Category: arbit

Hybrid events

In general I’m short tempered and have a short attention span. One thing that annoys me more than anything else is if someone I’m talking to gets a phone call and moves away from the conversation.

In fact if I think about it more than 90% of my fights with my wife have been triggered by phone calls she gets while she’s taking to me, as a result of which she abandons me for the moment.

I’m writing this from a “hybrid event”. My wife is giving a talk at the Goa project, and this event is happening both online and offline. I’m offline, as are some twenty others. Another dozen people are online.

As an offline audience member I’m finding this damn annoying. The most annoying thing is that the moderator is online. And the way the event has been set up, online seems to take precedence over offline. The online moderator can interrupt. He can ask a speaker to repeat the last five minutes of her talk. And as a live audience member I find this insanely irritating.

The other problem with hybrid events is there is no scope for banter. Small offline events with 20 people can be rather intimate and have a high scope for banter. Like I cracked a wisecrack a few minutes back. People around me seemed to like it. And then one of the local moderators had to repeat the wisecrack to the zoom audience.

I wrote until this point in the first of the three talks. After that I decided writing this blog is not enough and protested (a tad too) loudly that the hybrid format was boring.

Then someone figured a simple nudge. They muted the zoom while talks were on. The remote people couldn’t interrupt as much as they used to. And the event became so much better.

So I guess, like everything else in design, its just about the defaults. Then again I don’t know if the online people were happy with the new default. Not that I care.

Though: the quality of CP is far superior from people in the room than from those who can hide behind a screen without camera on

It’s not just about status

Rob Henderson writes that in general, relative to the value they add to their firms, senior employees are underpaid and junior employees are overpaid. This, he reasons, is because senior employees trade off money for status.

Quoting him in full:

Robert Frank suggests the reason for this is that workers would generally prefer to occupy higher-ranked positions in their work groups than lower-ranked ones. They’re forgoing more earnings to hold a higher-status position in their organization.

But this preference for a higher-status position can be satisfied within any given organization.

After all, 50 percent of the positions in any firm must always be in the bottom half.

So the only way some workers can enjoy the pleasure inherent in positions of high status is if others are willing to bear the dissatisfactions associated with low status.

The solution, then, is to pay the low-status workers a bit more than they are worth to get them to stay. The high-status workers, in contrast, accept lower pay for the benefit of their lofty positions.

I’m not sure I agree. Yes, I do agree that higher productivity employees are underpaid and lower productivity employees are overpaid. However, I don’t think status fully explains it. There are also issues of variance and correlation and liquidity (there – I’m talking like a real quant now).

One the variance front – the higher you are in the organisation and the higher your salary is, the more the variance of your contribution to the organisation. For example, if you are being paid $350,000 (the number Henderson hypothetically uses), the actual value you are bringing to your firm might have a mean of $500,000 and a standard deviation of $200,000 (pulling all these numbers out of thin air, while making some sense checks that broadly risk pricing holds).

On the other hand, if you are being paid $35,000, then it is far more likely that the average value you bring to the firm is $40,000 with a standard deviation of $5,000 (again numbers entirely pulled out of thin air). Notice the drastic difference in the coefficient of variation in the two cases.

Putting it another way, the more productive you are, the harder it is for any organisation to put a precise value on your contribution. Henderson might say “you are worth 500K while you earn 350K” but the former is an average number. It is because of the high variance in your “worth” that you are paid far lower than what you are worth on average.

And why does this variance exist? It’s due to correlation.

More so at higher ranked positions (as an aside – my weird career path means that I’ve NEVER been in middle management) the value you can add to a company is tightly coupled with your interactions with your colleagues and peers. As a junior employee your role can be defined well enough that your contributions are stable irrespective of how you work with the others. At senior levels though a very large part of the value you can add is tied to how you work with others and leverage their work in your contributions.

