work – Page 12 – Pertinent Observations

CEO Presentations and Rocky Movies

As part of my consulting assignment, yesterday I had to make a presentation to the CEO of my client. The process of preparing the presentation reminded me of Rocky (or any other Martial Arts movie). In these movies, before the protagonist can challenge the antagonist, he has to go through a series of underlings. Only after the protagonists has defeated all the underlings does the antagonist accept his challenge to a fight.

The work itself was done in consultation with a mid-level manager who heads the division that follows the process that I was going to recommend. While we had had a few rounds of discussions which led to the recommendations, I had prepared the presentation all by myself, and most of Wednesday was spent with him fixing the presentation.

Next we went to his boss, and repeated the process. Then to the boss’s boss. Then to someone else in the top management who would not be available for the main presentation! The hour before the main presentation was spent with the head of the division in whose realm the processes I was recommending fell. And then I got to the CEO.

Two hours before the meeting with the CEO, a couple of client team members and I were discussing the finer points of seppuku and hara-kiri. An hour before the presentation, the division head and I were discussing the Mahabharata!

The entire hierarchy was present for the meeting with the CEO (the mid-manager I had worked with, his boss, his underling, his boss’s boss and a couple of other people). Still typing away on his iPhone, without looking up, the CEO asked, “are all of you in agreement with what is in this presentation or are these Karthik’s recommendations alone?”

The Rocky Process was worth it, after all!

PS: I’m writing this sitting at the client’s office, in between meetings.

Career Progression

I’m close to two thirds my way into my “Project Thirty”. Parts of it aren’t going so well. I’ve hardly traveled, for one, save a bike trip across Rajasthan. My to-be-read pile is as tall as it used to be, and my DVR hard drive is almost full with movies that I’ve wanted to watch, but haven’t been able to watch. Despite this, at this stage I must say Project Thirty is heading to a success.

Soon enough, I should be signing my first really large consulting deal. That should keep me busy enough for the next six months, though I think I’ll have some time to do other interesting stuff. The interesting thing about this is that it all started off with an “incoming lead”. One of the senior managers at my prospective client reads this blog. So that can be considered as my blogging career’s second big achievement – this blog’s predecessor was instrumental in my getting acquainted with the woman I’m currently married to.

I’ve structured this consulting assignment in a way that I spend just over half my time on it, and I’ve decided to use the other half to do things that I find interesting, without really having a monetary objective. So I’ve built a new graphic for cricket, which I’m trying to hawk around. I’ve built a whole system to simulate cricket matches. I’ve taught myself R, and more R, and have now learnt to scrape data off the interwebs.

I’ve rediscovered my love for programming (through that cricket project), and have now started dabbling with some stock market data trying to figure out if I can come up with a statistical arbitrage based strategy (in which case I’ll try sell it to some hedge fund). I’m teaching a course for the Takshashila Institution and if things go well, I might be teaching more than that, and elsewhere. I’ve started doing corporate workshops. Later this week I’ll be attending a conference for networking purposes. I meet people over coffee, just to get to know them. And so forth.

Now the problem is sustainability. Being a lone wolf, trying to find six-monthly consulting projects that take half your time is not an easy task. You need to be careful about how much you commit, for you have no resources at hand if you are over-stressed, but then you need the pipeline to flow, if you need your life to flow. That tells me that the logical step is to recruit, and build a team. That way, I can spend my time doing more quality things, but that also means that I spend time doing employee-management, something I don’t particularly look forward to. I like my current life as a freelancer but sustainability issues mean that I might need to “settle down”.

Some of those over-a-cup-of-coffee meetings have been with old friends/bosses who are insanely brilliant people. These conversations have given me a real high, and I never seem to have had enough of them! The amount of positive information flow and idea flow that happens when I meet one of these people is phenomenal. Unfortunately I don’t get to meet them too often, given our respective busy-ness. However, it would be wonderful to find co-workers like that, who would keep me mentally stimulated all the time.

