Dipak Jha (PFM 1998-2000) specializes as a freelance, hands-on solutions & integration architect and works in the United Kingdom as an SME on Internet/cloud-based technologies for large business enterprises and government bodies. A significant chunk of his experience accrues from working on Enterprise Architecture, Systems Design, Systems Integration, Transformations, Migrations, eCommerce, Cloud, and Internet technologies. He is settled with his family in London, where he operates through a software consultancy firm of his own.
Q. How has been your journey from IIFM to this role?
Exciting and challenging at the same time, I must say. It has been difficult because making a career and a stable living out of Information Technology has almost always presented steep learning curves to me, given the intense competition
and fast-paced technological advancements that are so inherent to this sector. For a person with my kind of background, keeping up to speed with new technologies being rolled out by the day has ensured I have perpetually been on my toes, learning new skills and honing existing ones. And the journey has been a sheer excitement because those lanes of technology challenges are exactly where my heart belongs. Unadulterated personal passion and love for technology have kept me going and, more importantly, utterly happy.
At this stage in life, when I am getting old, the satisfaction of having been able to keep neck and neck with youngsters in terms of technology is my biggest asset.
Q. What were some of the key milestones/learning in this journey that you would like to share with us?
Working for a small US-base startup in the early stages of my IT career was perhaps the single experience that shaped my mind into being the hard-core technical thinker that it is. I was part of a team tasked with building a network forensics and analysis tool which translated into high technical expectations, long working hours and immense work pressure. But I still feel it was that experience that prepared me for future challenges. Whenever I write a UNIX bash shell script to solve a problem or come up with an XML parser to make sense of some incoming data, I am filled with gratitude towards people who had forced me to learn such things in that startup and who, at that time, seemed to have polluted my life with disgust and horror.
Another milestone I must mention here was a very conscious decision I made years back to say turn down a managerial role that an organization was keen on hiring me for. I was expected to lead/manage a team of about 70 software engineers, but one week into the job, I realized I was not made for such things. Technology has completely engulfed me, leaving no scope for a leader or manager to flourish within my personality. Deep introspection helped me take cognizance of this aspect of my psyche, and to this day, I am not ashamed at all of openly admitting it. The role would ensure I remained immersed in word documents, excel sheets and presentations rather than my beloved IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), and that just broke my heart. I apologized to the organization and walked out of that job to get back to my enchanting world of software programming – a decision I have relished every day since.
Another significant landmark I would like to mention here was an open invitation from a highly technology-oriented company in the UK to join them on a vast eCommerce project that they had been struggling with. That invitation kick-started my career in the UK, leading to the adoption of England as my official home. Personal aspects and patriotism apart, I have found life as a technology practitioner in the United Kingdom to be much more professional, challenging and therefore, satisfying compared to similar roles in India.
Q. What is the most satisfying part of your current role?
My current project is all about a mammoth enterprise transformation/migration effort that involves moving a series of existing and inter-communicating applications to the cloud, adapting them to function and most importantly, tuning them to perform better there. It also poses daunting systems integration challenges. Several POCs (Proof of Concept) that I am involved in have kept my adrenalin levels reasonably high, and I have ended up drawing immense satisfaction from that itself.
Q. Has your learning at IIFM helped in shaping how you approach your professional roles?
Very much. The course I undertook at IIFM had substantial content that goes a long way towards shaping the learner’s psychology and personality. I have benefited hugely from that fine-tuning. Secondly, management as an academic stream, nudges you not only to improve your communication skills but also to become an interactive team player. The IT industry today discourages individual contributors with everyone frowning at break-away Newtons or Einsteins keen on sitting alone in corners and spinning out technology by themselves. I guess the personality development that happened to me at IIFM has gone a long way towards helping me grow in such an industry. Lastly, I did have some good computer programming experience at IIFM under a professor I harbour immense respect for. Logical thinking, problem analysis and the ability to produce the right solution for a problem are all down to that experience and his careful guidance.
Q. Who (or what) are the biggest influences or drivers in your careers? What would be your advice to freshers and IIFM graduates who are looking to choose similar sectors/roles.
As explained above, a professor at IIFM had profound impact on the way I would look at a problem and the manner in which I would work my way to a technical solution for it. I must say he turned me around and got my career going.