So one way a company can get you to contribute more is to have a good set of peers you like working with, which increases your average contribution to the firm. Rather paradoxically, because you like your peers (assuming peer liking in senior management is two way), the company can get away with paying you a little less than your average worth and you will continue to stick on. If you don’t like working with your colleagues, there is the double whammy that you will add less to the company and you need to be paid more to stick on. And so if you look at people who are actually successful in their jobs at a senior level, they will all appear to be underpaid relative to their peers.

And finally there is liquidity (can I ever theorise about something without bringing this up?). The more senior you go, the less liquid is the market for your job. The number of potential jobs that you want to do, and which might want you, is very very low. And as I’ve explained in the first chapter of my book, when a market is illiquid, the bid-ask spread can be rather high. This means that even holding the value of your contribution to a company constant, there can be a large variation in what you are actually paid. And that is a gain why, on average, senior employees are underpaid.

So yes, there is an element of status. But there are also considerations of variance, correlation and bid-ask. And selection bias (senior employees who are overpaid relative to the value they add don’t last very long in their jobs). And this is why, on average, you can afford to underpay senior employees.

Proof of work

I like to say sometimes that one reason I never really get crypto is that it involves the concept of “proof of work”. That phrase sort of triggers me. It reminds me of all the times when I was in school when I wouldn’t get full marks in maths despite getting all the answers correct because I “didn’t show working”.

In any case, I spent about fifteen minutes early this morning drinking my aeropress and deleting LinkedIn connection requests. Yeah, you read that right. It took that long to refuse all the connection requests I had got since yesterday, when I put a fairly innocuous post saying I’m hiring.

I understand that the market is rather tough nowadays. Companies are laying employees off ($) left right and centre (in fact, this (paywalled) article prompted my post – I’m hoping to find good value in the layoff market). Interest rates are going up. Stock prices are going down. Startup funding has slowed. The job market is not easy. And so you see an innocuous post like this getting such a massive reaction.

In any case, the reason I was thinking about “proof of work” is that the responses to my post reminded me of my own (unsuccessful) job hunts from a few years back. I remember randomly applying through LinkedIn. I remember using easy apply. And I remember pretty much not hearing back from anyone.

Time for a bollywood break:

Yes, the choice of where I’ve started this video is deliberate. As i was spending time this morning refusing all the LinkedIn connection requests (some 500+ people I have no clue about had simply added me without any matter of introduction or purpose), I was thinking of this song.

I followed a simple strategy – I engaged with people who had cared to write a note (or InMail) to me along with the connection request, and I just ignored the rest. As I kept hitting “ignore ignore ignore … ” on my phone (while sipping coffee with the other hand), I realised that I almost hit “ignore” on one of my company HRs who had added me. A few minutes later, I actually hit ignore on a colleague who I’ve actually worked with (I made amends by sending him back a connection request that he accepted).

Given the flood of requests that I had got, I was forced to use a broad brush. I was forced to use simple heuristics rather than evaluating each application on its true merit. I’m pretty sure I’ve made plenty of errors of omission today (that said, my heuristic has thrown up a bunch of fairly promising candidates).

In any case, if you think about it, the heuristic I used can pretty well be described as “proof of work”. And what the proof of work achieved here was to help people stand out in a crowded market. That there was some work showed a certain minimum threshold of interest, and that was sufficient to get my attention, which is all that mattered here. And on a related note, during normal times (when I get a maximum of one or two LinkedIn requests each day), I do take the effort to evaluate each request on its own merit. No proof of work is necessary.

And if you think about it, “proof of work” is rather prevalent in the natural world. A peacock’s feathers are the most commonly quoted example of this one. The beautiful tail comes at a huge cost in terms of agility and ability to fly, and the tail is a way for the peacock to show off to potential mates that “I can carry this thing and yet stay alive so imagine how fit my genes are. Mate with me”.

Anyway, back to the hiring market, you need a way to stand out. Maybe a nicely written cover letter. Maybe a referral (or “influence” as we used to pejoratively call this back in the 90s). Maybe a strong github profile. (Ok the last one is literally a proof of work!)