Another cup of coffee was downed last week with a couple of acquaintances who needed my help in analyzing a particular data set they were looking at. They are individually intelligent people (though neither belongs to the category I mentioned in the previous paragraph), but a little different from me in terms of world-views and backgrounds and expertise. It turned out to be another phenomenal conversation, though, as we exchanged notes on how to attack the data, with each of our views educating one another. We were different people, but we were comfortable working together, and there seemed to be a lot to learn.

Anyway, the point is that I’m looking for partners now, to run my consulting business. Of course, they need to be people who share my world-view in terms of quant and data analysis, but I do think there needs to be some diversity in terms of world-view and way of thinking. Again, they need to be self-motivated to pursue this field of quant consulting, and they need to remember that they won’t be drawing a salary – since they’ll be partners. The most important bit, though, is that I need to be able to work with them. I hope that over the course of the next few months I’m able to identify and convince one or two people who fit this description and who I would want to share revenues with.

I’m also looking for a mentor. I have a number of things I’m doing and I need to focus. I have a friend who has worked in consulting who is mentoring me with respect to the general stuff regarding my consulting assignment. However, I need someone who can guide me in a larger perspective. In terms of how I need to approach life, how I should go about building a partnership, building my business, building my team, etc.

I’m excited at this point in time, and I hope I can make things work in terms of my new-found career. I’ll keep you updated on this.

Generalists and specialists

So you have generalists and specialists. Generalists are fundamentally smart people who can do a variety of things. They take a look at a problem, take some time to understand the basics, and then go about solving it. They get bored easily, and move from problem to problem. Generally, they don’t dig deep but are well equipped enough to solve most problems.

Specialists, as the name suggests, dig deep into a particular problem. They are the kings of all they survey within their domain, and know every little trick in the book. However, they are usually unaware of the world outside of their wells, and suffer from the hammer-nail problem (to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail). They are also deeply insecure – for if their area of specialization gets invaded by generalists, they are likely to lose their livelihood. So, they are incentivized to build walls, and make it harder for generalists to invade. Generalists don’t have any such problem. Given their nature, if one fort gets invaded, they can soon go ransack another.

The world is dominated by specialists, and they continue to build walls around themselves. Artificial barriers to entry get created (such as “experience requirements”). While this keeps their domains safe, it leads to an increase in transaction costs and overall decrease in efficiency.

Take accounting as an example. In principle, it is not a particularly hard practice. What makes it particularly hard for aspiring accountants is the way you go about becoming an accountant. You need to pass an exam, set by the association of accountants, and then intern under an already qualified accountant (who pays you less than minimum wage) and pass another exam (again set by the association of accountants) in order to practice accounting. The exam and internship are rigorous enough that you need to devote two or more years of your life (full time) in trying to get your charter. All for a profession that is fundamentally fairly intuitive. So that the specialists’ turf is protected (of course the accountants have every incentive to keep the requirements to the charter prohibitively tough – for more chartered accountants would mean more competition and hence less margins).

Another example is in math papers. They are so formula and jargon ridden that it is prohibitively difficult for anyone who is not a full-time mathematician to make much sense of them. While some of the rigour may actually be justified, most of it is for the sake of preserving the mathematicians’ turf. The same applies in general to all peer-reviewed paper publication journals and conferences.

Social scientists are afraid of economists. Financial traders (from a commerce background) are afraid of engineers. In business schools, “marketing students” are afraid of “finance students” (more on this in another post). Their only defence is raising barriers, forming cliques and spewing jargon.

Tear Down The Wall! TEAR DOWN THE WALL!! TEAR DOWN THE WALL!!!

The Quants

Since investment bank bashing seems to be in fashion nowadays, let me add my two naya paise to the fire. I exited a large investment bank in September 2011, after having worked for a little over two years there. I used to work as a quant, spending most of my time building pricing and execution models. I was a bit of an anomaly there, since I had an MBA degree. What was also unusual was that I had previously spent time as a salesperson in an investment bank . Most other people in the quant organization came from a heavily technical background, with the most popular degrees being PhDs in Physics and Maths, and had no experience or interest in the business side of things at the bank.

