The Indian Career Conundrum

Disclaimer: Most of this blog applies to professionals in the technology industry. While there might be commonalities that apply to other industries as well , I lay no claim on the efficacy of the suggestive measures.

Two years back I worked with a Product Management Institute which trained people on the intricacies of product management and helped them get jobs in the PM space. Most of the people who spent a fortune in doing their courses were people in their middle ages who were either confused with their career track or had not really seen any growth over the last couple of years. I did manage to speak with a lot of people across many cohorts and I learnt that somewhere down the line when people in the tech industry become a part of middle management, their growth either stops or slows down. This wasn't certainly the first time I had heard this. Over the years I had heard many people say this. The only way out was to either change the company or try for IJP(Internal Job Postings seemingly rare inside the corporate utopia). I always wondered what really made some people climb up the organisation ladder faster than the rest. What does it take to reach the top and grab the corner office. I mean it is obviously difficult to reach the top but its definitely possible to grow leaps and bounds till you are in a space where you are revered because of your superlative skills. But that doesn't happen in real life. What has really plagued the growth of millions of people, who have always desired to grow exponentially? Or is the zero sum game merely a ploy by the corporate to create a 'dog eat dog world', where no matter what happens the corporate always wins. This was certainly an interesting area to explore and so I decided to delve deep into it. But before I go there, let me talk a little bit about what really used to happen over the years in the corporate. For the sake of convenience, let us consider the industry we are talking about is the technology space. Not because I have an inborn aversion towards other industries but because I worked as part of the technology industry more than a decade and it become tad easy to cite real world examples.

Now what is the quintessential career path for a guy right out of engineering. Well I am from the 2000s where working with TCS, Infosys or Wipro was considered quite an honour. I still remember those recruitment drives we'd attend as freshmen and those subsequent interviews that followed. Most people from my era would join a software services company as a software engineer, work their way to becoming a lead , a project manager, a delivery manager and if they got lucky perhaps a Director. A slim majority would go beyond that to enjoy the perks , senior leadership positions offered. The appraisal process(The typical Bell Curve one) guaranteed you'd at least get 15 % average hike. It would divide the crowd into 5 categories namely 5(excellent),4(good),3(average),2(below average) and 1(poor). The top ones namely 5 and 4 would get a hike somewhere between 22% and 30% , 3 would get hikes between 12% to 20% , 2 would get between 8% to 12 % and 1 would either be fired or would receive minimal hike(in most cases they'd be put under something called PIP or performance improvement plan). Most of the work that one would do would be for a foreign client and would be well defined.There would not be much scope for innovating things. It was pretty much as Orwell described in 1984. It was a pretty straightforward system. The business model of a services company typically revolves around body count. They would charge the client for every resource that would be put to a project even the ones that were buffers or more appropriately on bench. To achieve maximisation of revenue, they'd hire in bulk every year. Clients would flock to Indian services vendors because they did not charge a premium , a certain IBM or Accenture did. Although they wouldn't trust these vendors with high quality work like design and most parts of the engineering process, they'd gladly part with some low level development work and post production support work. As a services vendor, one wouldn't think twice about accepting any work and hence anything under the sun was taken care by Indian companies as long as it fetched revenue. Some of these companies sent their engineers to onsite locations where the client company was located to fix any apparent issues that occur with deployment. This would fetch the company some more dollars and would bring forth some happiness to the onsite employee. That pretty much sums up what really happened on the services side of the spectrum.

