I always knew I was going to work in Tech.
Sure, there were times when I wanted to be a Physicist, or when I was seriously considering becoming a pro Dota2/CS:GO player. But a career in tech was always the most likely outcome.
Fast forward many years, I found myself at Design school.
Learning design was great but it immensely bothered me that my designs were always stuck within an artboard.
Interface Design is about solving problems with interfaces as the medium. But to me, that didn’t mean much if those interfaces didn’t eventually get built.
What is the point of this time-tracker app that is designed to help you track time more efficiently if it only stays within a Figma file and I cannot actually use it to track something in real life?
Over 4 years, I did try to learn to code. And I got partially there but never enough to bring my own ideas to life. It didn’t help that most of my ideas were too silly to convince someone else to build them.
I was slightly disillusioned with design during this period.
My first job out of college was at Infosys. All I wanted was to ship something, to see my designs brought to life. I figured going to a company with tens of thousands of engineers would be a surefire way of ensuring that.
Haha. Little did I know.
I quit a year and 4 months later because nothing I designed ever got shipped while I was there. I worked on a lot of designs but their shipping-date was always on the horizon and like a true horizon as I approached it, it moved further away. At some point, I felt like I had waited enough. (They eventually released 2+ yrs later)
I left because I wanted to take matters into my own hands. If no one else was going to build my ideas, why not just do it myself. There was no scarcity of ideas in my head.
I settled on wanting to build a test-taking android app that I wished younger-me could’ve had when he was in high school preparing for competitive exams.
Except I had never coded anything (of substance) before.
I sought guidance and met with a head of engineering at a design consultancy in Bangalore. He didn’t dissuade me but he tried to explain the folly of my ways. He said what I was trying to build was complex and it would take a good engineering team a lot of time to get it right.
I took heed of his advice and decided to build something much smaller in scope before I tackled what I really wanted to do. This smaller scoped project was called ‘BrowseTweets’. It was a better tweet browser.
I thought it would take me 3 weeks.
It took me 3 months.
But I built it and IT WORKED. It was a working piece of software that I could use to do the task that it was designed to do.
I was (am) immensely proud of it but I also realised a few things —
There is a big gap in the quality of designs I wanted to be producing and the designs I was producing. I realised that I could not produce quality designs at the time.
This Engineering thing, is hard and time-consuming. I don’t know how Zuckerberg built Facebook over a semester but I’m not him. It was too early for me to be a solo-developer/designer and I couldn’t see a positive pathway forward.
I needed to learn how Design was done and I needed people to learn from. A team, a mentor.
I applied to jobs and found my way into Flipkart.
I wrap that job search up in a sentence but it wasn’t without drama. It never is a dull day in my life, but that’s a story for another day.
Flipkart was a coveted place to work at when I was in College. I knew it had hundreds of designers and I was happy I was finally going to be able to learn from others and get the feedback I needed to improve quickly.
Except.
The team I joined was called Flipkart Wholesale, and I was the first (and only) designer in that team. Due to some internal team structure composition, I didn’t really have a design team to fall back on or even a design manager.
Eek.
I was at Flipkart for only 10 months but in that short time, I shipped A LOT.
In my first 6 months there, I did more than I did in the 16 months at my previous job. And in the next 4 months after that, I did even more.
I designed so much of their new consumer app. But the highlight was designing software for an entire warehouse that required screens numbering into the mid triple digits.
I had never worked harder in my life and by the end of my term there, I had had my fill of shipping things.
Why then, did I decide to leave?
Again, more realisations —
It wasn’t satisfying enough for me to simply ship software. I wanted to ship quality software. And that wasn’t the case here. We were a scrappy team within the company and quality took a firm backseat.
I was designing software for unsophisticated smartphone users and I personally didn’t enjoy it. I wanted freedom to do more than the most basic thing in my interfaces.
Not having a design team to fall back on wasn’t a great for an early career designer like me. I often felt helpless because I didn’t know how to pushback against feedback from my Engineering/Product counterparts.
I was burnt out.
I grew a lot as a designer in those 10 months but I was extremely unhappy by the end of it. And I quit because I took Mrs Maisel’s mother’s words to heart — “I was unhappy and I didn’t want to be unhappy anymore.”
As always, I didn’t have another job lined up but this time I wanted to take it slower. I had enough runway to last me a couple of (frugal) years and I wanted to give myself enough time to explore.
I didn’t have a specific idea I wanted to bring to life, I just knew I wanted to make software and have fun again.
I did just that. Over the next 7 months —
I ported over a government science textbook to the web because I was apalled at the way it was currently being accessed and felt like students deserved better. I built a browsable wardrobe for myself. I made a tool to help me obsessively read an author’s entire writing collection. A made a way to tweet without opening twitter. Found out who the most popular person following me on Twitter was. Given two Twitter users, a script to generate a webpage of tweets that they have in common….
The highlight of this period was Solve Irodov. It was a web-version of a soviet-era Physics problem book that people could purchase.
This period was the most creative of my life. My coding skills finally improved to a point where I could take an idea and bring it life.
It was a powerful feeling.
Again, more realisations —
Importance of a team. Solve Irodov could’ve taken me half the amount of time if I was working with another equally capable person. And I would’ve learned twice as fast that this idea won’t make me any money.
Importance of building something people actually want. I enjoyed creating software that only I wanted but… it wasn’t as satisfying as creating something other people used.
Some soul searching later, it was job-hunting season again!
A short job hunt later, I found myself at Quizizz.
I’ve been here for slightly over a year and I love it. It is the best job I’ve had.
I ship stuff on a regular basis.
I work on challenging problems
I sometimes get to be a hybrid design/pm
The devs are great to work with and extremely flexible
The problem Quizizz solves is meaningful to me
Our customers love us
Most importantly, I’m happy.
My biggest gripe at the moment is that my craft isn’t there yet. I’ve gotten better since my BrowseTweet days but I’m not there yet.
My designs mostly work. They achieve the goals they set out to. But they almost never evoke a ‘wow’. Not from me, not from others. I want my work to evoke a ‘wow’ like how seeing the output of some designers I admire does for me. Their work is always of the highest quality and mine isn’t.
Whenever I think of work that I’m most proud of, I reach for the outcomes the project achieved. At some point, I would like to reach for a project where I’m proud of the craft instead.
Committing to improve at something is scary but this is a no-brainer. (Massively) Improving at my craft will unlock the next level for me and I can’t think of a reason to wait to do that.
Putting this out there to see if I still feel the same way at the end of 2023.
Looking back, my 4 year career has been rocky. 3 job switches. 2 self-imposed career breaks.
Things could’ve been so different, could’ve been so much smoother — I could’ve tried for a better first job out of college. I could’ve switched teams at Flipkart instead of quitting entirely. I could’ve decided to focus on my craft earlier on my career
But where’s the fun in a story without a few wrong turns and dead ends?