22 Apr 2022
It’s that time of year - when admits to B-Schools roll out and a pretentious Linkedin is filled with the posts about folks joining a fancy $100K business school.
And for those not joining a fancy school - there’s of course “I’m now a Noogler post”. Give a year and FAANG will absorb literally every knowledge worker in India.
LOL, last statement didn’t age well. Thanks to US Federal reserve.
Anyway, back to topic - while I have nothing for good wishes for your fancy admit or dream job. Infact, for all qualms I have, I’m happy to see people achieve their potential but alas, comparision monkey (read competition) is so ingrained, in few weak moments, I do circle back to my various decisions that has landed me in my current situation - career wise. Before I garner pity - I think I’ve been more than lucky to have a nice gig, intellectual growth with excellent trajectory.
That however doesn’t mean I will ever be content, years of conditioning of worrying about future won’t just go away in a smack, right?
And as I recently hit my official milestone of venturing into late 20s - colloquial anxiety has again piqued. It’s almost ironical how I took a leave on 15th (Friday) motivated to dedicate the day to self care and ended up partially panicking with writing a note on possible path ahead. This also got amplified by conversation with my folks where I was told to make up my mind on next organic milestone of personal life (read marriage) where principal argument were the “receding market of eligible bachelor” and how this is right age to get settled where I got ambush-advised by multiple unrelated people at random places with advice that I have to admit made sort of sense, bizzarely. And I’m not going to discuss it here, maybe another post.
Anywho - I wrote this post near about August and a lot has happened since then, the tech stock market has virtually crashed. Almost all big tech has had layoffs and Indian companies are following the lead.
Let’s face it - no one thought it wass sustainable. Post covid boom - Economic slowdown was expected, crash was imminent, valuation hit were expected but layoffs are always uncomfortable. Specially in firms with comfortable FCF and herculean margin. Why would Apple even think of freeze is literally beyond me but it does show that at the end, it’s shareholder value that’s supreme. You were chased by recuriter but it was literally free money then so get off high hourse that you’re important. No matter your designation of Staff Engineer - you’re just a number in cost centre side of balance sheet.
This begs to answer if all we do is even worth it. Let’s clarify one thing before venturing deep, which is :
Nothing is ever enough
Unless you hit a colloquial lottery - you’d almost always be working to next milestone with no FatFire in sight.
For last decade, the definition of lottery for knowledge worker in tech was :
- Joining early stage and hope it becomes big (High Risk)
- FAANG gig with refreshers (Low risk as liquid and always go up)
While your first option remains, the recent bust of tech IPO will surely deter your prospects. I understand that what you’d potentially liquidate would be significant (possible even 20x of Seed allocation) but it’s just such a rare event. Add to the fact that by the time it’d happen - you’d have almost destroyed your physical health, mental health, relationships due to long work commitment and lost hobby that you cared about. Begs to differ if it’s even a worthy choice.
Brings we to option #2 which is was the sought after position for all smart folks of decade. But cometh the fed resevrve and they saw almost 100K drop in total comp. Not a joke!
Worst part - issuing infite RSU, as it turns out - is not sustainable. Who would have thought!
But wait - why are we discussing this? Aren’t we supposed to talk about career capital?
Well, my point of coming to this is exactly that. We should not be looking at career in isolation because it’s just such a big part of life.
- We should also not expect any big event to happen - if it does - good riddance but just take life as it is. Importantly - Job, as it is. Give 100% if you like it by trying to excel but probably see it just means to an end and not the whole journey.
- Secondly, always know that you're dispensable. Your title, perks, comp mean nothing when push comes to shove. Always be paranoid about this fact which will inturn make you ready to intreview and face the mini crisis of imminent layoff should it happen. Be OK because it really is OK!
- Your credentials matter but more importantly your network - even in that what truly matters - are people you worked with. Not the random person you met on twitter. An ex-colleague referring you to a good gig or calling you to work with him is best possible validation you can have. So nurture relationships and be kind, helpful.
A smartass with less EQ works well only in bull market in leadership exclusively.
- Investment are your best friend. It's ok to have aspiration in life and increase your quality of life but with each increase in your comp, the contribution to investement should be more than material things (except for health + food which are never that costly). This will be a cushion you'll be thankful for later in life when you have more reponsibility. Just to calrify - I've moved after from my thought process of going for FIRE because it feels a state of mind, what will you call enough. I'm okay if my interest on investment payout for basic neccessity i.e cost of living at place I choose - maybe UAE, India or UK!