Now lets talk a bit about a bunch of product companies that were mostly from outside and had their offshore centers here in India. These companies did not hire frequently and the hiring was small in number and need based. Most of them were American namely GE, Oracle,HP,Yahoo,Goldman Sachs, Fidelity,Microsoft,IBM( its surprising but IBM had both product divisions and services in India), Sun Microsystems, Dell, Intel, Texas Instruments and the rest European or belonging to some other country. Most of the work again was tightly defined at the HQs and people worked according to the specifications denied in the PRDs or SRCs or MRDs. Before the advent of Agile and Scrum, the typical waterfall models were employed as part of software engineering. The hierarchy was almost similar to services companies except that now the typical journey included lesser positions. A lot of graduates from Ivy Leagues colleges joined these companies and would grow organically. The work mostly considered of software development related to building a part of the major product release or post production support or in some cases consulting. Product releases were either major releases or minor releases(which were nothing but software free of bugs or by design constructs). There was scope for some amount of incremental innovation as this was the marketing punchline the management would publish every year. Most managers received their incentives on innovation. It was again a tightly knit environment. The business model depended mostly on the number of licenses a client bought. The subscription model had yet not arrived(although cable TV vendors in India were charging subscription fee every month, software was late in following the trend). Product management was given due importance as it became more and more important to understand customer requirements in the B2B space. Most engineers would be sent to foreign locations for either training or maybe meeting the client to better understand how the client works and to be able to map the requirements of the client to their so called solutions. Although the environment was a little different than services companies, I wouldn't say it was democratic in nature. There was an extremely tight lid on how the company operated. The foreign masters would not let things slip out of their hands and almost everything was subject to scrutiny. The career of an engineer in a product based company revolved around being an engineer, lead, an engineering manager, director, VP, SVP,CXO and maybe a board member(which was a rare event). The career progression was faster than a services company but mostly everyone quit after 10 to 15 years on average. The appraisal system was again the bell curve one.

Now most people who started their career over the last 30 years went through similar career curves. Software industry in India provided stability to Indians who had severe aspiration deficit. It helped a lot of people come out of their impoverished backgrounds and helped them stabilise. Many years ago the Indian dream consisted of a well paying job, a good wife, couple of kids, a house in a metropolitan city, some foreign trips etc. Quality of work was never a criterion for joining a company. Add to it the intricate notion in India where one is supposed to finish his education by mid 20s or late 20s and then settle up in life and focus on building and growing his family. It never focused on growing inorganically by learning a lot of things outside work that might prove helpful going ahead. It never focused on excellence.It never focused on learning skills other than the ones already being used for work. People never took out time to think outside of the box. They never focused on creativity and innovation, something our education system has completely destroyed( but we will talk about that in another blog). They never took out time to understand how the business worked. They were barely aware of what other departments did and how they worked. Most of them were quite comfortable being a cog in the organisational wheel. Complacency became the mantra of people in software. Most of them were averse to embracing change. In an earlier blog, I described how that stripped us of innovation. So most of them were in jobs because of materialistic reasons, not because they were passionate about building software or making an impact, Marc Andressen describes in his cult blog 'Why software is eating the world?'. Many a software professionals were by products of an education system that placed grades over excellence. Unlike a quintessential silicon valley story one would read about a young Elon Musk crazy about software and building games in his teens, most Indian students were forced into engineering because that was the thing that guaranteed success. Unlike Peter Robinson in 'Snapshots from Hell' , I realised after spending 2 years in engineering that I did have an interest in tech. I am assuming most people from my generation or before that would have gone through similar ordeal. What worked for me was my curiosity to learn and understand how stuff works. Unfortunately most people got into software industry for different reasons. Once they got there they acclimatised themselves to the internal environment to survive and that was it. Most of them just sat there drenched in complacency and mediocrity so long they were getting their salary cheques. The economy was mostly stable till 2003 onwards but a new phenomenon had started by then.

