Tag: job

Coasean notes

I’m well over two and a half years into my current job, easily making this my longest unbroken spell of employment ever. This is a random set of pertinent observations, more a set of notes to myself rather than for any reader, regarding how the job has been playing out.

  • The Nature of The Firm is real. For nine years, as a consultant, I enjoyed market pricing (adjusting for illiquidity and and other distortions) for all the work that I did, but also suffered from the transaction costs that Coase writes about in his famous paper.

    This meant that unless the work was reasonably well defined, or of a certain minimum size, I wouldn’t take it up – the transaction costs involved in doing the deal would far outweigh any benefits that my counterparty and I would achieve from the deal. This meant I added less value than I could have to my clients

  • “Going deep” has its benefits. If I look at some of the work that I’ve done in the last few months here, and compared that to my work in my first year here, there is an absolutely marked difference. The difference is the two years of compounded extreme domain knowledge (about the company and its business).

    From that perspective, consulting can sometimes suffer from a limitation of domain knowledge

  • Countering the above point is that I’ve “been internalised” after two plus years here. The things that excited me at the time I joined don’t excite me any more. There are times when I get what I think are interesting insights, and then just don’t bother about showing them to anyone, based on the historical reaction to such insights.

    A fresh consultant, on the other hand, would share more, and would thus get more done

  • The biggest advantage of being “in house” is the data – I have access to pretty much ALL data in the company, and if I don’t have access to something, there is a good chance that the data doesn’t exist. This means I’m able to craft better hypotheses and do better analysis, compared to the time when I relied on clients to share specific datasets with me (pretty much nobody opened up full live access to their database to me)
  • In a way I also miss the novelty of being a consultant – because you work with a company for a short period of time, you are bringing in new ideas and insights in that period of time, and people pay you attention for it. As an in-house employee, you become a part of the furniture. And a lot of the time, it is a good thing if nobody notices you
  • Lack of friction in terms of taking up work means average quality of work can suffer. If you are very particular about the kind of work you want to do, it’s good if you can be a consultant – the friction means it’s easier to say no there.
  • As a consultant, by definition, I was a “hybrid worker”, working by myself for long periods of time and then visiting the client for meetings and discussions. That had worked out brilliantly well for me.

    However, I realise “that hybrid” is different from “this hybrid” (the job), since here people have access to my calendar and are able to schedule meetings even at times when I’m not in office. Rather, since my company has a multiple-headquarter setup, I even prefer to take meetings with colleagues not in Bangalore on days when I’m at home.

  • The biggest difference between monogamy (one employer) and polyamory (two or more “clients”) is that in the latter, no one owns your time. Because they know that they are “one of several” (even if at some point in time they are “one of one” it doesn’t matter, since that’s a special case), they can’t take your time for granted. And that gives you immensely more control over your time.

    This was possibly the hardest part for me getting back to a full time job – the lack of control over my time since I had now sold ALL of it to one company.

  • The flip side of this is that, at least for someone like me, not having to keep selling myself constantly is a brilliant feeling. Though, there is some amount of “within the company selling” that has to happen from time to time.
  • Apart from control over my time, the thing I miss the most about my consulting life are the “semi work meetings” – these are meetings with prospective clients, people who can lead you to prospective clients, old clients, etc. Where there is a tinge of work to the meeting, but you also catch up on several other things.

    Now that I’m in a job, and one that is entirely internal facing, there is no concept of “pseudo work meetings”. It is either proper work meetings (or “water cooler conversations”) with colleagues, or proper socialisation with others. That means I’m meeting far fewer people on average, nowadays

  • I admit that having become a sort of a “company man“, I’ve started taking myself more seriously than I would like to. Of late I’ve started making a conscious effort to dial this back a little bit, and I think it’s already making me happier.
  • Oh, and game theory rocks. Not a day goes by without me thinking about “saama daana bhEda danDa“

I can go on and on and on, but I think this is enough for now. If I have more, I’ll write another post.

When Institutions Decay

A few weeks back, I’d written about “average and peak skills“. The basic idea in this blogpost is that in most jobs, the level of skills you need on most days (or the “average skill” you need) is far far inferior to the “peak skill” level required occasionally.

I didn’t think about this when I wrote that blogpost, but now I realise that a lot of institutional decay can be simply explained by ignoring this gap between average and peak skills required.

