By the time you realize the impact of a single word, it’s already changed your life.
The fan whirred lazily in the tiny bedroom of a two-bedroom flat in Velachery, Chennai. The July heat wasn’t kind, and neither was the job market.
Arun, 24, sat hunched over his secondhand laptop, his eyes bloodshot from days of LinkedIn scrolling and coding tutorials. The desk was cluttered with old coffee cups, a cracked water bottle, and a resume that had seen more printers than recruiters.
He had graduated with a BCA from a small arts college near Tambaram. No IIT tag. No relatives in tech. Just a dream stitched together by sheer will and YouTube playlists titled “Java for Beginners.”
His father, a retired MTC bus driver, snored in the next room. His mother, a school teacher, had packed his lunchbox with lemon rice and thayir sadam that morning — as if he had somewhere to go.
Then it came — a notification from a job board:
“Walk-in Interview | Freshers Welcome | CodeRiver Technologies | Tidel Park, Chennai.”
He sighed. Probably a scam. Probably unpaid training. Probably nothing.
His mouse hovered over delete.
But his mother’s words from the night before echoed:
“Just try once more, What if this one’s different?”
He hesitated. And then — he said yes.
Two days later, Arun stood before the imposing glass facade of Tidel Park. He had walked from the Thiruvanmiyur MRTS station to save ₹20.
Wearing his only formal shirt — one button missing — and borrowed shoes a size too large, he felt the eyes of better-dressed candidates around him.
In his bag was a resume printed on the backside of an old EB bill. Paper was expensive. Ink even more so.
The company — CodeRiver Technologies — was on the 5th floor. A name no one had heard of.
At reception, he gave his name. The HR executive, a young woman in smart casuals, raised an eyebrow at his worn resume but didn’t say anything. Arun noticed.
When the interview began, it wasn’t what he expected. No aptitude test. No group discussion.
Instead, a tall man in a black T-shirt entered the room and casually asked:
“Who here knows how to break down a problem?”
Everyone looked blank. Except Arun.
He raised his hand.
The man — Raghav, the founder — tossed him a whiteboard marker.
“Show me how you’d find duplicates in a list.”
Arun walked up. His palms were sweaty, his heart pounding. But he wrote out a simple nested loop in Java. Basic. But clear.
“Not optimal,” Raghav said. “But it works. You're in. Monday morning. 9 AM.”
That was it. No HR rounds. No fancy offer letter. No fixed salary.
Just a yes — and a door flung wide open.
CodeRiver was no fancy tech firm. It had twelve people, five laptops that overheated, and one cracked whiteboard.
But what it lacked in polish, it made up for in raw ambition.
On day one, Arun was given a real client bug to fix. No training, no mentor, just a line from Raghav:
“Figure it out. If you break it, fix it. That’s the job.”
Arun stayed back after everyone left, huddled in the pantry with a notebook and a YouTube playlist on Spring Boot.
He didn’t have answers. But he had resolve.
He said yes to the smallest tasks. Yes to learning React. Yes to picking up AWS configs even though he barely understood them. When teammates bailed, he stayed. When builds failed, he debugged them until 2 a.m.
His parents didn’t understand what he did — but they watched him return home each night with tired eyes and a quiet fire they hadn’t seen before.
He stopped going out with friends. Missed weddings. Skipped Deepavali shopping. His world had shrunk to one building and one goal:
Make this work.
Six months later, CodeRiver landed its biggest contract — an AI-based recruitment platform for a US-based startup. Tight deadlines. High stakes.
Two senior developers resigned over pay disputes. The project was days from collapse.
Raghav walked into the office and looked at Arun.
“It’s yours. Lead it.”
Arun froze.
He wasn’t ready. He had never led a team. Never been on a client call alone. But he knew — this moment wouldn’t wait.
He looked Raghav in the eye and said: “Yes.”
The next three months were brutal.
He worked 16-hour days. Missed Pongal. Slept in the office twice. Faced clients with trembling hands. Broke production twice.
But he delivered.
The client launched on time. The product worked. Raghav called it “a damn miracle.”
The client, impressed, wired in a cheque worth ₹60 lakhs — the biggest the company had ever seen.
One week later, on the terrace of Tidel Park, Raghav handed Arun a sealed envelope. Inside:
• A promotion letter.
• A 20% salary hike.
• And something Arun never dreamed of — company equity.
“You bled for this place,” Raghav said. “You deserve to own a piece of it.”
Three years later, Arun would look out from the top floor of the same building. Not as a fresher. But as Chief Technology Officer of CodeRiver Technologies.
His office had a view of the Bay of Bengal. His inbox now filled with resumes from engineering grads. Some from IIT. Some from colleges just like his.
When people asked how he got here — how a boy from Velachery, with no contacts, no money, and no English fluency made it — he’d say:
“I just said yes. Once. And I kept saying yes. To the hard things. The unknown things. The scary things.”
Because that’s the truth.
A simple yes leads to something you never saw coming — If you're willing to own everything that follows.
React