Else you will just get swept away with the tide.

 

PS: In general, I was also thinking of the wisdom of writing to someone at a time when you know he/she will be flooded with other messages. The bar for you to stand out is much much higher. Being contrarian helps i guess.

So many numbers! Must be very complicated!

The story dates back to 2007. Fully retrofitting, I was in what can be described as my first ever “data science job”. After having struggled for several months to string together a forecasting model in Java (the bugs kept multiplying and cascading), I’d given up and gone back to the familiarity of MS Excel and VBA (remember that this was just about a year after I’d finished my MBA).

My seat in the office was near a door that led to the balcony, where smokers would gather. People walking to the balcony, with some effort, could see my screen. No doubt most of them would’ve seen my spending 90% (or more) of my time on Google Talk (it’s ironical that I now largely use Google Chat for work). If someone came at an auspicious time, though, they would see me really working, which was using MS Excel.

I distinctly remember this one time this guy who shared my office cab walked up behind me. I had a full sheet of Excel data and was trying to make sense of it. He took one look at my screen and exclaimed, “oh, so many numbers! Must be very complicated!” (FWIW, he was a software engineer). I gave him a fairly dirty look, wondering what was complicated about a fairly simple dataset on Excel. He moved on, to the balcony. I moved on, with my analysis.

It is funny that, fifteen years down the line, I have built my career in data science. Yet, I just can’t make sense of large sets of numbers. If someone sends me a sheet full of numbers I can’t make out the head or tail of it. Maybe I’m a victim of my own obsessions, where I spend hours visualising data so I can make some sense of it – I just can’t understand matrices of numbers thrown together.

At the very least, I need the numbers formatted well (in an Excel context, using either the “,” or “%” formats), with all numbers in a single column right aligned and rounded off to the exact same number of decimal places (it annoys me that by default, Excel autocorrects “84.0” (for example) to “84” – that disturbs this formatting. Applying “,” fixes it, though). Sometimes I demand that conditional formatting be applied on the numbers, so I know which numbers stand out (again I have a strong preference for red-white-green (or green-white-red, depending upon whether the quantity is “good” or “bad”) formatting). I might even demand sparklines.

But send me a sheet full of numbers and without any of the above mentioned decorations, and I’m completely unable to make any sense or draw any insight out of it. I fully empathise now, with the guy who said “oh, so many numbers! must be very complicated!”

And I’m supposed to be a data scientist. In any case, I’d written a long time back about why data scientists ought to be good at Excel.

Recruitment and diversity

This post has potential to become controversial and is related to my work, so I need to explicitly state upfront that all opinions here are absolutely my own and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employers or colleagues or anyone else I’m associated with.

I run a rather diverse team. Until my team grew inorganically two months back (I was given more responsibility), there were eight of us in the team. Each of us have masters degrees (ok we’re not diverse in that respect). Sixteen degrees / diplomas in total. And from sixteen different colleges / universities. The team’s masters degrees are in at least four disjoint disciplines.

I have built this part of my team ground up. And have made absolutely made no attempt to explicitly foster diversity in my team. Yet, I have a rather diverse team. You might think it is on accident. You might find weird axes on which the team is not diverse at all (masters degrees is one). I simply think it is because there was no other way.

I like to think that I have fairly high standards when it comes to hiring. Based on the post-interview conversations I have had with my team members, these standards have percolated to them as well. This means we have a rather tough task hiring. This means very few people even qualify to be hired by my team. Earlier this year I asked for a bigger hiring budget. “Let’s see if you can exhaust what you’ve been given, and then we can talk”, I was told. The person who told me this was not being sarcastic – he was simply aware of my demand-supply imbalance.

Essentially, in terms of hiring I face such a steep demand-supply imbalance that even if I wanted to, it would be absolutely impossible for me to discriminate while hiring, either positively or negatively.