You might wonder what PhDs in Physics and Maths do at investment banks. I used to wonder the same before I joined. Yes, there are some tough mathematical puzzles to be solved in the course of devising pricing and execution algorithms (part of the work that us quants did), which probably kept them interested. However, the one activity for which these pure science PhDs were prized for, and which they spent most of their time doing, was C++ coding. Yeah, you read that right. These guys could write mean algorithms – I don’t know if even Computer Science graduates (and there were plenty of those) could write as clean (and quick) C++ code as these guys.

While most banks stress heavily on diversity, and makes considerable efforts (in the form of recruitment, affiliation groups, etc.) to ensure a diverse workplace, it is not enough to prevent a large portion of quants coming from a similar kind of background. And when you put large numbers of Physics and Math PhDs together, it is inevitable that there is some degree of groupthink. You have the mavericks like me who like to model things differently, but if everyone else in your organization thinks one way, who do you go to in order to push your idea? You stop dropping your own ideas and start thinking like everyone else does. And you become yet another cog in the big quant wheel.

The biggest problem with hardcore Math people working on trading strategies is that they do not seek to solve a business problem through their work – they seek to solve a math problem, which they will strive to do as elegantly and correctly as it is possible. It doesn’t matter to the quants if the assumption of asset prices being lognormal is widely off the mark. In fact, they don’t care how the models behave. All they care about is about their formulae and results being correct – GIVEN the model of the market. I remember once spending a significant amount of time (maybe a couple of weeks) looking for bugs in my pricing logic because prices from two methods didn’t match up to the required precision of twelve decimal places (or was it fourteen? I’ve forgotten). And this after making the not-very-accurate assumption that asset prices are log normal. The proverb that says, “measure with a micrometer, mark with a chalk, cut with an axe”, is quite apt to describe the priorities of most quants.

Before I joined the firm, I used to wonder how bankers can be so stupid to make the kind of obvious silly errors (like assuming that housing prices cannot go down) that led to the global financial crisis of 2008. Two years at the firm, however, made me realize why these things happen. In fact, the bigger surprise, after the two years there, was about why such gross mistakes don’t occur more regularly. I think I’ve already talked about the culprits earlier in the post, but I should repeat myself.

First, a large number of guys building models come from similar backgrounds, so they think similarly. Because so many people think similarly, the rest train themselves to think similarly (or else get nudged out, by whatever means). So you have massive organizations full of massively talented brilliant minds which all think similarly! Who is to ask the uncomfortable questions? Next, who has time to ask the uncomfortable questions? Every one, from Partner downwards, has significant amount of “day to day work” to take care of every day. Bankers are driven hard (in that sense, and in that they are mostly brilliant, they do deserve the money they make), and everyone has a full plate (if you don’t it is an indication that you may not have a plate any more). There is little scope for strategic thinking. Again, remember that in an organization full of people who think similarly, people who have got promoted and made it to the top are likely to be those that think best along that particular axis. While it is the top management of the firm that is supposed to be responsible for the “big” strategic decisions, the kind of attention to details (which Math/Physics PhDs are rich in) that takes them to the top doesn’t leave them enough bandwidth for such thinking.

And so shit happens. Anyone who had the ability to think differently has either been “converted” to the conventional way of thinking, or is playing around with big bucks at some tiny hedge fund somewhere – because he found that it wasn’t possible to grow significantly in a place where most people think different to the way he thinks, and no one has the patience for his thinking.

