Category: work

Internal Conflict

When a bunch of friends and I described ourselves as a pantheon a few years back, I was War. Part of the reason was that in Hindu Mythology Karthik is the God of War, but more importantly, I was War because I was always at war with myself. With three others being conveniently called Disease, Hunger and Madness, and another being Death, we formed a formidable force indeed.

True to the name that these guys gave me all those years ago, for the last six months or so, I’ve been absolutely consumed by internal conflict. It mostly has to do with my professional career, which hasn’t particularly taken off the way I imagined it would when I graduated from IIMB some 5 years ago. For the first time ever, I’ve completed two years in a job, and things don’t particularly look rosy, especially if I evaluate myself based on where I could have been had I not made those big blunders.

A part of me wants to go easy upon myself, and not be too harsh. Everyone goes through tough phases, that part tells me, and that mine has been a wee bit longer than most people’s. This part tells me to not worry about peer pressure, and to concentrate on keeping myself peaceful and enjoying the good things in life. This part further asks me to not worry too much about the future and that things will get into a flow. And that despite my corporate career not exactly taking off, life isn’t all that bad.

The other part, on the other hand, holds me responsible for all my troubles. It tells me that it’s because of my mistakes in the past that I’m where I am, and that I need to work really hard to rectify them. This part takes me to LinkedIn, and shows me the wonderfully sculpted oh-so-successful careers some of my old associates seem to be having, just to prove the point that I’ve messed up. This part wants me to conform, and be a good employee, and climb the stairs in the same way others have, and follow the well-trodden path into successful corporate whoredom. And this path is also supported by those pesky relatives who ask you uncomfortable questions about your career every time you are unfortunate enough to bump into them.

The first part is quite worried about my health, both mental and physical, and believes that messing up one’s health is too high a price to pay for corporate success and the associate perks that it brings. The second says I need to learn to adapt, and somehow reduce the impact of my health, while still being a good corporate whore.

And like in that old Coffy Bite ad, the argument continues. Except that these two parts of myself have completely ravaged my head over the last few months. I’m reminded of the story of the Bherunda bird (the “state bird” of Karnataka) which has two heads and one body. The two heads get into a quarrel. One of them gets so upset that he drinks some poison, thus killing “both of them”. These two parts of me, by means of their continued conflict have ended up completely consuming me, and my head.

And here I am, trying to figure out once again what it means to chill.

Corporate Culture

In good times, when you like the core aspects of your job, you don’t really care about your “organizational culture”. You don’t care so much about how they treat you, about how they make you feel. All you care about is that you are enjoying your time there, that you think there’s some value that the job is adding to your life, and you are happy receiving your salary.

When your organization’s “culture” starts mattering is when things aren’t going all that well in your job. It’s when you stop liking the core aspects of your job, and start wondering why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s the time when all the “cultural” and “feel good” things about your job that come to the fore. That’s the time when any problems that you have with the organizational culture get highlighted, and you start focusing more on that and less on your work (after all, you’re trying to think whether there’s a reason apart from your core work for you to stay in the job).

As an employer, the risk with not paying attention to your organization’s culture is that when one of your employees doesn’t feel that good about his/her job (and this is bound to happen; irrespective of how much one loves his job, one is bound to go through these cycles), if he realizes that he doesn’t like the culture of your organization, it is that much more easier for him to get extremely disgruntled, and think of deserting ship. By maintaining a great organizational culture, on the other hand, even when someone is going through the troughs (in terms of core work), there is value that they see in sticking on to job, and living to see another day in the job, when (hopefully) the cycle would’ve been reversed.

As a prospective employee, if you see a high degree of attrition in a prospective employer, think twice before joining even if the core nature of work really appeals to you. For, the attrition indicates something is possibly wrong with the culture of the place, and that sooner or later that is bound to bite you.

I don’t know what to name this bias

So yet again I’m at that point in my life when I’m pondering about my career, pulling up my socks and asking myself uncomfortable questions. I’m asking myself what it is I really want to do, what it is that I really enjoy, what is the best way I can monetize my skills and the like. I’ve been pondering between radically different alternatives – from staying on in Wall Street to becoming a hippie; from becoming a professor to starting a company. I’ve been thoroughly confused and have been talking to a number of people about this.