In India, that's about 1L/month, in UAE - that's about AED 10K per month. For this, I'd need a corpus of 1.25cr in India and 2.5cr for UAE which is something that's doable with current run-rate of average knowledge worker.
I know this is generic advise but try to go through it once and evaluate what is important and doable, your career is important - so is your mental peace, your relationship, your family, your partner and above all you - YOU! If you’re not at peace with your life, what shall a VP title do :)
Shobhit
18 Apr 2022
Ah, it’s almost funny how I thought I’d set a weekly cadence and be more regular at writing. I literally woke up to writing a new after almost 10 months. LOL.
To be fair - a lot of things happened in between. This also involved I moving abroad (YAY!), meeting some new people and getting back to fitness. Not all rosy things, also involved sunsetting a product that I poured by heart and mind which was a bummer of course. Happens, I know - still hurts :)
Also, I think I forgot the commands to commit from terminal as I messed up my Jekyll setup so here’s another go at it from Github Desktop, will update more on this post.
Cheers!
Shobhit
15 Apr 2022
Ah, it’s almost funny how I thought I’d set a weekly cadence and be more regular at writing. I literally woke up to writing a new after almost 10 months. LOL.
To be fair - a lot of things happened in between. This also involved I moving abroad (YAY!), meeting some new people and getting back to fitness. Not all rosy things, also involved sunsetting a product that I poured by heart and mind which was a bummer of course. Happens, I know - still hurts :)
Also, I think I forgot the commands to commit from terminal as I messed up my Jekyll setup so here’s another go at it from Github Desktop, will update more on this post.
Cheers!
Shobhit
20 Jun 2021
I have a total of 35 ideas on my Notion page, 10 are “hot ideas” i.e ones on which I definitely do want to write. Most are product and business-related where I’ve to either do small research or just summarise with structure.
Yet, I keep coming back to typing on ancillary personal things. Maybe since Twitter is where I’d primarily post the former. Owing to extended WFH and bad work-life balance - I find Twitter to be too overwhelming and have almost stopped the usage. As a result, this blog is where I’m posting my thought and it’s mostly personal, always helps me clear my mind.
TLDR ~ I really like how this blog has turned out to be akin to therapy :D
Anywho. What’s with the title. I recently came across a tweet by Kunal Shah
“Comparing with others is the fastest and most reliable way to remain unhappy in life.
Comparing yourself against your past while having an image and personal goal for future is a non-toxic way to achieve progress.”
P.S - Really wanted to embed the tweet but it seems you need to have a plugin for it. Since I built the site on Github Pages, they disable the plugins for security reason. Here’s the link to tweet in case you want to see Indian techbois go crazy, as they do on KS’s timeline.
And this really hit me. I had been unusually hard on myself and anxious about it. Between performance at work, non-existent personal life and thoughts about the future (The return of a la MBA), it’s been super stressful week and invariable insecurity as I come face a bleak prospect of what is gonna happen 10 years down the line. The unknown - unknown as my colleague calls this :)
Some time back I interviewed for a PM job, cleared it and declined before they rolled out a final offer. I did that as I realised that’s not what I want to do for valid reasons. I wrote a mail to HR who was extremely professional during the whole process and as I actually enjoyed the whole process and firm - I even offered to connect them to people looking out.
The hiring Manager reached out and had a chat where he narrated his own perspective and also about how much potential I have. This was followed by his suggestion to come and work there, get “brand tag” and go for a solid Ivy MBA that would 10x my career. It always is good to hear when someone expresses confidence in you but I had buried the MBA hatchet for good and this came up like an old wound :(
This was followed by randomly coming across Dalan’s blog and reading his vvvvvvv relevant experience on same.
The triggering post in order of anxiety :
- Post-1: Link
- Post-2: Link
- Post-3: Link
Normally - I exasperate for a few days and things settle down. Not this time, some more ancillary things happened, maybe those contributed as well but it’s fair to say - I don’t have a confident verdict on the MBA thing.
Somewhere deep down, I know Dalan is right. I don’t plan to startup. It’s tough to get calls from aspirational place. Most people I have asked have given mixed answers and I’ve mainly fed the answers with confirmation bias to base my decisions and partly how I’m actually a bad rat who has to go through the grunt again, something I feel is not fair. I did awesome work. Let me continue to do so. Why subject me to standardized exam, atrocious grade and classes again :/
All right, rant over. Now, back to tweet - Among all this, I really did lose the plot and felt quiet down the whole week. So this tweet triggered a thought stream that made me realise that I should appreciate what I’ve done for myself.
