The Chameleon at Work
When I joined the organization, I was introduced to Vikas — one person who seemed to have it all figured out. Be it end to end working of a new application or someone experiencing trouble at work. Every God Damn Thing!
Vikas wasn’t the loudest or the most assertive, but because he adapted so well to every situation that it felt like magic for us.
He could blend into any team, handle any challenge, sometimes even advising the CXOs.
All in all, he knew how to reframe the chaos into clarity
Let me tell you what had happened on 15th August 2023. It was the Indian Independence Day and most people were on leave. And a major service of our company collapsed. It started throwing errors. This was something to do with Elasticsearch, a senior techie suggested on a call. But he mentioned it was his anniversary and he apologized that he couldn’t help.
An hour later, Vikas and I were asked to come to office. Both of us were from different teams but had to help here. Everyone was panicking, why these Elasticsearch queries are suddenly timing out. I saw him quietly reading the documentation, going through a few questions on Stack Overflow, and start troubleshooting, being on a call with someone from outside our organization.
Within hours, we had identified the root cause and proposed a workaround.
In all honesty, I deserved 1% of the credit here, but he shared his 50% with me.
Over the year, I felt Vikas was everywhere. He was lending a listening ear to our HR, laughed along with designers during brainstorming sessions, and the CTO would always go on walks with him.
Today, we had a massive lay-off. We had a lot of cost-cutting done. Most senior employees were let go. I called Vikas to check if he is doing alright and if they paid him a good severance?
Vikas laughed and said — I am the glue that holds everything together. If I go, everything falls. Just like a domino.
I was shocked. How could the best techies go and not Vikas? I directly questioned him and he said —
Serve Each One What They Like :)
In case we are meeting for the first time, come over here, it’ll be worth the roller coaster of articles that are gonna come up in the next few weeks.