Leader in Today's Generation

• Someone who can learn faster than the rest of the team.
• Someone who can bring their experience and perspective to find solutions when trade-offs are needed.
• Someone who balances skills, team talent, and deadlines effectively.
• Someone who learns on behalf of the team, anticipating questions before they arise.
• Someone who takes responsibility for failures.
• Someone who brings experts to the table when external perspectives are needed.
• GenAI is like having interns for CEOs. Now, all we need is focus, time, and the willingness to learn.

A true leader of today's generation learns faster than the rest, balances talent and deadlines with precision, takes responsibility for failures, and brings in the right expertise when needed. They anticipate challenges, solve problems with perspective, and embrace AI as a catalyst for growth—fueled by focus, time, and a willingness to learn

Keep Going!!!

My Learnings as an AI Strategist / AI Advisor / Solution Architect

• Finding a Job: Understand the difference between finding a job that pays well and aligns with your passion. Aim for the latter; it fuels long-term growth and fulfillment.
• Building Passion: In the early stages, it's okay to prioritize learning over earning. Build your passion—it's an investment in your future.
• Focus on Problem-Solving: Choose a direction that enables you to build impactful products and address core challenges comprehensively.
• Avoid Distractions: Stay focused and don't get sidetracked by every new opportunity or idea that comes your way.
• Maximize Peak Years: Your 'peak' years—when you have the best health, time, and energy—are limited. Make the most of them by working on meaningful goals.
• Leverage Your Perspective: Your unique perspective is your strength and grows more valuable over time. Share your authentic lessons to inspire and guide others.
• Spread Optimism: Life is short. Be a source of hope and positivity. Remember, technology isn't inherently complex—it's often how it's communicated or understood that makes it seem so.

"Focus on building your passion, solving meaningful problems, and sharing your unique perspective. In your peak years, embrace learning, spread optimism, and leave a legacy of impact and inspiration."

Keep Going!!!

Navigating the Tradeoff Between Income and Responsibilities in Freelance AI Consulting and Corporate Jobs

• My friend - Hey Siva, you seem busy. 
• Myself - Yes, I have some classes and consulting. 
• My friend - So, you're earning more money? 
• Myself - Not necessarily. Some leads work out, some don't. Sometimes, even after presenting the architecture, there is no convergence. 
• My friend - That's common. 
• Myself - The same uncertainties exist in a corporate job, where ideas may not align. However, you get to work closely with founders. 
• My friend - That's true. 
• Myself - Even if your idea fails in consulting, you have a direct connection to lead, discover, and strategize. 
• Myself - In Freelance AI consulting, the outcome is clear - it either works or it fails, and I deal with it directly. No regrets :)

Freedom entails risks, but it's worth it. You pave your own path.

Sure, feel free to ping me if you are interested in harnessing the power of AI.

Keep Exploring!!!

Embracing Lifelong Learning: A Call to Rethink Skills, Failure, and Progress

In an era where innovation propels us forward, the history of automobiles and airplanes serves as a powerful reminder of human ingenuity and resilience. These inventions, perfected over decades, symbolize our capacity to adapt and trust in both progress and the individuals behind it. Just as we have placed our trust in these revolutionary technologies, it is imperative that we apply the same open-mindedness and commitment to the world of personal and professional development—especially in emerging fields like AI.

Learning as a Natural Process

Learning, particularly in artificial intelligence, should not be treated as an imposition but rather as a natural extension of our innate curiosity and growth. Constraining this process to fixed timelines or comparisons only hampers the genuine learning experience. Instead, the focus should be on addressing challenges that resonate personally, which ensures a more authentic and impactful engagement with the subject matter.

The Power of Continuous Improvement

One of the most empowering aspects of learning is that it does not require formal recognition or titles. True learning comes from a steadfast commitment to experiment, fail, collaborate, and relearn. By prioritizing personal skills and interests, each individual paves their own unique path towards their goals. This journey enriches not only the learner but also those around them, transforming interactions and leading to mutual progress.

Failure is Okay, Experience and Journey matters

Moreover, undergoing failures—be they in products or personal lessons—are crucial in shaping a more empathetic and knowledgeable individual. These experiences teach resilience and provide unique insights that can be shared with others. In doing so, a learner evolves from a mere participant in their field to a mentor and leader who uplifts and educates, rather than exploiting the potential of others.

Keep Learning

Embrace the process of learning as you would trust the safety of a car or a plane. Dive deep into your passions, allow yourself the freedom to fail, and rise with a richer understanding and capability to contribute positively.

Remember: the journey of learning should be liberating, not limiting. Let's commit to making learning a part of our lifestyle—to continuously develop skills that drive us towards our ultimate destinations.

Keep learning, growing, and influencing. The road ahead is as exciting as you choose to make it.!!!