This is the real failure in investment banking (markets) culture that has led to innumerable crises. The screwing over of clients and loss of “culture” in terms of ethics is a problem that has existed for a long time, and nothing new, contrary to what Greg Smith (formerly of Goldman Sachs) has written. The real failure of banking culture is this promotion of one-dimensional in-line-with-the-party thought, and the curbs against thinking and acting contrary to popular (in the firm) wisdom. It is this failure of culture that has led to the large negative shocks to the economy in the years gone by, and it is these shocks that have led common people to lose money rather than one off acts by banks where they don’t necessarily act in the interest of clients. And irrespective of how many Business Standards Committees and Risk Committees banks constitute, it is unlikely that this risk is going to go away any time soon. And I can’t think of a regulatory cure against this.

On mental math and consulting careers

Sometime last week, the wife wanted to know more about management consulting, and I was trying to explain to her the kind of work that consulting firms do. I told her that the two most important skills to have in order to be a successful consultant are structured thinking and people skills, and in order to illustrate the former I put her through a “case” on the lines of those that consulting firms use in order to interview.

The importance of structured thinking, I explained, lay in the fact that not all problems that consulting firms pose have a definitive solution, and structure helps you hedge against not being able to generate a solution. In the worst case, if you follow this approach, you would have made a contribution to the client solely by putting a structure on their problem, and by enabling them to think better about similar problems that cropped up in the future. This is also the reason that consulting firms use the much-touted (and much-abused) frameworks – they are a good method of structuring the problem, I said.

I then went on to talk about how I’m not much of a structured thinker, and how I frauded my way in through that during my consulting interviews nearly six years back. On joining a consulting firm, I’d found myself thoroughly disillusioned and out of my depth, and finding that the job called for a completely different set of skills than what I possessed. The nature of problem solving, I found, was very different from the kind I’d been mostly exposed to, and enjoyed. I quit in a matter of months.

I went on to narrate a story from my B-school days. It was about the final exam of a second year course, and I’ve blogged about it. The question presented a business problem and asked us to find a solution for it. I thought for a bit, figured out the solution (with a bit of thinking it was obvious) and explained it two or three paragraphs. My friend had instead put a structure on the problem, and used all possible applicable frameworks in order to structure it. He has been working for a consulting firm since graduation, and I’m told he’s doing rather well. You know my story.

So we talked a bit more about problem solving approaches, and how I could possibly structure my business now that I’m an independent consultant (given that I’m not a particularly structured person). During the course of this conversation I happened to mention that most of my early problem solving was in terms of programming. And the wife jumped on this. “You are a mental math guy, aren’t you?”, she asked. I nodded, feeling happy inside about those days when I would do three-digit multiplications in my head while my classmates still struggled with “six in the mind, four in the hand” methods of doing addition. “And you’re an algorithms guy, always trying to find the easiest method to solve problems?”, she continued. Again I replied in the affirmative. “Then how the hell could you even think that you would do well in a job that requires structured thinking?”

She has a point there. Why didn’t I think of this earlier? The more pertinent question now is about how I’m going to structure my data modeling business since it’s clear that I won’t be able to pull off the classical consulting model.

Offshored

Two of the four full-time jobs that I’ve done have been “offshored”. They’ve both involved working for the Bangalore office of American firms, with both jobs having been described as being “front end” and “high quality”, while in both cases it became clear in the course of time that it was anything but front end, and the quality of work depended on what the masters in the First World chose to throw at us.

In between these two jobs, I had done a “local” job, at an India-focused hedge fund based in India, which for the most part I quite liked until certain differences cropped up and grew. While doing that job, and while searching for a job while looking to exit it, one thing I was clear about was that I would never want to do an offhshored job again. Unfortunately, there came along an offer that I couldn’t resist, and so I ended up having not one but two experiences in offshored jobs.

Firstly (this was a bigger problem in the second job), I’m a morning person. I like to be in at work early in the morning, say at eight. And I like to be back home by the time the sun in down. In fact, for some reason I can’t fathom, I can’t work efficiently after the sun is down – irrespective of when I start, my productivity starts dipping quickly from 5 pm onwards. Huge problem. People say you can take calls from home and all that but that blurs the line between work and life, and ruins the latter. You are forced to stay in office even if you don’t have anything to do. Waste of time.

