my toughest job

they say as your years of experience grow, the tougher your job gets.

But that isn't true for me, let me tell you about my toughest job so far!

Back in 2005, I was a fresher straight out of college and had landed up on my first job with the bygone IT giant Satyam Computers. I was super excited, IT and computers always get me excited!

But alas, my first job was a super boring one, I was responsible for monitoring a set of applications and servers, it was a simple webpage with 3 indicators right next to any asset. If the indicator is green, everything is fine, amber, I create a ticket and pass it on to the support staff, red, something has seriously gone wrong, I need to pickup the phone and call someone.

Simple, right? Most of today's freshers would run away with this as a first job, but I this was IT offshoring two decades ago.

So how can such a simple job be the toughest for me and what did I learn from it?

1. I am color blind, a mix of Protanopia and Deuteranopia, I can't differentiate between red and green and the shades of orange. So a red and amber indicator is near impossible for me to identify. I followed a simple rule, dont rely on the colors but on the position of the indicator, 1st one is RED, 2nd is AMBER and 3rd is GREEN. But there was a catch, how do I spot changes, say how do I know when red turns amber? Bring in technology, this is where I learnt the right click on a page, view source code trick, and read thru the page to see what indicator is live. This is also how I self taught myself HTML back in 2005. Web development has changed a lot since then, but this was my stepping stone to learn HTML, web design and frontend technologies.

2. Funny names, back then assets were named like tiger, lion, nile, everest and what not. I had the job of calling people at onshore in the middle of the night and telling them - "tiger is down, I repeat tiger is down at 03:00 BST, need your immediate attention". At first I felt it was an important job to let everyone know that tiger was down but later realised how stupid I looked coz of this naming standards. I learnt the importance and convinience of using standards in IT. This has helped me immensly, as I was a very early adopter of naming standards for documents, files and other artifacts. Following standards are a habit now.