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It’s been 4 years 0 months and 4 days since I joined Experian Bulgaria.

And today is the day I am leaving it.(a tad dramatic, aren’t I?)

It’s been a wild journey. A rocky one. And pretty fulfilling as well.

I learnt some important lessons(some with sour disappointment, some through gentle guidance) and I met some truly wonderful people here.

I never expected to stick around for so long, and I can easily say it was the people I now call friends who kept me in Experian.

Having passed through the pipeline CMI(MPI) > ECS > Scaled Dlivery > Custom Analytics before that, I am happy to be closing the Experian chapter of my life having joined the Marketplace Data and Analytics team.

I can only hope my new colleagues will be as welcoming and kind.

And because I’m me, before I leave, I did take a look at some stats only I will find interesting, and that honestly surprised me a little:

  • For the sake of my own inner peace, I’ve created and edited 48 pieces of documentation and I’ve contributed to another 74 (practically a legacy!), spanning across 4 years and 5 teams.

I’m the most proud of the one named „Dis breaked, wot do“ and the one I left with „Enemy mine“ easter eggs(a lovely book; give it a read if you happen to find it).

  • I’ve spent crushing 210 working days in each team, on an average, and while I loved some days, mundane and repetitive work brought me to burnout and being suicidal on too many others.
  • I acquired the minimum reaction my resignation should bring going forward(thanks, you-know-who!)

I am choosing to remember the good moments, and I can never thank enough the people in Experian that believed in me when I wasn’t ready to believe in myself or just needed a little push to carry on.

A couple of thanks nevertheless:

– to the first mentor I had there for believing I have it in me to figure things out even when my mind was too busy with studying building physics and how CAIS and CAPS data is connected was the last thing on my mind( I owe you at least 10 pairs of socks!);

– to the gentle and ever so funny manager that with only a handful of conversations reshaped my determination and thinking about how to get things done in a way no stakeholder management training ever could(being devoted and passionate about my work was easy because you were on the other end);

– to the project manager whose solid professionalism was the only thing that got us both through a migration that was badly planned and even worsely executed;

– to the colleagues who somehow managed to teach me things when my brain was an overworked or simply uncoooperative slush – those that made me less scared of joins (and then SQL became so so much easier); that helped me grasp statistical knowledge when no other senior help was provided; that were there when I needed someone who doesn’t write Python with the brute force of a dragon and actually knows the proper syntax; that continued having genuine and honest conversations with me even when I had swithed teams; that welcomed me in the new team with kindness and genuine desire to help me grasp the new objectives; that happily picked my brain about things of importance and got me out of the slump of daily work banality…

Y’all were a spark in the dark. Take that as you will, and know that you helped me to keep going.

(I am getting all sappy, it’s time to wrap it up.)

 

I am happy with the work I’m leaving behind, and even more so with the friendships I made along the way.

Closing the chapter and turning the page.

(19/08/19 – 23/08/23)