If I want to hire less of a certain kind of profile (whatever that profile is), I would simply be letting go of qualified candidates. Given how long it takes to find each candidate in general, imagine how much longer it would take to find candidates if I were to only look at a subset of applicants (to prefer a category I want more of in my team). Any kind of discrimination (apart from things critical to the job such as knowledge of mathematics and logic and probability and statistics, and communication) would simply mean I’m shooting myself in the foot.

Not all jobs, however, are like this. In fact, a large majority of jobs in the world are of the type where you don’t need a particularly rare combination of skills. This means potential supply (assuming you are paying decently, treating employees decently, etc.) far exceeds demand.

When you’re operating in this kind of a market, cost of discrimination (either positive or negative) is rather low. If you were to rank all potential candidates, picking up number 25 instead of number 20 is not going to leave you all that worse off. And so you can start discriminating on axes that are orthogonal to what is required to do the job. And that way you can work towards a particular set of “diversity (or lack of it) targets”.

Given that a large number of jobs (not weighted by pay) belong to this category, the general discourse is that if you don’t have a diverse team it is because you are discriminating in a particular manner. What people don’t realise is that it is pretty impossible do discriminate in some cases.

All that said, I still stand by my 2015 post on “axes on diversity“. Any externally visible axis of diversity – race / colour / gender / sex / sexuality – is likely to diminish diversity in thought. And – again this is my personal opinion – I value diversity in thought and approach much more than the visible sources of diversity.

 

Structures of professions and returns to experience

I’ve written here a few times about the concept of “returns to experience“. Basically, in some fields such as finance, the “returns to experience” is rather high. Irrespective of what you have studied or where, how long you have continuously been in the industry and what you have been doing has a bigger impact on your performance than your way of thinking or education.

In other domains, returns to experience is far less. After a few years in the profession, you would have learnt all you had to, and working longer in the job will not necessarily make you better at it. And so you see that the average 15 years experience people are not that much better than the average 10 years experience people, and so you see salaries stagnating as careers progress.

While I have spoken about returns to experience, till date, I hadn’t bothered to figure out why returns to experience is a thing in some, and only some, professions. And then I came across this tweetstorm that seeks to explain it.

Now, normally I have a policy of not reading tweetstorms longer than six tweets, but here it was well worth it.

It draws upon a concept called “cognitive flexibility theory”.

Basically, there are two kinds of professions – well-structured and ill-structured. To quickly summarise the tweetstorm, well-structured professions have the same problems again and again, and there are clear patterns. And in these professions, first principles are good to reason out most things, and solve most problems. And so the way you learn it is by learning concepts and theories and solving a few problems.

In ill-structured domains (eg. business or medicine), the concepts are largely the same but the way the concepts manifest in different cases are vastly different. As a consequence, just knowing the theories or fundamentals is not sufficient in being able to understand most cases, each of which is idiosyncratic.

Instead, study in these professions comes from “studying cases”. Business and medicine schools are classic examples of this. The idea with solving lots of cases is NOT that you can see the same patterns in a new case that you see, but that having seen lots of cases, you might be able to reason HOW to approach a new case that comes your way (and the way you approach it is very likely novel).

Picking up from the tweetstorm once again:

 

It is not hard to see that when the problems are ill-structured or “wicked”, the more the cases you have seen in your life, the better placed you are to attack the problem. Naturally, assuming you continue to learn from each incremental case you see, the returns to experience in such professions is high.

In securities trading, for example, the market takes very many forms, and irrespective of what chartists will tell you, patterns seldom repeat. The concepts are the same, however. Hence, you treat each new trade as a “case” and try to learn from it. So returns to experience are high. And so when I tried to reenter the industry after 5 years away, I found it incredibly hard.

Chess, on the other hand, is well-structured. Yes, alpha zero might come and go, but a lot of the general principles simply remain.

Having read this tweetstorm, gobbled a large glass of wine and written this blogpost (so far), I’ve been thinking about my own profession – data science. My sense is that data science is an ill-structured profession where most practitioners pretend it is well-structured. And this is possibly because a significant proportion of practitioners come from academia.

