My journey from being a Noob Engineer to a Product Designer at Walmart

“Life is too short to spend 8–9 hours on something you don’t love to do.”

It all started when I was in the fourth year of my college and was confused like any other engineering kid , I literally tried everything Java, C ++ , business analyst. I used to try things for a month only to figure how disaster I was at that thing! Then one fine day, what I did was I started connecting the dots , I literally sat down and jotted down all the things I loved to do. I liked to observe people , look at the various apps and websites and was always curious, how people came up with this , at that time WhatsApp came recently and my first response was how can anyone think of something like this? I always had so many questions in my head with little or no answers. My friends used to call me “Shreya Subhangi question mark question mark” I always used to be so confused about everything. Ahhh ! Sorry I got deviated from what I was talking about so, we were at jotting down points, so one point was I liked apps and ideas other one was I was very much fascinated by animations , colours , User interfaces , the way of things working and solving problems , creativity, and requires little or no coding skills. I wanted to be the idea behind the app but was not so interested in coding the whole app or website.

After knowing all these I thought is there any way , any profession which can help me making a career out of this ? I would also like to mention that I was good at doing pencil sketches, creative arts but my father used to say you cannot make a profession out of your hobby so you have to find a conventional path to earn your bread and butter.

But by then after googling almost everyday like crazy I got to know about this UX /UI designing thing and that was my “ Eureka” , moment my heart said yes yes , this is the one 😂 lol. This is the exact career which you were looking for since a long long time.

So later on, I got placed (fortunately) in one of the “employee friendly” as they say MNC and started working as a software engineer, there also I had that in my mind that I want to be UX / UI designer at any cost! But unfortunately what I got was monitoring, copy paste kinda stuff, then they put me in SAP , backend development of a dead application which is still surviving on one kidney. And I was looking for the better days to come very patiently.

This continued for some time, but whoever I met in office, I used to tell them you know I am not meant for this I will be a UI/ UX designer someday when, how that I even didn’t know, but I knew that will happen. So, what I did was I started building my own path, attended workshops, talk shows design event , did a hell lot of networking ! Being an extrovert I love meeting new people talking to them understanding their journey and so on. But nothing was really falling into place. Meanwhile one fine day, I applied for changing my skills in my office portal and luckily after qualifying few exams I got my skills changed as a UI Design and Development. But it was a mix of both world like we used to do some UX some UI , some development, but lately my manager started convincing me that I should leave my UI/ UX thing and should switch to Salesforce since I ll get more money duh uh 😏. That day I decided bus ab bahut hogyi na insaafi ! ( Enough is enough)

And randomly started applying for jobs I’ll explain how I applied and interview happened in another article so do read that ! And after giving some 15–20 interviews I cracked all of them btw ( just flaunting😏) it was very exhausting 🥲. At end I got into one of the dream company of many “ Walmart” wohooooo 🥳🥳! , I still remember the day I couldn’t believe my eyes , and I am so, so grateful for that. At the end, I just want to say never ever lose hope, because good things take time.

See ya in the next article !