Tag: job

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.

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.

S&P’s Responsibilities

Reading through some of the reactions from “experts” to the S&P’s downgrade of US debt, I see words such as “irresponsible”, “misguided” and “inappropriate” being bandied around. These experts seem to be of the view that in view of all that the US is already going through (given the debt crisis et al) it was not correct for the S&P to push it further down into the abyss by downgrading its debt.

Now, the S&P is a rating agency. Its job is to rate debt, categorizing it in terms of how likely an issuer is to honour the debt it issues. It is a privately held firm and it is not the job of the S&P to prevent global crises and save the world. In this case, the S&P has just done its job. And having been following the crisis for a while I’m of the opinion that it’s done the right thing (check Felix Salmon’s article on this; he says the downgrade is more due to the risk of the US’s willingness to not default, rather than its ability; given that there is no permanent solution yet to the debt ceiling and it issues all debt in its native currency).

If a simple move like this by a private company is going to bring down the world, it is because of screwed up regulations (read Basel 2 and Basel 3) that ended up giving way too much importance to firms such as this. And I’m sure the US had adequate representation at that meeting in Basel where the accord was adopted, so it can be partially held responsible for the enormous power that rating agencies currently wield.

The bottom line is that excessive regulations based on dodgy parameters have been responsible for a lot of the mess that we see today. #thatzwhy we need strong regulations.

Two kinds of immigration

There are fundamentally two kinds of immigration – local job-creators and local job-competitors. The former are primarily middle and upper middle class people, who create jobs locally in terms of employing people (directly) to provide services for them – like maids, cooks, drivers, laundrymen, etc. The latter are primarily working class people who migrate in order to provide local services. They work as maids, cooks, drivers, etc.

Already existing local service providers welcome the immigration of job-creators. That means they now have the opportunity to push up their asking prices, since there is now more competition for their services. There is little economic opposition to the immigration of job-creators. The opposition to them is usually cultural – witness the rants of middle class “native” Bangaloreans like me against “koramangala people”.

Job-competitors, on the other hand are not so welcome. While they usually don’t contribute too much to the “culture” of the city, they compete directly economically against already existing local service providers. There is a clear economic rationale for local service providers to oppose the entry of more such providers, and since the local service providers are usually numerous and politically active, it is easier to oppose the entry of such job-competitors.

In the 1960s, for example, Shiv Sena started out by targeting South Indian middle class people. However, that campaign didn’t last long, since the “masses” (mostly local service providers) realized that it was economically counterintuitive for them to target middle class people. Hence, gradually over time, the rhetoric changed and the targets are now immigrant job-competitors. So you have Shiv Sena guys beating up Bihari taxi drivers, etc. And since this targeting of immigrant job-competitors is economically advantageous to the “masses”, it is likely to be more sustainable than the targeting of immigrant middle class people.

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.

Vishnu and Shiva temples

This post may add to Aadisht’s contention of Shaivism being superior to Vaishnavism. Earlier this month I’d gone with family to this place called Avani, some 100 km east of Bangalore. The main centre of attraction there was this 10th century Shiva temple that had been built by the Gangas.

As we got off the car, I was pleased to see the signage of the Archaeological Society of India. I’m in general not a big fan of temples. I find them to be overwhelmed with “devotees”, and way too noisy, and more importantly for some reason I’m not allowed to use my camera inside temples. So I was pleased that this being an ASI temple there won’t be any worship in there and so I can take pictures peacefully.

As we entered, though, I saw a number of priestly figures standing around the entrance, and one of them shouted “no photo in temple, no photo in temple” (i was in bermudas and a t-shirt, and wearing a backpack and camera bag so looked foreign types). I just nodded and went on. And then another priest accompanied us, and performed the pooja to the idol.

The temple at Avani is that of Ramalingeshwara, a version of Shiva. Now, the studness with Shiva temples is that the idol is extremely simple. It’s just a penis. And it’s not hard to make, and more importantly it’s hard to break, since it’s monolithic, and usually without any portions that can easily break off. Contrast this with Vishnu temples, where the idols are of actual human figures, with arms and legs and ears and noses and fingers – all made of relatively thin pieces of stone, which makes it easier to break.

So think of yourself as an invader who for some reason wants to defile a temple by destroying its idols. The very nature of idols in a Vishnu temple makes your job simple. All you need is to give one strong hit which will break off a nose or a toe or a finger – not much damage, but enough to defile the temple and render it useless for the purpose of worship. But get to a Shiva temple, and you see one large penis-shaped stone in there, and you realize it’s not worth your patience to try break it down. So you just loot the vaults and go your way.

And hence, due to the nature of the idols in these temples, Shiva temples are more resilient to invasion and natural disaster compared to Vishnu temples. Aadisht, you can be happy.