I keep telling people about my first brush with what can now be called data science – I was asked to build a model to forecast demand for air cargo (2006-7). The said demand being both intermittent (one order every few days for a particular flight) and lumpy (a single order could fill up a flight, for example), it was an incredibly wicked problem.

Having had a rather unique career path in this “industry” I have, over the years, been exposed to a large number of unique “cases”. In 2012, I’d set about trying to identify patterns so that I could “productise” some of my work, but the ill-structured nature of problems I was taking up meant this simply wasn’t forthcoming. And I realise (after having read the above-linked tweetstorm) that I continue to learn from cases, and that I’m a much better data scientist than I was a year back, and much much better than I was two years back.

On the other hand, because data science attracts a lot of people from pure science and engineering (classically well-structured fields), you see a lot of people trying to apply overly academic or textbook approaches to problems that they see. As they try to divine problem patterns that don’t really exist, they fail to recognise novel “cases”. And so they don’t really learn from their experience.

Maybe this is why I keep saying that “in data science, years of experience and competence are not correlated”. However, fundamentally, that ought NOT to be the case.

This is also perhaps why a lot of data scientists, irrespective of their years of experience, continue to remain “junior” in their thinking.

PS: The last few paragraphs apply equally well to quantitative finance and economics as well. They are ill-structured professions that some practitioners (thanks to well-structured backgrounds) assume are well-structured.

Christian Rudder and Corporate Ratings

One of the studdest book chapters I’ve read is from Christian Rudder’s Dataclysm. Rudder is a cofounder of OkCupid, now part of the match.com portfolio of matchmakers. In this book, he has taken insights from OkCupid’s own data to draw insights about human life and behaviour.

It is a typical non-fiction book, with a studmax first chapter, and which gets progressively weaker. And it is the first chapter (which I’ve written about before) that I’m going to talk about here. There is a nice write-up and extract in Maria Popova’s website (which used to be called BrainPickings) here.

Quoting Maria Popova:

What Rudder and his team found was that not all averages are created equal in terms of actual romantic opportunities — greater variance means greater opportunity. Based on the data on heterosexual females, women who were rated average overall but arrived there via polarizing rankings — lots of 1’s, lots of 5’s — got exponentially more messages (“the precursor to outcomes like in-depth conversations, the exchange of contact information, and eventually in-person meetings”) than women whom most men rated a 3.

In one-hit markets like love (you only need to love and be loved by one person to be “successful” in this), high volatility is an asset. It is like option pricing if you think about it – higher volatility means greater chance of being in the money, and that is all you care about here. How deep out of the money you are just doesn’t matter.

I was thinking about this in some random context this morning when I was also thinking of the corporate appraisal process. Now, the difference between dating and appraisals is that on OKCupid you might get several ratings on a 5-point scale, but in your office you only get one rating each year on a 5-point scale. However, if you are a manager, and especially if you are managing a large team, you will GIVE out lots of ratings each year.

And so I was wondering – what does the variance of ratings you give out tell about you as a manager? Assume that HR doesn’t impose any “grading on curve” thing, what does it say if you are a manager who gave out an average rating of 3, with standard deviation 0.5, versus a manager who gave an average of 3, with all employees receiving 1s and 5s.

From a corporate perspective, would you rather want a team full of 3s, or a team with a few 5s and a few 1s (who, it is likely, will leave)? Once again, if you think about it, it depends on your Vega (returns to volatility). In some sense, it depends on whether you are running a stud or a fighter team.

If you are running a fighter team, where there is no real “spectacular performance” but you need your people to grind it out, not make mistakes, pay attention to detail and do their jobs, you want a team full of3s. The 5s in this team don’t contribute that much more than a 3. And 1s can seriously hurt your performance.

