Forem: Shikhar Sachdev

How I Flipped My Fears And Changed Jobs

Shikhar Sachdev — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 21:03:05 +0000

2021 was the year of the Great Resignation.

For me, though, it was also a year of great hesitation.

I couldn’t decide whether to leave my job. I knew I wanted to try something new, but I had feelings like guilt and anxiety preventing me from actually doing anything about it.

For over 9 months, I’d diligently weigh up the pros and cons of staying vs leaving. I viewed it like a problem on a math exam that I could solve. And arrive at the “correct” answer.

I was wrong. This was no math exam. There was no right or wrong decision.

It was just fears in my head making it hard to be decisive.

Everybody has their own fears, but the way to tackle them is the same: give them respect and then flip them.

Here’s seven fears I had about leaving my job. And how I flipped them.

Fear #1: At my new job, I’d have to prove myself all over again. I’m starting from scratch.

At my new job, I’d have to prove myself all over again. I’m starting from scratch.
Every decision you make will involve some form of pain.

If you decide to stay at a job where you’re coasting, you’ll experience the pain of stagnation and thoughts about wasting your potential.

If you decide to leave, you’ll experience the pain of learning new topics, making new connections, understanding a new industry, and transitioning.

You can’t avoid pain. Instead, embrace it and choose what type you want to endure.

I’d much rather face the pain of growth than the pain of stagnation.

Fear #2: The work might not be what I want to do.

Great, I’ll now be one step closer to finding the type of work that I do want to do by process of elimination. My brain will have more data to work off.

Fear #3: I might fail trying to learn new things.

If you fail because the work at your new job is too challenging, the company messed up in assessing your skills.

If you fail because you didn’t work hard enough or lost interest, you now know that this isn’t the type of work you want to be doing.

In both cases, it’s either something out of my control or something I can learn from.

Fear #4: There’s this one thing about their culture / Glassdoor review that bothers me.

There’s no such thing as the perfect job.

I can do my research and ask the right questions when interviewing.

I can negotiate for a salary number I’m happy with. I can even ask to speak to more people on the team (I did this).

But outside of that, there’s no way to find out with 100% accuracy what the new job will be like.

Plus, I know that my brain is prone to biases like loss aversion and hates the prospect of change even when the facts point to it being a great move.

Fear #5: I need more time to make this decision.

After 9 months of indecision, I called bullshit on needing more time and realized that there wasn’t a right or wrong decision.

Whatever I choose, I get to make that the right decision. I do that by having my own back and giving it my best shot.

Not by trying to manufacture more time.

Fear #6: My team won’t be as nice.

I was telling my coworker why I felt like I wanted to stay in my job.

The first reason I mentioned was “Everybody is so nice here! I really like my coworkers..” and then he immediately cut me off:

“But that’s pretty much the case at every job..”

For whatever reason, I kept reading workplace horror stories. And it freaked me out.

But no one who actually has normal and reasonable coworkers is screaming their lungs out on the internet.

Fear #7: I should be “grateful” for my current opportunity and shouldn’t get too “greedy”.

A job is a two-way street: I provide concrete, measurable value and get rewarded for it. I can be grateful for the opportunity, but that doesn’t mean I’m indebted to it in any way.

Also, staying at a job you no longer like is more “greedy” than leaving. Since you’re clearly not invested anymore, the only reason you’re there is to collect your paycheck and stop growing. Would a company want someone like that to stay?

A tip

Try to make your counter arguments as strong as possible:

Not “I’m someone who likes to try new things”. Go for “Starting from scratch is the best possible thing for my career at this moment.”
Not “I'll get new information about my strengths and weaknesses from this new job”. Go for “This new job is absolutely critical in helping me understand where I want to take my career.”
Not “I guess it’s not greedy to leave a job”. Go for “Leaving a job is the opposite of being greedy”.

You can tell how effective your arguments are by the emotion they generate. If you feel fired up, you’re doing it right. If not, keep digging.

Maybe your new job turns out to be terrible. Maybe it doesn’t work out. Maybe your new team is a disaster.

But that’s all out of your control.

What is in your control is the ability to redecide, the ability to use that new information to plan your next step, and the ability to ask for help.

Don’t let a fear of what you can’t control stop you from taking action.

Over and out –

Shikhar

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How Satya Nadella Transformed Microsoft

Shikhar Sachdev — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 21:29:41 +0000

It’s February 2014 and Microsoft has a new CEO. His name is Satya Nadella.

The company is struggling. Engineers are leaving for Google. Product launches over the past decade have failed due to an obsession with Windows & Office. Bing is dying. The pundits can smell blood.

But in just a few months, Microsoft’s share price has tripled.

The company’s outpaced the likes of Airbnb and Netflix.

Nadella had a repair job on his hands. Having joined Microsoft in 1992, he had climbed the ladder. And now it was time to rebuild it. Brick by brick.

So that’s what he did. He rolled up his sleeves and focused on Microsoft’s most important asset.

Its people.

The Vision

It started with a simple change. Nadella modified Microsoft’s vision statement from:

Put "a computer on every desk and in every home."

To:

“empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Rather than focusing on computers, Nadella and Microsoft were about to put their energy towards the humans behind the technology.

As he mentioned in an interview:

“Our company’s identity is fundamentally about creating technology so that others can create more technology. And it’s essential that it is being used for empowering more people.”

But you can’t empower others around the globe if your own employees..err, are being screwed.

And that’s exactly what was happening.

Microsoft's Stack Ranking System

I got Cs in college. And it wasn’t like I didn’t study.

All because I was being graded on a fucking curve. And that curve ensured a set number of people would always suffer each time.

My college experience, believe it or not, is what was happening at Microsoft. Their infamous stack-ranking system meant that employees were pitted against each other every 6 months.

And so instead of focusing on creating the best possible product, engineers would hide information from each other. They’d fear giving away their ideas because it could damage their positions.

Take the 5 best engineers in the world. Under this system, one of them would be fired.

This management style stemmed from the Balmer era which centered on finding holes in other people’s ideas. Employees wanted to show they were the smartest. At the cost of innovation. And innovation is everything.

So Nadella got rid of the ranking system.

Instead, Microsoft was going to give much more proactive and consistent feedback. Bonuses, too, were going to be much more at the discretion of managers instead of an algorithmic employee rating system.

Putting it into practice

Not everyone can walk the talk. But Nadella translated big words into actionable steps.

Here are some cultural values Nadella outlined along with their practical implementation:

i) Microsoft As One (Instead of split into the 14 different franchises)

Bin the stack ranking system. Make employees collaborate, not compete. This encouraged spread of ideas amongst the company and allowed Microsoft to innovate faster.

ii) “Learn It Alls” instead of “Know It Alls”

Instead of a weekly 4 hour meeting where the management would speak to the employees, management implemented a weekly hackathon where they could engage with and test out employee ideas.

iii) Diversity & Inclusion

Judson Althoff, one of Microsoft’s Executive VPs, explains how his compensation package weighs his sales goal and his diversity goal equally. Althoff has skin in the game when it comes to diversifying Microsoft’s candidate pool.

iv) Growth Mindset

This sense of curiosity and humbleness that had been bulldozered out by Balmer’s aggressive style was another trait that Nadella wanted to bring back.