Developing Your Skills in Data Science and AI

You don't need a title to learn/work in data science
You don't need to start with what everyone is recommending.
Focus on a few areas of AI, not the complete landscape.
Seek out mentors to guide you.
Learn by collaborating, solving problems, and asking for help in AI-related issues.
Do not believe that the growth path is the same for everyone; avoid a copycat approach.
Sometimes, you need to work without titles to really excel in your areas of interest.
Experiment / Look for Real-time problem-solving, and proposing solutions
Be resilient setbacks are okay, Pause and find alternate solutions
Consistently seek understanding and clarity. 
Roll up your sleeves, not all the time, but only for meaningful AI work. Remember, you are not a machine. Strive at a consistent pace.
Learn to differentiate Pro AI vs AI Hype and develop intuition to spot it

Keep Exploring!

Keep Exploring and Move on

Ideas are easy, On ground challenges makes the differences
Power point is easy, Getting first principles right is important
Always strong basics and persistence shine over presentations 
Ideation is Easy, Evolving is Innovation and Differentiator

Keep Exploring!!!

Startup vs Big Companies

In a startup, everyone works toward a shared goal using the best web, data, AI, and APIs, focusing on coding a cohesive user journey. Compared to big companies, where five separate teams with mixed abilities might work on overlapping projects, a startup operates with 'X' effort, whereas a large company expends '5X' with the risk of internal competition leading to inefficiencies. By the time the larger company overcomes these challenges, the startup likely has rolled out a robust set of production features.

Rate:

• Efficiency and focus: Startups - 8, Big Companies - 4
• Resource utilization: Startups - 9, Big Companies - 3

The ratings reflect the agility and clear focus of startups against the potential for redundancy and internal competition at large corporations.

Why a great product needs alignment at all levels is required

Keep Exploring!!!

Career in Data Science - Fresher / Lateral moves

A job is like onboarding and getting started, When you get into the train it doesn't matter it's unreserved / sleeper / ac. First, you need to get started. If you are starting your career in data, BI, reporting, SQL development. Everything connects to data science getting started.

A job is important, to begin with. Going towards a destination is as important as waiting for the best train. 

Every job you are paid to solve problems, there is no good data, good upstream, all set and come and code. Build solutions with what you have matter than complaining there is no good data / work.

After a few years when you switch into Data Science, focus more on value addition. How your experience can help in data, domain, and selling. An experience transition should offer more than just a data science developer role.

You cannot learn a new skill every day. You can have primary skills, secondary skills. Collaborate with people, work on joint success. You can never be solo successful anywhere. Be a team player.

Mindset / Focused learning / Get over failures / Remain focused on value creation are key traits of career growth.

Keep Thinking!!!

Career, Growth, Trust

Why do we switch careers?

• Better Salary
• Better Job profiles
• Relocation
• Brand

What drives you?

• Unsure of growth in the current place
• Not getting recognition

What is unsure of growth?

• The trust deficit between you and your manager
• I may not grow here or I don't sense my growth here

How you may grow?

• When you get your right projects
• When your work is appreciated
• It has both internal and external factors
• Your skills, projects, Contributions

Does it end with a Job Change?

• New job, the new team may be the same story
• Match of skills
• Culture, Able to question and ask with clarity
• Contribute, question, collaborate 

In long term, you are your own competition. Titles - Jobs - Salary is point in time but what you learn, build, make your own uniqueness, strength is the key.

Good read - link

• Transparently sharing it without request
• Make it clear that it's just opinions and not decisions

Keep Thinking!!!

Solopreneur vs Manager vs Entrepreneur

• Solopreneur - I learn everything and do it by myself, I jump quickly than trying to address/fix the gaps
• Manager - I need to get it done from a planning perspective, I may not need to be technically into it
• Entrepreneur - I grow myself plus I grow my team as well, I enable them to do achieve their goals as well as organizational goals

It again depends on personal interests/products/domain. With or without titles do what fills your passion :)

Keep Going!!!

Health vs Career

1. To pursue your interests you do not need titles
2. To make your ideas work, you need to focus
3. Don't wait for the title, prepare yourself as an independent consultant
4. Titles vs contribution are debatable and depends on company, Your ideal role vs what you have gaps address it
5. Every problem can be done in multiple ways, Think like a consultant, observe as a reviewer when you see already someone solved the problem
6. Connect dots of experience and apply for every new use case
7. Health cannot take a pause but a career can take a pause
8. When sabbatical matters, give a break for your body, mind, and soul
9. Career gaps do not mean you stopped learning, It only means you stopped earning
10. Having multiple passive incomes outside your work will assist in long term
11. Compete against yourself, Stay firm on your principles
12. New skills = Old Skills + New changes or features, Apply experience-based differential thinking
13. Overall its just one life, be less regretful
14. Money does not equate experiences learned or earned
15. Money matters but health matters more

Keep Going!!!

