Kshitij Mathur

@chiragbarjatya I’m an example of this. Salary increased exponentially. But focus on health was simply not there. Annual blood work opened my eyes The idea of taking care of health is to avoid problems later in life which is not something that comes in everyday life for most people

IEven after making 5x amount the money people used to make earlier, why they still eat the same food (with least protein), don’t get a gym membership and buy good shoes? Why are people so conditioned to NOT to look after their health even after making money. I don’t get it.

@chiragbarjatya Go Nassata park if you want to get amazing Instagram photos Cabs are expensive. So renting will help. Although Car parking is nightmare

People who have been to Bangkok, Thailand: what's one tip you can share before someone visits? Just 1-2 tips, not much.

@hagaetc Code can be used and tested, yes Designing systems cannot be tested. So that part of software job still cannot be automated easily

Software can be used and tested. AI can write some code, you ship it and get feedback from users. You can quite quickly and straight forwardly figure if it was "correct" or not. For data on the other hand there is no similar feedback mechanism. How can a management team know that "Some data output produced" is correct? ... they can't! Unless someone has done the work to craft and understand everything underneath. Sure, anyone can now write some SQL with AI, but you need to know the context to know if you actually answered the question at hand with all the nuances and context that entails. h/t @bennstancil for this profound insight

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

@ShreyashLal2 @deedydas This was in 2010

Every single one of these $100M+ companies were started by alumni from a single Computer Science club in a non-American high school. Cartesia Inception Labs General Catalyst CVF Wispr Flow Affinity Snapdeal Sugar boAt It's Exun Clan in Delhi Public School, RK Puram in India.

@deedydas This was in 2010

@deedydas I got 9.8/10.0 GPA in 10th class and they refused to even give me admission form. The talent (along with parents connections/wealth) in that school is absolutely insane

@deedydas Do you feel that Indian system of evaluating heavily through standardized test is better ?

I hate when people say things like this. When you're 18 applying for college, there are 2 types of smart people — the honest: incredibly unique and ambitious yet misunderstood (this kid) — the sweet nothings: ones who know the "right" thing to say or have a counselor As an elite educational institution, your job is to get the first kind and channel their ambition, not the 10,000th McKinsey consultant

@Vatsal_Sanghvi Journey itself becomes more difficult for UPSC aspirant because they know if they fail, those 5 years will be wasted. So staying persistent and not giving up is even more difficult

@Vatsal_Sanghvi Absolutely not true! Learnings from startup translate into an actual joba in a small/medium environment Someone spending 5 years in UPSC is considered worse than freshers by private companies

@ravihanda I have great memories of travelling via school bus But the ride was also risky as I had to cross 3 lane road. If your child can commute via van/bus safely, he should do that

How do you folks decide whether to pick up and drop the kid to school yourself or use a transportation service like a van or a bus. I understand that a lot of folks don’t have a choice because the school is far or office timings clash but that isn’t the case with us. School is close by. It is 5 minutes by car. It often takes me more time to get out of the society than to cover the rest of the distance. Both me and my wife are almost always free around the time of school pick-up and drop. But travelling with other kids to school has a nice dynamic. I have multiple fond memories of going in a van / rickshaw / bus. I don’t want my kid to miss out on that. But then he is just in pre-primary school. It doesn’t really matter to him. He doesn’t mind coming and going by car. Or may be it is because he hasn’t had the experience of a school bus. Or may be I am overthinking this. This parenting shit is hard!

@adhicutting Optimum plant based protein (rich chocolate flavour )

Protein twitter - please recommend a good plant-based protein supplement (no whey) that doesn’t taste like garbage and chalk? Whey gives me acne, so plant based only. Or if you have ways to make it taste better?

@Vatsal_Sanghvi @shalakulkarni It’s pretty but traffic noise is very annoying Cubbon park is better, but reaching there is not fun

@VicVijayakumar that's the corporate way!

The second part of why this story is funny is that when I said I was a principal, I was actually a director. I became a principal when we hired my replacement. He came in and was like uhh what do you do around here, because there’s nothing in Jira. So I was asked to do what federal employees do and write a weekly email with what I accomplished. However I am an asshole so I would dictate my stream of consciousness and send over insanely detailed emails that rambled on about unnecessary shit.

Funny story: I once worked at a place that calculated that the cost of a single sprint point was $500, based on some very bad math involving salaries and velocities. I was a principal at the time so if a team asked me to guest engineer anything, their budget was fucked unless I only took half the time of a median engineer. So everyone just pretended my time was FREE and equally divided across the entire org and I didn’t have to touch Jira for years.

@VicVijayakumar No it was ZIRP phenomenon

Eliminating college requirements in tech hiring was a DEI initiative Discuss

@VicVijayakumar In India Jio subscription provides with all services and let’s you do global search as well

So sick of paying for 6 streaming services & when my kids ask for a movie I have to search each one to see who has it. Someone invent a thing where I pay one price for everything. And every now and then I’ll call you to say I don’t like your new price give me the old price.

@chiragbarjatya People look at elite power lifters and without knowing that it takes >10 years to achieve that and think “I don’t want to look like that, so won’t go to gym” Same is the reason women don’t lift weights as they don’t want to look “too jacked”

I don’t know why people think going to the gym reduces their flexibility. By all means, going to the gym will increase your flexibility. You are literally stretching your muscles while doing an exercise.

@deedydas Excellent analysis! Taxes are already pretty high in India, yet the situation continues to get worse. Do you think the root causes are poor infra, public education and corruption?

The dark side of India's economic growth is inequality. — Top 1% income earners account for 23% of total, higher than South Africa. — Top 1% of wealth is 40.1%, higher than US and China. — If you're born in the lowest 40% income in India, your odds of getting to top 20% is 3-4%.

@ThetaVegaCap Make a decision between portion control vs intermittent fasting. Latter did wonders for me!

Targeting to Reduce 7-10 Kgs in 2025 Skipping Dinner . Only Salads n Sprouts No Rice in Lunch Limited outside food Any more tips ? #FitnessGoals #2025

@RobertMSterling Btw, H1-B data only shows the base salary and does not include incentives like bonuses, ESOPS, or equity. So the numbers are not reflection in CTC.

H-1B DATA MEGA-THREAD 🧵 I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data. I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I'm now *extremely* skeptical of how this program works. Here's what I found 👇