Once upon a time in a galaxy far-far-away…. okay, not that long ago, and this is true.

Some people could interpret my actions in the beginning of my corporate life as completely immature. I did fun things like get to know people, organize social events, and generally have fun while working. These actions allowed me to get to know some FANTASTIC people along the way. I had fun, was frustrated with corporate politics, but overall had a great support system to fall upon. This all worked out as I climbed the ladder, but right before a transition period I met a person who I greatly respected in the corporate world and he told me that as a female that I needed to be a hard-ass. He complimented that I was already very ambition to have climbed the ladder this far, as well as that I was focused, but he highlighted that I was too compassionate to others in the workplace. I took this advice as gospel and adhered to it. This caused some problems and when you add some other politics to this type of approach, it doesn’t yield great results. At the end of the day, I was being someone that I just am not.

As a professional female, one thing we are not short of is advice about how to be a professional female. Now, nobody exactly has a good bible for the geeky-professional females that came from the past of male-dominated roles and a male-dominated career path. Us females in these fields, well, all have our quarks!

Through our journey in our professional lives, we all make our share of mistakes, we all stumble, we all fall. I’m sure we have all seen the following personality types:

(Thank you to Nari Kannan for these)

The Technical Prima Donna - This is the person who takes immense pride in his technical prowess. I am using He and His just to make the points across quickly and efficiently. It could very well be a She and Her! It will not be as much of a concern if the technical pride does not come in the way of matching technical solutions to business problems. That’s where quite often, technical prima donnas fall down on their face. They walk around like a person who has a hammer and everything looks like a nail to them.

The Interminable Planner – This is the person who spends more time planning things than doing them. I once had a colleague who had one of those thick Day Planners that had pages for Days of the Month, Project Wise Tasks, Program Wise Tasks, Task-Wise Detail Planner, Multiple Pages for Tracking Expenses, etc. This person spent the mornings just updating the planners and some of the afternoon was left for doing some things and then it is back to planning tomorrow’s activities! Planning is important but it is possible to get carried away by the planning at the expense of doing things.

The Conceptual Mountaineer – This is the person who never descends from the dizzying heights of analysis, design, programming, approaches, the latest in Xtreme Programming, writing code while sky diving since less oxygen is shown to be directly correlated to good code, etc. To him, mundane matters like users and the tasks they do are at best, irrelevant and at worst, a painful intrusion in their higher level thinking.

The Presence Meister - This is the person that is a gift to the team and even if they do not do any work, just their presence should be enough contribution for the day! They seem to be imagining mentor roles for themselves rather than contributors.

The Invisible Busybody – This is the person who lives in meetings and is never seen anywhere else. It’s one meeting after another and when done it’s time to be in meetings outside the company!

Although some of my antics of my past could be definitely construed as inappropriate behavior at best (Organizing cart-wheeling contests down the halls is not smiled upon, nor are the “Guess what color thong” contests on corporate posting boards), my cold and psydo-ubber professional behavior during the period of my ‘being a hard-ass’ was terrible. I am now just me.

I raise my glass to those who have spoken to me, and those to have given me tidbits of their professional life.