As a naive 21 year graduating from sorta unknown college to doing some awesome work, working with top-notch people and continuously getting an awesome opportunity. Not to mention, a pay that I never anticipated would come this earlier in my career. Part luck, part hard work and lot of perseverance and more to come.
It’s very easy to default to comparing pay with friends as that’s an objective metric. Never mind that most of my friends are rockstar developer who are literally like unicorns among the sea of a unicorn. But I think, I’ve done well for myself and I do wish to continue the same.
What I should be grateful especially about is the fact that I can feel the progress I’ve made - on a personal and professional front that is actually visible to me. I think that counts a lot. 1% better every day.
I so want to end with that image of 1.01 raised to power 365 but I think this has been cheesy enough.
See you all next week!
Cheers!
Shobhit
05 Jun 2021
We all have our vices - they are all unwarranted by definition. You obviously don’t want vices in life, right? They may provide a guilty pleasure for a fleeting moments but that’s it. No addition beyond it.
I’ve been reading ikigai which is an insanely popular book which had been on my to-read for a while. The book talks about lot of things and one important aspect it focuses on is “emotional awareness”
The post is about that. It’s not a long - self help post. It’s just one of the things - I’ve deliberately tried to focus in my life and managed to get some good result. Since this blog is literally a void, I can document learning here - much better than doing so in notion. Who knows, this might actually help some stranger :)
We started with vice and landed in some random place. Let me strcuture.
I’ve had a temper since childhood. Maybe because I wasn’t a rebellious kid in general but there was just huge dissatisfication and personal expecatation which resulted is bouts of bad mood and ofcourse, bad temper. The receiving end was mostly my parents who - I believe - passed it off as teenage stuff and didn’t bother until my mom was also in bad mood and gave a good hearing to me. Rare stuff.
Either way, as I grew up - I started thinking in terms of bets and realised it’s not the ideal strategy to be “Angry young man”, it works well on popular culture for portrayal of typical male protagonist et al but in real life, rarely does problem get solved by temper. You end up alienating a lot of people as well. That’s definitely not ideal.
Hence, out of complusion - I started assesing things more and delayed my response. And it stuck me how often would my reaction or thoughts change once I didn’t react immediately and had a moment to give a thought or do a retro.
Lot of times, things might have just backfired had I reacted prematurely which would have been case of angry young man!
You see we have been told to think that on the fly, on the feet thinking is something good but in reality what happens is majority of the times you are not required to immediately react and you can take your sweet time to think through things and make sure that your response is very appropriate what is required in the situation.
Speaking from my personal experience I believe I was ingrained with this on the feet response thingy because the aspirational careers that we see - the civil services, management consulting, investment banking requires you to do that but these are highly specialised fields where you are constantly facing with someone - either your team/senior decision makers, CEO, or maybe head of institutional fund in which case this might be required but for most of the people, including those who work in knowledge industry - this might just not be required 90% of the time.
Couple of years back, I went through a breakup and one the complaints were - you weren’t angry when I told you about incident X. Incident X was an unpleasant incident obv. While I was startled, I deliberately tried NOT to react and say something I’d regret in fit of rage. I stayed mum, listened and proceeded to end the conversation. I always think of it. Was it indeed an issue where what I thought was emotion maturity was regarded as being emotionally distant?
I contemplated and realised I was actually hurt by the breakup in a startling order, more than I had ever thought. While nothing eased that pain, atleast I know that I’m not the latter :)
Needless to say - this approach has REALLY helped me in multiple facets specially in my profession where I’m needed to interact with wide range of stakeholders and rarely do things proceed like clockwork. So - to not have an impromtu reaction but a measured response that first focuses on “what” and then “why” eases tension, inspires confidence, encourages teams to be upfront with you rather than shield themselves and helps me effectively lead.
On personal front - it obviously helps you weed out un-necessary people like it did for me :P
All this being said, there’s a long way to go. While this is more dominant response in rather “Serious” episodes, say a disaagreement at work, major conflict with friends or partner. For minor scuffle - I still have a mild annoynace or silent treatment which I’d want to completely avoid and maintain a verison of stoicism . I’ll update if I make a progress on this front :)
Cheers!
Shobhit