One of the ways Microsoft puts this into practice is by bringing in customers they lost. They use failure as the starting point to see what they could have done better.

Growth Mindset

I want to highlight the work that Nadella has done with author Carol Dweck, who popularized and wrote about the Growth Mindset.

Dweck’s book separates the world into learners and non-learners. The learners are able to cultivate qualities through work and effort. And the non-learners don’t even try. They think everything is fixed.

Nadella wanted Microsoft’s culture to be based on this growth mindset:

“And to me, that model of culture is not a static thing. It is about a dynamic learning culture. In fact, the phrase we use to describe our emerging culture is “growth mindset”, because it’s about every individual, every one of us having that attitude - that mindset - of being able to overcome any challenge.” - Satya Nadella

This wasn’t all just a load of fluff. One small example of Nadella implementing a dynamic learning culture was moving the firm from an annual budgeting process to a rolling set of forecasts.

Things don’t always go to plan. And Nadella saw that there’s value in learning from mistakes, adjusting, and then heading off in the best possible direction.

Today

Satya Nadella holds a 98% approval rating on Glassdoor. People are excited about the prospect of working for Microsoft.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this is that Nadella wasn’t handed a blank slate. He didn’t have the luxury of moulding the organization into whatever he wanted from scratch.

He had to tackle the cultural debt that had built up, throw away rigid assumptions that his predecessors had held, and envision a new future for his beloved organization.

Satya Nadella turned shit into sugar. And now we’re all just waiting to see what he does next.

Credit

Thanks for reading. There’s great information available on this topic out there and I used this case study from Herminia Ibarra, Aneeta Rattan, and Anna Johnston to help me learn more about Nadella & Microsoft.

I’d love for you to subscribe to my newsletter. Each week I spend 20 hours analyzing a tech career topic that’s going to help you level up.

I share what I learnt in a 5 minute email report like this one.

This is the content I wished I had when I graduated. Instead, I got tips on fixing my resume.

Cheers,

Shikhar

My Guide To Coffee Chats

Shikhar Sachdev — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 02:11:50 +0000

I’ve had the chance to meet tons of awesome tech professionals over the last 6 months.

I’ve been curious to find out more about their backgrounds and listen to them describe what it is that they do on a day to day basis.

The number one benefit of doing this has been that I’ve been exposed to a variety of new industries, roles, and opportunities.

I’ve learnt about why people have made certain career transitions, how they’ve successfully learnt new skills, and what advice they have for others hoping to do the same.

All I’ve been basically doing is going on coffee chats (over Zoom, of course). And sharing them with everyone on the internet.

I’m going to structure this article in the following manner, feel free to skip to the parts you find useful:

What is a Coffee Chat?
Why You Should Do Coffee Chats
How To Reach Out and Prepare
Guiding the Conversation and Asking Questions
Final Thoughts

What is a coffee chat?

A coffee chat is an informational interview where you find out more about a person’s professional experience and goals.

If there’s only one thing you get from this article, it should be the following: a coffee chat is not a place for you to ask for a job. It may certainly help you land a role in the future (and I’ll talk about this later), but if you’re going into a coffee chat with the sole intent of asking for a job, you’re doing it wrong.

Instead, a good coffee chat’s primary purpose should be to build trust and for both individuals to get to know each other.

Why You Should Do Coffee Chats

An obvious reason to go on more coffee chats is to increase your future chances of getting the role you want.

So assuming you want to work at Stripe on their Product team, you could go reach out to a product manager there and speak with them for 30min. Assuming the conversation goes well, you can continue to follow up and stay in touch for a few months.

Then, say a year later, when you apply for a new product manager position at Stripe, you can get referred, and sometimes you can even skip the whole line and directly meet with the hiring manager.

Another reason to go on a coffee chat is to find out about what a particular job role or industry consists of and to get information on how to break in. Here, you again reach out to someone who’s knowledgeable in a field and then ask them questions regarding what it is that they do.

So for example, let’s say I want to make a career transition into data science. I browse the data science subreddit and read a bunch of how-to posts and come across someone who’s written about their experience transitioning from biology to data science.

I decide that this person can give me useful tips so I send them an email and end up going on a coffee chat with them. This way, I can get direct advice from someone who’s done what I want to do.

If you’re reaching out to someone to ask for a job, you’re not asking for a coffee chat - you’re just asking for an interview. And that’s very different.

How To Reach Out and Prepare

I recommend reaching out via email over Linkedin or Twitter. Everybody checks their email, even if they might not reply to you.

When sending an email to someone you want to go on a coffee chat with, keep it short and be specific. There’s probably a particular reason why you decided to reach out to someone - be sure to mention it in your email.

Here are two examples:

Example #1

In my senior year of college, I wanted to get a job in tech. As an international student, I had to get sponsorship and this was quite a big issue - I wanted to chat with someone who had been through this process before.

I came across Jay’s Linkedin profile and realized that he was an international student who also had a similar economics related background to me:

And he had also gotten a job in tech.

So when I reached out to him by email, I made sure to mention these things:

Notice how I didn’t say something generic like: “Would love to pick your brain”

Being specific when reaching out also makes sure that the recipient doesn’t think you’re randomly spamming people and sending the exact same copy to hundreds of people. You’re much more likely to get a response.

Example #2

Again, I outline what I want to talk to him about and why I reached out to him.

This degree of personalization is what makes getting a response likely. Most people skip this part. Hopefully this also shows to you that a well crafted message can get pretty much anyone to respond - even the CEO.

Finally, realize that the worst thing that happens is someone says no or doesn’t reply. No big deal, you’re still alive. Realize that most people will ignore your email. That’s okay.

And no, you’re not being “pushy” if you choose to follow-up. Just make sure you’ve taken the steps above to write a good message.

Okay, so let’s assume you’ve got someone to respond and they’re down to have a coffee chat with you. How do you prepare?

Well, firstly, make sure you do prepare in advance. Someone’s given you their most valuable asset: their time. Don’t waste it.

When I’m about to speak with someone, I spend a minimum of 1 hour going through their profile and drafting up questions I want to ask them.

I’ll look at their Linkedin profile, see if they’ve published any blog posts, or if they’ve previously spoken on any panels. I’ll compile my notes in a google doc - here’s what my set of questions for Ayman looked like:

Your conversation will likely be scheduled for around 30min.

30min is a long time if you only have a few questions prepared, so make sure you go in with more questions than you think you’ll be able to get to.

If the conversation is going well, you’ll find yourself asking a lot less questions and having a more two-way discussion, but I still recommend doing your research upfront.

When preparing questions, don’t just ask questions you could have looked up. Try to go a layer deeper - so instead of merely asking “Why did you transition into X?”, ask “Given your background in Y, what appealed you to X? Am I right in thinking that given my interests in A & B, I’ll also benefit from a transition into X?”

