My Life in the Corporate World So Far

So, exactly on 19th September 2022, I embarked on my corporate life by joining a startup in Bangalore as a Software Engineer Intern.
And now, it’s been a little more than three years. I’ve switched two companies and moved up from Intern → SDE 1 → SDE 2.
Worked on everything from building APIs to scaling web servers on AWS to writing ETL data pipelines from scratch.And here’s my take on the corporate world so far.

The Early Days: From Curiosity to Clarity

I started working as a Backend Intern on a project written in Node.js. And then the hardship started — the horror and fear of seeing a real-world production codebase. It was just so overwhelming. Everything looked like some colourful words and sentences written all over the place, and none of it made any sense. I didn’t know most of the functions or methods written in the codebase. I used to spend hours just staring at it, trying to make the functions and flow make sense — but they just didn’t. So it became a loop of googling things, reading blogs, and trying to understand.
The hardest part was grasping the concept of Node.js being async by nature. I used to miss writing await for blocking DB calls and struggled with Promises — oh god, that was tough at first. But slowly, I got the hang of it.

After around two months, I finally started to understand Node.js better — the codebase, its structure, and the coding patterns that were being followed.
Along with that, I also got to know about the corporate culture — how things work, the Jira, Confluence, and all that.

And god, oh god, it was just too much to take in. Working through tickets, logging work hours, syncing up… man, it was a lot.

Time to move on!

And when, just around in 5 months, I got to know the full code base in and out, and things were too comfortable, I got moved to a fresh new project — writing the core application for business. This one was built on a microservices architecture, so yeah, new challenges unlocked.

This project was not just about APIs anymore. It was about designing services that could talk to each other efficiently, scaling them, and making sure nothing broke when traffic spiked. The concepts of queues, caching, and service communication finally started to make sense.

During this time, I worked on integrating Travelport’s flight booking and rechduling system, which honestly was one of those projects that teaches you both patience and precision. The system had to handle flight booking and reschedules in near real-time — meaning, every API call and database transaction mattered. It was one of those tasks where you understand that backend development is as much about reliability as it is about logic.

There were nights when I’d be debugging a single workflow for hours, tracing request IDs across logs, only to realize a single missing header was causing the whole flow to fail. But once it finally worked, the satisfaction hit different. That project gave me a lot of confidence — I wasn’t just writing code anymore, I was owning systems.

Switches, Scaling, and Self-Discovery!

After my stint there, I moved on — switched companies, and with that came a new environment, new tech stacks, and new expectations. That’s when I got deep into Python, FastAPI, and AWS.

From building APIs to scaling web servers, to writing ETL data pipelines from scratch, it felt like I’d gone from a curious intern to someone who could see the whole picture — how data flows across systems, how infrastructure supports applications, and how the smallest optimisation can save hours of compute or thousands of requests.

Each new company brought its own culture and flavour — some fast-paced, some structured — but all of them taught me something about how teams function, how priorities shift, and how you grow by constantly adapting.

Lessons the Corporate World Taught Me (the Hard Way)

• Comfort is the enemy of growth. Every time I got too comfortable, something new came my way — and that’s what actually helped me level up.
• Documentation is not optional. The early me hated writing it, but the later me blessed my own notes countless times.
• People matter more than code. No system survives without collaboration. Good teams make great products.
• Your 9-to-6 doesn’t define you. It’s what you learn, how you adapt, and how you carry that mindset forward that shapes your career.

Now — 3 Years Later

It’s been just over three years now. From a nervous intern staring blankly at Node.js files to an SDE-2 building scalable, production-grade systems — it’s been a wild ride.

And if there’s one takeaway from my corporate journey so far, it’s this:

The corporate world isn’t about surviving; it’s about evolving — one deploy, one bug, one late-night fix at a time.

Until next time, cheers!