I was at my niece’s wedding this morning, and was talking to my wife about the nadaswara players (and more specifically about this tweet):

“Why do you even need a jalra”, she asked. And then I pointed out that the jalra guy had now started playing the nadaswara (volga). “Why do we need this entire band”, she went on, suggesting that we could potentially use a tape instead.

This is a classic case of peak and average skill. The average skill required by the nadaswara player (whether someone sitting there or just operating a tape) is to just play, play it well and play in sync with the dhol guy. And if you want to maximise for the sheer quality of the music played, then you might as well just buy a tape and play it at the venue.

However, the “peak skill” of the nadaswara player goes beyond that. He is supposed to function without instruction. He is supposed to keep an eye on what is happening at the wedding, have an idea of the rituals (given how much the rituals vary by community, this is nontrivial) and know what kind of music to play when (or not play at all). He is supposed to gauge the sense of the audience and adjust the sort of music he is playing accordingly.

And if you consider all these peak skills required, you realise that you need a live player rather than a tape. And you realise that you need someone who is fairly experienced since this kind of judgment is likely to come more easily to the player.

The problem with professions with big gaps between average and peak skills, and where peak skills are seldom called upon, is that penny-pinching managers can ignore the peak and just hire for average skill (I had mentioned this in my previous post on the topic as well).

In the short run, there is an advantage in that people with average skills for the job are far cheaper than those with peak skills for the job (and the former are unlikely to suffer motivational issues as well). Now, over a period of time you find that these average skilled people are able to do rather well (and are much cheaper and much lower maintenance than peak skilled people).

Soon you start questioning why you need the peak skill people after all. And start replacing them with average people. The more rare the requirement of peak skill is in the job, the longer you’ll be able to go on like this. And then one day you’ll find that the job on that day required a little more nuance and skill, and your current team is wholly incapable of handling it.

You replace your live music by tapes, and find that your music has got static and boring. You replace your bank tellers with a combination of ATMs and call centres, and find it impossible to serve that one customer with an idiosyncratic request. You replace your software engineers with people who don’t have that good an idea of algorithmic theory, and one day are saddled with inefficient code.

Ignoring peak skill required while hiring is like ignoring tail risk. Because it is so improbable, you think it’s okay to ignore it. And then when it hits you it hits you hard.

Maybe that’s why risk management is usually bundled into a finance person’s job – if the same person or department in charge of cutting costs is also responsible for managing risk, they should be able to make better tradeoffs.

Portfolio with a dominant stock

Last night, I read this post I had written shortly before I turned 29. I had embarked on a “Project thirty“, a year on project I had sponsored for myself. The plan was to do everything I had wanted to do but had never been able to, and the only condition that I had put for myself had been that I wouldn’t take up a full time job until the end of the “project”.

The project, largely speaking, was successful. It laid the bed for what was a fantastic decade of “portfolio life”, as I did several things with my time (though most of my income came from one of those things I did). I built a career as a freelance analytics ad data science consultant (which is how I made most of my money), wrote a newspaper column, became an adjunct professor, involved myself in public policy research and wrote a book.

In the middle of all this, i made time for myself to go spend a semester with my wife as she completed her MBA in Barcelona, and then followed her to London when she got a job there. It was all wonderful stuff.

And then, around the time I turned 38, partly fuelled by the pandemic, I brought my portfolio life to a close. Around then, my wife asked me what my “project forty” would be. “To stay in my job”, I had told her then. And now, that has been successfully completed.  As a bonus, according per my calculations, this is the job I would’ve stayed the longest ever in!

In any case, recently, my wife asked me the usual question once again. About what my “project” for my early forties is. She probably first asked me this a month ago or something, and I don’t think I had an answer then. And then last week, after we came back from our vacation to Tanzania, I spent 2 days at home just chilling.

My new personal computer (a 14″ M1) had arrived by then, and I spent the time setting it up, reading, writing, being on twitter and exploring cool new technologies such as Stable Diffusion and Chat GPT. It was absolutely enjoyable, those 2 days. It felt great having a non-work computer of my own (my previous one had conked 6 months back, though it had hardly been operational for a year before that). Those two days were spent like my project thirty days were. They were wonderful.