Measure Experience from Projects / Domain / Versatility / Evolving Perspectives

Career perspective at different stages

• 10 years of Working on the Same project = 10 years of Experience?
• 10 years Experience in 1 domain vs 5 domains (Multi-domain exposure)
• Ability to Translate Bird's eye view to Prototype
• Map prototype to Implementation tasks
• Work on the storyline in mind than just near focus tasks
• Code with Clarity vs Code with limited visibility
• Code with Domain knowledge vs Code and refactor based on domain knowledge
• Partner with Business and Work vs Work and Rework again for business
• Familiarity of Technology vs Visibility of use cases vs Clarity of implementation vs Ability to explain in an implementation perspective
• Map trends vs Current architecture vs Time vs Focus 
• Always keep thinking from multiple diverse perspectives

Keep Thinking!!!

Domain + Tech + Impact

My role has always been innovating / initiatives/domain knowledge-driven based use cases for more revenue opportunities / lowering the cost of operations / better customer service. Recollecting some of my milestone projects.

Reverse Logistics

Customer Service Projects

• Better delivery insights/emails to measure status at each leg
• Provided more touchpoints for better repair/refurbishment delivery

Warranty rewrite

• Rewrite warranty with traceability to new rules
• Data lineage for different warranty rules
• Tracking between repairs/exchanges

Vision for Retail Innovation

• RFID, EAS, and legacy devices for people counting, loss prevention vs vision-based solutions
• Ideate, prototype, demonstrate, patent. I wasn't there to collaborate or see how intel scaled it up but happy for the ideas that went till NRF / products

Startups collaboration

• Vision for ad effectiveness, Measuring sales impact from digital displays
• Vision for logo damage assessments - measuring logos to be replaced due to wear and tear in aircrafts
• Vision for Agriculture - Duplicate vendor detection and alert

Startups pitch and failed attempts. Vision doesn't work alone. It has to be a combination of vision + data to be a successful product.

Keep Thinking!!!

Career Lessons

I have gone through cycles of ideas, initiatives rejected, put down as it flows through leadership levels. Many times it got delayed but there were few memorable successes in #rewrite #warranty to XBOX, filing #retail patents, pushing ideas. I have observed myself going through frustration, rejection cycle. I was able to achieve those ideas in my next role the same/next company. It takes time to prove/demonstrate our ideas have potential. Sometimes we need to wait/ further sharpen our skills/ till the next role / next company to make the idea successful.

• Sometimes your best ideas will have no future, they will get killed. Keep going
• Keep versioning all your ideas and add techniques to improve upon it
• Build domain knowledge + AI to solve it optimally
• When people kill ideas, find a place to grow if you believe in your ideas
• 'Go' where you 'Grow', 'Grow' where you 'Go'

More Reads - Link

Accidental Leaders - (July 16th, 2020)

IT has a lot of accidental leaders. Years of experience may not reflect competency. Some categories of leaders

Idea Killers - Any idea you bring up to the table. The intention is to play a safe game. They view IT projects as sailing in smooth weather. Very less interest in innovation and pure 9-6 safe side players.

Jargon Gurus - Highly qualified, great connection with their ladder up. Any idea you take up they will provide a counter idea for it. Ultimately their goal is to prove the idea is not good enough to pursue

Enthusiast Leaders - They don't know about technical aspects but get carried away with wow factors. Their shortsightedness will not give them long term perspective

Passionate Leaders - Talk on your face, encourage the idea. Warn you when things fail but really back you when it fails. They are hard to work with but they take the organization to the next level.

The IT industry is a very hard industry to spot true leaders. All leaders who speak may not be good at execution. All leaders who deliver may not be good presenters. Keep going. Build the true leader in your inner self - Siva

P and L in Career

Yes, you guessed it right, It's Profit and Loss. Naaaa. My perspective is Passion and Learning.

Profit and Loss Perspective

• Goal is reach title / position / salary
• What is in it for me
• What's my next role
• Sell better

Passion and Learning

• Build expertise
• Continuously find new ways to implement ideas
• My vision will succeed one day
• Share credit and learning
• Customer needs to be happy
• It's okay to fail 

#HappyLearning
#Keep Thinking!!!!

Learning vs Compensation vs Titles

This question usually comes to me at different cycles. The experiences we gather from different roles and domains get accumulated and gives us perspectives unique to the domain.

After a decade I had options to choose

• Go forward in same Database space
• Setting up teams from scratch 
• Domain-based focus and build expertise
• Professional services, Automation, QA
• Learn something new

Every challenge once you solve becomes boring. Everything is difficult until you find a way to do it. Passion without skills won't get you where you want to go.