By 2004 technology started growing exponentially. Computing power became cheaper and cheaper and things like Cloud became a reality. AI started growing faster and machine learning algorithms could now be put to optimal usage to make the machines learn more about human nature which could be used to predict things accurately. Technological development jumpstarted or let's say accelerated the startup movement in the Bay Area. Lot of old incumbents were challenged by new age startups working on disruptive products. Google too could be placed in that category although Google started pre 2000s. A string of silicon valley companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,Uber,Amazon became global behemoths. Venture Capital industry in the valley exploded. Hedge funds betting on traditional industries wanted to be part of the startup value system and that was when Tiger Global, DST and Softbank started investing in the Valley. When Paul Graham and Jessica Livingstone started YCombinator, it was perhaps the stepping stone to recognising the impact startups could create. A lot of YC graduates like Dropbox, AirBnB, Stripe, Doordash, Coinbase, Instakart became overnight sensations. China was fast to catch up , with this wave of development by sending Chinese students to Ivy Leagues who spent an appreciable time in US, learning more and more about the technology business. When these technocrats returned back to China they started the startup revolution in China that helped companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and many more to grow exponentially and contributed significantly to the Chinese economy. Cities like Shenhzen , Jinang and Nanjing became overnite software development cities. Although Microsoft had arrived decades earlier and established Microsoft Research in China(One could read more about it in Robert Buderi and Gregory Huang's book titled Guanxi), the startup revolution started much later. Fareed Zakaria beautifully captured it in his bestseller 'The Post American World' , where he talks about how China grew and became the world's second largest economy. The reverse brain drain helped turn the Red Dragon into a formidable startup ecosystem. The next in line was of course India.

Indian startup ecosystem as I have described in one of my earlier blogs, followed next. We had a string of semi successful startups that triggered the startup revolution in India. Most of what Indians did was because the successful startup model in the West, namely Silicon Valley had helped America grow as a technology hub, leaps and bounds. With companies like Flipkart which touched astronomical valuations the rules of business were rewritten. Globalisation and Consumerism , thanks to technology, cut down geographical barriers and reached an all time high. Keynesian economics took over and suddenly the world realised how big an economy India is with its 1.3 billion people. The West suddenly became the producer and the East became a consumer. There was a mad rush to tap this huge market. that is what triggered the startup revolution in India that created several valuable companies. Sparks of this revolution spread far and wide to cities like Mumbai, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and almost all major hubs. Amidst all this , there was something else that was brewing or had just started to show itself. Seems like a horror film plot-doesn't it? Well let me assure you, its not.

Amidst the changing socio economic and geopolitical changes, the Indian economy suddenly changed from a services economy to an innovation economy. Satya Nadella in his biography 'Hit Refresh' talks about how he had to go back to the board and reinvent the wheel at Microsoft to keep pace with the innovation economy.He had to make basic structural changes in the culture Microsoft had and embrace many a things Microsoft had shunned under Steve Balmer. He did that because he understood quite clearly that to survive in an innovation economy, one has to break the archaic rules that led one to the 21st century and embrace new conceptual frameworks and radically different ideologies to succeed. He joined hands with the open source guys, something they had been resisting for over 2 decades. Likewise a lot of things that Microsoft did under Nadella helped Microsoft solidify their stand in innovation economy.

Free market economics has always outlined the importance of innovation and India was no different. With the advent of startups , we started our move towards the innovation economy, something America, Germany, Japan, Estonia and Israel had embraced in the recent past. If one reads, Jon Gertner's, 'The Idea Factory' , one would understand that AT&T Bell Labs was a haven of innovation in 1950s, chiefly because Mervin Kelly had managed to attract the top brains from around the world and who built the scientific frontier that made America a technology powerhouse. Every piece of device that we have use today, uses technology developed in Bell Labs. Fast forward a few years later when companies like HP, Fairchild Semiconductor, Oracle, Microsoft and Apple started the software revolution. This amazing video by Steve Blank tries to take us through the history of silicon valley and one gets to know much about how Silicon valley became what it is today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

