As you may have already known, my (soon-to-be ex-)company decided for me to pursue a new career elsewhere. I didn’t want to believe this - my body accepted it faster than my mind could. My body moved like clockwork - I proceeded to update my resume. My resume was in shambles. It looked lacklustre. As I documented my notable accomplishments line by line, my resume brightened a lot. It brightened like how replacing an incandescent bulb with an LED one felt.
I felt touched. I grew. And that was not all - if the things off the top of my head were enough to impress myself, I can’t imagine how much happier I’ll be when I recall my other achievements. I didn’t achieve these on my own. I had my team to thank. Things were hectic during the day when I was scrambling to get my resume, payslips, tax documents, Workday profile and insurance policy settled or downloaded. Now, as the slanting rays of the setting sun gave a warm orange tinge to the sky, my body slowed down, and my mind had all the space it needed to reflect and think.
Thank you, G, for being with myself and my teammates for the entirety of my career at Indeed. I love the team culture you created - it was one of compassion. We learnt to understand each other’s commitments and difficulties outside of work and cover for each other. We don’t point fingers - we learn from mistakes and improve. We embrace experimentation - in both projects and team processes. Lastly, thank you for always recognising my strengths and helping me shine.
Thank you, H, for being my role model and teaching me to make sound technical decisions - choosing between various solutions, whether to do a piece of work, etc. This growing instinct will come in handy, in face of so much work and so many feature requests. Even if we may not be working together anymore, my aspiration to be “someone from whom everyone wants to hear in the meeting room” remains - and I will think of you and that respectable demeanour as I trudge towards this ideal.
Thank you, A, for always being patient when explaining the various parts of the SE, SA and CT ecosystems to me. The troubleshooting guides and your input have been lifesavers during my first responder duties. You have been a great subject matter expert and a critical pillar of support for the team. Your product areas have the greatest reach and losing you is a major loss to Indeed.
Thank you, YH, for leading several of our team meetings and introducing so many areas for improvement in our products and the team itself. Our monitoring capabilities would be close to zero if not for you. While we may not always agree on everything during some of our technical discussions, it was important to understand both sides of the argument. I believe we did, and our interactions have helped me iterate towards informed and well-considered decisions.
Thank you, HY, for being such a joy to work with. You are my first female teammate (let’s not count school projects) and I liked that we confided in each other a lot - about life, career, work and so on. I hope I’ve been a great source of support as you were to me. And not to forget, your massive contributions to the SB and TE projects have improved the lives of many.
Thank you, E and I, for working round the clock to disambiguate stakeholder needs, managing their expectations and ensuring we work on what’s important. The XT project wouldn’t have come to fruition so quickly without your help.
It was short, but thank you, K, N, T and L for being such a significant boost to our reliability and productivity. Between Q2 2022 and today, we have resolved a ton of improvement work items for our existing systems (I don’t have the exact numbers as I’m locked out of Jira). Bugs were squashed and response times became much faster. You were so inspiring - you motivated me to stop in my tracks to prioritise improvements and better address user needs.
Last but not least, thank you, Z, for breathing life into my resume. Being locked out of my performance self-evaluation document, along with gloom, made it a challenge to describe my strengths in words. But now, I’m getting ready to face the world.