The one common strand I extract from my conversations with all these people is that most people give you advice that is aligned with what they are doing. When I talk to the prof, he talks to me about becoming a prof, and about why I’m suited for it. When I talk to the corporate whore, he tries to convince me that there’s no way out from corporate whoredom and that I must simply embrace and accept it. When I ask the hippie, he thinks it’s no big deal if I keep switching jobs, and that I’m being dishonest with myself continuing to do something I don’t enjoy. And the entrepreneur tries his best to push me into becoming an entrepreneur.

Given my thoroughly confused state of mind, all this has been mostly adding to the confusion, but now that I’ve managed to extract this common strand, I been able to add the appropriate amount of spices to all the advice I’ve received, and making more sense of it. While I continue to figure out what’s the best course of action for me, I wonder what it is that makes people want other people to be like them.

I must mention that this is not a recent phenomenon. Back when I was in college, I remember talking to a senior who went into consulting, and he convinced me that I should do that, too. The banker talked about how banking is perfect for my skills. Till I was in 10th standard, I had no clue about the existence of IIT until a rocket scientist uncle told me about it, and about how going there would be the best thing I could do.

Of all the people who have given me career advice, perhaps the only person who didn’t clearly show this kind of bias was my father. He was an accountant, and he used to work as a regulator. And right from the beginning he made it clear to me that I should neither become an accountant nor should I work for the government.

And I’m trying to think of what kind of advice I dish out. Perhaps because I don’t have one clear “career axis”, I don’t really show this kind of a bias. Or maybe it’s hereditary.

Jobs and courtship

Jobs, unlike romantic relationships, don’t come with a courtship period. You basically go for a bunch of interviews and at the end of it both parties (you and the employer) have to decide whether it is going to be a good fit. Neither party has complete information – you don’t know what a typical day at the job is like, and your employer doesn’t know much about your working style. And so both of you are taking a risk. And there is a significant probability that you are actually a misfit and the “relationship” can go bad.

For the company it doesn’t matter so much if the odd job goes bad. They’ll usually have their recruitment algorithm such that the probability of a misfit employee is so low it won’t affect their attrition numbers. From the point of view of the employees, though, it can get tough. Every misfit you go through has to be explained at the next interview. You have a lot of misfits, and you’re deemed to be an unfaithful guy (like being called a “much-married man”). And makes it so tough for you to get another job that you are more likely to stumble into one where you’re a misfit once again!

Unfortunately, it is not practical for companies to hire interns. I mean, it is a successful recruitment strategy at the college-students level but not too many people are willing to get into the uncertainty of a non-going-concern job in the middle of their careers. This risk-aversion means that a lot of people have no option but to soldier on despite being gross misfits.

And then there are those that keep “divorcing” in an attempt to fit in, until they are deemed unemployable.

PS: In this regard, recruitments are like arranged marriage. You make a decision based on a handful of interviews in simulated conditions without actually getting to know each other. And speaking of arranged marriage, I reprise this post of mine from six years ago.

Working for money

One of these days during lunch at office, we had a fairly heated discussion about why people work. One guy and I were of the opinion that the primary reason people work is for money, and everything else is secondary. The third guy, who among the three of us perhaps works the hardest, argued that “people who make a difference” never work for money, and that it is only “ordinary people”, who have no desire to “make a difference” that work for money. He took the examples of people like Steve Jobs and a few famous scientists to make his point.

Now, while I agree that money is the primary reason I work, and which is what I argued that day during lunch, I disagree that the end-of-month salary credit tells the whole story. The way I see it, you need to take a longer-term view of things. So while the short-term money you make is important, and affects important decisions such as quality of short-term life, a more important thing is sustainable returns. While you do your work and get that end-of-month salary credit to bolster your bank account, an important thing is about how much the work you’re doing now will contribute to your income later on in life.