Now for an innovation economy one needs to have people with skills and competencies that an innovation economy will consume. These skills have changed drastically over the years. The kind of skills that were relevant a decade back are no longer in demand. As AI became more and more powerful and as technology could help automate some of the tasks, humans did earlier, there wasn't much need to have additional labour to do those tasks. The skills matrix has changed so vigorously that most of what made sense when I started my career, don't seem to make any sense at all. It's not only related to individual careers. The Innovation economy made a lot of companies like Kodak and Nokia irrelevant. In today's world one needs to have an overall understanding of how the business works. Most Silicon valley folks are learning new things over their skillsets to upskill themselves as they realise that without having a comprehensive understanding of business by learning new skills, they won't be able to grow exponentially. Unfortunately in India, thanks to a lacklustre education system and a culture that barely focuses on learning and undermines any amount of creativity and innovation, a lot of folks suddenly became 'irrelevant'. Its harsh to bring it out like that but its true. A lot of folks that I have met over the years suddenly felt they did not have the skills the new world needed. One rebuttal that is usually thrown by a lot of people is that they are fighting against machines and machines are going to eat most of their jobs. Its wrong analogy. They are not at war with machines but the human pursuit of optimisation. We tend to optimise on a lot of things in business for revenue maximisation. If labour force could be cut by a factor of 0.5X, then that will optimise the cost for a company and might also increase the productivity by several factors. There is a very interesting documentary called 'American Factory' on Netflix that shows how much a Chinese glass company Fuyao struggles to culturally integrate Chinese and American workers to bring about more productivity through cultural diversity till finally they employ technology to cut as much labour as possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m36QeKOJ2Fc

But the larger question is what will happen when machines can do almost anything? It seems futuristic and frivolous but who knows when it could end up being real. Back in 1968 who'd have thought that , most of what was shown in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' , would become a living reality today. The point I am trying to make is that when phenomenon like automation happen and old jobs perish, there are new jobs that are born. Luckily for us , we are eons away from super intelligence)an era when machines become far more intelligent that humans). It has been shown in movies like Matrix and iRobot , how super intelligence can cause an almost existential crisis for humans. But things like that mostly happen in a Christopher Nolan or a JJ Abram movie these days. Not to digress, let us talk a bit about the skill matrix.

Let me take the example of what skills are required in today's world. Fast Company published this amazing article, where they spoke about the jobs of tomorrow and what skills would be required to do them. You'd find that a lot of skills that would be required to stay relevant are quite different from earlier. One has to unlearn and relearn a lot of things. Most of what the gig economy requires today are skills that can produce an outcome. Its one of the most prominent selection criterion a lot of employers demand. Take a look at Drew Houston's YC form and you'd see he cleverly mentions all the products he built and emphasises on his technical and entrepreneurial skills, which got him a slot at YC.

Today companies are more interested in seeing if you can actually do the job, you're hired for. With technology interviews, its still easy to assess that with traditional yet powerful methods like whiteboard coding that tests you on your skills and your approach or by simply taking a look at your github repository and understanding the code shared by you. With positions like Product Manager and Product Marketer, its fundamentally difficult to understand if one is the right fitment or not, because the skills one requires is difficult to measure. OKRs serve as a right way to assess performance as John Doerr talks about it in his book 'Measure What Matters' as endorsed by his Guru Andy Grove in his cult book 'High Output Management'.But those apply once a person is inducted in a company. At the interview stage, its difficult to measure a person for non tech positions. However some of the traits that have always come handy are:-

1. How superlative communication skills one has?

2. How well can one write?

3. How one can handle work under pressure?

4. How much empathy does one have for his customers and colleagues?

5. How good a salesman one is?

6. Can one handle negotiation?

7. How good is one in leadership skills?

8. How well does one understand the business?

9. Does one understand finance and accounting?

Does one think one has the right skills, is pertinent to unravel the enigma behind one's continual failure to grow? In fact Gayle Laakman McDowell , a best selling author and a silicon valley luminary has written several books that tend to educate people on how interviews are, for some of the top tech companies in the valley and how one can prepare for it. Her book on product Management is particularly a hot favourite among product professionals because she clearly demonstrates what it takes to crack a product interview. However what a lot of companies are worried about is that extra thing, one brings to the table. Take the example of Philippe Duboste, who at one point in time was looking for a product gig and instead of putting across his CV to companies in an organic way, created an Amazon product like page and put himself as a product. His page got millions of visits and he ended up getting a dozen offers.Take a look.