Ultimately, though, your questions don’t need to be perfect. A coffee chat is just a conversation with another person. And as long as you’re genuinely interested in finding out about their professional journey (rather than begging for a job), you’ll come across well.

Guiding the Conversation and Asking Questions

As I hinted at in the last section, whilst you should have a bank of questions to rely on, you don’t want the conversation to just be a series of questions and answers.

Instead, use your questions to add structure to your overall conversation, but let the discussion itself ebb and flow. Go on tangents - if something the other person says catches your interest, don’t be afraid to ask them about it.

There is no script and there shouldn’t be.

Keep in mind, though, that your first few coffee chats will likely involve just a bunch of questions and answers. But as you go on more and get more practice, just like anything else, you’ll develop a habit of steering the conversation in a manner that doesn’t involve just Q&A.

Finally, I also recommend taking notes - not necessarily to remember what you discussed, but rather as a tool to highlight the important parts of your conversation and to internalize some of your learnings better.

Final Thoughts

Congrats, you’ve just made a new friend!

I recommend following up once right after your chat and sending a nice thank-you note.

Here’s one I recently got that I thought was good:

Then, in the coming months, if you work on something cool or explore any new opportunities that are related to what you discussed, make sure to let them know!

As a slight tangent - you might be surprised at how many people end up reaching out to you.

After one of my coffee chats, I got a recruiter from one of the people I interviewed's company reaching out to me asking if I was interested in a new role they had.

Going on coffee chats is one of the best ways to increase future opportunities that come your way.

All they take is a bit of outreach and prep. And I hope this guide has proven to be a helpful start.

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Interview with a Data Scientist at Twitter

Shikhar Sachdev — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 21:09:55 +0000

I spoke with Sayan Sanyal who’s a Data Scientist at Twitter on their Notifications team.

He originally studied Computer Science as an undergrad before attending graduate school at Berkeley’s School Information with a focus on Data Science.

A few things that stood out to me were his ability to reason about the benefits of his engineering degree on his day to day work and his thoughts on navigating different types of organizations.

You initially studied Computer Science - tell me about that. Was that what you always wanted to do? Why did you pick that?

In highschool, I was certain that I wanted to do something quantitative but I wasn’t sure what it would be. I was equally interested in economics, physics, or other engineering pathways. However, given cultural proclivities in India and oppurtunities available, computer science seemed to be the quantitative pathway that was the most easily available to me.

Once I started studying Computer Science, though, it became fairly clear to me relatively quickly that it could be applied to many different things - note that at the time, data science wasn’t really a thing. It was more around the line of analytics and there were certain companies that were trying to do things around that space, so that’s what I decided to explore further.

What do you see as the main difference between analytics and data science (considering there’s roles for each sector)?

Right after undergrad, I got into a business intelligence and analytics role. I think those types of roles are super interesting but I essentially just wanted to do more math. It boiled down to being able to understand and apply things in a slightly more sophisticated way, rather than just counting things and being able to display them.

I think that analytics is important however there are certain questions we aren’t able to answer. And for these questions, you need to infer things. We need to go beyond the data that’s available to us and think about processes that haven’t been observed. In order to do that, you need a different set of techniques - whether that be predictive or inferential in nature. And that’s what interested me.

Can you tell me what your previous business intelligence role consisted of?

It mainly consisted of 3 parts. One is ETL, which is basically getting data from place A to place B and ensuring that the data is cleansed. I think being able to build robust pipelines is a skill that I’m still leveraging today in the data science world.

The second aspect of it was the data modelling. That is trying to figure out how you would shape data that would enable different kinds of analysis. So for instance, this is where I learnt about snowflake versus star schema, ensuring transaction processing, and other things like that.

The third aspect of it was data visualization - so the dashboard building part. I think these three skills I just mentioned are useful even when you’re not in the analytics space.

Did you have to pick up these skills at work or were they transferable from the computer science degree you had?

The only thing that was transferable was the idea of normalization and that I had skills in trying to understand how programming works. I knew how to reason through challenging problems, I understood o-notation, I knew the fundamentals of databases, I knew how distributed systems worked - but mainly everything else was picked up on the job.

For instance, how should pipelines be structured in a way that they are fault tolerant? How do we implement error handling? These are things that I picked up on the job.

One of the projects I was working on at the time involved understanding weights and their impact on funding - and I knew that I would be able to do this via regression, but I didn’t feel like I had the mathematical chops to do it in a nuanced way. I thought that understanding data better and the statistical foundations behind this analysis was something I wanted to invest in further, so I decided to go to grad school.

Tell me about your Berkeley experience. You studied Data Science. How was that overall?

My two years at Berkeley challenged and pushed me to a degree that I hadn’t ever done previously. It took a lot out of me but I’m very glad for it. It made me question knowledge gaps that I had from undergrad and I tried to fill those as rigorously as possible.

The good thing about grad school is that it’s a choose your own adventure type of sport. Unlike undergrad where a lot of the programs are more structured, I would say over here I was able to have much more freedom over what I wanted to focus on. I spent a lot more of my time learning things that interested me. So for example, I went really deep into natural language processing and ended up being a teaching assistant for some of those classes.

I also worked with a professor trying to understand developmental economics using machine learning on satellite data. I spent a lot more time in grad school doing machine learning than causal inference, but now I do a lot more causal inference work than the sort of machine learning that I did in grad school.

Going a bit deeper into economics - it’s probably the only other space doing a lot of observational causal inference right now. And that is a space I’ve been inspired by and spent a lot more time learning about whilst at Twitter.

So for example, I read a lot of papers by researchers like Susan Athey, because they’re able to take techniques in machine learning and able to apply them in the field of causal inference, which is something that marries a lot of the questions that come up very often at Twitter.

What team do you work on at Twitter?

I work on the Notifications team. I’ll speak about 3 projects I’ve recently worked on.

One is far more engineering in nature. It involves building up a library using pyspark and python that helps you aggregate experimental data and perform statistical tests on them. This allows you to do flexible experiment analysis on Twitter data.

Another project I was working on was based more on observational causal inference. Trying to estimate the effect of a customer action on their long term user behavior. These are things you can’t always experiment with, so at that point in time you need to use observational techniques to do that.

Finally, another project was focused on trying to understand what happens when you change a machine learning model in one space and the downstream effects of that on the recommendations you end up getting in the notifications space. So trying to figure out how different candidate generation processes work and how they affect models is what I worked on.

As you can see, sometimes these projects include analysis of systems, sometimes they include observational studies, and sometimes it’s just plain engineering. Most of the time, I have one main project and other small projects.

How often are you collaborating with other teams?

All the time! You can’t work without collaborating with them. I most closely partner with my engineering tech leads and my product partners.

There’s a triumvirate in terms of product, data science, and engineering. So when trying to understand how to make the product better, a lot of the time we also take into account what user research has to say or we’ll also look at a design hypothesis that may have been laid out.

Does having that engineering background make that collaboration process easier? Or do you think you could have done it even without?

