Work on your skills because your skill will definitely pay off – Devesh Raj, Map Analyst at Google LLC

Greetings! Tell us about your background and your journey as a developer?

Hola! I’m Devesh and I am a Data Analyst, Software Engineer and also a Keynote & Motivational Speaker at Google Developer Group. I graduated from IGNOU Lucknow in Computer science & technology. My craze for black screens with the green font started since I watched Hollywood’s sci-fi movies like Matrix & Iron Man in my childhood. It started out as a pursuit of looking cool at that age, but quickly became a passion when I started developing simple web pages. Since then I have been learning new concepts and technologies to date. Today, I am responsible for data mining and data analyzing technology systems at my day job. As a side role, I help in establishing tech culture and adopt best practices that help scale the organization technologically.

How was your journey from coder to leader? 

Fortunately, at the starting of my career, I had the opportunity to work as the Geek in my organization and start working on the project from Google Maps. I didn’t have any mentors at that time. As a consequence, everything I did was a result of self-study or experimentation. That was a very big confidence booster. Luckily, my colleagues and mentees have been very supportive during that time. This led to a natural progression into a leadership role early in my career. Call it destiny or the nature of my choices, I have been always been to positions where I end up leading the teams. The real field experience of building things from scratch and mentoring people has been helping me to continuously learn how to be a better leader and developer. With the support of the mentee, I started to speak in public to share my feedbacks and some experiences about technologies and career building.

Give us a sneak peek into your regular day at work and how do you regularly motivate yourself to work? 

Well, my day to day work like manage huge data from servers and cloud and working on some projects regarding my working profile and it’s really amazing to work with my colleague and my team. I also try to ensure that all events can also be managed at that time. On my weekends I attend meetups, where I participate as a keynote speaker and sometimes as a Mentor or Judge in few events. I generally try to work as my schedule and motivate myself with reading books, watching web series and doing some new stuff.

what was the biggest challenge as a manager and how you came out of it?        

The biggest challenges I faced with deliver our work with more efficiency and manage thousands of data management from the cloud with upcoming new products and technologies. the lesson I have learned while leading teams is that ensuring redundancy in terms of abilities and skills always helps in mitigating risks in product delivery. You cannot rely on a single person for a sizeable portion in a running product or a new delivery. Working in such kind of organization is an honor for me.

What’s the best advice you’ve received about being a manager?

Leading and mentoring the team is the best advice I have received about being a manager and a team leader. To gain the trust of the team and make them follow is only possible when they see you doing the real stuff yourself. Things become much easier when you preach what you do. I myself haven’t seen any successful leaders who themselves cannot do what they are asking their teams to do.

What the best advice that you can give to someone who is starting their journey as a manager? 

I would urge the developers who are considering making the switch to focus a lot on their interpersonal skills. While working as developers, very rarely people pay attention to soft skills, but as you rise up the ladder, the way you communicate becomes as important as what you communicate. Secondly, I would also suggest that if you don’t have the prior experience, start with small teams as this will give you more breather when learning new management skills. I always force to everyone, please work on your skills because your skill will definitely pay off. Always be in good surroundings and set your new goal and break it then again do the same.

How can other coders learn more about you? 

My GitHub profile (https://github.com/devish2). 

My professional profile is on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/devish2/). 

My Blog (https://www.medium.com/@devish2) 

Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/devish2)