Digression 1: I keep oscillating between wanting to retire at forty and wanting to retire at sixty. And I must admit I haven’t frankly decided which one is more suitable for me. This analysis is more relevant with the retirement at sixty model (which is what I think I’ll end up following, health etc permitting). End of Digression 1.

Digression 2: Not so long ago, some people in my firm wanted to recruit “software engineers from IIT with two to three years of work experience”. Being one of the “CS guys” around, I interviewed quite a few people for that role. Their CVs indicated that had we “caught them” on campus, they would have been sure hires. But two years at a software services shop, I figured in all cases, had made them “rusty”. Spending all their time in mind-numbing activities (like building UIs), they had failed to build on the skills that would have been useful for the higher-up-the-value-chain job I was recruiting for (finally that team went to IITs and got a bunch of campus hires. They gave up on lateral hiring altogether). End of Digression 2.

Those two digressions weren’t particularly meaningless. I guess you know where this post is headed now. So, the thing with a job is that along with the short-term benefits it provides, it should also help you build on those skills that you think you can monetize later on in life. Every job (most jobs, really) teach you something. There is constant learning everywhere. But what matters is if the learning that the job offers is aligned with the kind of learning that you think you are geared for, which you think you can monetize at a later point of time in life.

I still claim that I work for money, but just that I take a longer-term view of it. And I strive to learn those things on a job which I think will be helpful for me in terms of monetization at a later point of time in my life.

 

Data Science and Software Engineering

I’m a data scientist. I’m good with numbers, and handling large and medium sized data sets (that doesn’t mean I’m bad at handling small data sets, of course). The work-related thing that gives me most kicks is to take a bunch of data and through a process of simple analysis, extract information out of it. To twist and turn the data, or to use management jargon “slice and dice”, and see things that aren’t visible to too many people. To formulate hypotheses, and use data to prove or disprove them. To represent data in simple but intuitive formats (i.e. graphs) so as to convey the information I want to convey.

I can count my last three jobs (including my current one) as being results of my quest to become better at data science and modeling. Unfortunately, none of these jobs have turned out particularly well (this includes my current one). The problem has been that in all these jobs, data science has been tightly coupled with software engineering, and I suck at software engineering.

Let me stop for a moment and tell you that I don’t mind programming. In fact, I love programming. I love writing code that makes my job easier, and automates things, and gives me data in formats that I desire. But I hate software engineering. Of writing code within a particular system, or framework. Or adhering to standards that someone else sets for “good code”. Of following processes and making my code usable by some dumbfuck somewhere else who wouldn’t get it if I wrote it the way I wanted. As I’d mentioned earlier, I like coding for myself. I don’t like coding for someone else. And so I suck at software engineering.

Now I wonder if it’s possible at all to decouple data science from software engineering. My instinct tells me that it should be possible. That I need not write production-level code in order to turn my data-based insights into commercially viable form. Unfortunately, in my search around the corporatosphere thus far, I haven’t been able to find something of the sort.

Which makes me wonder if I should create my own niche, rather than hoping for someone else to create it for me.

Between Suits and Geeks

So you have suits and you have geeks. The problem with me is that I’m neither. I lie somewhere in between. So when I’m in the company of suits, I look like a geek, and in the company of geeks I look like a suit.

Problem is that suits don’t understand geeky stuff, or tend to get intimidated, or expect me to do magic. Geeks are usually dismissive of suity stuff, saying it’s all “globe” or “pfaff”. They think they are the masters of the universe and suits are dumb.

So. Suits to the left of me, and geeks to my right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you

In search of uncertainty

Back when I was in school, I was a math stud. At least people around me thought so. I knew I wanted to pursue a career in science, and that in part led me to taking science in class XI, and subsequently writing JEE which led to the path I ultimately took. Around the same time (when I was in high school), I started playing chess competitively. I was quite good at it, and I knew that with more effort I could make it big in the game. But then, that never happened, and given that I would fall sick after every tournament, I retired.

