Below is a snippet from the interview of mentor Tulasi Sivanesan.His journey can be helpful to many individuals who desire to rise in their career. He is an individual who has made best of opportunities and challenges in his life. 

How would you describe your journey when you were starting in your career?

It was not a bed of roses and I struggled without any mentorship help and tried to understand the industry trend and aligned myself. I started as an electronics digital / analog design engineer and grew into an embedded software engineer. In my earlier days, I learned office politics in a hard way. One must know a little bit about office politics whether you like it or not. 

Even though my manager at my first job had a very complicated personality, I learned a lot during that period. If I had a proper mentor at that time my journey would have been a little easier.  

1. User of complicated code segments without any any proper comments. 
2. The knowledge was not shared among the team, usually, one key person will have an upper hand on this. 
3. SW was created without any proper requirements (or traceability)
4. There were no common coding standards
5. Lack of proper documentation 
6. Lack of support from senior people (hiding the knowledge/history)
7. 
   

1. Use of use case maps which will show actual code flow and easy to understand the design behind the thinking. 
2. A common repository for knowledge sharing 
3. Senior management support of requirement management and traceability, and testing 

• Working with legacy SW codebase to add new functionalities were very challenging.
• Train the team to use tested code segments and to follow the agreed coding standards
• Developing an easier way to show the code walkthrough with customer 
• Common team dynamics to resolve no technical issues among the team members 

I developed a state machine modeling approach to capture the legacy behavior and add new functionalities around the model, which also kept the mission critical certification compliance for the legacy code. I have spent considerable time coaching the team in the new way of doing the design and coding standards. More of my personality helped to resolve many issues than solving technical issues. 

I have a passion for teaching and hence I did the teaching/training work. It gave good satisfaction to my soul. I think I would say diversifying in the career does give broader scope, but sometimes it goes against you, that you have not developed deep knowledge in some areas. But for me, it helps to have the end2end view of what is going on and solving the problems quickly. My advice to people on this is to have a vision and goal and revisit them every month because of the speed in which technology changes in this modern era. 

In one situation in a big corporation, I had to work with a director who was very abusive. I discussed the issue with my peers and I had taken the issue to the VP for resolution. Finally, the director was removed from the post but she started to hurt me via her network. Then I had to stand up to her and finally, she left the company. This was emotionally challenging and made me a stronger person.

• Ramping up was a bit challenging, but I spend time in a lot of experimentation and trial to learn the new domains. 
• Attended evening courses and online courses 
• Find experts in the new field to mentor 

The manager is one of the key factor people changes jobs. One of the techniques is to understand the DISC personality type (http://www.123test.com/disc-personality-test) and try to work with the manager openly. If this approach did not work then it is better to move to a different team. Some companies have ways to discuss the issues with HR in confidence.  

Some instances the conflicts due to racism and women’s minority issues. 

Also, nothing is constant in life, the issues will change, but we have to proactively try our best from our side.