Now lets talk about a skill that I feel is the most important skill but how many people really have it? No!! it's not coding. You got it wrong-I am talking about Sales. Well most tend to think of salesmen standing outside an ATM selling credit cards on hearing sales but everything that we do socially or commercially involves sales in some way or the other. You are either trying to sell yourself or your company or your product or even your lineage. But how many people think of grooming themselves on sales? How many people think of joining the sales bandwagon? Its not the job that is important but its the experience that makes it extremely valuable. I spent 5 years building products and companies and failing a million times in almost anything be it writing code to build the product or making money or raising money or attracting traction or eventually conversion. The failures made me sharper and I developed a set of skills that has helped me till date with my gigs. On that note how many people know how to effectively negotiate. negotiation is a skill that is taught at a lot of B-Schools but is quite a futile drill since negotiating in real life is quite different from academic experience. In fact FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss talks about the same in his cult book 'Never Split The Difference'. He explains the nuances so amazingly and teaches how one can effectively negotiate in the book that one can clearly see 'negotiation' is lot difficult than it seems. It takes years of practice to master the art of negotiation. But how many people have actually tried understanding more about negotiation in their everyday lives. Not many I presume. Take a look at one of the videos where Chris talks a bit about negotiation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guZa7mQV1l0

If one just sees the amazing videos startup school has put up on their site, year after year that talks about the issues a lot of famous Silicon Valley folks fad while building their companies in different areas like marketing, funding, operations, hiring, product etc. It becomes apparently clear what are the volley of skills an entrepreneur or a product leader or an engineering manager or a product designer requires to build a successful product. Paul Graham mentions about the same in his mindblowing essays and one can learn a great deal from his experiences. Peter Norvig spoke about the 10000 hour rule in this world famous article, where he talked about how one needs 10000 hours to master a skill, which in this case was programming. Michael Gladwell talks about the same in his book 'Outliers'. In fact Chris Gullibeau in his bestseller 'The 100$ Startup' talks about how people are using just one skill they are good at, in scoring good money and more importantly outstanding growth. That is the entire premise on which the gig economy stands, that is currently quite popular. People who want to experience more freedom, a typical corporate job doesn't provide are opting for freelancing as a full time profession. In fact the size of this gig economy is as large as 204 billion USD. That explains why upwork and freelancer.com have become overnight successes. That is the same fundamental which makes sites like Udemy, Themeforest, Fiverr or Patreon click. The gig economy is here to stay but unfortunately not many can derive the much needed benefits out of it due to skills deficits. Let's move on to the basic discussion now and try to go a level deep into the skills matrix.

So in a nutshell, people in today's world face three basic problems:-

1. They aren't aware of the skills they need to build.

2. They don't know how to build those skills

3. How can they use those skills to score a gig or a job that can help them grow intellectually as well as financially?

Let me take them one by one. I guess the first one is rather difficult to ascertain, chiefly because, one barely knows, what skills to develop. In India most people bank on the wisdom of their managers or their peers who need not be necessarily right. But the right way to go about according to me is to first understand what one likes to do. I am a serious believer in following one's passion. I was completely sold out when Steve Jobs said that one needs to lead his own life than somebody else's life. That translates to following one's passion. If one can do that for the rest of his life then one may never be unhappy again. No book or course or counsellor on Earth can help someone with that. I am saying it more because if one can pick his passion, it becomes relatively easy to pick up skills that one needs to realise his passion. So the answer to that lies within as Zen philosophy dictates,

I have talked a lot about the current economy and the definitive skills one requires to survive in this economy, but we need to see how can one develop those skills. That is where the problem lies. There is an information explosion on the web. There are millions of ways to learn new things and thus it becomes difficult to understand what one should do. I heard the same from a lot of people over the years until MOOCs appeared and it became all the more difficult to choose.Then there are schools that are marketing themselves as the best places to learn those skills, some of which seems like a lot of BS. I mean no one can really become a data scientist in 3 months. Even theoretical physicists who have had a 4 decade long career, churning numbers and running simulations can't make that presumptuous claim. Its also important to understand the context of why one needs to learn a specific skills. Take for example- a friend of mine who felt he wasn't growing that much in his current role. He heard a lot of music around data science and without understanding the context in which data science would help him in his role, went ahead and did the course. He didn't have a programming background so found it difficult to absorb a lot of things that needed prior exposure to technology. He somehow managed to complete the course but did not derive the actual value out of it. It bombed on him heavily since he could not find a gig where he could put that knowledge to effective use and moved on to do a sales gig. Aligning your skills to your passion and understanding the context could help one could apply those skills to solve a problem is what is required but seldom happens. People are so sold out on marketing dopamine that they barely pay any attention to the aftermath of investing in such a course. From my experience where you learn a skill from is immaterial as long as you can use those skills to produce an outcome.