It was in 2002, I think, that I was introduced to contract bridge, and I took an instant liking for it. All the strategising and brainwork of chess would be involved once again, and I knew I’d get pretty good at this game, too. But there was one fundamental difference which made bridge so much more exciting – the starting position was randomized (I’m not making a case for Fischer Chess here, mind you). The randomization of starting positions meant that you could play an innumerable number of “hands” with the same set of people without ever getting bored. I simply loved it.

It was around that time that I started losing interest in math and other hard sciences. They had gotten to the point where they were too obscure, and boring, I thought, and that to make an impact in them, I wanted to move towards something less precise, and hard. That was probably what led me to do an MBA. And during the course of my MBA I discovered my interest in economics and social sciences, but am yet to do anything significant on that front, though, apart from the odd blog here or there.

I think what drove me from what I had thought is my topic of interest to what I think now it is is the nature of open problems. In hard sciences, where a lot of things are “known” it’s getting really hard to do anything of substance unless you get really deep in, into the territories of obscurity. In “fuzzy sciences”, on the other hand, nothing too much is “known”, and there will always be scope for doing good interesting work without it getting too obscure.

Similarly, finance, I thought, being a people-driven subject (the price of a stock is what a large set of people think its price is, there are no better models) will have lots of uncertainty, and scope to make assumptions, and thus scope to do good work without getting too obscure. But what I find is that given the influx of hard science grads in Wall Street over the last three decades, most of the large organizations are filled with people who simply choose to ignore the uncertainty and “interestingness” and instead try and solve deterministic problems based on models that they think completely represents the market.

And this has resulted in you having to do stuff that is really obscure and deep (like in the hard sciences) even in a non-deterministic field such as finance, simply because it’s populated by people from hard science background, and it takes way too much in order to go against the grain.

PS: Nice article by Tim Harford on why we can’t have any Da Vincis today. Broadly related to this, mostly on scientific research.

More on consulting partners

I’d written in an earlier post that consulting firms remain young nd dynamic by periodically promoting new people to partnership, and they in their quest to develop new markets and establish themselves, take on risks which can prove useful to underlings who now have a better chance to make a mark and establish themselves.

However, as I’d once experienced a long time back, there can be a major downside to this. The new partners, in their quest to establish themselves, can sometimes be too eager in the commitments they make to the clients. They are prone to promising way more than their team can logically deliver, and that contributes to putting additional and unnecessary pressure on the people working for them.

Nothing earthshattering, but thought I should mention this here for the sake of completeness, so that I don’t mislead you with my conclusions.

On Running a Consulting Firm

So most of the consulting firms are run as partnerships (as you might have already figured out). There was an experiment in the late 90s where a then leading firm was bought over by an IT company, and that saw stagnation for the next few years until the consultants did a “management buy out” in order to rid themselves of the IT company’s controls. By then, though, valuable time was lost, and last I heard this company was severely lagging its peers in terms of reputation, among other things.

As I had mentioned in the earlier post, the rut sets in once partners reach “steady state”, where they have an established set of relationships that they milk to get more business. And as I mentioned, it’s hard to get out of this rut, until employees start leaving protesting the poor quality of work, and lack of opportunities to make it big. And that starts sending the firm into a downward spiral. So what is it that the firms must do, in order to keep themselves dynamic, and not get into this kind of a rut?

The answer is something that is practiced by most leading consulting firms. Every few months or a year, these firms add to the partnership pool, mostly by promoting from within their ranks. Once thus promoted, it is the new partner’s responsibility to expand and generate new business for the firm, and he is not able to piggyback on the relationships established by the established partners. And thus, in his process to expand and get himself established, he has an incentive to take more risks. And take on projects with long-out-of-the-money option kind of payoffs.

Regular promotions to the partnership level means that there is always a bunch of partners who are thus taking risks, and that keeps the firm dynamic. I don’t know how well this works in practice, but in theory at least, this helps firms from getting into stagnation. That this is the model followed by most leading management consulting firms indicates that this is probably an appropriate approach.

So, if you think your consulting partnership is stagnating, get in more partners. Promote. Or make way. And keep the group dynamic and a great place to work.