Friday was my last day in Zynga.
Zynga has been a very different place for me to work in. Coming from Yahoo, where the tech folks had sway over the company, to a place where the product managers were the core of the company was jarring to say the least. But adapting to thrive, indeed succeed there has polished off a few rough edges that I had.
I've sat at the cliff's edge between what's management and the frontline. I've stared into the abyss and stared it down. I've seen exactly how incentives work and more importantly, when incentives tend to work against you. I've learnt to temper my competitive spirit to skip the usual pitfalls of meritocracy. I've understood how to work with people who are not engineers.
I've known the difference between talking & persuading. To effectively bring people over to your side of the debate - whether it is with statistics or merely by running experiments. In some sense this is more diplomacy than being technically right every time - but there's no value in actually being wrong. And I got better at saying No.
I've learnt what risk looks like. Very early in this "game", I learnt to play offense. To gauge a risk, take it and occasionally clean up afterwards if it blew up in my face. And in some sense that's the general motto around there. I became quicker at churning out a solution, battle testing it and minor setbacks weren't really a deterrant anymore. And I was brave.
I got to treat crisises differently. I was on the on-call rota. Instead of panicking and hyperventilating, I started treating them as merely opportunities to offer solutions. And in my spare time, I prepared for these crisises which turned out to be massively productive moments of innovation. I tried to get some of it opensourced, but a lot of it is locked up in the paperwork that I never finished.
I've had my moments of frustration too. There have been scenarios which were charged with egos and people politics, which are probably no different in any other workplace - people trying to play schedule chicken, folks trying to delay others with scope creep, territorial engineers telling me to keep off their turf & avoidable meetings where people duel with power point slides full of promises they can't keep. I've occasionally gotten demoralized about all that, but I've managed to move beyond that and build out a stronghold around me.
And finally, the best thing that's happened to me was working with the senior technical folks in the Bangalore office. People like Binu, Prashun, Prakash & Jayesh have been a big part of my development at Zynga. And not just them actually, the whole team is full of fun folks who don't really consider work as the end-all of their daily life.
It felt like I was part of an uber startup!
--The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
-- Charles Kettering