We had our leadership offsite in the US this week and one of the lines mentioned in the culture session is still on top of my mind. Companies only have strong or weak cultures. You can’t classify them as good vs bad culture. For example, you can have a culture where you treat everyone as a family. Salesforce is a …
I’ve been wondering about this for a while and still can’t understand my/human behavior. I’m a grown-up adult, who knows about responsibility. I know I’m responsible for my own career, growth, etc. I give enough advice to others about extreme ownership and how they should own their career growth. I also understand how doing just the bare minimum might not …
Even after fully going remote more than 3+ years ago, I still have a lot to learn about being productive in meetings. Zoom fatigue is real and sometimes jumping meeting after meetings makes it harder to focus on the right thing. Before the meeting Installing Meetingbar. Probably the single most productive step I’ve done to make it easier for me …
This started as a tradition with one of my colleagues (Radhika Balaji) where we started sharing one new thing to learn every day. This got triggered when Radhika shared how she used to learn new things every day when she was in school and stopped this during board exams. Post the board exams, she never started the habit (for at …
Life update: We bought a new place last year and moved to this place a month ago. Second-order effects on the life update. Life was easier for the last few years. Walking from home to the office used to take exactly 12 mins. Traffic or no other external factors couldn’t change anything this number. In fact, I could step out …
These two books got into my reading list mostly because of Vivek. The number of times he mentioned instances from this book, I had to know what the Starbucks story is all about. And I’m glad I did read these two. I expected a simple and smooth story about Starbucks. Didn’t expect so many ups and downs within the company. …
Probably the right title for this blog post should be “Regionalist”, but somehow the word ‘state-ist’ was the word I created and have been using for a long time. When I was assigned my room in the college hostel (back in 2004), each room was supposed to have 5 students. The 5 students in my room were assigned like this. …
Recently, we (me and Vasudha) went for a short trek (around 75 km from Bangalore). We found an agriculture shop selling fertilizers and pesticides on the way back. We have a small garden at our place, and Vasudha has written a great post about it here at https://ideaweb.me/blog/from-cacti-killer-to-gardener/. We’ve been using natural organic pesticides so far, and this is the …
An amazing book. The story is exciting, a lot of good life lessons to learn and of course, listening to the book in Trevor’s voice. If there is one book which should be read via audible instead of physical book, this must be it. Top things I recollect from this book.
Speed Starting from the early age, speed has been a great fascination. Given dad was a math teacher, I wanted to become a mathematician when I was at school (though I’m not sure even now what mathematicians do). I still remember the quote that fascinated me the most “speed and accuracy is the motto of the mathematician”. Next experience with …
New year comes with a lot of excitement, energy and resolutions. Logically it doesn’t make a lot of sense to celebrate new year. After all, the new year is an arbitrary line that was drawn by a few Romans way way back. And it is not like we grow smarter or efficient on the day of new year. Dec 31st or …
This is script/project started when three of my friends ended up losing their domain simply because they forgot to renew the domain. It is a helpless situation to recover a lost domain and the ‘techie’ inside me realized I had to do something. Especially when I’m making more and more folks from my team to write on their own domain. …
Working as the CTO, there are lot of assumptions people make about me. One is that the CTO is supposed to be super rich. The running joke is that whenever we go out for a restaurant for team lunch/dinner and if there is a delay, someone or other would recommend me to buy that restaurant, so that the team doesn’t …
The book I just completed. This one was hard to complete, but an interesting read nevertheless. The book is more than 29 hours (took me more than a month to complete). Also a lot of characters in the book are complete strangers. Wish I knew a little more about American politics. Three things I take away from this book Hard …
I love reading (actually listening) books. This wasn’t the case a few year back. It all changed with one single book. Radical Candor. Somehow before this book, I never imagined books to have the exact solutions for the business problems I might have. Since the author wrote the book at a different time, in a different context without knowing anything …
When we started our company (>10 years ago), we decided to visit Bangalore to meet a few startup mentors for advice. I’ve already worked from Bangalore for a year, but visiting the startup folks was a new exciting experience. One of them we got a chance to meet in person was Swaroop CH. He wrote a book called Byte of …
From wikipedia, this is the actual definition of fire and forget – “Fire-and-forget is a type of missile guidance which does not require further external intervention after launch such as illumination of the target or wire guidance, and can hit its target without the launcher being in line-of-sight of the target.” Working with different kinds of people, there are some …
I was listening to this podcast from Farnam Street (https://fs.blog/knowledge-podcast/best-of-2021/), mostly because I thought it is a shortcut to read all the good podcasts from 2021. Little did I know I’ll learn so much about trusting people and the right framework on when to trust people and when not to. These are three excerpts from the entire podcast which I …
I’ve come to realise that one of the most underrated skills for anyone to grown well to a senior position in a company – “Growing with chaos”. By growing with chaos, I mean the ability to understand the state of chaos, being ok with increasing chaos in the systems, managing the chaos at the right time and ability to imagine …
We have this principle at HackerRank to treat people as people and not refer them as resources. This is from an excerpt from email Vivek to the entire company On that note, I would like to remind everyone of the nomenclature we use in the company. Refer to people as people, not resources. If you want an SE to help you, just …
This book was recommended by Manas & Geetanjali as a part of our monthly book we read. In fact, the fact that this is just a small book made it easier to finish in one sitting. For anyone reading the book, I would recommend reading this book from physical book or e-book. I missed some of the key parts of …
Sachin Tendulkar When Sachin Tendulkar arrived in Sydney for the fourth Test between India and Australia 2003-04, he had scores of 0, 1, 37, 0, and 44 in his five Test innings on the tour. Tendulkar recalled later I had got out a couple of times to balls bowled outside the off stump. So I decided not to play the cover-drive. They were bowling consistently outside …
When I started building HackerRank, I was expecting to get promoted (rather pushed) from an SDE to CTO. I was expecting the change and it wasn’t so bad. Since we acquired customers at a steady rate, I had the bandwidth to learn from my mistakes. We were extremely apologetic whenever something went wrong with our customers and made sure we …
A very good friend/well wisher pinged this over chat. I’m always glad to listen to the critical feedback (especially from the people I trust). But I was equally surprised by the fact that she was so reluctant to share the feedback in the first place. She had all good intentions (as you can see from the first message). But still …
