প্রথমেই বলে নিচ্ছি, বাংলা-ইংলিশ মিলিয়ে, গরু রচনা লিখতে বসছি। তাই, পড়তে পড়তে বিরক্ত লাগলে, গুগলে কিচ্ছুক্ষণ বিড়ালের ছবি সার্চ দিয়ে দম ফাটিয়ে হেসে এসে বাকিটা পড়তে পারেন। শুনেছি বিড়ালের ছবি ইদানিং বেশ হাস্যরসাত্মক হিসেবে গণ্য হচ্ছে। কি জানি বাপু, আমাদের সময়ে তো এমন ছিলনা! বিড়ালের কাছে খামচি ছাড়া অন্য কিছু আশা করা নিতান্তই বোকামি ছিল। যাই হউক, বিড়াল আর গরু কোনটাই ভাল না লাগলে, পাশ কাটিয়ে পরের লেখায় চলে যাওয়াটাও বুদ্ধিমানের কাজ হতে পারে। আপাতত গরু রচনা শুরু করি গরুর দাম কত সেটা দিয়ে -
And as you already understand, here comes the traditional line - Salary is not the only thing in the package. You know when you get an offer from a company, the first thing most people look at, is the monthly salary amount. This is a bit different for international companies, there people look at yearly salary :p Well, either way, salary is one of the most important thing in the offer letter. But it’s not the only one. Ask yourself the question “What do I feel proud of?” Don’t worry about the answer. If you can’t find it now, you’ll realize it 5-10 years later. That’s ok.
If you are in the career for several years, you might have already understood that there are few people who didn’t go with the mainstream. After graduation, some entered into companies, some went for higher studies, few became successful entrepreneur and few are still struggling with things. At this moment, a very silly question can come up in mind - “Does people always fall for monthly monetary amount ?” And then the answer will be, Yes and No. At some stage, they really fall for it, but after a while they don’t. This could be because of two reasons - either they have it abundant, or there are other "values".
Now, the question is what the hell is "values" ? To give an example, Company culture has values, Team members make values. Company facilities i.e. transport, lunch, bonuses have values. Even collaboration with other teams in abroad, or delivering solution in abroad, both of them have values. Couple of friends/classmates working in the same company together, have values. Career growth opportunity plays an important factor both in engineering and leadership positions of the company, if you vision long. Even though, these things aren’t much obvious at the first month. Comparing to the salary, you might want to consider those other values. Or you might go for the salary itself and adjust your considerations with your experience.
Company culture depends on headquarters. The work pressure depends upon several factors. One of them is the company culture and the other one is The Deadline.
Working in companies from two different continents, I have some small generalization to share. People from China, Japan, Korea (CJK) are hard working. They work like hell and they expect that other people will work hard as well. By working hard, I mean really hard. It requires a lot love to do hard work, to cope up with the pace. On the other hand, European culture is a bit more work life balanced. Here people use the concept that work is to make people's life easier. So they work till they earn enough. Life is more secure here, so you don’t need to make billion currency savings. You work that much, what you can spend to enjoy your life. This is once again, a very high level generalization.
Companies that have headquarters in Europe will try to nurture similar culture in their branch office. Sometimes, based on local management culture, it gets different. It’s not like the local management is bad, their work culture is just different. Also, there are cases where some local branches even have comfortable work pressure comparing to their CJK headquarters. Another important thing to consider, working in high velocity isn’t always bad. High velocity helps to get things done fast. That’s how startups trump the established giants, either with their innovation or velocity.
The other thing is Deadline. Normally people work a bit more harder with deadline in front. There are companies which works with strict deadline. For example, if there is a deadline on 25th, it doesn’t matter if it’s weekend, or you have some other important task. You gotta make sure that things are delivered before the date. It doesn’t matter if it’s midnight, the product is on fire, you gotta stay awake and fix issues. Aaaaand there are companies, where there are people pre-assigned specifically for firefighting issues in critical scenarios, and they are paid for their extra effort. It’s all about culture. Normally our local companies can not afford the later culture. So they try to compensate with some other means, which might not make you always as happy as expected. But they try. The thing is, you gotta understand these scenarios, you gotta understand which culture you are on. Or more importantly, which culture you are letting it to grow, and have the confidence to deal with them.
Culture also varies by team and team lead. How is your team lead? Well, most people can not confirm that before joining to office. But it’s also an important thing. More likely if you work with a person for an year, you’ll share lots of behaviors, skills, principles, you’ll learn new things. So if possible, choose a team with good people, with strong engineering knowledge if you want to learn engineering, with business knowledge if you want to grow career in that direction. If you can not choose, that’s also ok, it’s not the end of your life. Routinely take some time from your work to get acquainted with the people you feel valuable.
Technological practice depends on the projects conducted by company. There are two ways of software development - #1 Making something new #2 Maintaining something that has already been built. Just like keeping your freedom tight, is hard than earning the freedom itself, #2 is literally hard than #1 in some cases. If someone wants to build a page, you can make it easily. Just write a page. Now when you need to make a almost similar page with few contents different, you need to think about abstraction. And when these type of things are replicated with other features, shit starts hitting the fan.
