Rushabh Doshi

CTO: We lost our strongest backend engineer today. Founder: The one handling infra and outages? CTO: Yes. Founder: Did a bigger company hire him? CTO: No. Founder: Then why quit? CTO: He said he was exhausted. Founder: From the workload? CTO: Not exactly. From watching the same database bottleneck, same queue lag, same deployment mistakes come back every month. Founder: That happens in fast moving teams. CTO: He agreed. What he could not accept was that every fix was temporary because nobody wanted to slow down and clean the system properly. Founder: We had deadlines. CTO: He had standards. Founder: So he left because the work was hard? CTO: No. He left because he was not doing engineering anymore. He was just containing damage. The best engineers do not hate hard problems. They hate preventable problems that management keeps normalizing.

Recently my son asked me why he needs to do mental math when calculators exist. I told him if he doesn't, he will make irrational decisions throughout his life. Let me explain. Say you see two packs of snacks. A 500g pack for ₹100, and a 200g pack for ₹45. Which one should you buy? The math is not at all hard, but people who are scared of mental math will not do it. This is not such an important decision that you pull out a calculator for it. So you make the decision on vibes - say ₹100 "looks too high", or that the smaller pack costs "less than half of the biggest one" or some such. The problem isn't that you made a poor decision on snacks. It is that if you do this repeatedly, you train your mind to make decisions on vibes. Over time your reasoning muscle atrophies - so you start relying even more on vibes. Before you know it, you are taking even big decisions on vibes. Should I rent or buy a house? Let's decide based on "EMI affordability", not rental yield. Should I invest in this IPO? I have heard of the company's brand so I'm all in. It isn't only financial or quantitative decisions either - in my mind the math muscle and the logic muscle are closely correlated, so a decline in one certainly affects the other. Like the Arab who let the camel's nose inside the tent, fear of math is the first step towards thoughtlessness, and needs to be nipped in the bud. Intellectual laziness starts with snack prices.

With agentic slop, we are trading software reliability for shipping velocity and calling it progress. It isn't. Systems are more fragile than ever, and engineers building them no longer trust their code to hold up in real-world edge cases. I am pro-AI, but this will backfire - big time.

Champions ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Phenomenal win for Team India in Ahmedabad. Absolutely no match for the explosive cricket played by us throughout the tournament. Brilliant character shown by the boys to keep fighting in tough situations and become world champions once again. Congratulations to all the players and all the members of the management for achieving this feat. Jai Hind 🇮🇳❤️

I never understood the need for a granular planning of projects. You know something needs to be done, you make your rough estimates, and then you run with it. Once ready, you roll it out. So long as engineers are motivated to do it, they will run with it. But spending weeks breaking down tasks to the most granular level, deciding efforts, and going back and forth on timelines for every single one of them is such a waste of engineering energy and bandwidth. This energy could have been easily used to build things. Every extra hour spent polishing timelines is an hour not spent moving the product forward. Let engineers code. Tell them the impact of their work. That's all it takes.

people need to understand that even if you're genuinely sorry, you still have to deal with the consequences

The lesson for all of us is that you must never issue an ultimatum you cannot enforce. It makes you look weak.

Saw a person at a cafe he is drinking coffee and eating pasta alone without scrolling phone, not pretending to work on laptop. Just simply sitting, eating and enjoying. This makes me question when was last time we were ideally sitting in moment without being worried. Sitting without doomscrolling, fake productivity or overthinking life. Or have we just lost this basic human thing ?

(comic) Coding: ❤️ Reports & tickets: 🫠

Life is too short to worry about little things. Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing, and don't let people bring you down. Study, think, create, and grow. Teach yourself and teach others.

"Should I go for a master's?" - This is a pretty common question I get asked, and here's my take on it. If it doesn't resonate with you, that's fair. We're all shaped by our experiences. A master's can be a great move, but only if you're clear about why. Broadly, it makes sense for three reasons: - as a reset button for career or - as a reset button to geography, or - as a gateway into academia. If you're aiming for research, go for a top school and squeeze every drop of value. If you want to switch domains or countries but can't break in otherwise (via job switches), a master's can help bridge that gap. But, doing it just because it feels like the “next step” is usually not worth it. That said, today's environment is tricky. Unlike a decade ago, macroeconomics and geopolitics add more uncertainty, and countries are more protective than ever. So you must assess the hard factors before committing. A few questions I recommend asking yourself: - how hiring look like when you graduate? - will your chosen field still be hot in 3 years? - what income and growth will you forgo while studying? - can you realistically repay the loan, and is it worth the cost? When I did my master's, fees were low and ROI was solid (for me). I went in purely to explore advanced CS subjects I missed during undergrad, and that clarity mattered more than anything else. I took some of the best courses IIIT had to offer, skipped the project, and loaded up on subjects because I wanted to learn as much as I could. My degree cost about INR 4,00,000 and has given me a strong ROI. But again, if you think you'll benefit (given all the factors), go for it. If you believe you can reach the same place with a couple of smart switches, just double down on getting impact at your workplace and switch. In tech, a master's doesn't usually change much. You're paid for the impact you make. Except for a few specialized roles, companies don't care whether you hold a postgrad degree or not. So draft your 5-7 year plan and see if you truly need it to get there. The world changes a lot in 5 years, so be honest and rational while you analyze. Hope this helps.

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Today's kid: I want a PS5! 10 y/o me after getting a new bat:

Biggest trigger for employees to become founders is insecurity and incompetence of fellow employees.

यह 7 मिनट का प्योर गोल्ड है। बहुत शानदार है!

If chat window on right, it is AI-assisted coding. If chat window on left, it is vibe-coding. Sorry, but, I don't make the rules. It is what it is 🤷‍♂️

"Dad, what happened on 14th July in Ind-Eng Lord's test match ?"

2015: everyone built a to-do app. 2025: everyone is building an AI interviewer.

when you can’t move to dubai because golden visa costs 23 lakhs