By Balaji Jagadeesan, Sourcing Manager
In my family, the urge to build is in the blood. My father is in the construction business, and even as a little kid, I loved to build houses out of sand. Soon, I was dreaming of becoming a civil engineer and building real-life bridges, highways, and buildings.
After high school, I proudly became the first person in my family to go to university. I had to decide what to study, and my first thought was, of course, my childhood dream of civil engineering. But as I looked around me, I saw there was a revolution in progress. Every day, more and more Indians were using smartphones to communicate, check email, play games, listen to music, browse the internet, and much more.
India’s population is over one billion people, I reminded myself. So just imagine the number of engineers that would be required to create and maintain the hardware, the infrastructure, the operating systems, the apps, and the websites. Those, I realized, were the true careers of the future. So instead of civil engineering, I decided to pursue a different kind of building: one where, in place of steel and concrete, I would use code!
After university, I spent some time working for a U.S. marketing company, helping them generate business leads. Then, in 2012, Revature approached me and asked if I could apply similar techniques to find talented candidates to become the software engineers of tomorrow.
Certainly! I said. I knew from personal experience how important it was to get good people into coding, so I was excited to apply my skills to do exactly that. In the 10 years since that moment, my work at Revature has helped me pursue my passion for building in at least three different ways.
First, I have helped build the company itself. When I started, we had only 18 employees. Today, there are almost double that number on the sourcing team alone. In the meantime, we have hired, trained, and deployed literally thousands of software engineers. To put it mildly, it’s an exciting place to work!
Second, Revature has helped me build up my own skills and confidence. For example, I once suggested that we experiment with an innovative new technique for generating leads. After listening to my proposal, the company encouraged me to try it. I went ahead, and the new approach wound up creating even more leads than before. Without a supportive environment like the one at Revature, that never would have happened.
Third, and most importantly, we at Revature are in the business of building people’s careers and helping them to a better life. As the first graduate in my family, I know very well the importance of that mission. Coding is still the future, maybe even more so than when I noticed all those smartphones appearing years ago. So the more people we can help access careers in tech, the better off the world will be.
Today, I encourage my kids to become builders in their own way. We have a terrace garden at home where we grow jasmine, spinach, brinjal (Indian eggplant), and roses. Instead of building houses out of sand, we build our garden together. For my kids, the lesson is that with hard work, we can build anything we can dream of. That has always been my guiding principle, and at Revature, I get to apply it every day. Having learned a lot from my own experience, I can now assist others in building their own paths to a brighter future. For me, that is the greatest mission of all.