Managing stud work

I begin this post with an apology. About two years back I’d promised that I won’t write any more on Studs and Fighters on this blog, and I’ll save all that for my forthcoming book. Unfortunately, since then I’ve managed not more than one page of my book, and that too has been in the last couple of weeks. I realize that by not writing about studs and fighters here, I’m losing that perspective of thought entirely, because of which I’ve not been able to write my book.

So, Chom (a friend) raised an important point during a discussion earlier today. He said that people who are studs, after they become “managers” (in which case their job is solely to manage other people. Think of someone like a partner in a consulting firm), start angling for more fighter work for their team.  That they seem to forget all their studness, and assume that all the people they manage are fighters.

I had argued earlier that once the partner of a consulting firm stops doing day-to-day work, the quality of work at the firm suffers. This post is an extension of that. So what Chom says inherently makes sense. Here’s why.

Stud work is risky. There is a good probability that it may not be completed. So when your target changes from the “total impact of work done” to “number of pieces of work successfully completed” the whole equation changes. You are not looking for those “big wins” from your team, any more. What you need from your team is a high rate of delivery, and a large number of projects that are completed. If you get big wins, that is just a bonus. But all you care for now is the number of wins.

So you start taking on more fighter work, and letting go of stud work. After all, it is now rational for you to do that. Your own working style can sit aside.

Comparative advantage and competitive advantage

So there are two reasons why you could be employed. Comparative advantage and competitive advantage. Let me explain.

In international trade, there is a concept called “law of comparative advantage“. Let me explain with the classical (and simple) example. Robinson Crusoe is marooned on an island with Friday. Now, let us assume there are two productive activities on the island – catching fish and cutting wood. Now, Crusoe can catch 10 fish an hour, while Friday can catch 5. On the other hand, Crusoe can cut 3 trees an hour, while Friday can cut 2. Clearly Crusoe “dominates” Friday, and the latter is much more inefficient. So does that mean that Crusoe can just have Friday for dinner one day?

While the intuitive answer might be a “yes”, the law of comparative advantage shows otherwise. While Friday might be inferior to Crusoe in both activities, he is “less worse off” at chopping trees than he is at catching fish. For example, let us say that if left to himself, Crusoe would spend 3 hours fishing and 2 hours chopping wood every day. That would produce 30 fish and 6 trees of wood.

Now, if Crusoe were to spend all his 5 work hours exclusively catching fish, he will have 50 fish and no wood. He can trade the extra 20 fish for 8 logs of wood from Friday (Friday demands 5 fish for every 2 logs of wood, since that’s his opportunity cost). So net-net Crusoe is better off by 2 logs of wood. The trade similarly leaves Friday also better off (compared to the situation if he were alone on the island). Now you see why Friday keeps his job.

So in a “comparative advantage” job, you keep the job only because you make it easier for one or more colleagues to do more. You are clearly inferior to these colleagues in all the “components” of your job, but you don’t get fired only because you increase their productivity. You become the Friday to their Crusoe.

On the other hand, you can keep a job for “competitive advantage“. You are paid because there are one or more skills that the job demands in which you are better than your colleagues. You have a “competitive advantage” in those skills, and that is what you are paid for. Here you can expect to be treated better than your comparative advantage colleague would. You can even expect for some of your “comparative advantage” colleagues to be assigned to you to take your load off on those tasks you don’t enjoy a competitive advantage in. And again I’m not saying you need to “dominate” your colleagues.  All you need is one “axis” along which you are clearly superior. And you’ll get the “competitive” treatment.

Pause for a moment and ask yourself why your job exists. Check if you work because you have a competitive advantage, or if it is merely because of the “comparative advantage” – that your presence frees up time for the more efficient people. If your job belongs to the latter category, I think you have reason to be more worried.

Quiet Dissent

Sometimes when someone asks you to do something that you don’t want to do, your instinct would be to not do it. However, in certain situations it might unnecessarily offend the person who asked you to do it, and you may not really enjoy fighting with him/her. On the other hand, doing it would be like simply listening to what that person said, and effectively inviting him/her to run you over (figuratively) at the next opportunity, so you would want to avoid that.

In such situations, I follow this policy of quiet dissent. I do whatever has been asked of me, but make it a point to register my dissent. I ensure that the person who has asked me to do the job knows that I didn’t like doing it; and by doing the job, I also try to communicate that I don’t mean any disrespect to the person who asked me to do the job, but that I’m opposed to that particular idea (me doing that job) of his/hers.

You might find it strange that the usually firebrand me is espousing moderate ideas such as this one, but I think I’m just being pragmatic, and I’ve found this technique to be quite useful in dealing with people you don’t want to piss off – because it’s not profitable for you to piss them off. Of course there is the chance that that person may not understand the subtlety of the action, and might interpret your voice of dissent as disrespect to them. I think if anyone thinks like that, they deserve the disrespect.