Maitri Patel
11 October, 2018

Count on your Technolust:
An engineer’s search for intellectual freedom

“We are young and it’s going to be a constant curve of learning,” is a quote she passed on to me from her favorite author Don Brown. I came across my Interviewee, Kajal Patel, in Boston where I went to visit a friend and she happened to be the perfect person I found for my work. She completed her education in the computing field and works as a Computer Scientists since almost six years. Throughout this interview, I got a comprehensive exposure of how I would design my future to look like. Right from the starting, we had a kind of common ground established regarding the place we belong from, India. It is not merely the competition that drives her to build a career in the United States, but also the greater intellectual freedom and the modern technological facilities in computing.

Kajal is a charismatic, industrious person working as a Front End Developer at Marlabs in Piscataway, New Jersey. She completed her high school, pursued her Bachelor’s in Information Technology from India and transferred to the United States for her Master from Stevens Institute of Technology in Computer Science. She lives in Salt Lake City and serves her current client, Fidelity Investments, as a User Interface Developer. Also, she got an opportunity to do work-from-home as she is on a project in Boston. So as you can see, she has been to quite a few places. That explains her interest in traveling and landscaping. Other than that she also likes to play guitar and is a thorough badminton player. About her field, she always had a strong inclination towards computers and therefore, she loves designing and developing in computer science.

Kajal never worked before moving to the United States. Her first job was on-campus as Graduate Assistant where she had to maintain student and technical websites. When asked about the reason for not working earlier, I firmly agree with her principle of building strong base by giving enough concentration to undergraduate education first and then set foot in the corporate world with liable qualifications.

About her job distinction, she still works in the same firm but had her responsibilities expanded to the accountable extent. In the beginning, she mostly had to work with designing and testing websites but now, she is in the authorization of creating and developing them. While going through the career path, I got a chance to ask her one of my main concerns regarding showing work experience during any job application. Like many of us, she faced the same issue of having no experience at the time of first job application. As an advice, she strongly recommends to get summer internships in college or outside because it is the only place which teaches you everything from scratch without asking for experience. This was very helpful to me for sorting out the future actions that I need to take in order to build a solid career.

Kajal’s typical day starts with a stand-up meeting with her colleagues: four developers, one Quality Analyst, two Data Analysts and Manager. Each of them has to discuss three questions regarding what were their tasks yesterday, what are they planning to work on today and any obstacles blocking their work. Meeting hardly takes 10-15 minutes and then they return to their desks for allocated tasks. Their tasks comprise of subdivision of sprint and stories, which in simpler words is a time period of 2 weeks and a pile of small tasks called stories to complete.

So, the question now is where does their work come from? They attend a sprint-planning meeting where they choose a small chunk of work from the big cloud and then the manager assigns stories to work on. Towards the sprint-end referred to as the retrospective, they discuss what went good and what they can improve in the next sprint. Isn’t this how our life works basically? When I was too blank to respond to this heavy technical terms, for my ease, she made a wonderful connection between how business ideologies coincide with conventional life principles.

Communication is a foremost necessary part of any job. Kajal, mostly involved in coding, doesn’t have to do much communication with any customers. Within the team, they use skype business chat window and for formal interaction with the clients, she uses outlook. Her position at most requires 10-15 back-end email conversations per day with her manager and developer team.

There are not much hardware tools required for the developers as they have to code on computers. But software like IDE for syntax correction, Slush tool for designing template codes and Jira as project management tool, are some basic advantageous tools.

During her journey, there was one thing which definitely took her by surprise. She has just entered within the firm for hardly a month when her team leader and two senior developers left the company. Her other two colleagues were also two months experienced with the coding system. There was no one in the authorization of decision-making within her team. That’s when she felt pressurized to think beyond the boundaries and manage everything at once. But she addresses it as a “healthy pressure” as it trained her to perform complex roles. I think she manages her work pressure in a pretty smart way by sidestepping the drama and staying positive.

There was a bit of harsh struggle involved in finding her first job. One of the Kajal’s biggest mistakes which she considers is her fast decision making mentality. She was so rushing to complete the degree that she didn’t spend much time after any internships or events/programs during her college life which would have helped her with her resume. She strongly recommended me to participate outside the campus world as an individual to explore things that could make me look as a multi-faceted computer scientist. She advised me to opt for certification courses which regardless of my major, can provide me with a reliable proof of my varied knowledge.

This interview session with her was an eye-opener for me. I came to a realization of setting my goals in a properly organized chronology which won’t make me regret having wasted my time in college doing nothing but giving exams. She had been very frank and elaborative to share her life story of moving to a completely alien country for carving a career. Now, as she is fully satisfied with the kind of technological exposure she got, she has no regrets with her decisions and heartily encourages me for being on a right track.