Skip to main content

Simple Story

One of my LinkedIn connection shared this no bullshit profile that I totally loved. This person tells a compelling story about his career without wasting his words or the reader's time. In a time when there is so much embellishment of accomplishments and self-aggrandization all untethered to reality, this was refreshing. It takes someone very comfortable in their skin to state they stopped learning much once they reached a certain level in their career - this should inspire confidence in anyone who wants to hire the person. Middle managers have always been that precarious position where their contributions can't be measured clearly, but they make too much money. The most important issue that is not talked about as much is they stop learning making their situation that much worse. 

After dealing with people management and all the administrivia that goes with it, the average middle manager has little capacity left to keep their skills sharp. Every once in a while, I run into a person in this level who clearly understands that they are on very thin ice and work extra hard to drive direct, measurable value. My thoughts turned to my friend A who most recently started to post a learning curriculum he has worked on as his side project in his non-existent spare time. His aims to make software development understandable to one and all because a lot of decision makers in his company come from non-technical backgrounds that make decisions that result in tremendous hardship for engineering teams tasked with delivering. A is a long suffering middle-manager who is caught up between these opposing forces decided to do something about it, started learning again and is now trying to teach others. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more