I knew right from starting of my career, that I like coding & technology more and I don’t want to go into people management.
So, when I started my career, I had a question in mind: “Should I build connections in my company or just go there, work hard, come back and enjoy with my family?”
I asked this question to experts in my company, who were mostly nerds, and they always answered me that don’t consider company as home and the day your company doesn’t need you, they will simply fire you.
All these experts whom I used to admire, I saw one common pattern in them. They come to office, have coffee, do great work, their style of communication was very direct, and they are critical about other people work. Though at times I found them rude, but I always aspired to be like them and try to mimic them.
Their advice of not considering company as home and building relationships, did make sense to me. Plus, since I am an introvert, this thing resonated with my way brain well.
I only talk about work at office, no office parties, lunch at desk, work from 8 to 5, pack up my bag at 5 pm and come back to enjoy with my family.
This transactional nature worked well for me for a decade of my career.
Over the time, my responsibilities grew. I have to take care of junior developer’s design and code, make them understand what’s right and wrong. I have to get my design reviewed from management of my company, as now features I work on have bigger impact. If my design choices will be wrong, there will be lot at stakes, not just my increments.
I thought this will be piece of cake, I just have to present facts and data, pros and cons and everyone will understand logic behind technical choices I was making and they have to make.
But I realised, be it junior developers or senior management, everyone had opinions about how certain things have to be done, they had their own ways of describing right and wrong.
Job which I loved once, I started finding very difficult to manage as I was failing to make people understand. I was like what’s wrong with the world around me, why can’t people understand simple things.
When I introspected, I realised that, throughout my career I never built relationships and connections with people. At the end, we are humans and more than data, we go by our gut feeling. I am not able to convince and influence people, as I missed the variable of human relationship and connections.
At home, when we are making decision, family members are not just responding to facts and data, they are responding to relationship and trust they have on me. They trust me more than data, they know if something will go wrong, I will correct it.
and some howAs I started growing further.. technology complex, micro services.. I had to interact more… for every decision I have to update everyone about reason for decision … at times influence people.
Yes, company may fire us any day, when they are facing losses. But people with whom we build relationship will not fire us, they will help us this way or that way, as per their abilities.
