{"id":14000,"date":"2019-03-30T17:57:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-30T17:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14000"},"modified":"2023-12-09T18:00:58","modified_gmt":"2023-12-09T18:00:58","slug":"first-day-of-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2019\/03\/30\/first-day-of-work\/","title":{"rendered":"first day of work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This was me on my first day of work. It\u2019s been 4 years now.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s what I remember\u2026 I was terrified. It was my first full-time job, and the first time I\u2019d be paid more than $500 for anything. This wasn\u2019t actually a career path that I had identified for myself. I had gotten married 3 months earlier, and my wish was to be a flight steward with Singapore Airlines \u2013 I was hoping to write during the downtime. Dinesh (founder\/CEO) emailed me out of the blue to introduce himself and to tell me that he was looking for someone to help run their blog. At the time I actually knew almost nothing about tech startups, in Singapore or anywhere else. I was familiar with Google, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It would be about a year before I used Uber for the first time. I had never heard of the phrase \u201cSaaS\u201d before. (It means software-as-a-service. Software used to be sold as a product \u2013 lots of money for a single product that gets obsolete pretty quickly.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was curious to meet Dinesh for coffee because he was someone who had read my blog, who seemed smart and accomplished. Also he implied that I was a \u2018talented individual\u2019. Over coffee he told me about his vision for what he was building \u2013 I remember he described it as \u201cCisco for social networks\u201d, which sounded really smart. But I didn\u2019t really understand it. It sounded like a bunch of technology stuff, and I wasn\u2019t sure if I wanted that. I wanted to travel and write about random social issues and stuff. So I think I told him\u2026 well I really need a job, and SIA is my first choice. I went for the interview a couple of days later, and I didn\u2019t even make it past the first round. On retrospect, I\u2019m really, really glad that SIA didn\u2019t choose me.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was terrible at negotiating and I didn\u2019t think I had any skills or bargaining chips. So when Dinesh asked me to suggest a salary, I said something like, \u201cUm\u2026 I\u2019m buying a house, the mortgage costs this much, and I\u2019m going to need at least X a month to be able to focus on my job without worrying about finding freelance work, etc to make ends meet.\u201d I can get emotional thinking about the kid I was then. I was completely uncertain of myself. He introduced me to the team over lunch, and  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Small team<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I first joined, there were about 5-6 people in the team. We\u2019d go out for lunch together every day. We\u2019d turn the lights off and lock up the office. We\u2019d all fit in a single elevator, and then we\u2019d all fit in a single car (Zach\u2019s SUV, which we dubbed the Zachmobile). We\u2019d drive out to have lunch somewhere \u2013 Holland V, Buona Vista, Ghim Moh, etc. The team was small enough that you could know everything that was happening in the company, over lunch. I really enjoyed listening to the engineers describe the challenges they were dealing with \u2013 scaling issues, premature optimisation, etc. They were very patient with all of my noob questions.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

1-1\u2019s\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still remember this \u2013 on my first day of work, Dinesh told me that he had a meeting. Turns out that the meeting was with Zach, his co-founder. I remember very specifically thinking, there are only 6 guys in the room, and the two co-founders are obviously great friends, why do they need to have a “meeting\u201d? But I quickly learned that this was a great habit, and I\u2019m now of the belief that everybody should do regular 1-1s with anybody important to them in their lives. Spouses should do it. I think parents should do it with their children.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was me on my first day of work. It\u2019s been 4 years now.   Here\u2019s what I remember\u2026 I was terrified. It was my first full-time job, and the first time I\u2019d be paid more than $500 for anything. This wasn\u2019t actually a career path that I had identified for… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[294],"class_list":["post-14000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-memoirs-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3DO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14002,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14000\/revisions\/14002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}