Then, there is the patronizing attitude of the “onshore” office. In both my offshored jobs, it turned out that an overwhelmingly large portion of the Bangalore offices actually consisted of employees who were there because even the stated reason for their existence in the firms was labour cost arbitrage. It was simple offshoring of not-particularly-skilled work to a cheaper location. I don’t know if this was a reason, but a lot of people in the “main” offices of both firms considered Bangalore to be a “back office”. And irrespective of the work people here had done, or their credentials, or record, there was always the possibility that the person in the foreign office assumed that the person in the Bangalore office existed solely because of labour cost arbitrage.

And then you would have visits by people from the onshore office. Every visitor who was marginally senior would be honoured by being asked to give a speech (without any particular topic) to the Bangalore office. In the first offshored company I worked for, people would actually be herded by the security guard to attend such speeches. The latter company was big enough to not force people to attend these talks, but these talks would be telecast big-brother style from television sets strategically placed all over the floors.

And these onshore office people would talk, quite patronisingly, about how Bangalore was great, and the people here were great, and they were doing great work. Very few of them would add actual value by means of their lectures (some did, I must mention, talk concrete stuff). Organizing this lecture was a way for the senior “leaders” in the Bangalore office (most of whom had been transplanted from the firms’ onshore offices) to etch their names in the good books of the visitors, we reasoned.

Then there was the actual work. Turn-around time for any questions that you would ask the head office was really high, unless of course you adapted and did night shifts (which I’m incapable of). In the earlier offshored firm, there would be times when I would do nothing for two or three days altogether because the guy in the onshore office hadn’t replied! Colossal waste of billable time! Also, if your boss sat abroad, there would be that much less direction in whatever you did. In my second offshored job, there were maybe two occasions when I was on two-hour phone calls with my boss (in the onshore office), where he patiently explained to me how certain things worked and how they should be done. Those were excellent sessions, and made me feel really good. But only two of them over a two year-plus period? Apart from which, most one-to-one interaction with the boss was with respect to “global” stuff. Yeah a local boss can get on your nerves by creeping behind your back every half hour, but at least you get work done there, and can learn from the boss!

Then there is training. Because of the cost-arbitrage concept on which most offshored employees are hired, the quality of training programs in the offshore offices are abysmal. During my second offshored stint, I happened to attend one training program in Hong Kong, in common with people from onshore offices in the rest of Asia. None of the numerous training programs that I attended in the Bangalore office attained even a tenth of the quality of that program in Hong Kong. The nature of employees in Bangalore meant all programs had to start at an extremely basic level, so there was little value added.

I can go on, there is a lot more. But I’ll stop here, and let you tell me about your stories of working in an offshored environment. And I certainly won’t make the same mistake third time round – of working for an offshored entity.

Thirty to twenty nine

I turned twenty nine today. Yesterday to be precise; I see the clock has just ticked past midnight. And I’m sensing that my “project thirty”, where I had decided to not take up a full time job until I turn thirty and do “all the things I ever wanted to do”, is already in trouble.

Sensing that over the last two months of joblessness I hadn’t been spending my time usefully (Parkinson’s law and all that), I decided to sit down today and make a list of all those things that I’ve ever wanted to do and haven’t been able to, which I want to do before I’m thirty. It took me a couple of hours maybe, maybe a little less than that. At the end of it, I had a grand two page bullet-pointed word document to show for my efforts. To be honest, it looked rather skinny.

I started a (time) budgeting and planning exercise, and figured out how much time I would need to do all that. Apart from a few big holidays I’ve planned, I realized that the rest of the activities can actually be worked around a “normal” work schedule, as long as I don’t take up a job that will eat away all my time. Yes, the list of “things I always wanted to do” include entrepreneurship and freelancing, but again, bereft of concrete ideas I’ve started getting doubts if this is the right time to do that. Things are quite unclear right now.