On the other hand, if you’re running a stud team, you will want high variance. Because by the sheer nature of work, in a stud team, the 5s will add significantly more value than the 1s might cause damage. When you are running a stud team, a team full of 3s doesn’t work – you are running far below potential in that case.

Assuming that your team has delivered, then maybe the distribution of ratings across the team is a function of whether it does more stud or fighter work? Or am I force fitting my pet theory a bit too much here?

Conductors and CAPM

For a long time I used to wonder why orchestras have conductors. I possibly first noticed the presence of the conductor sometime in the 1990s when Zubin Mehta was in the news. And then I always wondered why this person, who didn’t play anything but stood there waving a stick, needed to exist. Couldn’t the orchestra coordinate itself like rockstars or practitioners of Indian music forms do?

And then i came across this video a year or two back.

And then the computer science training I’d gone through two decades back kicked in – the job of an orchestra conductor is to reduce an O(n^2) problem to an O(n) problem.

For a  group of musicians to make music, they need to coordinate with each other. Yes, they have the staff notation and all that, but still they need to know when to speed up or slow down, when to make what transitions, etc. They may have practiced together but the professional performance needs to be flawless. And so they need to constantly take cues from each other.

When you have n musicians who need to coordinate, you have \frac{n.(n-1)}{2} pairs of people who need to coordinate. When n is small, this is trivial, and so you see that small ensembles or rock bands can easily coordinate. However, as n gets large, n^2 grows well-at-a-faster-rate. And that is a problem, and a risk.

Enter the conductor. Rather than taking cues from one another, the musicians now simply need to take cues from this one person. And so there are now only n pairs that need to coordinate – each musician in the band with the conductor. Or an O(n^2) problem has become an O(n) problem!

For whatever reason, while I was thinking about this yesterday, I got reminded of legendary finance professor R Vaidya‘s class on capital asset pricing model (CAPM), or as he put it “Sharpe single index model” (surprisingly all the links I find for this are from Indian test prep sites, so not linking).

We had just learnt portfolio theory, and how using the expected returns, variances and correlations between a set of securities we could construct an “efficient frontier” of securities that could give us the best risk-adjusted return. Seemed very mathematically elegant, except that in case you needed to construct a portfolio of n stocks, you needed n^2 correlations. In other word, an O(n^2) problem.

And then Vaidya introduced CAPM, which magically reduced the problem to an O(n) problem. By suddenly introducing the concept of an index, all that mattered for each stock now was its beta – the coefficient of its returns proportional to the index returns. You didn’t need to care about how stocks reacted with each other any more – all you needed was the relationship with the index.

In a sense, if you think about it, the index in CAPM is like the conductor of an orchestra. If only all O(n^2) problems could be reduced to O(n) problems this elegantly!

Management and Verification

For those of you who are new here, my wife and I used to organise “NED Talks” in our home in Bangalore. The first edition happened in 2015 (organised on a whim), and encouraged by its success, we organised 10 more editions until 2019. We have put up snippets of some talks here.

In the second edition of the NED Talks (February 2015), we had a talk by V Vinay (noted computer scientist, former IISc professor, co-inventor of Simputer, co-founder of Strand Life Sciences, Ati Motors, etc. etc.), where he spoke about “computational complexity”.

Now, having studied computer science, “computational complexity” was not a new topic to me, but one thing that Vinay said has stayed with me – it is that verifying an algorithm is far more efficient than actually executing the algorithm.

To take a simple example, factorising a number into prime factors is NP Hard – in other words, it is a really hard problem. However, verifying the prime factorisation of a number is trivial – you can just multiply the factors and see if it gives back the number you started with.

I was thinking about this paradigm the ohter day when I was thinking about professional managers – several times in life I have wondered “how can this person manage this function when he/she has no experience in that function?”. Maybe it is because I had been subjected to two semesters of workshop in the beginning of my engineering, but I have intuitively assumed that you can only manage stuff that you have personally done – especially if it is a non-trivial / specialist role.

