My journey from being a born failure to an aspiring software developer: part-1

Y'all must have heard about genius and extremely bright kids making their way to colleges with big names and then to big companies. Their stories are inspirations for so many people out there. But honestly, it's not always that interesting to hear about their journey especially for those who've always been a failure throughout their lives because those successful kids were born geniuses who barely ever failed. These kinds of people require motivation from those with whom they can relate to, those who have been slapped by failure on their faces a countless number of times and yet they have managed to transform their lives in such a drastic way that people find it "some kind of hard to believe fantasy story".

Before I start let me give you a brief introduction about myself. I'm Joy, extremely lazy, hate maths, failed in 6th standard, repeated 9th standard, being extremely demotivated by someone; I opted for commerce, dropped commerce after a month, opted for science, again failed in 11th standard. I couldn't clear any of the competitive exams because I'm not that good with maths but getting 11 marks in exams like IIT Entrance felt like an achievement to me.

After much struggle somehow I got into a college named ABESIT, Ghaziabad. Starting from the first year I started studying hard so that I could pass my semester exams. I had to cram up most of the things because of numerical and mathematical questions since I didn't understand math and nor did I do up till today's date. Even after studying so hard, I got my first backlog in the first semester itself and then this process of getting and clearing backlogs continued like some kind of tradition. Every semester I had a couple of backlogs that I had to clear later in the next semester.

"When you know things it'll be easier for you to do."

I took costly coaching for learning java programming language when I was in 10th standard because I did not understand even a single line of code back then. But later since I knew and understood coding a little bit I took computer science in my intermediate school as well but didn't write a single line of code the whole year until my exams were on my head. This made me realize that I've forgotten everything I learned so I took up the same costly coaching again but this time I did not understand coding even after the coaching classes but somehow managed to clear my board exams.

During my time in college, I took part in some coding events in the college club, and a hackathon where my role was just to fill the space for a team member and did not code at all in the event. All these events took place when I was in the odd semester of my third year and because of the tension of clearing my backlogs and my exams, I stopped coding. I had no one to guide me on what should I do, how should I clear my backlogs or how should I clean up the mess that I made of my life. I didn't even think if I'd be able to secure a job from college placements but to my surprise, I was able to crack the placement offers for two companies. Let's say one of them was company 'X' and the other one was company 'Y'.

When my exams were almost over, someone called me from the company 'Y' and mentioned that I'll have to join the office from X date and further information would be provided in another couple of days. After my exams were finally over, I kept calling the company folks but ended up with no response at all. So I finally decided to join company 'X'.

During the onboarding process, I was told that the process in which I will be in has a semi-technical job and it will not involve picking up calls but later when I went to the work location I found myself picking up calls mostly from ridiculously brain-dead Indian customers who kept buying tech from a particular brand which they knew is gonna break and its repair would cost them double the purchase amount. Many of those customers had already received warnings regarding the product from their friends and relatives but still bought the product anyway and later call us up to abuse how pathetic the product was.

I was literally being abused on the job every single day and not only this those brain-dead customers used to call during the nighttime and demanded that their devices be taken on remote connection and once done they'd flash their nudes through the device camera. Some of them used to get drunk and call us just to entertain themselves with ridiculous questions and uncomfortable topics.

Despite all of this nonsense, I had gotten too comfortable with the work environment there and somewhere in my mind, I made myself believed that coding was not for me. Coding was hard and one needed to be really good to be coding for any company. I disqualified myself from coding. After working there for seven months, I got to know that the process for which I was working in company 'X' was shutting down. I took advantage of this situation and went for a job change because I was earning just Rs 10,000 per month and my room rent was Rs 2,000 more than my salary. I joined the company 'Z' which, again was a call center but at least I was not being abused there by brain-dead customers but the work there, I didn't understand at all.

"You are whom you surround yourself with."

I started working here picking up calls every single day just to earn Rs 25,000 per month. While I was working, I had a good friend who was a mechanical engineer and jobless at the same time since the mechanical industry had completely collapsed. He started learning to code since there's a lot of money and life with code just gets better and better. This made me think if a mechanical engineer can shift his career to coding, well, I was from the Information Technology branch so I could do it too.

NOTE: Read my remaining journey in Part - 2 of this blog from the link here: My journey from being a failure to a software developer