It's been a long time
Context
It’s been exactly three years and three days since my last post. I didn’t forget about this blog, nor did I get lazy. A lot has happened in three years, far more than I could have imagined. Going back and reading my prior posts, it feels like someone else wrote them. I guess that’s a sign of progress?
My last life update was at a weird time for me. We were still by and large, in the pandemic. I was still in my first job (although in the notice period). I didn’t realize it at the time, but that period of time was probably the most uncertain and dark period for me mentally. I was working for a company that illogically delayed my joining date by 3 months, catching me off guard with no backup options. Still, with a glint in my eye, I took it on the chin and started working. It was really horrible, not necessarily because of the company, but just in terms of mental stimulation. I didn’t know this about myself at that time, but I crave to be hyper-productive all the time. I put a lot of effort into being as technically holistic as I can be, its a matter pride for me to do my best in everything I do. That job, did not let me spread my wings. I barely learnt anything (I did learn though, because I challenged myself to do the tasks I was given in ways that were new to me).
Who Am I?
I was miserable, but I didn’t feel that way at the time, because I’m generally a very optimistic person. I like to keep a lot of safety nets around me, and when something doesn’t work out, I convince myself to try something that will make things better. That’s the origin of this website. The three months after graduating, and the subsequent six months, in hindsight, was a massive opportuntiy that I capitalized on, and I was only able to do so because of the optimistic mindset I had at the time. I don’t even know how I was able to force myself to be so consistently productive. I used to spend hours every single day practicing, learning, building, and networking. And it worked out in the end. I didn’t immediately want to leave my job, so why did I do all of that? I guess I hoped that all the effort I was putting in would be useful in the future. Boy was it. About 2 months in, I made up my mind that I wanted to work somewhere else.
Better times
Over the subsequent 2 months, I interviewed for a few companies, and ended up getting 2 offers. The first offer was a 50% pay hike from my first job, and I was extatic. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I felt a bit more relaxed, like the edge was smoothened. I could have settled there, but a friend suggested I interview at a company they were working at, ThoughtSpot. To be honest, I did not know much about it, and in hindsight, I couldn’t have imagined the world of difference between some companies. There’s a reason that legacy companies die out, and its because clearly people who work there haven’t worked in really good companies in modern times. All the hard work over the last many months paid off, and I got through a pretty satisfyingly challenging interview process. I was blown away by the benefits and pay I was being offered. It’s honestly a different world. The crazy part is I didn’t know why I was getting paid so much. Most of my friends who graduated at the same time, they’re really smart people. Looking back at it now, its like they’re getting robbed. The pay disparity doesn’t make since. I was being offered a pay that exceeded 100% of my first job, which I had just started 6 months ago.
ThoughtSpot
Not only that, I enjoyed every minute. Two years and three months. Lots of brilliant and fun people, solving really interesting and challenging problems, the learning opportunities, the sense of responsibility, ownership, and seeing the fruits of your hard work. It was life altering. Being surrounded by brilliant people, capable leaders, and tough problems, it alters your mindset towards life, towards how you should behave, what it means to be good, what it takes to be successful. I won’t go much into the exact work I did, mostly because I’m pretty sure no one is going to read it all.
When I started, I had to push myself harder and harder every month, I felt like I had to prove something to the people around me. Relative to everyone else working there, I was from a worse university, with irrelevant prior work experience. I would sit in meetings in awe at how smart the people around me were. It was very motivating to push myself harder. The key takeways were that I worked under 3 different managers, initially working in a team of just 2 people, and our product was looking grim. By the time I left, we scaled the team up to over 25 people in 3 locations, and our product was thriving, with a clear vision for the next several years. I always wish for the best for everyone and everything, and I want to see ThoughtSpot excel, I gave it my all, and hopefully set the tempo for my successors, with my contributions to the vision.
The X factor
About 8 months in, I got into a groove. I could finally start to itch that productivity rash I’ve been having. Clearly, all of this was being recognized, because I then got promoted two times within a 6 month span. I ended up at a position that involved a lot more decision making, management, guidance and ownership. Remember how I was one of two people when I started, with the product being grim? Yeah, that also meant that when my teammate moved on to a different team, I was leftover as one of the few people who knew the entire codebase, having fixed all sorts of nasty bugs, learning many nuances along the way. In addition to this, we had a severe shortage of frontend engineers, which hindered our ability to work on some bugs and build new features.