Let's talk about Erin Parker, a humanities student from Stanford University who wanted to develop a fitness app for women. She had no idea how to code let alone build an entire app from scratch. Erin learnt programming step by step and built an entire app from a basic paper mock diagram to a complete app. Take a look

Today Erin's app is one of the top apps in the women's fitness category and she also teaches programming to students. The technical skills she learnt helped her produce an outcome after a series of iterations and helped her become an expert in coding. She was able to commercialise her product and the market validated her hypothesis. Not only did her skills help her to learn coding but it also helped her become a successful entrepreneur and launch her own product. She basically mastered a bunch of skills not merely programming. This is exactly the outcome I am talking about. How many people actually do something similar? Not many. The biggest question we forget to ask ourselves is that- are we really worth anything considering what kind of labour the innovation economy requires. its natural to be drenched in narcissism but its foolish to not get a reality check from time to time. The fact that most people don't have mentors or peers or managers who could give them a taste of reality is why most people never realise their skills are no longer required by the innovation economy and they have suddenly become irrelevant unless they learn the skills that the industry requires and produce an outcome like Erin. I bet not many of us think on those lines. Mediocrity has become somewhat of a new normal but it might not be long before change takes over and that would shake the very floor from underneath our feet.

In fact I don't know, if many have heard or read about this technology school called Ecole 42 in Paris started by French billionaire Xavier Niel. This is perhaps the world's first school which neither has a curriculum nor faculty. The entire experience is gamified into 21 levels and students have to cross these levels on their own and they have 5 years to cross all the 21 levels. Since the students have no help from anyone they tend to develop a habit of problem solving on their own and by the time they are at level 21 , they are subject matter experts in technology. Some of the best employers in the world hire from Ecole 42. This is one of the best examples of how experiential and outcome based learning is one of the best methods of determining how skilled one is. Unfortunately not many courses provide this kind of learning.

Another fact that I wish to spotlight is that we are not a reading nation. Except for peppy news on the internet or stuff related to our work, we barely read a book or a research journal. I don't blame anyone since children emulate their parents while they are growing up and most of us have grown up seeing our parents not reading and that explains why most of us don't read. I am a voracious reader. The reason I developed reading as a habit is because from early on in my life my mom would leave me in her official library over my summer vacations and I'd spend close to 6 hours in a day reading books. Most of them comprised of adventure stories or mythology but it did convert me to a reader. Over the years I have been reading and there is a gradual upheaval in my taste where now I enjoy reading mostly non fiction over fiction. The advantage I have personally felt is that it helps you grow intellectually a lot if you read. It helps you connect the dots. It enables you to view reality in an entirely new light. It helps you solve some real difficult problems. But I don't see many readers around. most of the times when I have spoken with professionals and they are clueless about a lot of things I say, I sense the helplessness. Not that I blame them for not reading as much as I did but unless they take an active interest in reading, they'd really not be able to make much sense of things. That will limit their growth in the truest sense of the world. Almost all great achievers that I have been fortunate enough to meet or read about, were all atypical book lovers. In fact Tim Feriss mentions it in his best seller 'Tools Of Titans'. Sudha Murthy has articulated the same quite a few times. In fact we are all aware of how big a reader is Bill Gates. In fact Bill went a step further in talking descriptively about it in the Netflix documentary 'Inside Bill's Brain' and talked about the numerous benefits he has derived out of reading books. Take a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwh88cI_d8

Reading shapes your mind and helps you see things normally not visible to the naked eye. I believe if such big giants can spend an appreciable amount of time in reading, then that's definitely a habit one can start nurturing. Although it takes a while to develop habits if James Clear is to be believed but once they are built , they can help an individual go a long way. Reading is one of those habits which can take one to an entirely different plane of consciousness where everything starts appearing brighter and clearer. The choice is ultimately yours. Do you want to grow intellectually or stay being in the clueless state you were always in?

