Hmm, a quirky mail got me a job, but it sucked

I have never thought that I will writing my first blog like this, but it-iz-what-it-iz.
My crossover with a "AI Form Builder" company from Bangalore, for which I am not mentally fit or in their words "My learnability is not that high". I don't know what to do next, my age is coming closer and closer to 24. I don't have guts to face my parents.

How it all started

You guys must have seen this tweet by me, right? The infamous tweet that opened a plethora-of-human emotions about me. At that point in my life, I need a job to not only make money, but to learn about living independently. This tweet actually got noticed by team of Metaforms.

HR(her name is Santoshi), was very kind to me and asked me my story, and how I came across Metaforms. I was building Prompt.up(I will continue about this project in next blog). Next, she took bring me on call with Engineering Lead "Arjun", smart guy but I can see he hates me from first second. But I continued giving my interview. Apparently, this interview was about my past experience and they were asking me for 1 codebase for Frontend Complexity and 1 codebase for Backend Related Complexity.

For Frontend, I have one opensource code that I build for Frontend Role for Arpit Bhayani's Company DuggUp(DuggUp Assignment). For Backend, I showed him a hiring assignment in another startup. He was adamant on explaination a project that was group project in final year(7th semester tbh) course at IIITD. I told him that this project is relatively old as I don't have much thing in my mind about this project. It was there in my resume(guys have everything from your resume on your tips) and after this i have worked on 17-18 projects in various domains like express.js, android, flutter, nextjs, a bit of rust as well.

Non-the-less, Akshat (Founder of Workhack), contacted me to express that tech lead don't want to proceed with me. But he want to give me a chance. So, instead of me becoming a (core) Software Developer, they made me (marketing) Software Developer.

Those who are not aware of what marketing engineer do, let me tell you. We build side-projects independently, that have some relevance with core product without having codebase of main product. C'mon what?

But it was first offer-letter that I have gotten in months(thanks to recession).

Minor Red Flags to notice

One day after this interview, i joined company slack. I saw founder was laughing about he is liking me less-and-less (I am literally quoting his words in third person) in #random channel. For this tweet, this post is for my twtr-homies. That I will be more busy now. I don't understand this laugh. But I also, see within 30 minutes he removed his post. Maybe its for decency or may be its being avoidance of conflict.

He then give me friendly advice that not to tweet too much. This is actually a very good advice and I saw what kind of person he is. And my limited professionalism led me to ignore his previous comments, and agreeing on his advice. Infact, I didn't post the next week. Because not only because he advised me to not to do so, but I have a life outside twitter.

Joining etc.

Day 1 : New Beginning in new City

I was staying with my college friend, who was generous enough to let me stay for 4 days, till I got to a point where I can afford house. I got up wearing formals, and went to workhackHQ which is on top of Barista, I mean dekh-kar-hi-bhook-lagayi. First day, I got panic attack looking at team. Nothing much but the things the founder communicate just to make us lose our shit. We have <1 Million in bank(added to both US and India banks) which is equivalent to 20 months of runway. We are looking to raise another series-A about 10 Million. We have this much investment under this investors, etc. I sometimes feels that founders specially used these lines to confuse people, this mixed with heavy English will make everything sounds puffy and big. I finally met marketing contractor name "Ankit", great guy tbh. But he is still in marketing, he do understand some technical things, but not that much. I love talking to Ankit because he is #Delhite and talks shit like that. I like people who talks directly. Also, he breaks things for me which i am grateful to. First day, he gave me task to build extension to metaforms. They wanted me to build a static react site to list all of the alternatives to typeforms. Hence, cheapertypeform.com came into picture. First day, deploy they were very happy. I am unfortunately not. Because I know, this is super simple and anything tough it would have taken us time.

Day 2-4: They now wanted a generic form to result project.(it took more than 3 days btw)

The thing you see in twitter a lot, they want me this. I build this thing in 2 days but this haven't released yet. :/

One thing that I learn in this project is how to communicate b/w iFrame and host.

But this need engineering teams efforts as they are one with access to main site. As they are the one who can send signals to my site. Red-flagged for not being independent enough for marketing engineer. After that, I passed values to openAI's gpt api. For some reason, npm package of OpenAI never worked on that time it was blocking UI if I used that on useEffect hook. So, I have to make fetch command to curl openai api. Somehow, able to complete this task in 2-3 days.

Day 4-6: Internal Marketing Dashboard using Redshift and Amplitude

Here, the time when they really got under there nerves. They have redshift data for backend events and amplitude for frontend. Firstly, I never got which events to look for. So, i keep asking for help for queries. Plus, I could able to query one table after much efforts like 3-4 hours. Then, I asked if tech lead himself can do it because I can't do it. I don't understand why he got upset but he mentioned if he need to do this, then what is point of giving task to me. okay :/
Somehow, I got it working and deployed it AWS. One more things, I couldn't able to ssh into AWS using private key. I asked him to placed my public key in `~/.ssh/authorized_keys`. Still he is like "Google how to ssh using private key." I somehow able to get the access. So, that project was deployed.

Day 7-8: Final two days

They gave me task to build a sale-funnel named "David - AI Survey Analyst", this is where i fucked-up. The problem was it was supposed to launch on 12 PM Tuesday(14th May 2024), I was assigned this task on 1 PM, Monday(13th May 2024). Although, it is super simple but I don't have enough knowledge to tell LLM how to process the data and get it in proper format. Now, I know if we can tell LLM to use tags for information then it will give the properly information in proper format. Also, the designer who got working on designs was also clueless as me. He build one design for David, by 5 PM which got rejected by Akshat, he deliveried it by 8:15 PM. During this time I build backend endpoint. Which I initially wanted to be FastAPI because it is easiest to me. But later move to give express endpoint. This endpoint only consist of how to get csv as input body and process that. Later, I got help with Siddhish (only AI engineer) which I am hesitant to ask for (because founder tell me not to disturb the engineering folks for my work), but he did irrespectively. After that, I got both frontend designs, backend endpoint with openAI queries. I only need to stitch the code. I took whole night, and try to delivery it. Code was extremely hacky because what else you expect on 1 day delivery. I called Akshat at 9:30 AM for testing which I thought was possible(I can acheive it if I didn't slept for 3 hours at night). I tried my best but 11:00 AM, I only have job of making last few ui which state parsing for analyst. Which i was doing at blazing speed and I was about to cry if that wasn't supposed to complete. Akshat said if 11:20AM is not going happen then his engineering folks will take the project, that means I am fired. That happened. And then his tech lead got an edge over me to fire me. I AM OFFICIALLY FIRED. So, much happen in 24 hours and I don't care about getting fired, as if they don't fire me then I would have resigned that company.

Aftermath - Unemployed Again

For 45 minutes, Akshat didn't said anything and also anyone who tried to ask me anything, he diverted the question to Arjun. Just let me sit on my chair which is kind off expected as he have deadline to meet. But after that he called me to his room and told that he expect that company is working at certain speed, to explain me those concept arjun and other folks need to slow down, my level of learnability is very low for them and state of being confusion is very contagious for such high-speed environment. I don't want to comment/defend myself because if I didn't said a word then, there is no point of ranting them here. I feel burden for fucking this time, as because of me Ankit (Marketing Contractor) have to sacrifice a part of his credibility, and I can't do anything to make it right now. :( It was not his mistake but mine, purely mine.

Overall, they paid me certain amount for my work and I am looking for job again.

Thanks for reading this long essay.