To clarify a bit more on previous paragraph, some companies starts project from start, like very beginning. We call them startups. In this place, you’ll be able to expose your knowledge on building new things, designing new stuffs from the scratch, or choosing the software stack yourself. There are however some other companies who already built a thing. That thing might already being used by customers. Sometime successful startups becomes a stable company after a while. At that time, the challenge is maintain things with adding new features. While in startups you design how to build new stuffs to support future stuffs, on a matured product, your challenge is to adopt design so that nothing breaks and you can add more stuffs. On startup you go fast, you run to meet deadline, on matured projects you can pre-plan, because things are a bit more defined here. In some cases, you can not even go fast, because, things are so large that it takes time to co-ordinate meetings with corresponding parties to come up with a viable solution. So, you gotta chose where you wanna go, what you wanna learn. Both are challenging in their different way.
যারা মনে করে "ধুর, আমারে দিয়ে কিচ্ছু হবে না!", তাদের জন্য মারজুক রাসেলের একটাই কথা -
**** হবে না, **** হবে না, **** হবে নাকাহিনী হচ্ছে, কেউ যদি দুই বছর HSC তে ভাল পড়াশুনা করে, ভাল ইউনিভার্সিটীতে চান্স পেতে পারে, তাহলে চার বছর ভাল পড়াশুনা করে ভাল কাজ পাওয়াও সম্ভব। আবার, কেউ যদি সেই চার বছর সময় না দেয়, তাহলে হয়ত ল্যাবড়া ছ্যাবড়া কোন একটা কলেজ থেকে পাস করেও, পরের ছয় বছর কাজে অনেক চেষ্টা করে ভাল কিছু করা সম্ভব। ব্যাপারটা আসলে কি পরিমাণ সময় দেওয়া হচ্ছে, তার উপর।
Humans are awesome. People can do anything. It's not about boasting, it's something to be proud of. Actually it sounds silly in general. But there is a reason I mention it specifically. Because believe me, it’s true. When they truly wish for something, sooner or later, they make it happen. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it on many of my friends.
They did it. It's possible, but not free. And, that’s why Determination is indeed important to pursue goals.
You gotta prove that you can do things. Some people say that CGPA doesn’t matter and other’s say having poor CGPA sucks. But the main point here is not the CGPA, it is something to prove that you utilized your time. Some others have good record in programming contests, some has software development skills and some did research work in undergrad, Some did build up their network with industry. You gotta prove that you can achieve things that you are determined on.
Similar thing applies for getting admission into PhD. CGPA is not the only thing in the profile, there are GRE scores, TOEFL scores, undergrad thesis, personal development skill, research works etc. People just have to convince about their value. Professors look for value, Recruiters look for value, Entrepreneurs create values. Now it’s the time to find the right place for work where you feel yourself valued. And BAM! You will love that work.
To tell about values, I will refer to a common quality I have seen in teachers
People who become teacher at universities, excluding few exceptions, all of them are regular.
Now it seems like some moral line from Aesop’s story book, or some universal truth line. But interestingly, regularity pays off! You see people doing good in GRE, it’s a result of regularly putting time aside for learning words/compositions/maths. You see people doing great in contests. It’s not something that one day they learned 50 algorithms. They regularly worked hard. People doing awesome at their work, is that they are regularly putting time to do something either at home or at offices.
I have a friend, who are super expert in programming contest. And I tell this to other people, that guy entered BUET, went to his hall and when graduated, came out of the hall. All the remaining time, he was solving algorithmic problems. And he is one of the topmost algorithmist in our batch.
I have the other friend, who regularly participated in competitive contests, parallely helped four/five of us preparing for CT till late night, and then again study on his own after midnight. And he did it consistently. I am happy to have such friends.
Regularity is the key thing here. Teachers are known to be best at it. Somehow they maintain a scheduled study on all those CTs and PLs. It’s no magic. Some people just realize it a bit late. That’s the quality. If you want to create value in a specific area, you can give regularity a try.
No one except Morons likes Morons - You might hate your job, but don’t hate effort. You might not like the company, you might not like the people around you, you might not like the culture, but never dislike hard work. Because that’s what makes people reach beyond boundary. You might be momentarily unhappy, but never let your anger or bad day hunt your work. No compromise with the things you love. If you love to do something, find some place where you can do it best.
এই গরু রচনাটা আমি লিখছিলাম এই বছরের শুরুতে। নতুন বছরের শুরুতে সবাই New Year Goal ঠিক করতেছে দেখে আমার নিজেরও মনে হইল, আচ্ছা কিছু একটা করা দরকার। নতুন বছরের গোল সেট করতে গিয়ে এইটা পেলাম ( জিঙ্গেলটা কারও মাথায় ঢুকে গেলে আমার দোষ নাই :p )
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