Year in review
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What have I learnt in the past year?
Last year was a good one. Not in the sense of an average,
curmudgeonly existence, but in the sense of progress and direction. It was a
good year. My most significant year was my 24th. The opportunities
and the open head surgery performed on my thought processes over my time at
Stanford was life altering. My connections there make it very vivid and
memorable for me still. My 25th was a year of reconciliation. To get
back to a profession is underrated. The ability of a human being to keep coming
back for more is what is so underrated. To keep coming back thinking that you
will have something new to learn is persistence. It’s the other side of the
coin to insanity where you try the same thing over and over and expect different
results. It really isn’t about the effort you put in so much as it is about how
you go about it.
Lesson 1 – Persistence has value. Patience probably not
Patience is a construct that is misunderstood often. To be
patient when the other option is being a headless chicken wont help is not
wise, it is sane. To be patient when your options are exhausted and the only
way forward is through someone else’s intervention is not an option, it is all
that is left for you to do. So you never choose patience, you cop out on it. At
least that’s my take.
Lesson 2 – You do not know what you do not know
So many curveballs in the last year. I had an interview with
Palantir that I thought went really well. Didn’t get the job. Was it
disappointing? Yes. It forced me to re-look at my career choices and take some
time off. I was still applying but I had very little conviction. I had patience
but not persistence. Then things changed, a startup and a product later, my
confidence is pretty much where it should be. I never really liked the products
built in and around big data. It seems like a fancy con, and a long one.
Something that scares me. A friend of mine said, big data is just the same as
small data. You don’t have to worship it. When I joined Greenplum (Pivotal), I
was pretty sure that I wanted to write specs. 2 months in, I was working on
products with a team that did only pair programming and took their orders from
the Pivotal Tracker. I thought I would have a hand in open sourcing a
proprietary piece of software. It open sourced itself and I was in the
audience. Months later I thought I would be good with Hadoop and storage.
Which, as unsexy as it is, has gained traction. A good career move I thought to
myself. A month later, I was gone.
Lesson 3 – Uncertainty undermines you.
I wanted to get my Visa stamped in India because, you know,
immigrant. I was scared. I had heard horror stories of RFEs and peeps getting
stuck in India for a long ass time. I wanted to make up for the money spent in
getting my MS over the next year. I did not want to be a slave to the dollar –
rupee machinations. I canceled my flight once because I had a bad vibe. And for
long periods of time, I did not want to go. I finally did and managed to get my
visa stamped. It was fear that made me not get a car here in the US. I was
constantly wondering if I would be stuck on the other side of the Atlantic or
not. I was never gung ho about life. I was uncertain. I was pretty fucked up. I
embraced the fact that I did not know and carried on with life. Take a
decision. Even if its bad, you learn from it. If you deliberate, its going to
be a while before it gets better.
Lesson 4 – Be unapologetic
A lot of my concerns and questions over the years have been
silenced by my fear of failure, and even worse, my fear of having to admit it.
If you have been put in a position where you need to take a decision, take it. Don’t
apologize for it. If they didn’t want you to pull the trigger, they wouldn’t have
given you a gun in the first place. Shit happens, embrace it (metaphorically,
not in a 4Chan kind of a way).
Lesson 5 – If you don’t learn a new thing everyday, you are
undercutting yourself
Knowledge is power. It may not be money.
Trivia is not knowledge. Trivia is suited for pub nights.
Knowledge is when you have a coherent hypothesis around what happened. Trivia
is knowing which year it happened in. Money comes from winning the pub quiz. I
have been told that I must outline everything I know on a document and then get
others on the same page before coding starts. If I had my way, I would shove a
skunk so far down the throat of the maker of this particular request that their
burps could evacuate buildings. Knowledge and learning take time. And it is a
slow process of unraveling layers and mysteries. No body starts off with a
perfect view of the world. We iterate on what we know and if we are lucky, we
get somewhere.
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2 comments:
Good one, quite honest and ahead of your age too. :)
It also made me think about how my thought process was, when I was 25, waaay different, I tell you!
back then, the only thing on my mind was to stabilize my career (which I now know was my job) and make enough money. My major growing up happened between the ages of 27-29, I feel. :)
"We iterate on what we know and if we are lucky, we get somewhere." Where do you want to go?
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