I started my career thinking, that I wanted to be a developer. But when I was interviewing for developer positions, I was in the middle offered a job at a consulting firm, where I work now. I appreciated development, because of the logic building involved. Consulting helped me realize that it is problem solving that I love rather than development alone. Consulting taught me how to convince people, how to hear and understand their concerns, how to engage in push and pull with the clients. How to keep the required tension in a relationship, that it is kept stable. I think I have done a pretty good job and for that I got 3 employee-of-the-month awards in 2019 2020 2021.My career started with consulting, I then moved and started learning about Linux and OS in general, since that was what my application was deployed on. My curiosity and help of my friend and guru lead me to discover Linux, to an extent, that I could not only find problems in OS related issues, I could fix them. I could even debate with the System administration team of the bank, to suggest better alternatives to the common configuration, since I knew the application as well, with respect to the OS. From Linux, I went into AIX, Solaris, and discovered their pros and cons. Since most young developers considered them dead in the development world, I saw that they have many features missing in Linux. For E.g. Zones. I was then given the task of optimizing the database, in UBL, which had been tried by IBM and UBL’s head DBA. The latter had a better impact than the former. But still there needed to reduction in EOD time. I studied the Oracle Manual, then 2 books of Oracle, that I studied prior as well. This brought the time from 120 hours to 20 hours. I used the unconventional technique of bitmap join indexes and turning parallelization off. I continued and came to a point, that I - like OS - could suggest better configurations to DBAs and have been doing that since.During this time, I also read on functional knowledge more than required, by the job. Especially Trade Based Anti-Money Laundering. Trade is a very complex topic, with a lot of regulations. This helped make gathering requirements easier.Financial industry has a lot of challenges, but from the IT side, there always has been a problem for finding good IT Business Analyst. Acquiring technical and business knowledge kinds of knowledge takes time and effort. Lucky for me, I had taken microeconomics, accounting (in O levels), and was surrounded by Business Grads in IBA. This helped me understand banking faster.