Whenever I met friends and acquaintances after a long time, I dreaded the question “Are you still working in mainframe?”
For readers from non-tech background, its akin to making fire by rubbing stones. Not that it doesn’t require any skill, just that its not relevant anymore.
So after nearly 12 years, when I landed myself a job in Technical Business Development at Amazon, it was a dream come true. The journey was not easy. Nobody had walked this path before, so it was quite a struggle to break free from limiting beliefs and open my mind to the possibilities. When I look back now, I can exactly say what got me here. Its easy to connect the dots backwards.
My career background
I started working at the age of 23, when I was fresh out of college. I got placed in one of the popular multi national Tech Consulting companies in Hyderabad. I was trained in .Net for 3 months but eventually landed projects that had mainframe at its core, so I had to learn COBOL, JCL, CICS and REXX in a month.
At such an early stage of career, the move to mainframe didn’t strike to me as a setback. I was happy that I was learning something new, the job was close to home and was getting me a decent paycheck.
Within 2.5 years, I got an opportunity to travel to the USA for work, got exposed to new ideas, new people, new ways of doing things and a great lifestyle. I was around inspiring people, was being challenged intellectually, and was growing as a person. I was soon leading 10-member teams and multi million dollar projects.
This went on for another 2 years before I realized that the runway for my growth was coming to a stop.
The struggle to find my career path
My projects and role kept getting repetitive. I was no longer feeling challenged. My paycheck didn’t grow. I was ambitious but opportunities didn’t come my way because my perceived skill-set was limited and that’s when my struggle began.
Three things stood in my way.
My core skill was mainframe, which was a legacy technology.
Being a part of the Engineering department of a company, being skilled in mainframe was definitely a drawback. My peers dabbled in more current and advanced technologies. Although I showed the willingness to learn and put in extra efforts, I still had to support mainframe projects and hence the tag “mainframe SME” never really left me .
I figured coding was not my thing.
Its not that I hate coding. I like the logical thinking and algorithm development part of it. And I like to think I am even good at it, better than my husband, really, who is an architect 😀
But there are other aspects to it that made me go crazy. For starters, there is a new tool and a new programming language or a new version every day. To even start coding, you have to do a 100 other things. Most of the time you are troubleshooting problems that are configuration related. (All the engineers out there, don’t kill me :D)
I know this because I tried learning .NET and Python and Nodejs (all the new shiny objects). I bought courses and spent my weekends and holidays learning to code. I went through the code bases at work to support my understanding. I gave up. I tried again. I gave up again. There was a steep learning curve ahead of me.
Then I chanced upon a Jeff Bezos video where he said “If you do not enjoy your work, you cannot be great at it. ” I cannot be a great coder if I didn’t enjoy it. And I was not okay with that.
This gave me the clarity to accept the fact that coding was not what I wanted to do. I didn’t love coding. Period. But I didn’t stop learning. I wrote powershell scripts, learnt MongoDB, troubleshooted .NET code, led technical projects. I continued to pick up skills, but nothing gave me a breakthrough.
I was in the wrong place.
I knew what I did not want. But I had no idea what I wanted.
I spent quite a few months, miserable, trying to figure out what is THE job for me. I sat down with a pen and paper. I analyzed my skill set, my strengths and opportunities, and figured that with a little bit of more education and hard work, I could pursue Delivery manager, project manager, Business Analyst, Scrum master kind of roles. But my workplace was in no position to offer me that. They either didn’t exist at all, or had a long wait time.
This realization was hard for me to accept because that meant I had to look outside. And everyone knows how job search can be an overwhelming experience.
I entered the job pool, already wary and skeptical, applying for random job postings to “test the waters”. I had zero confidence and the fact the I was not hearing back from anybody only compounded my misery.
The breakthrough
There were two events that steered me in the direction that landed me at Amazon, or AWS to be precise. One prompted me to work on my strengths and the other to upskill myself.
A disastrous presentation before the VP
I had worked closely with my manager for 3 months to do an extensive analysis of our client’s business capabilities in mainframe and I was to present some strategies for modernizing their applications. I was proud of doing that analysis all by myself, learning and creating visualizations using PowerBI.
When it was finally the time to present before the VP, I fumbled during the opening. Although I quickly recovered, I was very disappointed and shocked. To believe communication was my strength and then failing so badly didn’t go down too well. That compelled me to join Toastmasters and that’s the best thing that could have happened to me! I loved going to the club every week, standing up there, shaking and speaking before 20 pairs of eyes. I sucked, no doubt, but I became better and better. My confidence grew and that showed at my workplace.
I even wrote a detailed article on Medium about How Toastmasters Helped Me Build My Confidence.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing was becoming the next big thing. Our client’s roadmap was to move all their IT infrastructure to cloud in the next 2-3 years and they were asking people to skill up.
I still remember reading up on AWS Cloud services when being 8 months pregnant. And then continued my learning after Siddu was born. I would listen to Ryan Kroonenburg’s lecture on Udemy while rocking a 1-month old Siddu to sleep, or while feeding him. I did the hands on exercises and then even went a step ahead and presented before my peers.
After 6 months, I gave my AWS Solutions Architect Associate Certification. I really enjoyed learning about cloud computing because it was conceptual and helped me appreciate the complexity and level of thinking that goes into designing robust applications.
And then the breakthrough came.
I got the opportunity to lead our client’s first cloud migration project. It was a simple lift and shift of .NET application, with small-scale improvements. I worked hard and long. I got to get into the trenches and weeds of application development along with project execution. It was a very valuable experience.
This solidified the cloud foundation I needed for my career. It also reinforced the belief in me that I can learn and figure things out.
By this time, I had confidence and Cloud experience under my belt. This took 3 years since my struggle began.
The Quest continued…
Of course I was still not satisfied. My job only became more complex. And my paycheck refused to change.
In August last year , people in my circle were preparing for their interviews at AWS and they casually suggested me to apply too. I brushed it aside, because, you know, why would AWS consider a mainframe developer ? It sounded blasphemous.
But something clicked. Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In one of the many random conversations I had about career with people in my network, my brain picked up the advice about trying for Business Analyst positions in big Tech companies like the FAANG. The advice didn’t make sense then, but suddenly it felt thrilling. I felt I was on to something.
I started looking for non-tech jobs like Technical Program Manager and applied to a bunch of them. While scouring for jobs on Linkedin, I also found a posting for Technical Business Developer.
It thrilled me that the words “Technical” “Business” and “Developer” independently exist in my resume 😀 It required cloud and customer facing experience which I HAD. It also required a few other experiences which I did NOT have. But I still applied. It surprised me that my application moved to “Under Consideration”. I also had a referral that got me the needed visibility. I landed an interview with AWS and the rest as they say is history!
Finally
Today, I am proud to say I work at Amazon, one of the fastest growing companies in the world, in a role that I am good at and also enjoy doing. I earn three times more now, with a plethora of possibilities and avenues to explore.
On a closing note, I want you to believe that you deserve a thriving career. If you find yourself struggling to find your path, I only have 3 things to say.
1. It’s out there
2. Take steps
3. Trust the process
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