Data Science allows for a wide variety of roles. The way I look at it: I am better placed to do some of the systems work or some of the engineering work compared to some of my peers because of my engineering background, but that doesn’t make me a better data scientist.

They have other skills that they’re able to bring in that I perhaps won’t be able to bring to the table because of my background. So I would say that data science is a very wide space where you’re able to bring in your unique skill sets and shine.

How is working at a bigger company like Twitter different to working at a smaller company like at your previous role?

The thing about Twitter is that being as large as it is, it still feels like a terribly small company compared to our other peers. For instance, our ratio of active users to number of people working here - that’s a really big ratio compared to some other companies in consumer tech.

One of the things that has been instructive for me is observing how planning, prioritization and strategy works across a larger company. Especially when there are multiple directions in which a company could be pulled. So being able to understand how to make an impact in that sort of an environment - which can get quite messy - has been a great learning experience.

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How I Learned to Enjoy Networking

Shikhar Sachdev — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 02:40:40 +0000

I used to hate the term “networking”.

I remember walking home one day when I saw one of my friends rushing towards our career center. When I asked why he was in such a hurry, he mentioned there was a networking event going on.

He carefully explained that your network is your net worth. I puked a bit in my mouth and continued home.

It always seemed really artificial to me - you go to a place with the intention of meeting someone who’ll benefit your career, irrespective of your actual interest in getting to know them as a person.

That doesn’t sit right with me. It leads to artificial and short sighted conversations.

After thinking about it more, I realized that the reason I don’t like networking events is because the agenda is very unclear.

And no, an opportunity to potentially meet someone who will help advance your career is not a clear agenda. I guess what I don’t like is that these events are trying really hard to manufacture serendipity. And no one likes a try-hard.

But then you have something like developer meetups which I think are much better, mainly because the agenda is clear: you’re learning about something new. And you’re doing it together.

Now, in the process of learning, you might indeed meet like minded people who help you advance in your career. But the point is that, this is not the primary purpose of the meetup - it’s just a byproduct.

The best networking is learning

This got me thinking and then I realized that the best form of networking is learning. You either offer value by sharing your knowledge or by asking someone else a specific question about something they have experience with.

That’s why the best way to network is to write blog posts, reach out to people you admire with specific requests, and to use platforms like Twitter to find interesting content.

This is the opposite of exchanging business cards and sending random Linkedin requests.

This is networking done right - you have a clear agenda in mind and the focus is on giving value. Not like vague entrepreneurship conferences where the supposed goal is to end up with as many business cards as humanly possible.

And to be clear, I don’t think the above has anything to do with being an extrovert or an introvert.

Those two are just attitude types, not interpersonal skills, and more importantly, everyone has both sides.

I consider myself an introvert but when I’m interested in a topic and I read something insightful about it, I’ve made it a habit to reach out to the author.

Here are a few examples I’ve seen that embody the “best way of networking is learning” approach.

Example #1: Learning in public

I follow Stepan on Twitter. He’s constantly posting his learnings and asking questions. Here’s an example:

Most of his tweets won’t get engagement, but sometimes people will comment and discuss topics he’s thinking about.

Over time, when someone visits his profile, they can basically scroll through his timeline and discover what kind of topics he’s interested in. This is a fantastic way to meet like-minded people and develop a high quality network.

Example #2: Blogging

I wanted to have a coffee chat with a founder. I reached out to him and he agreed. Instead of just speaking to him in private, I decided to make the interview public and wrote it up on my blog (with his permission, of course).

People who like the interview can now email me about it and we can talk about something that was discussed. A further benefit is that people can also reach out to Ayman (the CEO I spoke with).

Extending this - people often email me about multiple topics I’ve discussed. All because I decided to publish online and share my thoughts. I’m still at the very early stages of this, but the benefits are already trickling in.

Example #3: Publishing book notes

Nat Eliason publishes book notes for almost everything he reads. Talking about books you both like is a great conversation starter.

Again, just like the Twitter example, people can get an overview of the kind of topics that Nat is interested in and reach out to him if they want to talk about something specific.

Reaching out to someone you admire or even just a peer works way better when you narrow the focus of conversation. For instance, instead of sending a 500 word email where you ramble your thoughts all over the place, you send 150 words directed at something you want to talk to about.

All of the above examples make it really easy to do this.

Now that I've finished writing this, I realize just how lucky we are to have the internet available to us. You can literally connect with anyone you want by sending the right message.

And that's a massive privilege. Want to get a mentor? Email someone. Want to collab with someone on a project? Look at their github and suggest some ideas.

The possibilities are endless. You just have to put yourself out there.

Hope you enjoyed reading this. I write a weekly tech careers newsletter you may enjoy subscribing to, do check it out.

Cheers,

Shikhar.

How Kevin Scott Motivates Engineers at Microsoft

Shikhar Sachdev — Sun, 18 Oct 2020 00:24:24 +0000

Lex Friedman asked Microsoft CTO, Kevin Scott, what it takes to run a company of 30,000 engineers.

Ambitious, smart engineers can go anywhere. How do you motivate them? How do you make them stay?

Kevin responded that it had to do with storytelling.

Not money. Not prestige. But with the right story.

And it’s always been like this. Not just for engineers, but for humans in general.

Stories make us come together.

Numbers can help paint a picture. Revenue up. Costs down.

But at the end of the day it’s the words that stick.

Sapiens

In his book Sapiens, Yuval Harari explains that humans are special because they inhabit a world created from their own ideas in addition to their objective reality.

He calls this our fictional reality. Things like money, nations, corporations - these are all things that we invented.

Take something like gold, for example. You can’t eat gold. You can’t even make weapons out of gold because it’s too soft.

So as humans, we take something with no inherent value like gold and we tell a story around it. We construct the narrative.

Think about the stories you tell yourself everyday. How much of them are based on your objective reality?

Instead it’s probably the case that your mind is preoccupied by what Harari refers to as fictional reality.

Stories are central to our evolution as a species. And it just so happens that this also holds true for companies.

Apple

Steve Jobs was a great storyteller because he focused on the why over the what.

In other words: he focused on fictional reality over objective reality.

Take this commercial for the 1984 Macintosh. Not until the last few seconds is there even a mention of what’s being advertised.

What often goes unnoticed is that these same principles are used to attract the best people at Apple.

The best people, Jobs states, need a common vision.

“And that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision.”

And that vision needs to be reiterated. Constantly.

I’ve written about this before, but one of the ways Jobs would do this is by creating a Reality Distortion Field.

The reality distortion field was a mix of Jobs’ charisma, his strong will to succeed, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.

It’s how he got his team to meet crazy deadlines and how he convinced the best to work with him.

Keep it simple

Ask most people to pitch you their idea and it’ll probably sound really complicated.

The magic lies in making it sound simple. Compelling. Inevitable, almost.

Read most corporate mission statements. You’ll probably come away thinking “So what?”.

The details are important. The technology is important. The numbers matter.

But when it comes to leading a team, both those factors pale in comparison to having a clear vision and being able to tell a story.

