aaditya

उम्र भर खयाली भूतों से अगर मैं ना डरता, खुदा मैं क्या जोर से जीता, खुदा मैं क्या चैन से मरता...!

‘Age is the cruellest of prisons’ – Joséphine Pellegrini, [ The Causal Angel ]

@dale_vaz @Sahi_HQ A good hack could be to decouple pay scales and titles! We tried that for a while, but even that doesn't scale :(

Two things I grokked over time: - Titles are also an information channel ("if I have to talk about subject X, who do I contact/talk to") - If you don't have formal hierarchies, an informal hierarchy gets built nonetheless. And as usual for informal shadow hierarchies they're way more pernicious. - Another factor is the people at top don't really notice these things – it's invisible to them – so as a senior exec/founder you have to dig deep. Nonetheless, my best wishes :)

We just wrapped our annual performance review at Sahi. Nobody got promoted. And we love it. @Sahi_HQ is 2.5 years old, and we've consciously avoided internal job levels and fancy designations. Every engineer is a "Software Engineer." Every PM is a "Product Manager." That holds across the company. Having built and led 1000+ people organizations at @amazon and @Swiggy , I carry painful memories of what traditional org structures — levels, titles, ladders — actually do to a company. I've been guilty of it myself. At Swiggy, we created titles and new levels because we had to, as tools to attract and retain talent. It's a slippery slope. Once you anchor people to levels and titles, they start to optimize for them. I call this the "resume-driven development" phase: careers are built around what it takes to get promoted, not what the company actually needs. The machinery around promotions — peer feedback, promo templates, calibration cycles — only deepens it. Employees and managers spend weeks "aligning feedback providers" and "gathering data points." Before long, the promotion process becomes the single most important conversation between a manager and their report. All of this to climb a ladder that was invented to give people a sense of personal growth. After 20+ years of watching it up close, I can say it plainly: promotion culture is broken. It's the opposite of what great companies need to win. Great companies hire missionary talent, trust them with the freedom and opportunity to do meaningful work, and share the rewards through wealth creation. At Sahi, we're holding on to this. Every team conversation is about impact and outcomes, with zero time lost to promotion politics and the Day 2 culture rot it leaves behind. In the age of the AI-native company, the old hierarchies are dead. **Performance Culture >> Promotion Culture**

@ku1deep Even if we don’t follow the program exactly, just the advice to do only compound lifts is a win. Much better classical aesthetics, plus joint protection.

I really don’t get this view. Starting strength makes you really really strong. Aesthetic goals are a trap. Most people who do SS actually lead really balanced lives without having to obsess over anything. They can if they want to but they don’t have to get most of the benefit of the program. And Need I tell you how tough just lofting heavy makes you.

@ku1deep Mast hai yeh sari series! 🔥

My brain is fried. In a good way. What a book.

I’d say: Understand the hidden mechanics and shape of the world, understand what makes people tick (vs the fairy tale versions we naively believe), get good at the ability to get good at a thing, and always believe the universe is conspiring to fool you with confirmation bias. And of course learn a hard science/maths well because it trains your mind in rigour.

This, single handedly, causes more problems in Indian roads (because right-of-way norms aren't enforced)

@_svs_ and open the medians, let people take U-turn

Let's see the state of your roads. Quickest fix for congestion is to maintain roads well. That is if you want a quick fix. If you want to burn money then yes - flyovers, tunnels and so on .

What advice should one give to kids to prepare for the future? I used to think mastering basics of physics, math, cs is the way to go but now I’ve updated my belief as these fields will get automated soon. What we need kids to learn is personality traits like grit, resourcefulness, optimism, resilience, etc.

“The Turtle Moves”

Bukowski at least wins on 2/3

I love people with ADHD because they don’t really forget things, you just need the right trigger, like a secret code. Say the right words and suddenly they switch on, pulling out deep, oddly specific knowledge about something they hyper-focused on for 5 months straight 6 years ago

I'm in love with this sentence: “Forgive yourself for not knowing earlier what only time could teach.”

हर जगह है जल music.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3TI27…