And so, by the time the tens place of my age number got its increment, I had the answer ready to give to my wife. On what my plan for my early forties is. It is “portfolio with a dominant stock”.

I really enjoyed the portfolio life I lived through most of my thirties. And want to get to a portfolio again. On the other hand, I’m in a job that I’ve settled fairly well into. And during the recent holiday to Tanzania, I also realised that it feels good to be able to spend on holidays like that without really thinking a hundred times.

So what is the solution? It is basically about having a portfolio with a “dominant stock” – the dominant stock being my job. My objective for my early forties is to continue having a full time job, but also have an interesting life on the side.

For now, what the interesting sides will be – I don’t have that much of an idea, and am likely to go back to things close to my old ones.

I want to travel a lot more.
I’m restarting my newsletter soon.
I want to start teaching once again. Part time only. Need to wing this somehow, somewhere.
Meet people regularly. Breakfasts. Lunches. Dinners. Drinkses.
I want to start playing a card game competitively. Either resume bridge or (more likely) learn something new such as poker.
I have no intention of writing another book (yet). Even if I do, it is likely to be via Substack.

It’s not going to be easy of course. Last 2 years, I’ve largely focussed on my job and family, and done little else (apart from this blog and lifting). I will need to prioritise properly, and manage my time well (something I’ve never been good at). But there is no harm putting out this goal, and in public, in the hope that having put this out will help me do better at it.

Let’s see where this goes! And any ideas are welcome.

The Misfit Job Market

Exactly 15 years ago, I was looking for a job. I had graduated from IIMB four months earlier, taken my first ever full time job 3 months earlier, and was already serving notice. Very quickly on, I had figured that I was not a good fit for the job that I had taken up, and so decided to cut my losses and move on.

The only problem was job hunting was hard. Back then, most people I spoke to seemed suspicious of me because I was getting out of my first job so early. For the longest time (years later), people spoke to me as if there was something wrong with me because I had quit my first job within three months. Finally I ended up taking a 20% pay cut to take another job where I seemed a better fit.

Thinking back, I don’t think I’m alone. The sheer randomness of the campus placement process means that a lot of people end up in jobs that they are ill suited for, purely based on a bit of bad judgment here and a lucky interview there. And most smart people figure out quickly enough that in case they are in jobs they are not a good fit for, it’s better to cut losses and move on. If it is their first ever jobs (applies for undergrad jobs, and for MBAs without prior work experience), the desperation to get out of their misfit jobs will be high.

I think this is a highly underserved market. Companies fall head over heels over themselves to access premium slots in the random process called campus placements, without realising that a significant part of the same pool will (theoretically) be available for a proper interview just a few months hence.

5-6 years back, an old friend of mine had started a company which was essentially a clearinghouse targeted at this precise market – to enable companies hire people in their first years of employment. Unfortunately the company didn’t take off, suggesting that the market design problem is not easy to solve.

Anyway, in case you are a just-graduated student who believes you are a misfit in your first job, and instead want to do analytics, get in touch with me. Having been on the other side, I’m more than happy to fish in this pool, and I know that I’ll get some temporarily undervalued talent here.

Just that I don’t know what sort of market or clearinghouse I need to go to to tap this supply, and so I’m putting out a bid here in the form of this blogpost.

PS: In case you’re a recent reader of my blog, I’ve written a book on market design.

Proper Job

For the first time in over nine years, I’m taking up one of these.

If someone, sometime, were to do a compendium of stories of people whose careers changed because of covid-19, then I might feature in it. To be very honest, my present career change had been in the works for a while now. However, a bunch of things that covid-19 forced upon me this year made it that much easier to take the plunge.

As the more perceptive of you might have observed by now, I quit full time employment to embark on a “portfolio life” in late 2011. Apart from getting control over my own time, this change allowed me to do a lot of interesting things apart from my “core work”, which I took on such that most of the work I did was things I was good at or interested in.

So over the last nine years, apart from doing a lot of very interesting consulting work around data and analytics and AI and ML and “data science” and all that, I did a lot of interesting stuff otherwise as well. I wrote a book. I wrote a column for Mint. I taught at IIMB. I did public policy work for Takshashila.

I met lots of people and had loads of interesting discussions. There were times, yes, when I went into every meeting or catchup with a “sales mindset”, trying to sell something to someone. Thankfully these times were infrequent, and short. At all other times, I enjoyed all these random catchups, without any expectation  that anything come out of it.