I’m more open to taking up a full time job now than I was a week or so back. I need to not make the mistake again of taking up something that I’m not suited for, or something that won’t inspire me, or something that wouldn’t allow me to do the other things that I’ve wanted to do. Again, I personally don’t mind a “portfolio life” also, where I have a couple of part time gigs rather than a full time job. Ideally, something that would allow me the time and mind space to do my side projects on the side, while also generating some revenue.

I know I want to live in Bangalore. I know that I don’t want to take up an offshored job again (a mistake I’ve done twice in the past; not something I would want to repeat, ever). I have a reasonable idea about the kind of work I want to do, though I’m quite flexible about it. I want to do something that I feel for and be proud of doing – something more than just a “CMP”. And again, something that gives me the time and space to do my own things also. And yes, I know it’s going to be hard to find something to fit these constraints (Bangalore and non-offshored reduces the sample space quite a bit, I know). And I’ll continue my Project Thirty while I seek to find something on these lines, I guess.

Or maybe I’m giving up too early. Or maybe not, that I’m just being pragmatic. Maybe I’m bowing to pressures, both internal and external. Maybe I’m just taking a rational decision. Nevertheless,

I shall not take up a job that I won’t be proud doing.

I shall not take up an offshored job.

I shall not give up on the agenda of project thirty, which is quite exhaustive. It remains a priority.

I want to have a fulfilling life, and not feel like I’m wasting time.

I’m going to keep my mind sane, and try not to succumb to pressures.

Detail

Detail is the devil. That’s my big problem in life. I’m fundamentally clumsy and prone to errors, and don’t have much of an eye for details. I tend to make a lot of silly mistakes. So whenever I’ve to do some task that requires precision, it requires me to put in way too much energy, so that I don’t commit any mistakes. This is why I have a problem with “routine” tasks. Routine tasks being routine, you are expected to complete them with one hundred per cent accuracy. Ninety five percent won’t do. That transformation from ninety five percent to hundred, though, takes up a lot of energy, and I tend to get stressed out.

Essentially, for a routine task to be done with one hundred percent accuracy, the mental energy I spend is far more than what the average person does. This means that if I do even a small bunch of routine tasks, all my mental energy is exhausted and I have nothing in store for anything else I’ve to do. This is the reason I’ve had an indifferent corporate career so far. Essentially, I face a competitive disadvantage in performing routine tasks.

This is something most people don’t appreciate. Most people assume that it doesn’t take much effort to perform routine tasks, and if you don’t do them well, you’re a good for nothing. And I must admit I’ve also not played to my strengths so far, routinely getting into situations where I’ve to show “detail” and “one hundred percent accuracy”, and not saving my energy for things I’m actually good at. Detail has been the devil.

PS: The motivation for this post was some small form I’d to fill (by hand). The space was limited and I knew I’d to write carefully without any mistakes, and that drove me completely nuts!

Managing self

When I look back at my early career (high school and early part of college), and wonder how I was so successful back then, I think it was primarily because back then I was pretty good at managing myself. Even at that early (!! ) age, I had a good idea of what I was good at, and was able to either take paths that were aligned to my strengths, or outsource cleverly, in order to do a good job of things.

For example, back when I was in 12th standard, I was “Maths Association President” in my school, and was in charge of organizing the Maths section of the school exhibition. The first thing I realized then was that while I was technically good, I sucked at managing people, and the first person I recruited was someone who I got along well with, and who I thought was an excellent people manager. I think together we managed to do a pretty terrific job.

Another example was when I was preparing to get into IIM. I recognized that CAT was something I was inherently good at, but wasn’t sure of my ability to do well in interviews. So I decided to prepare hard for CAT (though I thought I didn’t really need it), so as to maximize my performance there and render the interview irrelevant. Thinking back about my IIMB interview, I’m surprised they let me in at all, and I guess that was because of my CAT maximization only.

