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My career turned 18 last month. In this journey, learning is the only thing that keeps me fresh and wanting for more experience.

I joined Thoughtworks first in 2008. I came to know about Thoughtworks through the master class series and geek nights that used to happen in 2006-07 times and got inspired to join. When I applied, I was surprised by the depth of the interviews and until I got relevant experience I was not able to crack it. I got into Thoughtworks only on my 3rd try, coming back working on the feedback after every failed attempt. This feedback was not about gaining knowledge (which would have been easy) instead it was about gaining wisdom which is seldom achieved without having hands on experience. I am an avid learner, but it was the first time I moved from mere fact hoarder to a person with expertise on something.

I finally cracked the interview and my learning grew multi-fold when I started interacting with the growing office in Chennai but also felt that there was a plateau that gets hit soon in the learning and it was easy to get going with the flow. My aspiration was to represent Thoughtworks in forums like Agile India and XP conferences but I was not able to find a way to grow myself into that. 

Our place was never short of mentors and luminaries, it is when I reached out to one of the mentors for advice on career. What I got was a book to read and get back with the summary back to my mentor. The book was ‘Talent is overrated’. It drove a simple point into my head that, intelligence or being gifted is not as important as deliberate practice. Someone with sustained development day on day will overtake gifted individuals and prodigies.

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I was looking for ways of deliberate practice, it is when I did two things that stuck with me forever. One was to write a blog regularly. Not even a month goes by without blogging which I keep continuing. The other was to establish learning communities wherever I am present. I started the learning Thursdays series with a bunch of like minded people and kept it running on every Thursday without fail. We would not find speakers but one of us will always have a topic ready to run and make sure the fire does not die down. Once we picked up the momentum we formed a community event and invited outsiders, as a geeknight series making sure to run every month without fail. Both of these helped me and other presenters shape up their presenting skills. 

These exposures helped me to always be prepared for a few topics on XP, agile practices, clean code and I was able to present them in different forums. One of my topics Whistle Blowers was presented in XP 2013 which was one of the first ideas to take examples from biology and applying that for evolving quality code. All of a sudden I could see how things are inter-related and this made it easy to present any information to any person in an easy to consume form. This happens only when unrestricted learning and chunking happens. From a person who had stage fright, I became someone who can do impromptu sessions on any stage.

I always like to keep this fire of learning communities up and running, so when a new office in Mahadevapura, Bangalore was established; I created ‘Learning Thursdays’ and later ‘Friday Socials’ by getting like minded people again. This group evolved into an active one which is running geeknights and other Thoughtworks meetups in the office. Once we stop learning collectively, that is the day we start regressing as a community. So I keep making sure that learning happens not just at a personal level but at a collective level in some form or the other wherever I go.

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I stumbled across the above video, it was so nice to see the metronomes eventually syncing with each other when the platform was not rigidly grounded. I could not stop thinking about the parallels in organisational culture when a previously organically grown company wants to scale up quickly.

When I interact with lateral hires in different organisations most of them have one common jitter in their mind is how they are going to gel well in a new place especially the ones which are growing fast. A lot of places have rigid mindset from existing people about new ideas from new people even though they were newbies once. This mindset is a killer to absorb new experiences, ways of doing into the culture and have will set a cold, rigid foundation. It will eventually lead to many factions who will align based on their line of thoughts instead of a coherent organisation.

How can we have the kuramoto model kind of an effect in an organisation. We do not have to do anything extra, all we need to is have our existing people in the organisation avoid this killer statement – “This is not how things are done here”. If we avoid saying this, then there is an inherent curiosity to see what new comers bring to the table and also set a mindset to accept proven things in existing organisations.

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Gardening is a good way of spending some quality me time and also in the process get used to accept things that take time, observe effects over weeks and months on our actions. As much as we like to see benefits of what we have sown immediately in the literal sense, nature’s template has its own way of doing things and it takes time. The harder you push by chemicals and interventions, you get nice blooms and fruits in a quick turnaround time but it prevents subsequent blooms forcing you to start again from scratch. We have to become a gardener if we want to grow a garden and know ways of sustaining a beautiful one, there are no shortcuts, just good practices and know hows.

If I look outside of software engineering, leaders grow from being an individual contributor in that field. I have met engineering managers who are so strong in their fundamentals that they would get back on the field and do a great job. In contrast, software engineering is plagued with leaders who cannot code. Adding more salt to the injury is the 3 day certifications that empower an individual to become a manager and deliver software projects without an idea of what it is to build a good software. These type of managers have no leverage other than compensations and brow beating to push people hard to the breaking point to get things delivered.

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Proliferation of computing means every company is becoming a software company. What was purely electronics and mechanical is getting software driven. This means that managers in those companies are managing teams without knowing what is going on. The worldwide infamous example is crashing of airplanes due to software’s decision without pilot knowledge. In recent times a lot of electric vehicles catch fire and started making headlines, it has also resulted in loss of lives. We have been using battery powered devices in our pockets for so long, they don’t catch fire, why should these vehicles catch fire. The answer lies in pushing hard on the engineers, when the managers don’t know what is going on resulting in severe defects in engineering.

Leadership is hard, it takes years of practice on a field to become a leader. Software engineering leaders have to be in such a way that they are able to understand the implications of decisions on tech debt, design and architectural tradeoffs, quality assurance etc instead of blindly going behind an arbitrary deadline laced with fat bonuses.