And that’s how Kevin Scott motivates his 30,000 engineers to get out of bed everyday.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, check out my website CareerFair - you can read reviews about tech jobs by people who've done them. You can also read more case studies like this.

Cheers :)

Interview with a Product Manager at Microsoft

Shikhar Sachdev — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:50:59 +0000

Felix is a Product Manager at Microsoft in the Azure cloud services organization. He’s got a very cool background: he’s started his own company and gone to business school amongst a lot of other things. I had the chance to ask him some questions about his job.

What does an average day look like?

Every day is different, but I generally spend my time doing one of three things:

Creating clarity on what to build
Guiding Execution
Reporting Progress

The role is highly collaborative so I’m constantly partnering with Engineering, Design, and PM colleagues. On an average day, I’ll have at least 3 meetings. Here’s what it looks like:

At the start, I meet with my Engineering Manager (EM) counterpart for an hour. We discuss our roadmap and realize we may need to cut a couple features because some work took longer than we planned. We review our backlog and discuss potential features to cut. I agree to get customer feedback to revize our prioritized list of work if necessary.

Before my next meeting, I review customer feedback and notice there’s a bug in one of my features. I contact the customer via email to provide a workaround and add a task to our team’s backlog. I reply to a few emails before my next meeting: a 15 minute stand up with the engineering team.

We discuss the current status of work in progress. One engineer has a question about a feature and I realize the requirements could use a bit more detail. I set up a working session for later in the day to clarify what needs to be done.

In the hour before my next meeting, I continue my work on a new feature. I need to provide feedback on mock-ups from our designer. The options look great! I leave some comments and set up a meeting with the designer to review the final decision. I also schedule a meeting for the following week to get feedback from engineers and other PMs on the team.

Next, my EM and I meet with a team we are partnering with to deliver a feature in a couple months. The other team explains that there will be a two week delay because some higher priority work came up. We decide on a new timeline and agree that the project is not significantly at risk.

To wrap up my day, I review a PowerBI dashboard that displays usage data for a feature we released 3 weeks ago. 40% of users have adopted the feature and 95% of user surveys are at least 4 out of 5 stars. This is great news! Our target is 50% adoption within 3 months and 90% ratings of at least 4 star ratings. I write a status update, include screenshots of the report, and send it to my manager and our engineering team.

After I finish the meeting to clarify the work discussed during standup, I write some SQL queries to gather data to support another feature I’ve been working on. I end the day noting my thoughts on how the data highlights the problem we are trying to solve.

What does a non-average day look like?

I have no meetings! I may spend the day refining my specs, scheduling talks with customers and planning our roadmap. On days like this I like to do big picture thinking and develop the vision for my feature area based on new market research or customer feedback. My vision document includes details on what I think are the biggest opportunities for my team to improve our product for customers.

Sometimes I’ll block my calendar for an entire week with back to back interviews or focus groups with customers. I develop a combination of questions, design mocks, prototypes, and surveys, then partner with User Research, Design, Engineering, and PM peers to execute a research study. I use the results of these various activities to discover the biggest challenges my customers face and add new ideas to my product roadmap and vision document.

What’s your favorite part about the job?

I love working with people and building consensus. It feels good when I get to talk to customers and we reach an understanding about how my product can serve them better. I enjoy when I can take that feedback along with product data to create alignment on what my team should build. Holding a meeting with multiple stakeholders and getting to see the nods of agreement as we develop a collective vision of success is energizing.

It’s also great to look back after a feature has been shipped and recognize the impact that has been made for customers. It feels good when I’m reviewing customer feedback and the comments express gratitude for my feature and how it helped them.

Do you think being a PM is beneficial if someone wants to start a company later on?

Absolutely! A business exists to create value for customers. The PM role provides great experience in discovering, prioritizing, and solving problems for customers.

Starting a company also requires hiring and - potentially - fundraising. So you’ll have much to learn, but being a PM will definitely provide you with useful skills.

Are there things you don’t like about being a PM?

Project management! This often involves tracking bugs, and features in backlog management software as well as writing status reports for my team and partners. While I don’t love this part of the job, I appreciate the value it provides in keeping the team on target and communicating our progress. Without this work it would be difficult to manage all of my responsibilities.

What advice do you have for someone young (or old) looking to build a career in Product Management?

Go build something! Product management is one of those things you have to learn by doing, so go build something, anything, for someone else. As you're building it, resist the urge to start with the end product. Instead, focus on what problem you are solving and why. Talk to a representative customer, discover their needs. And before you start building, think carefully about how you’ll measure success. Going through this process will give you experience with the essence of product management.

If you already have experience like this, great! Prepare your resume with results-based bullet points about your experience. Read the book, “Crack the PM Interview”, and practice interview questions with an experienced product manager. Then use your network (or build one) to get referrals into your target companies. My MBA program helped guide me through the resume preparation, interview practice, and networking process. Without an MBA program, all these things are possible, it will just take some persistence.

I noticed you studied Computer Engineering (and also worked as a Software Engineer) and now you work as a PM - how important is this technical grounding you have to your role? Could someone succeed without it?

My technical background is important to the extent that it is a part of me. Each PM has a different style and mine is based on my blend of technical and business experience. On a typical day, I communicate with both technical and non-technical teammates, go deep on technical discussions to unblock my team, and perform data analysis to measure success. And these things are not the essence of PM - the essence of PM is solving problems in a way that creates value for both customers and the business. If someone is comfortable learning from and communicating with the technical stakeholders involved in product development, they can succeed.

That being said, a product manager who builds machine learning models for a social media application may need more technical skills than a product manager who builds the web interface for an e-commerce application.

Previously, you founded a startup (Hansel). In what ways is being a product owner at Microsoft similar to building something from scratch?

PMs and entrepreneurs both need to understand who their customers are. I had my first experience running focus groups for my startup and I’ve executed several more since becoming a product manager.

Both also need to understand the market and the competition. As a founder, I spent a lot of time researching, speaking to, and using products of competitors. As a product manager, I don’t often get to speak to competitors or use their products directly, but I leverage any online resources I can find to learn about their products and what customers like about them.

Finally, both require effective communication with various disciplines. In a big company there are many specialized roles: design, engineering, marketing, sales, legal, research. As a PM you’ll need to work with them all at some point. As a founder you’ll need to perform some if not all of these functions yourself, especially in the early stages. And at some point, you’ll need the help of others to be successful.

Finally, how helpful do you think your MBA has been towards your PM career?

My MBA was extremely helpful in helping me transition from engineering, while providing a foundation of business knowledge to complement my technical background. The MBA provided me with tools to pitch my transferable skills and a network to help me land and succeed in interviews.

Additionally, the MBA taught me how to analyze business opportunities, develop business strategies, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams. I use these skills daily to be effective as a PM and an MBA is just one way to gain them.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this interview, check out my website CareerFair. You can learn about tech jobs by people who've done them and also read case studies.

Cheers,
Shikhar

Redesigning Apple Music After Being Rejected

Shikhar Sachdev — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 23:50:56 +0000

When you apply for a job and get rejected, that’s normally the end of the story.

