Skip to main content

Featured Post

The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
Post a Comment

The Backup

I realized it has been 8 years since I started working in tech. 18th May 2018 was my first day as an associate software engineer at Accenture. I remember meeting people with 8 years of work experience in my first week there and thinking, “man, they are really old.” I regret it now.

My first manager, who was definitely old, took a look at me and foretold “this is the boy who is going to be the backup.”

Backup is one of those ubiquitously used IT industry terms, because people ran out of words in their word bag to describe someone who is secondary to a main guy working on a project. They could have called me a rookie, but they don’t want to, because rookie makes me sound cool and they know I am not cool.

Over time I gained the trust of both the manager and the main guy, and I was later assigned as a backup to three other main guys. I was even once the backup for a backup. By the time I was about to become the main guy myself, a global pandemic punched me in the face and knocked me unconscious to the ground.

Or at least, I would like to believe that I have been unconscious for past four years and I woke up just a few months ago in a whole different continent with a Master’s degree. Because how else can I explain my current predicament!

I moved to a different team in my current company earlier this year, and I was freaking out about all the skills I don’t know (I have this flaw where I start being honest about my flaws with people, like I am doing right now).

So, my current manager took a look at me, channeled the spirit of my first manager, despite both of them not being aware of each other’s presence on this planet, and told me, “You are going to be the backup.”

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is SUTVA for A/B testing?

Imagine if person B’s blood pressure reading depends on whether person A receives the blood pressure medicine in a randomized controlled trial. This will be violating Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) SUTVA states that the treatment received by an individual should not influence the outcome we see for another individual during the experiment. I know the initial example sounded absurd, so let me try again. Consider LinkedIn A/B testing a new ‘dislike’ reaction for its users, and the gods of fate chose you to be part of the initial treatment group that received this update. Excited after seeing this new update, you use this dislike reaction on my post and send a screenshot to a few of your connections to do the same, who are coincidentally in the control group that did not receive the update. Your connections log in and engage with my posts to use this dislike reaction, but later get disappointed as this new update is not yet available to them. The offices of LinkedIn are tr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Solving Customer Churn with a hammer!

Learning when data should take a back seat and give way to domain knowledge is a valuable skill. Suppose you built a machine learning model on the data of your customers to predict churn risk. Now that you have a risk score for each customer, what do you do next? Do you filter the top n% based on the risk and send them a coupon with a discount in the hopes that it will prevent churn? But what if price is not the factor driving churn in many of these customers? Customers might have been treated poorly by customer service, which drove them away from your company's product.  Or there might have been an indirect competitor's product or service that removes the need for your company's product altogether (this happened to companies like Blockbuster and Kodak in the past!) There could be a myriad of factors, but you get the point! Dashboards and models cannot guide any company's strategic actions directly. If companies try to use them without additional context, more often tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Curing writer's block with sunk cost fallacy

I paid $20 to renew this blog's domain in July. But the truth is, I had been suffering from writer's block ever since the start of this year and hadn’t posted a single thing. At one point, I was ready to give up on the blog altogether, but a voice in my head kept reminding me of all the time and money I’d already invested in this blog. So, this week, I sat down to write this imperfect, patchy article—about none other than that voice itself.  Let me start with a classic scenario where you might have also encountered this voice. Suppose you’re at an Italian restaurant and ordered some pasta and tiramisu. After finishing the pasta, you realize you’re full, and there’s no way your stomach can handle that delicious tiramisu sitting right in front of you. But then, that beautiful brain of yours reminds you that you’ll be paying for the tiramisu whether you eat it or not. In a desperate attempt to avoid wasting money, you reluctantly eat two quick bites. And just like that, my frien...
Post a Comment
Read more