Sometimes the worst advice is the best advice!
Quick summary: My first project in my working life was challenging, and I solved it when no one else assigned to it could. At the time, I thought the advice was horrible! Fast forward ten years, and this is still the best advice anyone has ever given me! I took a seemingly impossible task and created a solution where with the click of a button, it would get the job done. This practice of making the solution easy for the end-user is now the foundational framework for how I operate.
Picture this: You have just graduated from university, but the world has gone into recession. As a non-American freshly graduated from an American university, there were no jobs, skill level did not matter, and the degree earned did not matter. There was nothing! A year goes by, and finally, you catch a break, and someone is willing to offer you an interview!
This is how I landed my first job (it was more of an internship). The pay was crap (reminder, it is an internship), and the post was entry-level. In my mind, this is the opportunity to get my foot in the door, show what I can do, add value, and make a name for myself. The team that hired me decided to throw me into the deep end with sharp rocks and sharks… It was nuts! They assigned me a project, gave a basic outline for what needed to be done, and sent me off to get it done.
On a side note, this is very typical of the Caribbean. Think economies of scale; countries with large economies and populations can afford to take a slower staff onboarding, be structured, and have the employees focus on a particular function. In the smaller Caribbean countries, like Barbados, we are resource-constrained. There is no time for babying into the role, and there is no room to do just one task. You must adapt, wear multiple hats, and be on top of your game.
Back to the story, there I was, a fresh-ish graduate from Florida Institute of Technology with a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, working my first job as an intern… in a bank! Absolutely nothing to do with what I studied.
The task: Scour through several thousand folders that contained emails, documents attached to emails, and attachments embedded within documents (who knows how many times). I needed to find a specific type of application within these folders and certain information inside these documents.
Reminder, this was my first job in 2012. I did not have access to the tools and experience I have today, and I had no idea what to do! So I did what any clueless intern would (or at the very least, should) do: I asked for help!
There were three people on our team. The first person said:
“I have never seen anything like this before. Sorry I cannot help you.”
The second person said:
“Boy… Chaa… I got nothing. I don’t even know what to say!”
The third person said:
“Booooyy, I don’t know who you pissed off, but you ain’t gine be here fuh long. Goodbye!”
Yes, someone said that to me as a young first-time intern. Inspiring, right?
So I went to the hiring manager and shared the feedback. His response:
“Murali! When you are done, I want this to be so easy to execute that everything works for the end-user at the click of a button!”
What? What kind of advice is that! That has to be the worst advice anyone could give in this situation!
Or was it?
I paused to reflect on my situation. It was a tough position to be in. None of my peers could help, and my managers didn’t have any helpful advice for me. I was legitimately stuck. Surely this can’t be impossible, and there must be a way! I refused to accept failure so early!
The path to a solution started with some research.
Alt-text: “All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying, ‘DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here is what we figured out so far…’”
Source: https://xkcd.com/979/
I found a guy within the department, just not the same team, and he had some fantastic out-of-the-box ideas to share! He introduced me to Excel VBA coding, and forgive the following statement (remember it was 2012, and I was a noob), this was amazing! Today, this would be considered far from an ideal solution, but at the time, I had no other choice. It gave me a platform to solve my problem, and I was excited.
Then I stumbled upon writing batch scripts which gave me the means to manipulate files on the system level for copying, moving, renaming, and extracting. Thank you, helpful teammates, and thank you, people of the internet! Stackoverflow, I’m looking at you in particular!
Piece by piece, the solution started to form.
I used batch scripts to create backups of the files and folders.
I used batch scripts to scan every folder to find various files.
Depending on the file, the batch script would convert them into .zip files (fun fact, most Office apps with the x at the end like .docx and .xlsx are zip files)
From the zip files, I was able to extract any embedded document.
I looped this process as many times as needed.
Once the loopty-doop process finished, I scoured each file programmatically with VBA to find a specific document: small business applications. Of course, this was complexicated because people changed file names and often even structures of the file itself.
Once I identified each application, I continued with VBA to extract specific fields within the document. The document was a combo of fields and free-form text. So I had to both extract the fields and scour for keywords and do some fancy select substrings.
Finally, I extracted all the information into an Excel spreadsheet (today, this would go into a database).
Final finally, I created a process where with a click of a button, the user can specify a folder and scan that too.
Final final finally, I made the whole interface pretty in Excel with colors and borders and prompts.
Here is the breakdown of the project timeline as I executed it (let’s make this a prettier picture):
I spent the first two days being excited about having a task to do!
I spent the next two weeks in a state of uncertainty, panic, fear, hope, doubt, research, self-reflection, goosefrabah!
Next week, full-on research mode.
Following two months: design, build, design, build, design, build, delete everything, design, build, design, build, delete everything, and the cycle goes on.
The first week of the final month: the first prototype presented
Second week: bug fixes and making it pretty
The third week: presenting to the bosses.
The fourth week: sleep. I deserved it.
What was next? Well. The solution I provided was a critical element that gave the parent company some insight into the demand for doing business in a new sector in the Caribbean. Their initial gut feeling without the data was the appetite was not worth it. After gaining access to over 1,500 applications from my extraction process (over 1,400 more than they anticipated), they could see a strong demand, put in additional resources, and start this new segment in the Caribbean. Today this segment is a thriving and profitable business. They have a strong team and have established consistent growth since they started.
The Conclusion
This experience was the first step to showing the world, and more importantly showing myself, what I’m capable of. While the advice initially was deemed to be rubbish, today that still stands as the best advice anyone has ever given me. Success did not come because I got the job done. Success came because, at the end of it all, the final result was a solution that was easy for the stakeholder to use, and they could use it to gain immediate value right away!
Today I use modern tools like Alteryx and Tableau. I can provide solutions that anyone can follow and understand with these tools. With these tools and methods, I can solve problems and move on to new ones, either hand them over to the key operators or leave them to run on their own. I always build a solution with the next guy in mind. “If someone needs to take this solution over from me, will they understand it?” That is what success looks like to me.
On a side note:
Someone once said proudly, “Look at this, my old job is still calling me for help on the solution I built them. I’m such an important asset to the team.” That is one point of view, and I think the solution is problematic enough that no one can figure it out.
I’m not too fond of building dependencies to own job security. Many consultants, vendors, and individuals create black box solutions that only they can maintain because of “proprietary” or concealed logic. This way of working hurts the client and adds tension to the relationship.
I build value to earn job security. Success is the client calling to solve new problems, not re-addressing old ones.
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