And in fact for most jobs, this doesn’t seem like the end of the world. You might have liked the product and the team culture, but hey, plenty of fish in the sea.

But if you really want to work somewhere and the opportunity doesn’t work out, then that can sting.

That’s where Jason comes in.

In the summer of 2017, Jason Yuan was rejected from an Apple Music design internship. He referred to it as an opportunity of a lifetime, that, well he had missed out on.

But what Jason did next is pretty awesome. He spent the next three months pursuing his own project focused on redesigning the Apple Music experience.

He reframed the rejection as an opportunity to get better at his craft. In his case study that went viral, Jason walks us through what he’d change about Apple Music, how he’d make it better, and other potential ideas he has for the platform.

It’s a remarkable piece of work. It shows that Jason is focused on the process - he’s willing to put his work out there and get better.

His whole experience conveys three concepts that I want to discuss:

High Agency

When most people are told they can’t do something, that’s the end of the dialogue. They outsource their decision making to other people.

People with high agency don’t let this happen. A second dialogue starts in their mind - how do I get around this obstacle?

This is a concept I first heard about from Eric Weinstein. Steve Jobs has a similar concept which he referred to as the Reality Distortion Field. An example:

In 1981, Bud Tribble, one of the key employees on the original Mac computer, greeted a new software engineer at Apple by telling him they were scheduled to ship the Macintosh software in just ten months.

The new employee, Andy Hertzfeld, told him this was impossible. Tribble agreed.

But Jobs wouldn’t take no for an answer. Tribble described this as follows:

“In Jobs’s presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”

Jason is a prime example of a high agency person. Although he didn’t get the internship, he realized that the opportunity to learn more about UX design was entirely up to him.

He didn’t need permission to do what he did. All he needed to put in was the time and effort.

Jason was rejected for the internship in the Summer of 2017. He published his Apple Music UX Case Study around then.

Can you guess where he interned the Summer of 2018? Apple.

That’s right - Jason’s case study basically made hiring him one year later a no brainer. He got rejected the summer before and there’s where the story should have ended. But his resourcefulness made sure that wasn’t the case.

Learn in Public

Most people think they need to be experts before publishing any of their work online.

But when Jason published his Apple case study, he made it very clear that he wasn’t coming from a place of expertise.

In fact, Jason’s alma mater Northwestern University didn’t even have a formal graphic design program, so Jason is all self-taught.

Don’t worry about being wrong because you’re likely in a position where you’re pushing yourself and growing. If you are wrong, the internet will correct you and you’ll end up learning new things.

Writing your thoughts out also forces you to be crystal clear and contributes to solidifying your learnings. In a world that’s going increasingly remote, writing well is a valuable skill to have and one that can make you stand out.

Finally, learning in public also allows one to attract mentors. Not many people share their work in public. It makes you stand out and people who are already higher up in their career start wanting to help you.

In Jason’s case, by documenting his work, he was able to get the Apple internship.

And let’s assume for a moment that he didn’t get the internship. Even then, his case study went viral - it was widely shared on social media and he got thousands of people checking his work out.

Only good things could have happened. If not Apple, Jason would still have eventually ended up with an awesome opportunity popping up.

Spite

Jason prefaces his case study by clearly stating that his work was not driven by indignation or spite. In other words, he states that he didn’t put all this work into redesigning Apple Music because they rejected him.

That’s fair. It’s definitely the healthy mindset. But I want to explore the alternative view as well.

Let’s assume that he did do this out of spite.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Proving people wrong can be a huge force of motivation.

Danielle Leong, an Engineering Manager at Github, talks about this in her Twitter thread. If you’ve been told that you’re not good enough at something, instead of complaining you can get better.

Everyone loves an underdog. When Apple rejects you and you come back by writing a 3000 word case study that goes viral on the internet, you’ve completely flipped the script.

There’s actually a bit of research that has been done related to this investigating the reason behind why certain individuals become entrepreneurs.

The paper finds that individuals with actual ability that exceeds the signal value of their ability (say, their credentials or whatever they can put on a resume) become entrepreneurs.

Steve Jobs was rejected from HP because he lacked a degree. He went on to start Apple.

Jan Koum was rejected by Twitter and Facebook. He went on to start Whatsapp..which he sold to Facebook for $19 billion.

Jason Yuan was rejected from Apple. So he wrote a case study that went viral and the rest is history.

Plug

Thanks for reading. I’ve linked Jason’s case study in the article but here it is again.

If you liked this, you’ll probably also enjoy this story about landing an interview using Facebook Ads. It’s another example of High Agency.

I run a website called CareerFair - it's practical career advice for your tech career. You should check it out.

From English Major to Software Engineer

Shikhar Sachdev — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 01:15:16 +0000

I had the chance to speak with a recent college grad who now works as a Software Engineer at a Series A startup. What's cool is that he studied English in college, so you can learn all about how he transitioned into his current role.

What do you do & where do you work?

My name is Chris Dang and I work at Scratch which is a Series A fintech startup that has reimagined loan servicing to help borrowers understand, manage, and pay back their loans. It’s a company filled with determined, smart, and mission driven individuals.

I’m a software engineer who primarily focuses on Identity and Access Management. This means I focus on authentication, authorization, and user management problems. I also occasionally work outside my domain in areas such as frontend, security, and infrastructure. This happens a lot at startups which require folks to wear many hats.

You majored in English in college (with a CS minor) - can you tell me a bit about your background? Do you think being an English major helps you as a software engineer?

I don’t really understand why but I just enjoyed writing essays and discussing texts so I became an English major. It was one of those moments where I felt like I just had to go with my gut and I’m glad I did because becoming an English major made me a more creative person. This creativity allowed me to come up with a few startup ideas that I’ve attempted and have planned for the future.

The reason I taught myself how to code is that I wanted to build my ideas. I’d like to note that I did take a few intro computer science courses before I became an upperclassman, so when I began attempting some of my startup ideas I already knew OOP, runtime analysis, data structures and algorithms.

In my day-to-day, being an English major helps me with communication, which is very key as an engineer, and, this is a little random, but it makes me more relatable to non-engineering folks since a lot of them probably took similar courses to me.

Was the lack of a CS major ever a problem in your job search?

It was definitely a problem in the beginning since I had no experience and a lot of companies wouldn’t even give me an interview. I wasn’t too worried about this though because I had a passion project I was working on and if I wasn’t able to get a job, I was determined to go all on the project and turn it into a startup. I actually was able to launch it to the app store and had a customer acquisition strategy. Luckily, a few companies, including WeWork, liked the grit I showed in my startup and gave me a chance.

The lack of a CS major did leave a gap in my knowledge when it came to interviews and performing the day to day job. I did a few things to mitigate this gap which included going through lecture slides for upper division courses I found interesting (e.g. Operating Systems and Computer Security), spending copious amounts of time reading articles about engineering, and spending time on my passion project which gave me a lot of real world experience. Also, Stack Overflow was my best friend.

What are some things you considered when moving from WeWork to Scratch?