Five years back I decided to reboot myself in Data science space. Every other previous experience gave new perspectives to explore. Building expertise in one area, solving problems in a domain perspective, Working on creating unique IP, Learning other related tasks to delivery.

Many times in career I always get discussions and proposals to go back to previous roles. From data science now I get to hear Big Data + Data science skills. Even within data science to build expertise in video, numbers, text aspects, it needs deep dive and consistent focus for a certain period.

Close to two decades in a few years now question remains how long to remain as Individual contributor, Finding a role that uses all the previous experience, keeping up with titles?

The primary aspect of my satisfaction is learning. After a few years, there could be something that would replace today's data science.

As I grow older, I have to pick and choose my areas of interest, areas to focus on. I never met happiness focusing alone on titles or compensation. They also have a priority after satisfaction though. A job that gives you learning, exciting but not overwhelming challenges, manageable work-life, and compensation would be the best thing to look for and have satisfaction till the day of death. Sometimes you need titles to execute your strategy.

Compensation helps you meet your financial goals. The search is to find a role that gives you opportunities that meets your priorities and leverages your strengths. Career is a long term thing. Keep learning until you find your dream role. Be prepared for the role. Don't wait for titles to learn the role.

Interesting Read - An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding

My Perspectives

How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of time

• Competitive product
• Papers Referenced
• Potential Architecture
• Prototype 
• Demo
• Next Steps

How to mentor an early-career teammate, a mid-career engineer, a new manager who needs technical advice

• What would I do if I am in your situation? This is how I look up and advise. We cannot learn everything. We have to pick and focus on few things which are important for us.

How to influence another team to use your solution instead of writing their own

• View it as a joint success. Sometimes you have to give credit to make things work. 

How to get other engineers to listen to your ideas without making them feel threatened

• You are not selling your idea, You are conveying how it is done across other industries/companies. You need to have a working demo, deep dive on the benefits of it. It may not work in the first go but over a period of time trust will develop

How to craft a project proposal, socialize it, and get buy-in to execute it

• Everything we pick someone who has already experimented / could be something ongoing. Give the context, potential value and take it to next level.

Keep going!!!

My Career Journey

2003 - Testing windows OS is great
2004 - Coding C++ MQ adapter is interesting
2005 - Setting up an Application support team and Swiss onsite
2006 - Finding my place in Microsoft, Learning the Domain, Supply Chain
2007 - Performance, SQL Migration, Biztalk and Automation
2008 - DB Developer
2009  - BI / OLTP performance tuning / TSQL developer
2010 -  BI / OLTP performance tuning / TSQL developer
2010 - Need more $$ and challenges
2011 - Setting up Team in Amazon
2012 - Better become Individual Contributor, Again Database and QA, Setting up Team
2013 - Performance, Automation, Database development
2014 - Big data jump and getting into it
2015 - Start from scratch Data science
2016 - Data Science year 2 All 2 year Masters deep dive
2017 - Data Science year 3 Image and Data Analytics projects
2018 - Data Science year 4 Machine Learning projects
2019 - Data Science year 5 Deep learning Projects
2020 - Vision Expert and Deploying Solutions in Scale

To sum up - "Data Guy, Empirical Learner"

The days I spent weekends learning is more than my weekday efforts. I have witnessed the transformation of technology and the tools that evolved all these years. Experimenting and working on different roles, starting things from zero and re-learning has been a rewarding experience. All these years I have learned, relearnt, and still learning. Outside this life also gave me lessons and blessings.

Keep learning, Keep growing!!!

QA Skills

My Summary of QA skills for Junior/Senior QA Candidate

Junior QA

• Follows defined QA Process
• Prepares Bugs Reports, Status Reporting with all relevant information
• Manages and updates automation suite

Senior QA

• Self Organized
• Challenges the Environment, Raise testing standards by experimenting with new processes/Adopting new Tools
• Aware of Test Automation Framework Design and Development 
• Sound Technical Skills 
• Selfless - Volunteers/mentors team in terms of process/sharing best practices
• Actively involves/drives meaningful discussions and implements best practices  
• Takes calculated risks and delivers products meeting quality bar

Growing to a Test Architect Role

• What is a test architect?
• Test Architect

Impressive QA JD description - link


Every skill (DEV / QA / Automation) can be learned with interest and passion. This JD is a mix of DEV-QA-Automation. This is a very good write up.

One more interesting job-ad from link. Highlighted below are core skills / competencies. This co-relates to a lot of behavior traits

More Reads

What are key properties of great QA team member?
Tips for hiring good testers

Hiring Software Testers in an Information Age

If I Were Hiring Testers
Thoughts on Automation as a Career : Role, Responsibilities and Career Progression