There were several other such occasions. Like when I decided not to prepare for JEE at all in my 11th standard in order to “conserve myself” for the push in 12th. Or when I spent a week doing nothing after my 12th boards, so that I could time my “big JEE push” such that I peaked at the right time. Or when I decided not to care about grades in courses that I loathed (as long as I passed, of course) so that I could spend more time and enjoy the courses I liked. In short, I loved being my own boss.

5 years of work in 4 different places has been largely unsatisfactory, as the more perceptive of you might have inferred from my posts. The biggest challenge so far has been in motivating myself to do something that I don’t just care about, only because I’m being paid a salary. And thinking more about it, it might be because I never really grasped the full import of what I was signing for every time I signed for a job. And I must admit there were times I lied, though not consciously. I tried to convince people I was good at getting things done (something I absolutely suck at). I told them I’m a decent programmer (I’m an excellent programmer but a lousy software engineer). And so forth.

In essence I realize that over the last five to six years I’ve failed miserably at managing myself. At getting myself into things that I enjoyed, at taking routes that I enjoy rather than one professed by someone else, at doing what I really want to do rather than what someone else wants me to do, and so forth. Essentially, by mortgaging my time to someone else, in exchange for a salary four times, I’ve actually lost the right to manage myself. And for someone with unusual skills and weaknesses (as I think I am), it is no surprise that things haven’t gone too well at all.

I do hope I can make a career in a way that I don’t mortgage my time in entirety to someone else. To be able to work, and be paid for it, but to do things my way. In other words, I don’t want to take up a full time job. To paraphrase a line I read in an extract of Aman Sethi’s A Free Man I need to recognize that I need my azaadi also, and shouldn’t give it up for kamaai.

I’ve done it yet again

I quit my job earlier this week. I did so on Wednesday, the fourteenth. In hindsight, I should have waited another day and quit on the fifteenth, to coincide with the anniversary of the demise of Lehman Brothers. So for the fourth time in five years of career, I’ve quit a job without knowing where I’ll go next. The plan for the first month is to just chill and detox, and get back my sanity. Once that’s achieved, I’ll start thinking about where my next paycheque is going to come from (my employer promptly put me on Garden Leave, thus effectively giving me a month of “free salary”).

You know what I miss the most about student life? The annual vacation! That once a year, you are entitled to spend two months or more doing absolutely nothing. I remember that friends chose to do academic projects during that time. Others got internships in companies. A few others chose to travel then. I used to do none of the above. I’d just sit at home in Bangalore and fatten myself (to compensate for the weight loss during the semester), and that ensured I started each semester in fairly high spirits (no I didn’t indulge in those spirits back then). The only time I did something “productive” during vacations was when it was an academic requirement to do a project.

I seriously miss having that annual two-month detox period. Yes, I know that my last employer gave me over twenty days of paid leave per year, but it wasn’t the same. You knew that it was a rationed resource, and you’d try to use it effectively. You’d go on vacation and immediately get on to a flight. You would land in Bangalore and head back to office within the next twenty four hours. You would sometimes need a break, take a day off from work, and then feel supremely guilty. It was on one such day sometime in the recent past that I realized that I miss vacations.

There exists a reasonable chance that I might choose to be self-employed (if things work out the way I intend, that is) but otherwise I need to find myself a job that gives me substantial vacation days a year, which I can take without any guilt. I realize that is absolutely necessary for me to keep myself charged up, and that if I had access to vacations the way I did during school/college I wouldn’t have taken a career break so many times after I started working.

My other objectives for this vacation are to travel (but it’s a bit tough given that the wife works and is subject to the twenty-days-of-paid-leave rules) and more importantly figure out for myself what my tradeoffs in life are. During my last job, I realized that I’d grossly misunderstood between my tradeoff between time and money. The other tradeoff I need to understand is the one between money and perks. And I want to write more.