My time at WeWork made me realize that I was very interested in the Identity, Infrastructure, and Security domains with Identity being my primary interest. So when I began my job search, I made sure to focus on jobs in those domains but I did apply to some generalist positions. The reason for this is that I’m pretty young and it’s good for me to have breadth in other areas. I also wanted to make sure that my next job had really challenging problems and smart engineers. The things I cared about least were job stability (e.g. whether or not my company would exist in a year), my total compensation, and the company brand.

I optimize for growth over learning by focusing on opportunities that I’m passionate about over opportunities that would make me more money. Money and brand names bring you a limited amount of satisfaction. However, doing something you are passionate about will always be more exciting because as you grow in that area, the horizons expand and more exciting ideas/projects will come to you.

How is it different working at a company with around 45 employees to one which had over 10,000?

The nice thing about working at startups is you are guaranteed to have a large role. Everyday I learn something new and I always feel like my work is rewarding. But there is a trade off here. I do feel like I’m a lot busier since my role is more significant than if I were at a large company.

One thing I wish I realized earlier though was that even at a big company, you can have a really exciting role. It really depends on the team and your manager. If you are hungry for a challenge but would like the comfort of a large company, I would recommend interviewing with some of the newer projects.

How was the onboarding process like at Scratch given that it’s been fully remote? How do you feel about remote work?

I actually went to the office before the shelter in place was ordered so I didn’t have any issues with setting up my laptop or developer environment. But even if this wasn’t the case, I don’t see remote onboarding being a problem due to strong video technologies such as Zoom.

My first day of work actually began a few weeks after the quarantine began so I haven’t had more than a few days to see my coworkers in person. It’s a little weird because I spend so much time with these people but our interactions are exclusively through a computer screen. One thing I’ve realized is I’m lukewarm to remote work culture since it’s hard to have spontaneous interactions with coworkers and happy hours aren’t as fun.

That being said, I’m really amazed by how our team has adapted to these conditions. Despite the pandemic, the conditions of working remote, and other obstacles, we’ve managed to persevere and launch our PPP product.

Do you get to collaborate with non-technical individuals too?

I’ve worked with teams in business operations and design at least once a week. It’s cool to collaborate with folks from other departments because you can pick their brains and see another perspective to a problem you are working on. A really big aspect of these interactions is your ability to communicate technical topics since a lot of times non-technical individuals will rely on you to explain what’s going on under the hood with the software.

Are there some things you did not expect to encounter on your day-to-day as a software engineer?

My average day consists of reviewing pull requests and working on my own pull requests. Occasionally, I’ll have meetings to sync on the state of my team or the company or run interviews for candidates.

My experience with my side project gave me a pretty good idea of the technical challenges I would face in my day-to-day. I would say one thing that surprised me was how open people were to my questions. This made it easier for me to grow as an engineer since I was surrounded by people who wanted to help me learn. A piece of advice I’d give to new engineers is to try to solve a problem or understand a concept on your own first before asking the questions.

My main takeaways from the interview:

Optimize for growth over money, especially at the beginning of your career. Money can help you reach a local maxima, but the biggest gains to be made are when you optimize for growth and learning (it's how you can reach your global maxima).
Remote work can be awesome, but it takes away the spontaneity and serendipity that can only really be replicated in person. Maybe a hybrid model is the future of work, where you can get the benefits of both.

If you liked this interview, I'd really appreciate it if you checked out my website Career Fair. It's a compilation of case studies and articles to help you accelerate your tech career.

Peace out :)
Shikhar

Avoid Calendar Creep

Shikhar Sachdev — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 03:35:20 +0000

We all get 24 hours a day.

And yet some people are able to produce massive amounts of output whilst others struggle to complete their work.

You might say this is because some people are more intelligent than others. Or that they just procrastinate less.

Whilst both those answers are probably true, I think they’re lazy answers. Anyone can tell themselves they’re not very smart and then just resign themselves to the fact that they won’t get much done.

I actually think there is a much more likely explanation behind why you might get less done than someone else at your day job: calendar creep.

Let’s define calendar creep as slowly letting your calendar be filled with seemingly harmless meetings that end up crushing your productivity.

Before we talk about this a bit more, though, we need to discuss the opposite of useless meetings.

Deep Work

In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport defines deep work as the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

In a workplace in which you’re bombarded by slack notifications, useless meeting invites, and never ending email threads, deep work can be like a superpower.

The people who have the highest output are very likely to also have a lot of deep work embedded into their workday.

The main reason behind this is because there is a massive switching cost to getting distracted. According to a University of California Irvine study, “it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”

But maybe you already knew this. The hard part is actually communicating this to others around you.

How To Say No

Okay, so let’s say a coworker sends you a calendar invite for a meeting you know you’re not going to add value to or benefit from.

It’s easy to fall into the mindset of thinking just one meeting won’t do anything.

But slowly what starts to happen is that more and more of these meetings creep up on your calendar.

Next thing you know, you have to work overtime just to complete tasks that are likely to be the important ones.

Focusing in and out of an important task will both reduce the quality of your work and take you longer to do it.

The problem is that saying no to unnecessary meetings can often be tough. You don’t want to offend people, especially if one of them is your boss.

I’ve found the following two ways to be extremely helpful in dealing with this:

1) Loom

Leverage tools like Loom to communicate your thoughts ahead of time.

Loom allows you to send video messages. When someone sends you a calendar invite for a meeting you don’t need to attend, feel free to send them a message along the lines of:

“Hey, thanks for sending me the invite. Not sure how much value I can add given X, but here are some thoughts I have. If you still need me to attend, let me know and happy to do so :)”

And then attach your video in which you speak on the meeting topic for around 30sec to a minute. If you need to speak for longer than that, then there’s a good chance you actually need to attend the meeting.

In most cases, the meeting organizer will be completely fine with your response and even appreciate your thoughtfulness in sending them a video message.

The video message makes things personable and allows you to communicate your thoughts faster than through written format. I’m really surprised more people don't do this.

2) Mark chunks of time on your calendar to not schedule anything

By blocking off chunks of time on your calendar, you can focus on the work that actually matters.

This mainly has two purposes. First, it reduces the ability of someone else to mark off time on your calendar. Remember: this is your calendar. By being aggressive about what you focus on, you’re actually benefiting your company.

Second, it is an intentional way to remind yourself to focus on the work that actually matters.

Don’t get me wrong - there are absolutely going to be meetings that you need to attend and be an active participant in. The tactics that I mentioned above, though, aim to make the % of such effective meetings much higher on your calendar.

Ending thoughts

Most people don’t pay attention to calendar creep. Don’t be one of those people.

Be proactive and aggressive about guarding your time, and in return, your output will increase.

If you liked the article, you can view it in a much nicer format with pretty diagrams here.

Peace,
Shikhar

Use Facebook Ads To Land An Interview

Shikhar Sachdev — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 07:54:16 +0000

This is a story about a software engineer who used Facebook Ads to target the CEO of Reddit to get an interview.

The traditional way to get a job interview is to submit your resume and pray.

