A person's first career is always special. Fresh out of college, the entire world, so well imagined in our minds, suddenly appears to be something totally different. As the facade of being equipped and prepared for life slowly fades, the new intricacies of a new job slowly sink in.
My experience was similar. Straight out of campus, I was fortunate to be placed in a reputed MNC. Coming from an Electrical Engineering background, I had my apprehensions about heading into the "Great Fast Paced IT Industry", the domain of fat paychecks and heavy coding as we had somehow come to believe.
Initially, we were coached in different technological domains and languages. We were exposed to different scenarios and encouraged to "disrupt" and innovate and bring in the new.
Deftly, we were sent to various projects and I still remember being so excited! Having mastered the basics of two or three languages, I was sure I would develop mind-numbingly complex and useful applications which would revolutionize IT. That is of course before I was sent to my first project, in the field of Application Support.
Imagine, after all that hard work, after finally learning what I believed were the tricks of the trade, I had ended up in support. I decided to be a sport and go ahead with it because, at the end of the day, support was eventually going to be a part of my IT career anyways. Assigned, to a huge client I consoled myself with the fact that I would be ensuring that one of the biggest companies in the world would be able to keep its business afloat because I was at my seat working on keeping their 70+ applications up. I arrived at work the first day, excited by this prospect until I found out that I was to be assigned to the application monitoring and dispatching team (Level 1 Support) as my skill set was not required for the main applications. Heartbroken, I began my stint in IT wondering when the day would come when I would be writing and supporting my own applications.
Slowly, a year passed as I did what needed to be done. I was never a quitter and I was not going to start now. I wouldn't stop working because, though simple, I understood the criticality of our tasks and the consequences that delays in our process would cause. Quite literally, we were making sure that the business never stopped. It was a slow year, with our little team of 6 misfits with invalid skillsets sticking around, doing 24x7 shifts including weekends, to make sure that all the applications were up and running and to ensure that the right tickets ended up with the right teams. It was without a doubt a dull job, and it felt even worse because frankly, you didn't need an engineer to do this. Anyone could do it! And THAT was the beauty of it all.
While others were whining about the fact that it was a simple job, time-consuming, and in need of perfection, but still absolutely simple, I realized that if anyone can do it, why not make something that can? Thus began my journey into automation. A colleague of mine and I began our research into RPA. Over the span of a month, we realized that we would not be listened to as at the end of the day, our little team was still treated as nothing but a band of misfits, so licensed software was out of the question! So we began writing our own code.
We picked up several languages before deciding that the language we would use would be Java. We then began mastering several APIs and started designing our own so that we knew exactly how everything we intended to do would work. There was no scope of risking a data breach, it would all have to be our work from scratch. Alternating between shifts and managing all our daily tasks of monitoring and analysis, we broke our tasks down into small rule-based segments and then part by part began automating then.
After a month, the two of us were proud owners of our own little application capable of handling the workload of the entire team! We invited our manager to a conference room and said we would like to talk to him. He immediately denied saying that we would need to have at least two people on the floor, it would be too risky! After a lot of coaxing and convincing and bluffing about the urgency of the situation, we arrived in the conference room with our manager. While he stayed grumpily at his secondary team, we couldn't help but smile. We delayed for a span of ten minutes before he started scolding us about how no one was monitoring the applications. We smiled and simply asked him to check his mail.
On opening his mailbox, he was stunned to find that he was receiving emails from our automated bot with timely summary alerts about which application was failing and which ticket was going where! He immediately ran to our seats and were scolded once again about being too rash. What if there was a breach of data? We smiled again. Once we clarified that there was no such possibility he looked at us dumbfounded! We had achieved something for free that apparently others had been trying for years! We had managed to automate the work of an entire team just because we were tired of doing it! We were able to channel our negativity and convert it into a positive force for change and that was where the career of 6 misfits changed forever.
It makes sense that lazy people come up with the best ideas. If a person is capable of understanding that, at the end of the day, the job needs to be done, there is no avoiding it, the sincere ones will do it because it needs to be done. However, the lazy/annoyed ones are the people who will eventually just find a better way to do it or get it done.