A former Zoho employee has written candidly on LinkedIn about spending the first three years of his career at the Chennai-based software company, saying the period eroded his confidence and left him anxious and doubting his future in tech. Kewal Agarwal, who joined Zoho as his first job, says he recovered within a year of moving to a startup called MishiPay. He is careful to add that he holds neither the company nor himself responsible, and that his admiration for Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has not changed.
From a dream first job to constant stress
Agarwal writes that he was thrilled the day he landed his first job at Zoho. What followed, in his words, was probably the worst stretch of his career. He describes living with ongoing stress and anxiety, gradually losing faith in his own abilities, coming to dislike coding and giving up hope that he would ever make something of himself.
Recovery at a smaller startup
The turnaround came at MishiPay, a startup that he says is nowhere close to Zoho in size or scale. According to Agarwal, he regained everything he had lost in under a year there, and the move permanently changed the direction of his career.
No blame on Zoho, or on himself
Agarwal is explicit that he does not blame Zoho for those three years. He calls Vembu one of the few people he truly admires and looks up to. He also says he does not blame himself, explaining that he was at the start of his career, was not in a position to take the risk of quitting, and was not mature enough at the time to handle the situation differently.
A broader reflection on fit
He closes the post with a general takeaway: sometimes things simply do not work out and nobody is at fault. A person can be at what looks like the best workplace in the world and still find it is not right for them, he writes, while a place from which one expects very little can end up changing one's life. Agarwal currently works at Flipkart on the product team.