My network expanded like crazy during these years. For the first time in my life, I came to be known for something apart from entrance exams. I spent time living in other places. I “followed my wife” when she first went to Barcelona, and then to London. It was all smooth.

In any case, you might be wondering how the pandemic resulted in my transition to employment being easier. The main way in which it has eased this transition is by ruining my carefully constructed lifestyle of the last nine years.

I’ve loved going around and meeting people. On an average, I would meet two to three people a week, for things completely unrelated to work. That has come down to nearly zero in the last nine months.

I had grown used to having massive control of my time and schedule. The prolonged school shutdown has completely sent it for a toss, with shared childcare responsibilities. “If I don’t have control over my time any ways, I might as well take up a job”, went one line of my reasoning.

I sometimes think I have a fear of open offices (I’ve felt this even during my consulting times when some clients have asked me to do “face time” in their offices). I hate having other people looking at my screen when I’m working. Maybe it has to do with some bad bosses / colleagues I’ve had over the years. The pandemic means I start working from the comfort of my home. And by the time I go to an office I will have hopefully settled down in this job.

And speaking of offices, the pandemic has normalised remote or hybrid working to an extent that I applied to jobs without having the constraint that they necessarily need to have an office in Central Bangalore. The company I’m joining – I’m not sure I would have thought of them in a “normal job search”. As it happens, while they’re not primarily based here, they do have a small office not far from Central Bangalore, and I’ll be going there once it reopens.

Then, thanks to the pandemic, I have successfully concluded my jobhunt without stepping out of home. All interviews, with a big range of companies, happened through video conferencing. In terms of my personal experience, Zoom >> Teams >> Meet.

But yeah, the biggest impact of the pandemic has  been on my lifestyle. So many things that I craved, and took as given, have been taken away from my life, that changing lifestyle seems to have become far easier than I had imagined. It’s like the tube strike model. I got shaken out of my earlier local optimum, and that has enabled me to convince myself that this new lifestyle will work.

In any case, I hope this works out. Just before joining, I feel positive, and excited in a good way.

Oh, and I guess I need to add here, and maybe at the beginning of every subsequent post.

All opinions expressed here on this blog are mine, and only mine. They don’t reflect the thoughts or opinions or positions of any organisation(s) that I might be associated with. Also, none of what I write on this blog is to be taken as investment advice. 

 

Join a boss or join a company?

“You don’t quit your job. You quit your boss”.

Versions of this keep popping up on my LinkedIn with amazing regularity. People have told me this in a non-ironic way in personal conversations as well, so I assume that it is true.

And now that I’m back in the job market, I’ve been thinking of a corollary to this – basically, if you apply “backward induction” to the above statement, then it essentially means that you “join a boss” rather than “join a company”?

I mean – if the boss is the reason why you quit a particular job, then shouldn’t you be thinking about this at the time when you’re joining as well? And so, while you’re interviewing and having these conversations, shouldn’t you be on the lookout for potential bad bosses as well?

In that sense, as I go through my hunt, I’ve been evaluating companies not just on the basis of what they do and what they might expect me to do, but also on the basis of what I feel about the people I talk to. In some places, I have an idea on who I could potentially report to, and in some I don’t. However, I treat pretty much everyone I talk to as people I have to potentially report to or work with at some point of time or the other, and evaluate the company based on these conversations.

Sometimes I think this might be too conservative, but at other times I think that this conservatism now is worth any potential trouble later.

What do you think about this approach?

Selling yourself for job and consulting

So for the first time in over eight years, I’m looking for a job. This was primarily prompted by my move to London earlier this year – a consulting business where you rely on networks rather than a global brand to get new business cannot be easily transplanted. Moreover, as I’d written a year back, a lot of the objectives of the “portfolio life” have been achieved, so I’m willing to let go of the optionality.

While writing a “Cover Letter” for a job application yesterday I realised what makes selling yourself for a job so much harder than selling yourself for a consulting assignment – in the former case, you need to also communicate a “larger purpose”.

For the last 5-6 years I’ve been mostly selling myself for consulting assignments, and while it hasn’t been easy, all I’ve needed to do to sell has been to convince the potential client that I’ll do a good job solving whatever problem they have, and that my fees is a worthy investment for them. And to some extent I’ve become better over the years making such arguments.

