The Career Conundrum

When I passed out my undergrads I was a 20 something confused lad who had no idea if engineering was what I wanted. I wouldn't lie. I got into engineering because everyone back in 90s was getting into it. Although I did have math in my Intermediate I had no clue what an engineering career would look like. To top it all I couldn't get a seat in some of the top engineering colleges post my Intermediate. So with 61 percent marks with 43 in computer science I had no clue what career I should choose. My parents were in the defence and to them only a defence career made sense. But then I am not quite my father's son as I didn't like getting up early in the morning and going for a run followed by innumerable physical drills across the day. I wanted a nice decent job which paid me well enough to fend for myself. I mean that is what I thought at least till then. I had no clue what IITs or IIMs were when I got into engineering and I really didn't care much. I was a happy go lucky guy who believed in having fun come what may which explains why I screwed up my boards.

So after my boards when I hadn't really qualified for any top college I was sent off to a less than mediocre college to get a degree. Degrees are a huge thing in India. Can also get you a job sometimes even if you are short on talent. Moving on I spent the next 4 years of my college visualising a Karan Johar film where there are songs and dances in colleges. The proverbial hero meets the college sweetheart and they fall in love. Unfortunately my college was a far cry from what a Dharma Production college looks like. Neither it had the right facilities nor the quintessential faculty one would expect in colleges. To top it all there wasn't any girl worth a shot. I mean apologies on the last statement sounded insanely sexist but back then I would think like that. Anyway life in college moved on but knowledge didn't.

Everything you learn in a C grade college is purely theoretical in nature. You have no clue about the implementation details. Funny thing is if you reproduce the same stuff in exams they honour you with good grades-say hi to the Indian education system or more rightly the Macaulay education system. No wonder why we haven't really innovated in a while save the dabbahwaalas(the six sigma dudes). It was only during my final year project where I got a chance to go to IBM Research Labs in New Delhi I actually understood computation as a field at a proximity. The project opened my eyes to what potential careers the field offered. It also instilled in me system based thinking. So if you are a product of one of these C grade colleges your coding skills are limited to building simple programs like a Fibonacci series using recursion(if you plan to add some complexity). However in the real world things are radically different. In the real world you build systems that solve a human need. Systems are complex in nature and they address a human need by providing an optimal solution. Once it dawned on me where computer science can take me I decided to give it another shot.

Right then you had the WTC incident in 2001 and the world shook as millions cried. In India it hurt our economy with Sensex falling down several points. A domino effect was the reduction of jobs due to fall in demand. A lot of Indians lost their high paying jobs in America and came back to India. That led to a recession of sorts. People like me who had barely received an offer had companies shut down their doors on any opportunity one had. Anyway I was least bothered since I believed in meritocracy or at least I thought I did. Since there were no jobs around I decided to spend my time learning programming and building things. I worked on a variety of problems (programming pearls and K & R C proved out real helpful).I learnt how to build software using C++. I built compilers. I built hotel reservation systems. I built almost anything the language would allow me to. Thanks to those months of arduous struggle I managed to grab a job with a service based company. The initial months were gruesome since I realised I had absolutely no clue how the world worked unlike my peers who hailed from big cities and were aware of the nuances of business, technology and management. I wanted to imitate them. I knocked their doors and the doors of several people who were placed well in the industry and asked for their help. Blatant refusals many a times forced me to learn things on my own. I am not gonna waste time in scribbling about this as I have written an entire blog on that.

Anyway now that I have spent close to 16 years in the industry and my about me reads something like 'I am a product manager, techie, entrepreneur, marketing ninja, sales hacker, growth guy, startup mentor, speaker' I realise one of the biggest conundrums you'd actually tackle other than your love life would be around your career. Now I apologise if this doesn't sound like a generic blog on almost all types of careers but at least it might be useful for people vying to make careers in tech or management. See the funny part that one would realise much later in one's career is that if you've completed your engineering and you are one of those guys who doesn't like coding let alone shape a career in coding there are other interesting things one can do in the tech industry.

Let us talk about one of the most controversial yet most popular jobs in the tech industry-the product manager. It is a job that demands more creativity, more analytical skills and more customer interfacing capabilities. It is a job devoid of power and relying mostly on persuasion skills. It involves understanding a lot about behavioural psychology. But not many students in many parts of the country in ecosystems gung ho on engineering jobs are aware of it. Reminds me of this article where Marissa Mayer ex Yahoo CEO and ex Googler had once expressed the fact that after joining Google she felt she wasn't an ace programmer but was quite good with product management lifecycle so she moved to products. This decision helped her grow as fast as possible and create a sort of a legacy still spoken about within the corridors of Googleplex( I mean thanks to her Google still runs the APM program and recruits some of the best minds for product based roles). So in a nutshell Marissa had a revelation where she saw herself doing better as a product person as opposed to a programmer.

Likewise there are plethora of jobs that one can explore within the tech utopia but the diaspora is seemingly oblivious to it. Additionally the Silicon valley tech culture has over emphasised how important it is to code and have established a connection between coding and problem solving which is not true. Coding is just one method of solving a problem that requires a tech solution but likewise there are umpteen methods of solving a problem. Investment bankers solve problems all the time and they don't know shit about programming. So is the case with Consultants or fire fighters. Once I understood that, I found some of the most successful people in the world had somehow been able to align their day jobs to their interests and could grow exponentially because of that. The apple ad that talked about thinking different actually tried to articulate the same message. Malcolm Gladwell prophesied the same message with his 10000 hours analogy in his bestseller Outliers subsequently used by Peter Norvig in one of his cult blogs. Our very own SRK or superstar Shahrukh Khan loved acting and decided to take a shot post his short theatre and television career. People loved him as a cute neighbourhood dude with boyish charms who could make any woman go weak on her knees and the rest is history.

So if you dissect the issues why there is a huge conundrum around career in India I'd say its mostly due to information asymmetry. Students across the country vying for engineering careers have no clue about anything happening in the tech utopia wrt technology, business, leadership, marketing, sales management, product, design, operations or strategy. More so none of them have ever done a SWOT analysis on themselves to figure out their strengths or weaknesses. I wouldn't really blame the student community since colleges should be the ones responsible for grooming students in the right direction. Unfortunately colleges are reduced to mere degree rendering tools as opposed to centers of learning.

In fact now that I toy with a lot of human psychology I understand how important it is to first learn how one can learn. Learning in itself is a holistic process but gets undermined by the education system's constant rant on scoring good grades. What is all the more interesting is that learning happens best when one follows one's interests to produce a viable outcome. The larger question is are we prepared to let our students follow their hearts? Are we prepared to put them in institutes like Ecole 42 where they could learn on their own by solving problems? More so are we prepared to build a workforce of problem solvers as opposed to white collar labourers? Unless we answer that and the Government , academia and the industry take cognisance of the same and make a conscious effort to disrupt our education system we might still be grappling with a third world tag for the next 100 years or so.