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Early 2000s in India had a lot of Public Sector Undertakings (PSU) float a voluntary retirement scheme popularly known as VRS. If you choose to live in a Chennai suburb in your late 40s or early 50s with no loans and a house to your name, then the monthly recurring expense of 5,000 rupees with some set aside for additional expenses like repairs, medical etc annually amount to about a 1,00,000 rupees. The VRS plans gave a mouth watering deal of 15-20 years of annual expense. A lot of people who opted for this were in the middle management who were bored of waking up to go to office everyday. Most of them had a thought of becoming freelancers or do simple jobs to keep up the cash flow and not disturb the nest egg.

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The reality was harsh, I have first hand information from near & dear ones and neighbours. The problems I observed were that

  1. Skill was not up to date in their field as a lot of them were middle management.
  2. Lacked the marketing and networking skills needed for a freelancer, unable to advertise and convince businesses to give them work.
  3. Did not understand uneven cash flow, inflation, investment diversification etc as they always had ever increasing salaries paid monthly, their entire corpus was bank deposits.
  4. Continued with their pre-retirement high income lifestyle.
  5. Did not cover themselves with medical insurance, one critical illness away from bankruptcy.

A majority of them ran out of their retirement benefits within 6-7 years when they were hit by inflation – medical, food and education went faster than retail inflation where the interest rates were lagging behind. From being their own boss they had to take their kid’s help to live peacefully in just a short span of a few years. They were not able to find jobs as a free lancer; even if they did, they didn’t manage to break even. They also felt too shy to cut down their status symbol items in front of their near and dear ones.

Unless we have a passive source of income like a rental income or income from an established business/equity that can grow with inflation and cover monthly/annual expenses comfortably, it is very hard to achieve financial independence through a retirement corpus alone. A lot of FI/RE (Financially independent, retire early) blogs explain that we need to have a minimum of 300 times our monthly expense or 25 years of annual expenses in the corpus to achieve that. These have been inspired from low inflation economies not for India, I had observed that what looks good for 20 years in India usually runs out within 6-7 years.

Financial independence for a regular salaried citizen is extremely hard, especially for the people I observe who are on the consumption based economy, are encouraged to take loans for their purchases. What we need to plan for is financial resilience. More about it in subsequent posts.

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In a king’s court, there was an argument that people get what they seek. If they seek luck, they get lucky. If they seek food they get fed. The king had to break this argument so he orders an experiment. Get one person who believes in luck and get one person who believes in hard work. Let us lock them up in a dark room with food and see what happens.

Two of the identified people one believer in luck called lucky man and one believer in hard work called worker both are locked up in a room where some food and water is kept at a slightly hard to reach place. People outside can observe the conversations. Over a few hours, both the prisoners got hungry. They started to debate about their way of something good happening to them. The worker did not spend time arguing much. He began to explore the room and tried to reach out for if anything was placed for them. The lucky man told him that his efforts are waste, this is an experiment and they will sure be released and fed something.

The worker found a box full of peanuts, he was very elated and started eating. Instead of sharing the food, he mocked at the lucky man. He did not stop there, in the box of peanuts he also found some stones he threw them at the lucky man saying you can eat these if you feel lucky. The lucky man laughed and kept the stones thrown at him anyways. Few hours later the room was opened and the content worker came out along with the tired looking lucky man.

The courtiers who batted for hard work were very happy, just then the king asked the lucky man about how did he feel. The lucky man reached into his pockets saying he got some stones by doing nothing. When the courtiers saw the stone they gasped, because they were gemstones not mere stones. So the king declared ‘people get what they seek’.

This story was confusing for me because I immediately drew parallels with laziness but the crux of this is ‘What you seek is what you see or get’. This is so true in both our personal and professional lives that we will be able to pile on instance after instance, evidence after evidence to prove our point of view about something or someone.

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When we grow up from our being an adolescent to an adult the things that we were subject to has to become more objective. Example a teen is subject to peer pressure but a grown up can distance from it and see it as an object. Similarly irrespective of our age or development we are subjected to winning be it playing a game, having an argument or even doing something small. This primes us to seek what will make us win, while this is useful while playing games it is not useful when there are disagreements and needs a dialog to sort out.

We need to be deliberate in our actions sometimes, which can be achieved through reflections. This will make us realise the subject/object relationships of us and make adjustments towards more objectiveness. If we seek snacks of victories, we get it; if we seek gems of wisdom, we get it.

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I am of the opinion that a tech interview needs no preparation apart from doing a great job in a setting similar to what we give an interview for. Doing a great job as a programmer involves a few major type of skills – Technical aptitude (Ability to learn something quick either from manuals, tutorials or peers), ability to work along with others, communication, fundamentals of programming like functional, oop, tdd.

Interviews have a problem “Like hires like”, if there are no checks and balances the entire organisation will converge to a narrow band of skilled people. Too much emphasis is placed on competitive coding and algorithms at many places. This is similar to hiring sprinters for your football team, they are fit and can run very fast, but they probably can’t play football or in a team setting well. This leads into a spiral of hiring more and more competitive coders and set the interview benchmark to hire similar people to do work that requires a lot of communication and co-ordination (teamwork).

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This results in undue pressure in the industry, to be able to code competitively, the skillset which contributes only to a small portion of success in day to day work. Because of this, good application developers are left out from the hireable pool. The problem of this interview style is amplified by large new age companies who do not have a great product strategy but minting money through one or two cash cows and burning it in other engagements. This leads to headcount game to consume the budget, I have interacted with some developers who have cracked those tough interviews only to end up copying values from one spreadsheet/slide deck to another wasting their potential.

At the other end of the spectrum are interviews which are just fact based, this is done to reduce the amount of workload on technical interviewers by giving a template Q&A to recruiters who conduct the first round with strict matching of answers to the questions. This encourages rote memorisation especially for graduate interviewees without solid understanding of the fundamentals. Some organisations hire easily, but to staff on an assignment they interview people again internally, defeating the purpose of first interview in place.

Hiring is still a heuristics game, you catch a glimpse of the potential and continue with the person. To make the heuristics effective, interviews for developers need to have the following characteristics

  • Have a diverse set of people in the panel, take the following into account – programming experience, relevant experience, management etc and huddle with the entire panel of all rounds to take a decision. This helps minimise ‘like hires like’ problem.
  • Give more importance to design, architecture and clean coding skills than competitive coding. This will help in interviewing in the space that is closer to everyday work.
  • Check feedback and communication skills by reviewing and extending functionality on a code. This ensures how well this person can be a team player and not a soloist.