My father, himself, a hard-core engineer and technology lover also influenced me significantly. His simple appreciation for things I did and the way I did them was force enough to propel me in the right direction. In his eyes, I have seen the genuine gleam of an engineer.
But the most influential forces, one must admit at the end of the day, come from within. I would strongly suggest freshers deeply introspect themselves to figure out the things that make them the happiest and then do all that is required to move their careers in those directions. As a child studying physics, I had learnt that resonance is the result of the driver’s frequency exactly matching the driven body’s natural frequency and I am so pleasantly surprised that the same law holds true for life too. If you end up going to work and doing what makes you happy, you already have all the ingredients for creating the resonance of your own life. Probably success is just a poor second name for this resonance.
Q. What are your favorite memories during your IIFM days?
Countless, and they are still quite fresh in the mind. A trip to Pachmarhi on numerous bikes, a trip made by fourteen of us in the din of the night to the forests of Delabari (again on bikes) as much for the enjoyment as to demonstrate our “rebellion” against hostel discipline, intoxicated evenings spent around those bonfires, a birthday party almost every evening and late into the night, lazy breakfasts at Madhuram Dhaba (despite the mess offering reasonably good food)… I could just go on and on.
Q. In hindsight, what was the biggest contribution (courses, faculty, library, friends, alumni.. Anything else!!) or take away from IIFM that you think played a critical role in shaping you as an individual or professional?
My case was not run-off-the-mill. I had joined the course more as a get-away from a lackluster job in a sluggish, politicized organization which I (and my father) didn’t quite like. IIFM presented a fresh change, an elegant atmosphere where I spent about an year getting the mental relaxation I needed after my harrowing work experience.
The combination of serene hill-top settings, the smell of academics in the air, the content of some courses and a bunch of loving friends gave me all the rejuvenation I needed. However, in the 2nd year, I stumbled upon a couple of computer-related courses that sucked an utterly helpless me right into the world of programming from which there has been no looking back ever since.
In hindsight, therefore, I feel the role that the institute played in introducing me to a variety of knowledge areas, computer programming being just one of them, has been the largest contributor. It wasn’t hard to do just the bare minimal justice to other subjects, focus solely on programming in the 2nd year and get away with the degree I had come to earn. I must thank IIFM for being flexible in so many ways.
Q. The best buddies/seniors/faculty at IIFM? Some memorable tidbits that you like to share?
Still vividly remember, and heartfully thank Dr. C S Rathore for giving me the opportunity to go back to the programming I had always loved
My apologies to Dr. Ravi Sundar for never being able to get my head around the differences between an asset and a liability in a balance sheet.
Must acknowledge Dr. Rekha Singal for some introduction to corporate culture.
Dr. N B Majumdar for his sonorous lectures on botany and some aspects of forestry.
My buddies Rajaram Sankaran, Avinash, Sachin Dubey and Ritu Bharadwaj for those wonderful evenings when all we could see were “old monks” smiling all around us
And my sincere thanks to my batchmate, Sonia Bakshi whose crystal clear class notes I thankfully borrowed in the beginning and literally stole (through a range of middlemen) towards the end.
This may sound a bit common-place, and even a bit vague but the only mantra that I’ve found working effectively in life is to follow one’s heart. I have repaired TV’s in the past, run in football grounds till my heart threatened to bleed, worked in 1200 meter deep coal mines for the thrill of it and spent half my life coding away on Linux terminals but have always managed to do what made me happy. I could bend life in the direction of my heart, coaxing the former to fill the latter up with a degree of pleasure and satisfaction not probably known to a lot of people. I guess that is what life should be about. My sincere advice would be to get there, examine every subject, every aspect carefully and then choose whatever makes you happy. A placement that did not meet your expectations should be the last thing to emit sadness, since, if you give it a chance, undoubtedly the entire world somehow conspires to help you be what you want to be.
I have been very fortunate to have a loving and extremely caring family. I do a lot of DIY stuff on Saturdays. Whether it is fixing a home surveillance camera or installing a new VPN server on our outbound router for personal use, I spend a lot of time over weekends adding new features to my “systems” at home that have already been referred to by some of my friends as constituting a “digital fortress”. As a family, we love to drive together and have made several road trips to far-flung places like Italy, South France, Switzerland etc. I love playing music on the harmonica and over the years, have published several renditions on YouTube (search for my name + harmonica). Finally, I have authored a textbook called “Computers and Languages” for 1st-semester engineering students of the UP Technical University. The book did well for a few years, but unfortunately, the syllabus changed drastically, and I have not had the time to update the book.
