seeyes

Adapted from David Chang's 33 rules to become a chef

Do you drink a lot of coffee? Anecdotally I was noticing restlessness/sleeplessless with my child when I was caffienated and breast feeding. Going cold turkey there helped a lot. Also if your child is slightly older, feeding him/her with some solid food might be useful. I gave my child mashed avocados, which was a huge hit.

>very much a norm for a lot of Indians Not at all true.

It is also a bit stereotypical to think that an engineer woman should not be interested in cooking a meal for her family or doing chores at home. In the podcast I pointed to above - Dakshayani mentions her love for cooking and interestingly compares cooking to coding.

There's an excellent podcast by Kalki - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jv110. The only part that irked me was how Kalki mispronounced the lady's name. I would hope that there would be some basic research to get the name of the protagonist right.

I came to the same crossroads and agonized over my decision for a few months. For context - I am an engineer with over 10 years of work experience currently working in a well-known small company. I am currently working on our Java/Scala services.

Every company I have worked at has been very appreciative of my communication skills and my focus on operations. So I was evaluating product management as a serious choice - as a PM who could also code reasonably well.

These were the questions I asked myself -

1. Is the new career going to give more control over my time or less (courtesy: Scott Adams's advice in his book)

With PM, I have noticed that your schedule is controlled by the customers you talk to and the deluge of meetings either with engineering stakeholders or the sales/marketing parts of the company

By continuing as an engineer, you get to dictate your hours to a large extent. There are still those meetings that you don't like, standups where people drone endlessly, but you can control most of the time and how it gets spent.

I have also noticed that people tend to forgive you if you don't want to/ care about socializing. They chalk it up to the engineer stereotype and let you be.

2. Are my skills transferable?

As an engineer, if you care about honing your skills and learning all the time, you'll do well. Mostly have transferable skills that you can take to other jobs

As a PM, this is not entirely true. Say you specialize in medical devices, you are unlikely to get hired by a ride sharing service. The vast domain knowledge you might have built about the market for medical devices might not be useful for ride sharing. Even though engineering problems tend to be similar (scaling, availability), it is not a guarantee.

So I decided to stick to being an engineer while also trying to be someone that is more empathetic to the product org. I will make a genuine effort to slip into the customer's shoes, think from the product perspective regardless of how cliched it sounds when I say that :)

The Frog and the Nightingale (Vikram Seth) - https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-frog-and-the-nightingale...

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woo...

Mending Wall - Robert Frost https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall

The Second Coming - W.B.Yeats http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

The Mountain and the Squirrel - Emerson https://sites.google.com/site/rainydaypoems/poems-for-kids/c...

The "hub and spoke" model that Cal Newport suggests in Deep Work.

I use wiki for stuff the team would care about. But asking this for personal use. For eg, there might be some git commands that I learned that I want to write down, everyone else may not really care about it/ may already know it.

Well put. I have been asked the same question in interviews. Any interview I gave myself < 8, I could see the interviewer was uncomfortable interviewing a 'newbie'. I am wary of saying anything over 8 because I feel there's no way you could learn everything about something. Not with the amount of information there is on language/paradigms etc