Coders for Causes BlogAbout

It’s been nearly two years since I started my professional journey by joining Telstra Purple. It’s been an amazing and rewarding ride. Today was my final day and within two hours of leaving the company, I lost access to everything. I guess it’s a great time now to reflect after having copious amounts of liquor.

I spent three years of my life at university. Like most, my first semester was brutal trying to adjust to university life. At one point I nearly gave up, but after the initial hurdles, things started to go well. I ended up making lots of friends and doing well academically. Life, in short, was easy, I could wear whatever I want, do whatever I want and wake up whenever I want. But all good things must come to an end. I graduated with a feeling of dread.

It is a complete change in your life when you start working as a professional. Suddenly you have to wake up at a reasonable hour and you have to be somewhere 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Additionally, young uni students are replaced by a really nice but much older group of people. The age gap is interesting, in some sense it’s harder to connect and you feel intimidated but you also mature. It can be isolating at times with your social life declining as you see your friends less and less due to your work schedule. It’s a far cry from seeing your friends everyday at uni.

Seems like doom and gloom huh? Even though I miss the social aspect of university I would never go back. Because you start to experience a real sense of meaning in life. You are no longer working on useless projects that only an indifferent lecturer sees. Instead, the projects can have an important role in people’s lives. For example, I helped create an app to help people with disabilities. There are real consequences now if you do a poor job it will lead to frustration for users but if you write your code well it will be a seamless experience. The software you work on is way more complex than anything you have seen before. Most of the time the code has existed for years and worked on by dozens of programmers. This can be overwhelming, fortunately, in a large organisation there is a support network and an understanding of a need to help junior engineers. This means less stress and an opportunity to learn in a safe environment.

At the end it has been a great experience. All that studying in order to reach a corporation I would say has been worth it. Just being able to meet really smart and talented people is enough. Not to mention the interesting projects, awesome free events and the many perks cough cough free phone, laptop, and travel.

Now I am throwing it all away to join a startup. Why? its a personal decision and that is where we separate my friends.

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Written by David Yu who loves to build things in code.You should checkout our facebook for latest events and news