30th of April marked my last working day at Kartbites, where I landed after getting the first job of my life as Software Engineer (Backend), while I was in third year of pursuing engineering in computer science and engineering.
Sometime around August of 2017, I was pretty sad one night, because campus placements were going on but I was not able to sit for most of the interviews because of low grades. Also, that particular day there was a recruitment drive for a role which I felt I could do very well because I had just done internship in the same domain at hasura after doing well in a coding course (IMAD) but alas, my grades didn’t meet the requirements. Although, I had passion for programming, hardware hacking and all the geeky stuffs from the very childhood, but in campus placements all that matters is fucking GRADES!
It was late that very night when I received a message on LinkedIn from a person named Akshay Dua, regarding job opportunity at Multitech (later renamed Kartbites). The job description was very impressive and hence I replied instantly that “I’m interested!”. Soon we followed up that night and he invited me for a quick interview on Google Hangouts. It went very smooth and he mostly enquired about my past experiences and what made me like Computer Science in general and I totally liked the conversation. I couldn’t sleep the entire night because I had a gut feeling that I’ve just got the first job of my life, and later it indeed turned out to be true after another round of interview with a person named Indra Dutt.
I started working in the month of October,2017. When I started, I realized how less my knowledge was, but luckily Akshay taught me everything from scratch! I still remember on the first day he taught us about Regular expressions, and the entire day and few more, we just installed Arch Linux on the new laptops, which taught as a lot about Computer Architecture. I will always cherish joining Kartbites and meeting Akshay as one of the most significant event of my life! I’m truly blessed to have a mentor like him who is so knowledgeable yet so down to earth, with whom I shared almost everything be it professional or personal, and he always was there to listen to and give advice. I feel, what I learnt in Kartbites I didn’t learn in 4 years of my b.tech. Being in an early stage startups can be life changing if you truly want to become a good software developer. It gives the golden opportunities to explore, make important decisions and most importantly to try,fail and then learn! You can build the product from scratch which makes you learn the process of development end to end, this aspect I believe is very important! Hence, I would suggest this to a fresher –> When starting career, choose mentor/work and not brand name. Small startups can provide this, not MNCs!
Also, I should discuss about some hardships I faced. If you work remote then at times you might feel lonely. This is excruciating as you will see your friends and classmates enjoy at weekends while you will either be with you family or alone. So it is very important that you know this aspect and make apt decision for yourself as to how you can deal with it. How I dealt with it is, I travelled often, spent more family time, bike rides (oh I bought my first time with my salary!) and played/exercised a lot! Another issue you might face is that, you won’t always be spoon-fed with guidelines. You need to be a self learner, which again, returns you with the fruit of awesome fundamental understanding. Also, the time saved while not having to travel to office, can be utilized to learn more and more!
To conclude, Kartbites gave me the best start to my career that I could ever dream of! Like all the good things, my tenure at Kartbites also has come to an end and it’s time to bid farewell. Hasta la vista :)