And my sincere thanks to my batchmate, Sonia Bakshi whose crystal clear class notes I thankfully borrowed in the beginning and literally stole (through a range of middlemen) towards the end.
Q. As an alumnus, what’s your advice to freshers or those are joining IIFM to get the best out of the 2 years there?
This may sound a bit common-place, and even a bit vague but the only mantra that I’ve found working effectively in life is to follow one’s heart. I have repaired TV’s in the past, run in football grounds till my heart threatened to bleed, worked in 1200 meter deep coal mines for the thrill of it and spent half my life coding away on Linux terminals but have always managed to do what made me happy. I could bend life in the direction of my heart, coaxing the former to fill the latter up with a degree of pleasure and satisfaction not probably known to a lot of people. I guess that is what life should be about. My sincere advice would be to get there, examine every subject, every aspect carefully and then choose whatever makes you happy. A placement that did not meet your expectations should be the last thing to emit sadness, since, if you give it a chance, undoubtedly the entire world somehow conspires to help you be what you want to be.
Q. What is your typical day at the office? (We want to know what your day job looks like..)
My day at the office usually begins with what is called a “stand-up” meeting – a fairly standard, agile-based meeting across the industry. The entire technical team comes together with every member updating all others on what they managed to achieve yesterday, what their plans for today are and if their work is blocked by someone/something. Architectural strategies, outcomes of POCs (Proof of Concept), results of functional and performance testing etc. are also discussed. After the meeting, I usually get cracking with the piece of work I have picked up. It may be a solution blueprint, conducting a POC or documenting the outcome of a POC, fixing a defect in a design I proposed earlier, helping developers understand a piece of logic or flow, understanding an issue faced by our online customers and developing a fix etc. Usually, I work unsupervised and am fortunate enough to work with line managers who have almost blind faith in what I do. The calendar for the rest of the day may also have some discussions assigned to things like key design decisions (KDDs), planning for hardware sizing etc. but by and large, I rarely have anything to do with things that are outside of technology.
Q. And what about weekends.. Hobbies.. Family..
I have been very fortunate to have a loving and extremely caring family. I do a lot of DIY stuff on Saturdays. Whether it is fixing a home surveillance camera or installing a new VPN server on our outbound router for personal use, I spend a lot of time over weekends adding new features to my “systems” at home that have already been referred to by some of my friends as constituting a “digital fortress”. As a family, we love to drive together and have made several road trips to far-flung places like Italy, South France, Switzerland etc. I love playing music on the harmonica and over the years, have published several renditions on YouTube (search for my name + harmonica). Finally, I have authored a textbook called “Computers and Languages” for 1st-semester engineering students of the UP Technical University. The book did well for a few years, but unfortunately, the syllabus changed drastically, and I have not had the time to update the book.
Q. IIFM is driven by alumni’s passion and commitments towards its goal. How would you like to contribute to IIFM or IIFM alumni, students?
More than happy to talk to current students and share my own experiences with them. I am sure some of my lessons learnt will help them steer clear of similar issues in life. On the technology front, I would be happy to talk to them about areas of opportunities, emerging IT trends, the hottest topics to spend time on and how to make technology work for you.
Q. What do you think is different at IIFM now vs when you studied there? What do you think is a positive change and what is not?
To be honest, I haven’t had a chance to visit IIFM (except for a day in 2006 for my convocation) or interact with the current batches. However, going by what I hear from some of my batchmates, I understand the institute offers a much wider variety in terms of placements and the salaries that students can garner. I would love to know more in this area.
Q. Any suggestions on who you want to get profiled/interviewed here?
Rajaram Sankaran – PFM 98-2000: He is the CEO for a pharmaceutical company in Uganda
Ashish Sinha – PFM 98-2000: He cracked the Civil Services exam a few years after we left IIFM and is now India’s High Commissioner to Kenya.
Ashish Sinha – PFM 98-2000: He cracked the Civil Services exam a few years after we left IIFM and is now India’s High Commissioner to Kenya.