confidence and self belief. Also, it feels really great to see the stuff that you had developed live in action on some of the websites that people in america and europe use.

Only in the last week we had a release. Now not only I will be contributing but sort of leading the biggest feature in the next release of the product. I will be working with 3-4 people from the team. This feature is going to be a hell lot of work and a huge amount of responsibility. I am looking forward to 3 exciting months of work.

I have learnt many things in the past year and hope to get better and better in coming future. Still a lot catching is left to be done and I just hope that the learning curve should never end. I am happy with where I stand today but certainly not complacent.

- Mandar Kulkarni.