But then – if you think about it, at some level, management is basically about “verification”. To see whether you have done your work properly, I don’t need to precisely know how you have done it. All I need to know is whether you have done bullshit – which means, I don’t need to “replicate your algorithm”. I only need to “verify your algorithm”, which computer science tells us can be an order of magnitude simpler than actually building the algorithm.

The corollary of this is that if you have managed X, you need not be good at X, or actually even have done X. All it shows is that you know how to manage X, which can be an order of magnitude simple than actually doing X.

This also (rather belatedly) explains why I have largely been wary of hiring “pure managers” for my team. Unless they have been hands on at their work, I start wondering if they actually know how to do it, or only know how to manage it (and I’m rather hands on, and only hire hands on people).

And yet another corollary is that if you have spent too long just managing teams, you might have gotten so used to just verifying algorithms that you can’t write algorithms any more.

And yet another before I finish – computer science has a lot of lessons to offer life.

 

Management watch

About a year back, a few months after I had started my current job, I was working late into the evening. I was sitting on the sofa with my laptop when my wife said, “you cannot call yourself senior management if you work like this”.

“What do you mean”, I asked.

“If you are truly senior management, you should not be using your computer after normal work hours. You should be doing everything using your phone. Do you remember, six months into my job at <@#R@#$@@>, I would work late into the night, but only with my phone?”, she countered.

I had to admit this was a good point. More practically, in terms of work stuff, I started thinking about making dashboards and reports more mobile-friendly. I started questioning interactive dashboards – if they are aimed at top management, the latter largely see the stuff on their phones, so interactivity is full of fat fingers.

Of course, the nature of my job means that I can never truly be senior management by this metric – I’m generally  too hands on to be able to work exclusively on my phone. However, that hasn’t stopped me from evangelising this theory of my wife. The theory itself is strong enough.

Recently I’d met a former client. He was using an iPad as a work “laptop”. I told him the theory and that he has truly arrived. He said he had been given a choice of an iPad and a Surface –  basically his company has internalised how senior management ought to be treated.

While I can never be senior management by this metric, I’m in a way trying to leapfrog it. Recently I got myself an Apple Watch. Apart from other things, it gives me notifications for all my messages, and I can reply using the watch as well. And this is where the magic begins.

For starters, Apple offers this standard set of templatised replies you can use. Now, Apple being Apple (and not Google), these replies are not customised to the message that you get. It drives me nuts that there is an “OK” and a “Sure!” and a “No” but no “Yes”. If this template doesn’t work for you, you can actually type a message on the watch itself. My fingers are fat (and I wear my watch on my dominant hand), so this is not so useful for me. However, there is also a voice typing mode, and that is rather good. And that is where things get real.

The other day, I shut work early and went off for a walk (I like doing that). My team had not shut their work though, and they kept bombarding me with messages. And that is when I realised I could actually read their messages and REPLY TO THEM using my watch. Most of the messages were the template monosyllables. Sometimes I spoke into my watch (without breaking my stride), and let Apple’s excellent voice-to-text do the rest.

And so I have this new theory, which is an extension of my wife’s theory. The next level of senior management is to be able to get all your work done simply using your watch – not even needing your phone. Of course, limitations exist – only a few lines of text are shown for each email, and images don’t load, but it is only a matter of time before watches solve for this.

But then, I’ve discovered one massive downside of replying to messages using my watch – the tone. The template monosyllables are all come across as rude (or curt). And the voice-to-text means you don’t really have your filter on while typing, and you end up “writing as you would speak”, and that can’t be great as well.

The other day I was walking from our Michaelpalya office to our Binnamangala office, when I was bombarded with messages from someone. And without breaking my stride I replied to all the messages, speaking into my watch. I “wrote” as I would speak (complete with swearwords), and that turned out to be an incredibly rude set of messages I ended up sending (I apologised later that day when I saw what I’d “written” on my phone later).

So leapfrogging and trying to act too cool can sometimes come at a price.