First Job at Azim Premji Foundation
Prologue¶
I got my first job on 14th April 2017. The company was Azim Premji
Foundation and my official role was that of a Technical Consultant. In
this I was to train the content-development team on the Ins and Outs
of Linux and be a guide on their whole learning process. It was quite
an educative experience. The contract ended on 14th
September 2017. But I can still visit the office and work on random
stuff (yes! the manager is really cool!!) =P
Now that this thing has ended I think I am in a decent-ish position to
evaluate it. Honestly speaking I had no idea that my first job would
be something like as meaningful (to me) as this one. I think I am
lucky than most people because I got to work with technology that I
love and I got to do things that I love as well (I have a small crush
on teaching; mostly because I have had bad teachers and think we need
to fix that!!) and on top of that; my job required me to learn more
and more about Linux and to push the boundary. That is like icing on
the cake.
This job shattered all the preconceived notions I had about jobs and how things worked and about "making an impact".
Making an impact¶
I used to be very short-sighted about the "impact" of a job. I always
thought that "impact" is something that you can see from day 1. After
working for 6 months I realized that it is rarely the case. I learned
that good things take time and most of the time this time is because
there are lots of situations that can arise in the middle; issues that
were not thought off before. Also when you are working with other
people then its very easy to get lost in the complexities of life and
work. But this does not mean the all the small things do not matter;
it's just that these things take time.
Teachers and Learning¶
Learning can be an intimidating task for anyone and mostly because
learning something absolutely new can make you feel incompetent and
that is not a good feeling. On top of that learning something new
takes a considerable amount of mental energy and time.
That being said I do not find any difficulty in learning something
absolutely new (this is only the case if I am learning something that
I want to learn); but what surprised me was that even though the
teachers I worked with were very dedicated to the cause but still they
had difficulty getting used to the learning mentality. This used to
bother me at times initially but then I had a breakthrough.
I am 20 years old now and I would say that I am pretty lucky since I
have a lot less things to worry about than most people. But the people
I worked with are not so lucky. What I was not accounting for is the
fact that they are not as free as I am. I was judging them based from
a very narrow perspective and not accounting for the fact that they
were more than just people with a job. They have families to take care
of of, jobs to worry about and hundreds of other things that need
their immediate attention. So expecting that they would be "perfect
learners" was an unwise thing to do. Thus even though the team was a
very motivated team; they have every right to feel unmotivated from
time to time.
I always had a personal grudge against teachers mostly because I had
seen teachers who were not too up to date with the current material
and teachers who did not inspire curiosity and teachers who would
rather say the wrong thing than accept that they do not know
something. I always thought that managers were evil mostly because how
my friends (who were working) always complained about how their
managers were not good and did not know enough about the underlying
system and stuff (I am generalizing here a bit).
Enter the APF team
The group I worked with included three high school teachers and a
Project Manager. The most striking thing about them is their open-ness
to new experience and their humility. This is a bunch of people who
are in their 40s; who are very good at what they do (being teachers)
and who are actively learning new technology that would enhance
the quality of education for high school students. Let that sink in
for a moment.
We had one person there who not only used GNU/Linux so that she could
create localized materials for her students (in Kannada); she was also
an active contributor the the GeoGebra community. This is the best
manifestation of the FOSS movement. I have been associated with FSMK
for over a year and this is the first time got to experience the real
power of FOSS for someone outside the developer community. I always
failed to grasp the idea that FOSS is about the people and not the
technology completely until this experience. After this realized the
full depth of the idea (I think so). There is also another person who
was teaching himself woodworking, calculus and German just because he
wanted to learn them.
I am interested in Theoretical Computer Science and that requires some
decent amount of mathematics which is not covered in great detail in
my course. So I planned to take an online course and teach myself the
maths. BUT I never did, I was too scared of finding out that I was too
dumb or too stupid or too late to the party. In the course of these 6
months my interaction with these amazing people inspired me to enroll
in 4 MOOC while the usual FSMK work and APF work and College course
work (more about this later). I realized that its better to start than
to just wait for the correct time. It is tough to maintain all of
these at the same time (I think I am in-eligible for some of the MOOC
certificates right now; but the certificates are not why I started
taking the MOOC in the first place :-) )
Life-skills¶
Let's talk about humility and open-ness. I was under the impression
that I got this job because I was supposed to know GNU/Linux and teach
them that so I was very scared that a scenario might arise where I
would be out of my depth. As a result I spent a lot of time doing some
homework about the stuff that I had planned to cover that day. But I
got hit by a brick when I saw how open these teachers were about not
knowing stuff. I had never witnessed that amount of acknowledgment
from a teacher about their own shortcomings. Now I think that I am a
lot more open about acknowledging my own short-comings as a
person. Furthermore I think that it is a disservice to yourself if you
can not acknowledge your own shortcomings because we can grow as a
person only when we acknowledge that there is more room to grow as a
person in the first place.
Linux¶
This section will be very short! =P
I had no idea that a Linux based OS was so complex. I always knew that
Linux was complex but I assumed that the OS built around would be
simple enough. Nah! not true again!!! I couldn't be more
wrong. Compiling LFS (Linux From Scratch) has been third best thing in this exercise.
Conclusion¶
At the end of these 6 amazing months I think its fair enough to say that
I learned a lot more from them than they learned from me and looking back I had no idea that this exercise would be such an amazing educational experience for me. Being teachers is not easy and I have more respect for teachers now than I did about 6 months ago. Sure there can be good teachers and bad teachers (I hope I was a good one!) but apart from the one-off cases; most of the teachers are amazing.