Kore was my first job out of college. Technically KonyLabs was my first job, but within a month of me joining KonyLabs they spun off their RnD division as Kore and I joined Kore. I worked as a developer there, for around 1.5 years before joining CouponDunia as a PM.

I create a shame list and a learnings doc whenever I join a new company. I keep adding my mistakes/screwups to the shame list and then my learnings from them to my learnings doc. For obvious reasons, I can’t share every item, but I will try to share as many as I can.

  • I learned very late how to work together properly with my front-end devs. Before a release, my iOS developer would be dumbfounded about something not working, would come to me, and then we would realize that he is expecting a response in strings while I would return an array. We never had any kick-off meetings. People would do whatever the fuck they wanted. It was chaos. My zeal when it comes to writing specs: be it product or tech comes from my experience at my first job.

  • I never took my first job seriously. I would just spend 8 hours, do the bare minimum, and then leave so that I could come home and read TechCrunch blog posts instead. I am glad I worked as a developer though. It is far harder to earn the respect of devs if you have not coded in the past. It is also easier to arrive at timelines knowing that devs can’t treat you like some tech-illiterate person.

  • Talking about tech illiterate, my project manager (yes, I meant project manager and not product) did not have much understanding of how product development worked. He came from a services background. I remember a project where I was working on the backend for a profile service. Every day I would come to the standup and say shit like “yeah, yesterday I wrote the API to fetch name from the database and return it”. The next day it was “today I worked on address”. It was a simple GET call to return all of these fields together. I just wasted time because I could. And the TL was my friend. So he did not call me out. I am not proud of who I was back then. This is also the reason I think the owner of delivery of a feature (be it the EM, PgM, PM or a Project Manager) should understand tech.

  • I did not pay any attention to Dev ops. My only job was to push my changes to a local branch. My TL would do the rest. I honestly learned how AWS works 3 years back when I was working on a side project.

  • Even if something was broken I used to say fuck it and go home to sleep. I did not understand accountability. Also, the company was more worried about people spending X hours a day than trying to get more output. So I did not bother about my output. I just measured my working hours.

  • If I wished I could write a new CRUD API in a day. You just had to copy-paste shit and change a few things. But I would ask for a crazy timeline like a week. I feel bad for my project manager who did not know any better.

Related read: