23rd Floor To Basement. Fall or Transition!!

Biggest trend amongst youth today is STARTUP. Either owning one or working in it, has become a mandate. It is a very important item of our bucket list.

To many people , this Startup Culture(yes, it has become a culture now), seems attractive. To some, it is repulsive. Nevertheless, everyone has an opinion about it.

I, like many other IT professionals, got bored of my 4 year old job in an MNC (huge MNC I would say), and joined a startup whose total age was less than my work experience.

Many people(read ‘all people’), around me were against this decision because at the same time I had an option to join another tech giant. But I being a ‘Dew’ drinker, firmly believed in “darr k aage jeet hai” (Translation: There is victory beyond fear) and thereby joined the startup.

While starting this new job,I had an array of varied emotions like excitement, determination, fear, joy and what not. To be honest, these feelings were very similar to the ones I had when I first entered my new house after wedding, only difference being , this time they were way more intense.

Talking about my new company, we had an office in the basement of a lavish house. Cool right ? Yeah. One enters the office and is welcomed by a pool table, video games and two lazy boy chairs. Uber cool !!!! Coming to work, whole new product creation from scratch. Every developer’s dream. Awesome !! Best Decision of my life.

When the world is this perfect, entropy strikes in. In my case, it was the top management. They lacked or rather were devoid of any knowledge about technicalities of building a website or any tech project whatsoever. They were very fussy about timings, time spent at desk, breaks taken and things like that. Target dates were unrealistic to say the least.

I was shocked. I felt cheated. All this was completely against the ‘Startup Culture’ that I have been listening about.

When I used to think about my old MNC’s ‘boring’ job, I found it way cooler. No restrictions of any kind and hence the focus was only on work and its quality. And they provided millions of benefits like most other established firms. Wow!! This fits completely under the heading ‘Startup Culture’.

This is when I realized, all startups are not the same and so are not all the MNCs. Instead of going after the name and type of company, we should focus on what is important for us and will the company be able to provide that to us.

The old saying, “Not judging the book by its cover”, works very well in here. ‘No judgement’, should be the key.

Never hesitate to take a step towards change. It is always worth it. “Darr k aage jeet hoti hi hai” (Translation: There is always victory beyond fear). Only thing is, at times we directly land at the victory and at times we take a scenic route. In the second case, which is way more common, instead of cribbing about how cumbersome the journey is, we should enjoy the experience.

My change from 23rd floor to basement turned out to be an interesting ‘fall’ which taught me a lot about walking up or down the floors. More than anything, it made me fearless.

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