After a long time, today I am here to tell you yet another story.
In this article, I will take you through my 6-months internship experience of working at redBus. In a nut shell, it was a fun and exciting journey, meeting new folks, making new friends and taking up new challenges. Apart from that I'll also be telling my experience of living in Bangalore, yup :)
And for the people who don't know how I landed my internship at redBus, then I highly recommend to check my article on "How redbus happened" I am pretty sure, you'll gain something out of it. Thanks a lot to the folks who DMed me saying they found this article really helpful.
Going back in timeline, I came to Bangalore on 20th May 2023. I came to south after more than a decade. It was a whole new city altogether for me. Soon after I stepped out of the airport, I went to the bus stand and the bus driver started talking to me in Kannada. Somehow, I was able to convey him the place that I wanted to go. It is my relative's place.
Moving forward, I joined redBus on 22nd May 2023. I went to their office as it was my first working day. Somebody from HR team took the induction.
I was given a MacBook Pro M1 and my mind was blown after I started using that machine. It's incredibly smooth, blazingly fast and a really cute machine that takes care of literally everything tech. In the past, I've heard that MacBooks are good but didn't believe until I started using one. It exceeds way beyond my expectations. And yes, it took me around a week to get my hands dirty with the Mac. But one thing I can say for sure is if anybody start using Mac then they will never go back to Windows again.
PS: I started using it as if it's my personal laptop. The sad part is I know for a fact that I have to return this to my employer just after the internship ends
After a while my manager came and introduced me to the some of the people from the UX Design team who were there in the office. It was the first time I got to work with some of the people having nearly a decade of experience. Of course, I was initially nervous as to how things will go but thankfully everything went well than I expected.
Then I was assigned some basic tasks on the first day itself. I had to study what redBus does, what other business verticals do we have and all of that stuff. I did all of this on my own so that I deeply get to know about the business that I will eventually be designing for. After that I was constantly involved in multiple projects and during that time I learnt a lot as to how to gather feedback, how to differentiate between good and bad feedback, how to communicate clearly and a lot more.
So, let's breakdown my experience of working at redBus into challenges that I faced, how did I overcome from that and what did I learnt out of them.
Communication: As employees in redBus come from multiple states, so one thing I was sure was communication in Hindi won't be possible that much any more. So, the only neutral platform that connects somebody Mallu to somebody Tamilian is English.
Although talking to other people in English wasn't a big challenge but because I wasn't that fluent in it then, it become sometimes hard to convey my design decisions in meetings. But eventually as I was surrounded by people from multiple states where English is the only language for communication, I eventually become pretty fluent at it.
Involvement of multiple stakeholders: redBus is an MNC where the employee base is quite large. In that large pool of employees, sometimes it becomes extremely hard to make things live. Sometimes a project take would take nearly a month for its completion takes more than a quarter and that's a big challenge (at least for me).
What I observed was the more people gets added in the project, the more complex the project eventually becomes.
I came to this observation after talking to people working at Microsoft and Google. Furthermore, I found this pattern to be a common one across multiple MNCs.
Startup vs MNC: I did my last internship at a startup where the things moved really fast. Before joining redBus, I had no clue how MNCs worked. After I joined here, I saw that the work is pretty slow here as all the systems and processes are already well established that too we are the market leader in bus ticket booking.
That's when I realised my true potential lies in working for startups and not MNCs. Startups have that freedom of making 0 to 1 products and can pivot anytime very easily whenever they need to unlike MNCs which will have to go a hard time about pivoting because everything from customer base to internal process are all well established.
Gather feedback: Soon after I started my projects, to gather feedback on any design I made I usually approach my manager and sometimes other people in the team. The challenge for me was, I don't know which feedback is good or bad and how do I classify it.
Over time, I learnt that collaboration with other team members is important for me to sort of differentiate between good and bad feedback. Sometimes feedback from peers is brutally honest and I don't mind getting that sort of feedback because I already know I'm not good enough and I am here to learn not to boost my ego. I remember this quote from Kunal Shah, he made in his TED talk.
"Shame is the motivator to goal achievement."
