Staying in the comfort zone is the worst we can do to our careers and hence I ensure I switch to an unfamiliar domain that makes me feel like an idiot. Here’s my journey 👇
2015: At The D. E. Shaw Group I was writing Web Scrappers - easy and comfortable, hence switched.
2015: Joined Practo as Platform Engineer in their DevOps/Platform team with no idea about infra, scaling, or engineering productivity; felt like an idiot but worked hard to understand the domain.
2016: Joined Amazon in a team that Cold Tiered the data using MapReduce; had no idea about Big Data, felt like an idiot, but worked hard to get things done.
2018: Joined Unacademy, and rebuilt their Search; again a domain I was totally unfamiliar with, but over time led a small team and built few systems in the information retrieval space.
2022: Joined Google, and right now part of a team that optimizes Apache Spark. Feeling like an idiot, again; and as history suggests, working hard will definitely make me a better engineer.
For folks early in their career: Work hard, get out of your comfort zone, challenge yourself, and become a better engineer, or if I may say, an #AsliEngineer.