Let's now talk about how these skills can help one succeed. Had this been a question 2 decades back when I was starting my career, I'd have been tad clueless about it since there was an abysmally less amount of platforms where one could show their skills. I remember taking part in Google Code Jam and Topcoder competitive programming events towards the beginning of my career but now there are ample amount of platforms where one can show their skills and create an outcome that can be easily noticed. Technology has platforms like Hackerank , HackerEarth and many other platforms where one can practise and share their code with employers. For non tech jobs in the technology industry there are marketing, sales and product hackathons that happen nowadays where one can participate, use his skills to solve a problem and get noticed. A lot of people write blogs or put up their work online on GitHub or Behance or any other platform where they can get noticed. Thanks to social media , news about someone's great work can spread like wildfire. A lot of people have effectively used social media to garner fame. I'd like to cite the example of Bhuvan Bam who created a series of characters in his online skit 'BB ki Vines' and shared them with his audience and over a decade or so has managed to bag 14 million followers on Youtube. That has helped him bag a few meaty roles elsewhere. If you are there on LinkedIn, you'd notice that in the recent past a lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs have become extremely active on social media in bringing about their opinion on several things and also use it as a platform for launching products, hiring and for getting customer feedback. I follow a lot of these people like Ankur Warikoo, Hari.T.N, Manu Kumar Jain, Ryan Hoover, Brianne Kimmel, Hiten Shah, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and many others. Most of the times they share some real valuable information that could be extremely useful for their followers. What people don't realise is that these guys are smart enough to project their thoughts to these platforms and in the process make everyone in the ecosystem aware of their skills and competencies. So if at any point in time they need help with funding or hiring or with anew gig, they could leverage their local networks. Unfortunately not many people understand the power of leveraging these platforms optimally. If an ex playboy model like Amanda Cerny with not many skills to boast of can fabulously use Instagram and Youtube to create a huge fan following, I guess everyone can use these platforms to display their skills to a wider audience that could also be a potential employer. The question is how many do that? Maybe a few but a larger percentage still doesn't understand the power of social media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kLRIvzMPlE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8CVbGmVdA

So now at this juncture when I've almost written a book and most of you are perhaps drowsy, I'd like to leave you with a bit of thoughts to ponder on. This is a competitive economy and more so because we are marching towards an innovation economy that would require subject matter experts, problem solvers, change agents, risk takers, street smart dudes who could build the next best product or service that can shape the future. This would require hard work, patience, superlative communication, great sales and negotiation skills and unbeatable business and financial acumen. One could be an engineer or a manager but one needs to be flexible enough to understand that if the need be one should be willing to do anything that it takes. The economy is in constant motion and constant turmoil. In some years from now there would either be commodities or assets in an organisation. As the industry keeps moving towards an uncertain future with a high degree of uncertainty, most commodities will be thrown off the train since they can no longer meaningfully contribute like the assets. The Matt Damon movie Ellysium talked about a dystopian future where the majority would be have nots who'd be pushed to live in extreme conditions and the haves would live in a paradise like environment adorned with every comfort humans can ask for. Although the movie was fictitious in nature but cutting an analogy from it, there would be soon the biggest economic divide in the history of employment where a majority of people with less and marginal skills would live in extreme conditions while the privileged minority would reap the benefits of capitalism through their expertise in a certain set of skills on which the economy is running. Universal Basic Income would be a short term solution and more of a consolation prize but not a winning proposition, so to speak of. The sooner people are wary of such economic realties the better it is for them. The days of longer economic equilibriums are over and today the equilibriums have shorter durations and change as rapidly as socio economic and geopolitical data points. Any economic wave can either devour your job or can change it for better. One needs to constantly upgrade one's skills. One needs to be prepared for any eventuality as a Navy Seal is. Good luck learning.