Honoring My Managers: Deepika Saxena

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Good morning!

In my 13 years of experience, I have worked under a lot of managers. To keep this post manageable for me to write and for the readers to read, I am going to stick to a few of those managers (and sometimes to their qualities, rather than to them as a person).

Let’s me start with my first manager, Deepika Saxena.

I was there at the NetEdge Computing in Noida for internship, and I wasn’t doing exactly well with the Android app that I was building. So one bright sunny day, around 10, 10.30, Deepika called me into the conference room. She sat on one side of the oval table and I sat on the other, but not facing each other, and like 1 or 2 chairs away.

Now she said something on these lines: “...We at NetEdge look for a few qualities in a person when we hire him or her and so do every other company. And let me tell you that you do have those qualities in you…” And she went on with that conversation, asking questions normally about work, about my college, education, my interests, family, health and other things.

The qualities that she mentioned were:
- Attitude: maintain a positive attitude towards work expected from you, and people you work with
- Competency: This is the most visible and reported quality in corporate world
- General Intelligence: Not everyone can know everything all the time, but you could cultivate the basic ingredient that makes you knowledgeable and that ingredient is general intelligence
- Commitment: Companies and managers like to hire people they see long term future with
- Humility: Deepika used to say a phrase to people and it was “There is always going to be some person better than you...”

~~~

One observation I had that’s work related from my time at NetEdge Computing (under Deepika) and at Magic Software (under Vikas Kumar Gupta) was that:

“In POCs and Projects with research like goals, you got to come back fast with response and development to a task / ask / or query – a little bit late and your manager or your client or your company may start to lose interest and start questioning the requirement itself.”

Thanks for reading!
Stay tuned!

Dated: 2026-Apr-15, 9AM