Everyone does this and it’s taken to be the default because it’s easy. You can send the same resume with the click of a button to totally different companies, no effort on your part other than preparing the resume.

There’s no way to stand out, no uniqueness.

Generally, the way to get around this is to ask for a referral or to reach out to someone at the company for some sort of informational interview. Both of these methods allow for a more personalized approach to job hunting.

But is it possible to go even one step further?

Stand Out

In 2016, Chris Seline was coming off a failed startup and looking for new opportunities.

Unlike most other people, though, Chris wasn’t a fan of the resume blast method.

His strategy was to target specific companies and try to get noticed creatively rather than use the traditional channels and get lost in the shuffle.

Chris decided that he really wanted to work for Reddit.

His plan was to write a blog post and then email it to the CEO of Reddit.

The blog post is thorough - it’s 2000 words, technical, and you can tell a lot of effort was put into it.

Even if Chris had emailed his post to the Reddit CEO, there’s a strong chance he would have gotten an interview. 99% of applicants don’t put this much effort into an application and receiving such a personalized email is a positive signal.

But Chris didn’t just email him.

Facebook Ads

He decided to use Facebook Ads to target the CEO of Reddit (Steve Huffman).

Here’s how he did it:

Find the Reddit CEO’s public Facebook profile
Use this to find out where he lived, what he liked, what he was interested in, etc
Use the above to run a super targeted FB Ads Campaign

Note that Chris only wanted one person to click on this Ad, that’s why he had to go super targeted.

The Result

Chris ended up spending $10. The ad reached 197 people. 4 People clicked on it. One of them was the CEO of Reddit.

Next thing you know, Reddit HR reached out to schedule an interview. Nicely done.

I contacted Chris to find out if he actually got the job - here’s what he said:

I did not. It turns out they were just starting a search for "head of search" at Reddit, and asked if I would like to interview for that job. That would have been my dream job, and definitely worth a move across the country, even with 3 kids and a wife in tow (I live in DC), so naturally I was very excited and said yes. But after a few talks they thought I didn't have enough experience with big companies, so they asked if I would be interested in an IC role. I was, but I wasn't willing to move across the country for that, and they didn't want to hire remote workers. So that was that.

Takeaway

The reason this is a fun story is because of the FB Ads.

But I think what people may gloss over is the amount of time and research Chris put into writing the blog post that he eventually showed to the Reddit CEO.

If we go back to the beginning of this case study, notice how I mentioned that just blasting a resume to a company signals nothing unique and frankly a lack of effort.

A good way to resolve problems is to invert them - if we do that here, we get the following:

Chris’ blog post was well researched, relevant, and made him stand out. The FB Ads targeting was just the cherry on top.

Next time you see a job you really want to get, think about how you can go that one step further.

Thanks to Chris for responding to my email. You can read his original blog post on this here.

Thanks for reading. I run a website called Career Fair where you can learn about tech jobs and get career advice. Would be awesome if you checked it out :)

Keep a Brag Document

Shikhar Sachdev — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 07:27:32 +0000

The human brain is terrible at remembering information.

When we try to use the past to predict the future, we end up using our memory of the past. And our memory is extremely flawed, subject to whims and emotions.

One of the biggest consequences of this is at work.

You clock in 9-5 for days on days and then when you look back at what you did a year ago, you think “Where did all that time go?”

Even worse, if YOU can’t remember what the hell you did, how will your boss?

In an ideal world: you do a great job, your company rewards you. They’ll notice all the hard work you’re putting in. All the beautiful lines of code you’ve written.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. And the costliest mistake you can make in your career is not being proactive about recording your achievements and your little wins.

Enter The Brag Document

I first read about a Brag Document on Julia Evan’s blog.

By recording your small wins and accomplishments on a weekly basis, you accumulate concrete evidence of what you’ve achieved.

And these “wins” don’t need to be Olympic Gold Medals.

Did you help a coworker understand how to use an API? Jot it down.

Did you anticipate a nasty bug and proactively reach out about it? It goes on there.

Did you help mentor a junior employee? That’s definitely part of it.

Over time, I promise you, your brag document will do wonders for your career.

Sure - negotiating a raise or getting a promotion will become easier. In fact, come performance review time, even your boss will thank you for it. Those things are hard to write from pure memory. More on this a bit later.

But the biggest benefit of a brag document lies in identifying what you enjoy doing.

Your wins are likely a representation of tasks you enjoyed. And you should be very proactive about focusing on those tasks going forward.

Use your Brag Document to ruthlessly identify the tasks you want to spend more time on, as well as the tasks you don’t want to do anymore.

The Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

At work, 80% of what you can feel proud about will stem from 20% of what you do. You can think of your Brag Document as representing that 20%.

Use this 20% to ask yourself questions like:

Is there a common theme amongst this work?
Are there topics here that I thought I didn’t actually like but turns out I do?
How much of this work involves collaboration with other departments / teams?
How can I do more of this work?

Frequency

Update your brag document on a weekly basis. You can set it as a recurring event on your calendar.

The biggest benefit of this is that it forces you to scrutinize your output on a regular basis and allows you to be proactive about focusing on the work you want to do.

Let’s say that after a few weeks of work, you genuinely have nothing to put on your brag document.

There’s a chance you had a bit of a slow period at work, but maybe you’re just stuck somewhere you don’t want to be?

Collaborate

Talk about your brag document with co-workers. Ask them what you think you should put on yours.

You’ll often find that they’re able to mention things you completely forgot or didn’t even seem to think about.

Remember - just because something seems easy to you doesn’t mean it’s easy in general. 5 minutes of work may have taken you 10 years to learn.

You should also encourage your team to keep their own brag documents. Help each other be accountable and celebrate each other’s wins. This builds a strong team culture.

Your Manager

You should try to share your brag document with your manager once a quarter.

It might seem weird or unnatural - you’re basically dumping all your achievements into their lap. But this actually really makes their life easier.

If your manager ever needs to vouch for you internally, then boom - they have direct evidence they can use. If your manager needs to reshuffle workload, then they know what you’re good at and what you can improve on.

Even better, you and your manager should go through your brag document together.

Tell them what you want to do more of. Tell them what you wish was on there more.

You’ll both be able to identify areas in which you’re doing a great job and also areas in which your manager perhaps wants you to focus on more.

Another aspect that’s helpful here is with goal setting - your manager and you likely work together anyway to determine quarterly goals.

You should use your brag document to help you identify what type of goals you need to be hitting. Very often, we will achieve goals and then think “Wait..what was the point again?”

By using your brag document to set goals, you’ll be much more likely to be working towards something that you find rewarding.

Ending thoughts

Once you start getting in the habit of using a brag document, operating without one will feel like doing your work in the dark.

Over time, you’ll develop a much clearer picture of the type of work that you want to focus on for your career.

Next step: be vocal about it and let your manager know. In fact, tell everyone you know.

Hope you liked the article!!

If you want to see the full article with nice images, you can see that here.

I run a website called Career Fair that helps you supercharge your tech career. Check it out and hit me up if you have questions :)

Peace,
Shikhar