The Beauty Within the Chaos

I realize that I have been writing posts so far that are dangerous, scary stories designed to sweep you off your feet with my bravery, daring, and intelligence. But while the East may be different, I would hesitate to call it backwards.

Today’s story begins when I walked into the office on day 1 (ready to go, and close to 3 am your time. I’m like Hillary Clinton. Word.). After a meeting with HR and with my new boss Vibhore, I meet the Naukri tech team and get introduced to a problem they had been working on for some time now.

Within the space of two days, Anshum, the guy who was showing me the ropes in the office, and I had designed a complete overhaul of the entire resume searching part of the site. It’s pretty thoroughly researched, and totally genius – I can’t tell you the design, but all in all it will cut the amount of data being stored on the Naukri servers and at the same time speed up search, and make everything more flexible for upgrading, allowing you to customize the system both to accommodate more data and more access…separately. It may be the most beautiful thing I have ever had a hand in creating. And I actually had a hand and made a number of decisions early in the planning stages.

I’ve heard it said that people here spend more time talking about what they’re going to do than they do actually doing it, and while that may be the case, I think that what I have seen more than anything else is just care in approach. We’re giving ourselves an open-ended timeline, sure, but we’re into the “doing” part now, after about 3 days of talking, for what may be the biggest overhaul this company has seen since it was created. And there are only two people working on it.

The guys are great. They all speak English very well, and many have actually been to the United States. By the end of the first day, I already had a busy social calendar – drinking, watching (and playing) soccer, going on food tours of Old Delhi and to see Agra…the list goes on.

After the (honestly) dullness that was my life at Princeton, this is the kind of experience, the kind of challenge I’m looking for. And it’s difficult on all fronts. Hopefully, the rickshaws will turn out to be as much of a positive experience as work has been already.