Today, with the heaviest of hearts, I’m announcing my departure from HackerEarth. It may come as a surprise to some of my friends who knew me well and my love for the company. HackerEarth has been a home to me and the people I worked with, a family away from “home” home. It wasn’t a split-second decision, one of the hardest I’d say.
I have learned and grown many a fold during last 2-3 years. It’s hard to put everything into words. The internship experience gave me a good idea about the future work and it has been a ride full of challenges and moments of triumph since then. I couldn’t have asked for a better jump start for my career. But then what made me decide to quit and start fresh?
I maintain an excel sheet where I write just one line about work every day and at the end of the month, I subjectively assign a score to myself. I used the word “subjectively” because the factors are relative from person to person: productivity, happiness, feeling of accomplishment, struggle before getting to the right solution and so on. I was personally not feeling accomplished for a few days. So, I started side projects. It didn’t help much though. The chart (productivity v/s time) clearly told me that I didn’t feel as productive as I’d expect from myself at this stage of my career. That’s when I thought, maybe I need to work on a totally different product, in another industry, to wander off in the alien codebase.
I’d have jumped teams internally in HackerEarth itself, however, I wanted to work on a larger scale this time. To move from the scale of a million to a billion!
I’m definitely going to miss the people I worked with. As I mentioned already, it was a family! All of us knew each other so well, that if one person starts a sentence the other would finish that. You know you are working with a great team when you see that! Thank you, each and every one of the devs I’ve gotten to work with. Thank you, HackerEarth. I wish that the company keeps flourishing, as it always has.
Lastly, thank you Vivek for letting me have the Das Keyboard. The one using which you started working on HackerEarth codebase. I borrowed it a year ago and haven’t returned it since. :D It’ll always remind me of the remarkable days at HackerEarth wherever I go.
It’s super cool. Have a look!
Let’s see what turns life takes next. Stay in touch!
Till next time. Evíva!