At one point, I just got really frustrated since no one else was rising to the occasion, and decided to also start working on frontend, meaning I was now frontend + backend + ML. My prior experience with frontend was all solo projects, so it was a huge learning curve for me to work on large scale production frontend code. Honesltly, I loved it, sometimes more than the backend and ML work I was doing. After a few months, I got really good at it, and suddenly I had a new surface to scratch my productivity rash. Suffice to say, this was an observable superpower, because I no longer needed to wait on anyone to do anything, and my managers noticed this.
Those promotions were again, life altering. I was suddenly years ahead of where I should have been in the corporate ladder, and I had so much more confidence in my abilities. The money was also fabulous. At a point, money stopped mattering, it was far more than I needed to be happy.
To Masters
For personal reasons, I decided to pursue my masters, and so I parted ways extremely amicably with ThoughtSpot. But, again, life is like a sine wave. Remember that university I did my undergraduate at being a sore spot? It reared it’s ugly head again. My university was extremely stingy with grading. For context, the highest anyone in my university got in my department for my batch was a 9.0 GPA. Most US universities don’t realise the intricacies in grading differences between foreign universities. I was suddenly competing with people with far greater GPAs than me from random universities, even though my undergraduate was literally half a decade in the past at this point, and it was something I could not change. Even worse, after the pandemic, most universities stopped taking the standardized GRE score, which I had done really well in. I had a higher GRE score than most people having significantly higher GPAs than me, but alas, was meaningless to universities now. I had to take what I could get, which was unfortunute, since the year I applied was hypercompetitive.
At Masters
Initially, I again felt miserable. I felt like I was wasting my time, learning things I already knew through self-exploration. There was a lot of self-conciousness too, with having met some folks who judged me for the university I was doing my masters in. But, with the help of my partner, my friends, and my brother, I was enlightened to stop having those folks occupy space in my brain. I feel a lot happier and content now, I don’t need to prove myself to anyone, I’ve already done it many times in my past, I’m sure I will prove myself again, and thrive when the time comes. The generative AI boom happened near the end of my tenure at ThoughtSpot, so its a realm I’ve only barely dipped my toes in. I’ve been utilizing my masters as an opportunity to get more confident in that domain, which has been going really well, learnt a lot about vector databases, tensor decomposition, model compression, attention, transformers, model parallelism, etc. I did a project and authored some material pertaining to simultaneous LLaMA quantization and pruning, which was a huge learning experience. I’ve also taken several courses on consistency in distributed systems, and cloud computing. I’m super confident working with AWS now, taking your time and learning things over a semester has its benefits compared to being forced to adhere to deadlines to deliver. For the latter, there’s only so much you can self-learn before having to use what you’ve learnt to make stuff.
Internships
The internship hunt was brutal, there were major layoffs in 2023, carrying into 2024, so there were far fewer companies hiring interns. Most of my seniors were finding it extremely difficult to find full time employment, so in that lens, not getting an internship doesn’t seem so bad. Still, I challenged myself to getting one. It took a bit, but I was successful (relative to others I know, I got it pretty early). The first big company I interviewed for was TikTok, who for some reason arbitrarily rejected me after my final round, even though I aced it? Regardless, it worked out well for me, they’re about to get banned in the states, glad I don’t need to have that on my mind.
I ended up getting 2 offers, one from Intuitive, a medical robotics equipment manufacturer in Mountain View, and Apple at Cupertino. Both offers had roughly the same pay, so that wasn’t a differentiator. The manager who interviewed me for Intuitive, Oleksiy, was an awesome lad, I got along with him really well, clearly he was a passionate soul, and we had a lot of similar interests and hobbies. I had told him during my interview that I was also interviewing for Apple, and I remember he remarked that that’s a great opportunity if I were to get it. Well, I did, and I came to the same conclusion as him. Perhaps in the future, I would love to work with him.
I’ve always wanted to work for Apple. I love their philosopy for building products (well, their more recent philosopy, anyway). Apple is far bigger than ThoughtSpot, so what I’m really interested in learning is whether a large company can operate like a well oiled machine, or if I should be looking elsewhere before I graduate. Hopefully, I have a good time, it’ll make my decision easier.