When you’re applying for a job, you not only have to convince the counterparty that you’ll be good at whatever you need to do, and that you are worth the salary that you are asking for, but also need to argue how the job will “improve your life”. You need to explain to them why the job fits in to the list of stuff you’ve already done in your life. You need to talk about where you see yourself 5/10/50 years from now. You need to actually express interest in the job, and irrespective of how mundane the job description, you need to act like it’s the most exciting job ever.

And this is a part I haven’t been good at, basically since I haven’t done any of it for a long time now. And in any case, this is a part of the cover letter that people routinely bluff about, so I don’t know if recruiters even take this part seriously. In any case, I’ve been filling most of my cover letters so far with explanations of how I’ll do an awesome job of the job, and keeping only a cursory line or two about “how the job will improve my life”!

10/13: Pep

It was sometime in 2011 that we’d gone for a family function where Pinky had worn my mother’s jewellery. An uncle instantly recognised it commented that she’s wearing “old models”, and asking why I hadn’t gotten her any jewellery of her own.

Pinky had stayed quiet then, but about a year later when I was trying to build my own consulting practice (and living off the savings from the job I’d recently quit), demanded that I buy her a diamond necklace. Not really knowing what it might cost, I instantly agreed. It was after I had taken her to the shop and she liked something that I realised it was going to exhaust all my savings.

I had to redouble my business development efforts, and about a month after that got my first big consulting contract. Pinky later told me that the reason she had made me “invest” (whether buying jewellery is an investment or an expense is something we disagree on) then was to shake me off my comfort zone and get me out there to do real business.

Pinky has her own way of inspiring me to do more, and to do well in whatever job that I do. When I was on outstation consulting assignments, which meant leaving home at 4:30am to catch a flight, she would wake up an hour earlier to make sure I had hot water to shower in. As I got ready, she would get me coffee and even polish my shoes!

When I was writing the first draft of my book last year, which was a damn difficult process, she made sure we celebrated every little milestone. When I finished the very first draft she took me out for a fancy dinner to our favourite Japanese restaurant in Barcelona. This way, she made sure I remained motivated as I took the not-so-easy task of preparing the first draft.

She’s also not hesitated to use the stick. Every time during my consulting life when she’s felt I’m not doing enough work, she’s made sure to throw sufficient tantrums to make sure I don’t slack off. Each time she’s done that, I’ve found myself pursuing leads with renewed vigour, and managing to win some business or the other.

Pinky has also turned out to be a reliable career mentor. When I decided last month that I should look for full time roles as well, she helped me figure out how to go about the process (it was 8 years since I’d last applied for a full time job). She’s repeatedly sat down with me to review my business plans, and to guide me regarding the best course of action. When there have been consulting or job or partnering offers I’ve been unsure of, she’s dissected the problem in a way for the solution to become apparent to me.

There’s little more I could have asked for from a wife in terms of motivation!

1/13: Leaving home

2/13: Motherhood statements

3/13: Stockings

4/13: HM

5/13: Cookers

6/13: Fashion

7/13: Dashing

8/13: Dabba

9/13: UnPC

Anxiety and computer viruses

I think, and hope, that I’ve been cured of anxiety, which I was probably suffering from for over six years. It was a case of Murphy’s Law taken to its extreme. If anything can go wrong, it will, states the law, and in those six or seven years, I would subconsciously search for things that could possibly go wrong, and then worry about them. And worry about them so much that I would get paranoid.

Let me give you an example. Back in 2008, after a four-month spell of unemployment, I had signed up with a startup. Two days after I signed, which was three weeks before I was going to start work, I started worrying about the health of the startup founder, and what would happen to my career in case he happened to croak between then and my joining the company! It had been a major effort on my part to try and get back to finance, and that job was extremely important to me from a career signaling standpoint (it played a major role in my joining Goldman Sachs, subsequently, I think). So I started getting worried that if for some reason the founder died before I joined, that signaling wouldn’t happen! I worried about it for three days and broke my head about it, until sanity reigned.

This wasn’t a one-off. I would take ages to reply to emails because I would be paranoid that I had said something inappropriate. When I landed in Venice on vacation last year, my office blackberry didn’t get connected for an hour or so, and I thought that was because they had fired me while I was on vacation. It would be similar when I would look at my blackberry first thing in the morning after I woke up, and found no mails. I needed no real reason to worry about something. It was crazy.

