A topic that has been something I’ve been talking a lot to the rest of the company. These are the builders who don’t just write code—they design experiences, solve problems, and ultimately solve customer’s end to end problem. The role of a product engineer extends beyond traditional software development. They …
One of the values we’ve recently added at HackerRank is something close to my heart. Like our other values, this one had taken on different forms in the past, but the current version resonates with me far more: we call it “Truly, Madly, Deeply Care.” In the past, we used …
Building a team or a company gives one a chance to make a lot of decisions at various stages. If you are lucky, some of them will be two-way doors, but most of them are one-way doors. Here are a few I can think of that I had to decide …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Yak Shaving Yak shaving refers to a task, that leads you to perform another related task and so on, and so on — all distracting you from your original goal. This is sometimes called “going down the rabbit hole.” Seth Godin has an interesting post about yak shaving – https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/ …