I once remember reading an article discussing if "social media is boon or bane to students". For me, It turned out to be the perfect platform which helped me land a job in a company where I love working every day.😎
I'm a Software Development Engineer, and this blog is about how I landed my first job at Slanglabs in the most unconventional way.
Background story
In my final semester at Ramaiah Institute of Technology, I was fortunate enough to secure an internship at a tech company. The journey was not sweet sailing, I struggled with understanding huge codebase and writing clean code. I remember having 50+ comments on my first PR. As time progressed, I learnt acceptable practices, tools and general advice to being a sound engineer. Needless to say, everyone in the engineering team taught me something new every day.
Thanks to efforts and hard work, at the end of my 6 months internship, I shipped many features to production, built developer tool and had the steepest learning curve.
In search of full-time opportunity
After the internship, I received a full-time offer. Though, I decided not to take up and look elsewhere due to personal reason. As I continued my endless search for a better opportunity, I interviewed at many startups. Eventually, I got 1 offer from a company working on an investment product. The team was good and offered better growth and opportunity.
Facebook post that changed everything
I found an interesting Facebook post from Kumar Rangarajan (Co-Founder Of Slanglabs in the newsfeed, announcing the Android SDK launch for building in-app voice features. Now, Kumar & I were connected on FB since 2014. I remember sending him friend request when I first came across his profile from the news article. The report covered how Kumar made a successful exit from Little Eye Labs. It became the first acquisition for Facebook in India.
Fast track to 2017, Kumar left Job at Facebook and started what is now Slanglabs.
Ok, back to the FB post I found. I googled Slanglabs to know more about what they were doing and found that it is based in Bangalore. I then decided to send my first message as a fanboy and asked for the opportunity to meet him and talk about Slang. In all honesty, I was not expecting a reply.
Here is my first message to Kumar:
Surprisingly, Kumar replied, and after some back and forth communication, we finally met over lunch at MTR Hotel in Indiranagar. In our first meeting, I was a fanboy who wanted to meet him and talk about his experience building a tech company. Interestingly Kumar showed me what they were building at slanglabs. Explained how voice could solve the problem in making the next billion people use the app without a language barrier. We further talked about my passion and what I was planning to do after college. A couple of docker & Algorithms question soon followed. 😉
During the meeting, it was clear that I wanted to be part of the team and be part of the fantastic stuff the team was building. After we finished our lunch, Kumar asked if I was interested in exploring an opportunity with them. I answered affirmatively. As a result, I got a take-home project that I had to complete in 3 days. After a couple more days, I interviewed with Slanglabs team.
Fear of rejection
The final decision took someday as Slanglabs team was busy with TechCrunch Disrupt event In US. As days went by, I was deeply confused about joining the company I interviewed and got selected or wait for Kumar response. Fortunately, I went with my instincts and chose not to take up the offer I had. It was risky, and at the time, I didn't have any other offer beside waiting for Slanglabs and fearing that I might not get selected.
Happy ending
All is well that ends well.
After about a week, I was elated when I got my final confirmation to join the team 🎉🎉🎉. During this time, Slanglabs got selected for Google Launchpad programme and My first day at Slanglabs was at Google Bangalore Office. 😁
I was the 7th member when I joined the team, and now we are 20+. Its been a fantastic 2.5 years at Slanglabs and looking back, I feel it was the best decision ever to join an early startup. I'm glad to have got this opportunity most unexpectedly. Over the years, I got the chance to build a great product and starting many projects from scratch with possible high-value impact.