When a virus attacks your computer, one of the ways in which it slows down the computer is by running “background processes”. These processes run in the background, independent of what you intend to do, but nevertheless take up so much of your computing power that it becomes extremely hard to function. Anxiety works pretty much the same way. Because there is always so much going on in your mind (most of it unintended, of course), a lot of your brain’s “computing power” is taken up in processing those unwanted thoughts (the brain, unfortunately, has no way of figuring out that those thoughts are unintended). And that leaves you with so much lesser mindspace to do what you want to do.

So you stop functioning. You stop being able to do as much as you were able to. Initially you don’t recognize this, until you bite of more than you could possibly chew a number of times in succession. And then, having failed to deliver on so many occasions, you lose confidence. And lesser confidence means more worry. Which means more background process. And means diminished mental ability. Things can spiral out of hand way too quickly.

I’ve been on anxiety medication for over seven months now, and the only times when I realize how bad things were are when I happen to miss a dose or two, and there is relapse. And having been through it, trust me, it is quite bad.

On the positive side, the impact a well-guided medication process (administered by an expert psychiatrist) can have on anxiety is also tremendous. For the six years I suffered, I had no clue that I was under a cloud of a clinically treatable condition. I didn’t know that it was only a virus that had attacked my CPU, which could be got rid off with sustained dosage of anti-virus, and I had instead thought my CPU itself was slowing down, maybe rusting (at the ripe old age of late twenties). After I started responding to my medication, I was delirious with happiness, with the realization that I hadn’t become dumb, after all.

It was sometime in March or April, I think, when I realized that my medication had come into effect, thus freeing up so much mind space, and I started feeling smart again. When I met the psychiatrist next, I told her, “I feel exactly the way I felt back in 2005 once again!”.

On mental math and consulting careers

Sometime last week, the wife wanted to know more about management consulting, and I was trying to explain to her the kind of work that consulting firms do. I told her that the two most important skills to have in order to be a successful consultant are structured thinking and people skills, and in order to illustrate the former I put her through a “case” on the lines of those that consulting firms use in order to interview.

The importance of structured thinking, I explained, lay in the fact that not all problems that consulting firms pose have a definitive solution, and structure helps you hedge against not being able to generate a solution. In the worst case, if you follow this approach, you would have made a contribution to the client solely by putting a structure on their problem, and by enabling them to think better about similar problems that cropped up in the future. This is also the reason that consulting firms use the much-touted (and much-abused) frameworks – they are a good method of structuring the problem, I said.

I then went on to talk about how I’m not much of a structured thinker, and how I frauded my way in through that during my consulting interviews nearly six years back. On joining a consulting firm, I’d found myself thoroughly disillusioned and out of my depth, and finding that the job called for a completely different set of skills than what I possessed. The nature of problem solving, I found, was very different from the kind I’d been mostly exposed to, and enjoyed. I quit in a matter of months.

I went on to narrate a story from my B-school days. It was about the final exam of a second year course, and I’ve blogged about it. The question presented a business problem and asked us to find a solution for it. I thought for a bit, figured out the solution (with a bit of thinking it was obvious) and explained it two or three paragraphs. My friend had instead put a structure on the problem, and used all possible applicable frameworks in order to structure it. He has been working for a consulting firm since graduation, and I’m told he’s doing rather well. You know my story.

So we talked a bit more about problem solving approaches, and how I could possibly structure my business now that I’m an independent consultant (given that I’m not a particularly structured person). During the course of this conversation I happened to mention that most of my early problem solving was in terms of programming. And the wife jumped on this. “You are a mental math guy, aren’t you?”, she asked. I nodded, feeling happy inside about those days when I would do three-digit multiplications in my head while my classmates still struggled with “six in the mind, four in the hand” methods of doing addition. “And you’re an algorithms guy, always trying to find the easiest method to solve problems?”, she continued. Again I replied in the affirmative. “Then how the hell could you even think that you would do well in a job that requires structured thinking?”

She has a point there. Why didn’t I think of this earlier? The more pertinent question now is about how I’m going to structure my data modeling business since it’s clear that I won’t be able to pull off the classical consulting model.