Bhardwaj Rish

tl;dr: I am a senior software engineer, and I know I can easily do this work for the rest of my life. So, it's time to shake it up. - Big tech "levels" people, putting them in categories of seniority. I've reached the "terminal" level at BigTech - the Senior Software Engineer. A place where a significant number of software engineers spend their lives. I know for a fact that I can do this work at this level for the rest of my life. The tech industry has* jobs at this level. Given where I am today, a 30 year old with limited responsibilities, I have the freedom to shake it up.  Join a startup, change my role, start all over, work as a barista, work at a farm. The worst that I can do is stay where I am, that is, continue with my current team. Slightly better is to change within BigTech, but I'm pretty confident it'll be the same problems any team I switch to. So, I must shake it up. Do something where I don't know what that future will be.  I can al...

Growth at my time at BigTech meant several things to me: Become the person everyone in my working radius knows. Be responsible for a good chunk of work, and in turn get promoted for it. Learn how a big org works, and learn to be effective in them. Eventually be in the room that leaders make decisions. Based on these metrics for growth, here's what I learned you need: Visibility. Visibility Visibility. Assuming you're already a top tier engineer, a team lead, and a go-to person in your project, here's how you get visibility: Be where leaders are. Don't try to play the ladder game from a remote office. It's futile. It's like trying to climb an extra greasy ladder. You will eventually get up there, but no one will recognize nor reward you for having climbed the greasy variant. Look where leaders are looking. Don't work on things you think are important. Don't work on things your users think are important. Work on things leadership thinks are important. T...

Over the last 2 months with Claude Pro I've reached the point where I work with AI the way I work with humans. I'm working on a fairly non-standard app - it's got a long living foreground service and interacts with the device from that service. And I'm surprised how helpful it has been for this non-standard use case. Simple tasks First, for simple tasks, I tell the AI what to do and ask it explicitly not to write code. We first review what it's going to do before letting it code. It takes us about 2 to 3 iterations, and then it codes. For most tasks, it's really good. The reviewing started as a way to work around Claude's tight token limit, but now it's just a really good tool to make sure Claude and I are on the same page. This is exactly what I do at work with my team. Every meeting is us writing high level bullets of what they will work on, and once we're on the same page, I just review their code - which usually takes them 1-2 days to come back w...

Before we know it, everything around us is going to change. Here are my notes as of Jan 2025: We live in a world where computers can communicate more naturally, professionally, and even compassionately than most people. Computers have become sorcerers of words, and yet everyone is going about their lives as if nothing has happened. It feels like AI is that Earth shattering asteroid headed straight towards us from the movie Don't Look Up. If you haven't see the movie, please watch it. It’s a brilliant take on human nature. Half the people don’t believe AI will change anything. A few are sounding the alarm. And politicians? They’re doing what they do best—grabbing more power. Unfortunately we live in a hyper world, and people are tired of hypes. In 5 years, we've had Web3 Crypto NFTs AI may be hype, but for good reason. There's substance here. Of course, Rule 34 of the Internet prevails. I find it amusing that there aren't killer AI applications yet, except search and...

What am (A)I to do?

Our team of 3 at big tech was constantly bombarded with the next big fire to put out on a weekly basis, requiring us to shift focus as soon as something came up. In the last 2 months, I've used the following strategy on  how we work , and we've found this very effective. No fancy tools, no agile sprint jargon, just the barebones of what made sense to us. Once you've figured out what the team needs to roughly do in the next year, then it's all about execution. Here's what our week looks like. Monday Morning = Plan We meet on Monday morning at a time most convenient to all and decide the agenda for the week. Each team member takes about 5-10 minutes. A minute on the past week Is there something that came up because of which you couldn't complete the planned work? Agenda for the next week Was there something that came up during the past week that you noted important enough to work on immediately? What's your focus for this week? Aim Plan only as much as you ca...

To plan better, try this .

"Now think of the person that runs the portable restrooms business. At construction sites or concert halls, you have these portable toilets everywhere - I'm certain the person never set out with a deep passion for toilets when building this business. No, it's business, for business' sake, and that business has an overall positive influence on society. The means of building a business, that is, the product you build or the service you provide is merely the vehicle. And depending on where you want to go, there is no shame in the choice of vehicle taken. As long as you're doing business ". It was happenstance how I met Maylon, but his analogy stuck with me. I was driving back home from the office while working in Seattle, when I stopped at a gas station. Now I was struggling to refuel this rental car, and up comes this massive Ford F-150 on the opposite side. The man inside, dressed in classic business attire - a fitting shirt with creaseless pants, hair sleek li...

Finding my partner feels more like finding  my kind . I’m this mix of an Indian boy with Indian familial ties, but European hobbies and a European way of leading life. I've lived in both worlds for 15 years each. There aren't many that have seen and lived in both worlds, and experienced completely different ways of life. Maybe I am asking for too much, but I don’t understand why one wouldn’t. If I have high standards for most things that I do in life, why wouldn’t I hope or want my partner to think from the same lens? Here's my value system. Be generally optimistic. A positive, happy person whose baseline state is to lean towards an optimistic outlook towards everything in life. Be fit. If one is not physically fit, there's low chance they're mentally fit. Plus, being fit shows discipline and consistency. Be hard working. Everything in life is a project. From raising children, to picking up groceries weekly, to building a home. And no one wants to work with a lazy ...