intro to grant thornton
if ur into finance, um, bro listen this company is super known in ur area but not that well known in the technical depths;
if ur not into finance, WHAT’S GOOD BUDDY, welcome to this random company i’m working at, totally not a big tech type company in a different industry;
ok i’ll be real, gt doesn’t need any intro, its a really big firm, i worked in the india office, mostly cuz they’re lenient with international kids who are indian, hello hello, i was also fully remote either way so yeah, have fun reading :)
what i did
this experience was more of data science than computer science but i enjoyed it because of the scale, like if i push a change then there’d be like a million people using it directly; to be honest, that’s kinda fun and all but it makes u wonder what’d happen if a bug goes all the way to prod (it won’t tho they’ve got next level guard rails) but still fun to think abt; also idk if fun’s the right word here but anyway;
i programmed a local crm (customer resource manager), also if u don’t know what that is, i lowkey didn’t either, had to learn all of it at the co-op so ur not alone;
a crm is basically what gt (grant thornton) uses to see how their clients are doing and to make decisions on if they need to change anything or visually make any improvements.
NOW GET THIS STRAIGHT, I MADE A LOCAL CRM, BUT WE CANNOT CALL IT A CRM, and idk the reason why but it felt very legit when my manager was telling me about it so i’m not gonna question it; i speculate its sth to do with local use vs. actual business use but anyway its fine, so even if i say i coded a crm, i actually coded a tool; that’s the more correct, and accurate word, not crm; kinda like saying i designed a highway truck when in reality i designed a truck to be used within production plants, idea is the same but they’re not the same thing; makes sense? ok let’s move on
also one important thing, just like my healthlytics experience, i’m not gonna give tmi (too much info), maybe just talk a little abt the stack and the outward experience, gotta prevent lawsuits u feel me, ok on a serious note, the work gt does it genuinely mind boggling and its why many people want to steal their work so that’s why they make employees sign this thing called an nda (non disclosure agreement) where the idea is to not just go around telling everyone what gt does internally so that other firms can do the same.
working from kenya
i did go to india during this co-op, i don’t remember exactly anymore, been a while, but i went for like 2 weeks or something and actually got to visit one of their offices; i can’t lie, it was super big and i got to eat some nice food, i love indian food, prolly because i’m indian and super biased but i feel like it tastes fairly nice, still prolly biased lol.
i did like 99% of my work from kenya and did it locally and that time i went to india i literally didn’t do any work i was just talking to the people in the company and that was funnn.
now let’s talk abt the work i did, in a very high level
data
bro there was so much data omg.
so they had excel sheets, csv files and json files just filled with data; i had to represent this on web so that they can localhost into it and quickly see trends for all 3 file-types in one area.
use-case
i can see the engineer reading this asking questions like: yo doesn’t this already exist, why get some random co-op to make the whole thing from scratch?
let me answer u, in great detail, with an entire word: privacy.
private use-cases
now the engineer comes back and is like: yo doesn’t a private option exist with some os repo u can clone and pull and customize and also locally host?
let me answer u, in greater detail this time: their customizations are on the os level. ASJDFUCOUWRNF, that was the engineer having a mini seizure reading that cuz they now know i’m kinda cooked.
ui preferences
ohhh i had fun, here i spent like 2 months talking to this one guy who we’ll call bob; bob had requirements for what he wanted the ui to look like; every day it’d be something new, but here’s the best part, the something new added on to what was previously there, I WISH MORE PEOPLE WERE LIKE BOB, but we can’t blame them, bob just happened to have prev. engineering experience so we cooked
coding
eh, idw to write abt this part, u get the gist, i coded coded coded coded coded until my eyes stopped working (they lowkey did this one day i couldn’t see my screen and i got petrified then i learnt from chatGPT that its cuz i’m over-stressing myself) lol
so instead of coding, i’ll tell u abt why u shouldn’t over-stress. OH YEAH there’s this 20-20-20 rule i learnt after having been to the eye doctor like 20+ times, i still go every year cuz now i’m on glaucoma (blindness) care, eeeeeee; anyway, 20-20-20 rule is like every 20 mins, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds, best way to do it is have a clock when ur programming or use the bottom right / top right of ur computer screen (see what i did there, i considered both windows and macOS, its called ACCESSIBILITY david), i hope someone called david read that; anyway, so look at that clock and everytime it hits 20, look away for 20 seconds to the buildings outside ur window, or wherever lowkey, just needs to be some distance away.
i would work 9-5 so i’d do it every 9.20, 9.40, 10.00, 10.20 and so on, at the start i kept forgetting but eventually u get a good hand of estimating 20 minutes and now i’m pretty good at making that estimation based on how long its been even without a clock, so it works, so when coding, don’t stress
i forgot to write the stack, ummm, i used apis, python, html/css/js, django (i said python already oof), apis, sql, yeah there’s more but i either forgot or idk if i should be telling u so guess what, i won’t, whatchu gonna do? um u can contact me and i’ll tell u more, that’s what u can do wink wink
4 months
remember how at the very start i siad that this experience was kinda ds (data science) focused, look at me being a proper writer and coming back to the intro and looping everything so ur in an infinite loop reading,
i spent most of those 4 months understanding data use properly and seeing the kinda trends we want to show on the ui for the end user
did lots of coding for these edge cases and to consider them fully/properly so that was fun too, yeah lots of edge cases and api management but anyway its time to go sleep and let the brain rest so that it can be grateful to God for giving it the ability to think, that was deep, anyway
advice
i lowkey got this role half through reference and half through grinding code; i barely worked in india and this gave my family in india the impression that i didn’t do any work, which was actually funny.
in terms of advice, i’d tell u to first not care abt big tech in terms of name but care abt it in terms of the work u’ll get to do there, that matters a lot, makes a pretty big difference because it changes ur attitude.
also don’t try to go only bigtech, large companies have lots of resources and fairly intelligent people too so u can benefit from that if bigtech doesn’t work, it didn’t work for me and i kinda like open source more so anyway, we’re all diff.
why it matters
i think that working in different parts of the world really changes the way in which u think; it matters because that helps u contextualize what some people with different backgrounds may do/think/act,
its pretty nice and i’d definitely recommend it if u get the chance.
it also matters because working in teams that do internal work (like manufacturing for engineering or pushes for local use in software) make the team appreciate u as a person more cuz all ur doing is working super hard to make things ez for them, so that’s super nice; also the money is more ehhehehe,
all in all, it was a very nice experience working at gt, i made lots of friends, lots of money, lots of connections and had a good time serving the people in locally working with products.