About
I am Eakan Gopalakrishnan and you can view my resume online by clicking here.
I am on LinkedIn and other networks as you can already see from the social links on this blog but I have not kept it up to date as I did not want my employer prying on changes to my profile 😃.
Early Life
I was born in India, raised in United Arab Emirates and now live and work in the United Kingdom.
Curiosity is what got me into computers. I only really had a personal computer by 1998. Everything about it fascinated me and I wanted to learn how it worked and how to make programs and build them. Gradually that led me to major in Computer Science at University.
Career
I am currently an engineering leader at a fantastic, fast paced, retail energy SaaS provider called Kaluza.
I started my career in tech after I graduated from Amrita School of Engineering, India with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2007. And I took a year away from work to do my Masters at the University of Southampton.
I took on a managerial role as an opportunity came up in 2015 at FactSet to do something other than being a technical lead. It was a radical change but I had great support and coaching from my manager at the time who helped me understand the do's and donts of engineering leadership; switching from my accomplishments being my contributions to enabling the team achieve their objectives.
In 2018, I decided to apply what I learned from a large product organisation like FactSet to a smaller org. That was when I found out that small underwriting firm in London had just got investment to develop software in-house. The role was loosely defined and demanding as it required the candidate to be an individual contributor and line manage a team of 5 engineers, so I found myself working long hours. The managerial challenges were complex and unpleasant as the Insurance side of the company didn’t trust the IT department at all, so deadlines were hard to negotiate, trust was low and there were big projects to deliver.
Thus those in leadership roles had a challenging time coming up with a process to streamline the funnel of requirements coming into the department, choosing the right team topology, improving the hiring pipeline, leading the application support team, and developing career frameworks for engineers working at the organisation. Due to the low trust environment and my personal discontent at a lack of a career growth opportunities, I decided to move out - the business often treated us as second class citizens despite all the amazing work. My proposals for career framework didn’t get far, I couldn’t really grow my engineers, apart from moving them from one project to another. Thus I decided to look for a product company again.
And that's how I got to where I am today.
What do I write about
I mainly write about engineering leadership these days. I have in the past written about my experiments with frameworks, programming languages, tools, or software engineering in general.
I have a wide variety of interests, some of them include:
- Photography 📷, Music 🎵 and Dance 💃
- Running 🏃♂️ and Cycling 🚴♂️
- Reading 📚 (fiction and non-fiction)