There were a few more challenges I faced that are deeply personal to me and I have no intent of sharing them
Overall, I had a pretty good experience of working here and I consider myself kind of fortunate enough to work for both startup and an MNC very early on in my career. Moreover, I enjoyed going to the office and ever since I joined the company I never worked from home. I love working from the office, meeting people everyday and just chat with them.
The team I was working in is also very good, extremely talented and helpful. The best part about the team that I really liked is we have people from multiple parts of India. So, it was like I am learning from multiple cultures at the same time. But sometimes the situation becomes extremely funny around me when I hear people around me talking in Malayalam or Tamil that I can't stop laughing.
Fun fact: I didn't learn even a single language of south despite being surrounded by people from south for around 6-months
Apart from regular work we also went for parties, not that frequently I would say but every time we went, I enjoyed it.
On 1st September 2023, the annual party of GoMMT group was organized. This time Harsha Bhogle and Kanan Gill were invited for performances.
So, that's all about my experience of working at redBus.
Now coming to my experience of living in Bangalore, it was pretty decent compared to what I expected. Of course, there are something I liked and didn't liked about Bangalore. If I have to summarize some tips for anybody planning to shift to Bangalore, then keep the following pointers in mind:
Bangalore is Expensive: Yup, it's expensive. From commute to general stuff to rent, it's a little bit expensive at least when I compare it to Delhi.
Traffic: You might have seen a lot of memes on social media ranting on Bangalore traffic and yup it's true. There's a lot of traffic in general on road here. Sometimes it's like for travelling just 1 km, it will take you more than an hour.
So one lesson that I learnt was, just take an accommodation near to the office. It can be a bit expensive and I guess that's fine if I have to make a trade off between cost and time.
redBus office was just nearly 500m from my PG, so I never faced this problem. It's like 8-9 minutes walk and I reach the office.
Fun fact: The fastest way to offend people in Bangalore is just tell them the distance between your place and the office. Sometimes, I was even abused when I told people that my office is just 500m from my PG.
Weird behavior of cab drivers: Here cab/auto drivers will randomly cancel your booking on Ola or Uber. Say, you have to leave your home for office by 10 AM, then start booking cabs around 9:30 AM. This is something I personally experienced. Keep 3-4 apps ready to book just one single ride.
If Ola isn't not accepting, try Uber if not then try Rapido if not then try Namma Yartri. Sometimes, you have to do this specially in peak times when either most people leave for the office or come from the office.
Weather: This is the one I'm damn sure readers will be most interested in. I came from Delhi which has pathetic weather of course. In Bangalore, it's like heaven for me. One thing I can say for sure, the only reason why people love being in Bangalore is it's weather. More or less, the weather is mild throughout the year. It feels very pleasant and fresh.
When it comes to rain, it's completely random. That's why I used to carry an umbrella everyday in my bag.
One thing I didn't like about Bangalore is the lack of street food culture. I came from Delhi which is kind of known for street food but here you won't find that culture. Here, there a lot of bars and cafes. You will find many people working from cafes, it's a norm here.
The best part about Bangalore (apart from weather) is you get to meet a lot of really smart people. Before coming to Bangalore, I planned to meet some folks I have been talking over DMs or Google Meet. Every weekend, you will be get to see some or the other design meetup is happening around you which you can attend and make good connections with smart people.
I attended a few of them namely:
- Figma Config Watch Party by Friends of Figma, Bangalore (24th June 2023)
- LottieFiles Design Meetup by Punit Chawla (Founder Designwings UI/UX School) (27th August 2023)
- Startup Mixer by Abhijeet (Designer at Refyne) (2nd September 2023)
- Framer Bangalore Meetup at Razorpay office (8th October 2023)
- Inclusive Design Meetup by Tekion Corp. (14th October 2023)
In every meetup I attended, I made some really good connections, friends and learnt about the design industry from some really smart people.
With that being said, around 6 months passed and my internship at redBus was coming to an end. My last working day at redBus was 10th November 2023. Meanwhile, I was wondering what's next. One day, I was scrolling on X, when I saw Scaler is hiring for product design interns.
I applied and got a call. A couple of rounds were scheduled and finally I got the offer letter. I joined Scaler on 15th November 2023, really excited to work for a startup again in the Ed-Tech domain. I am excited for new projects, new tasks, new challenges and of course new learnings.
Thanks Kishan Vagale for my next opportunity.