Lens 02 · Career
Long arcs, not quarter-by-quarter bumps.
A career is rarely won by the next promotion. It is won by the next ten years of choices that compound — the ones that are quietly invisible to the people watching.
The core idea
I treat career conversations as a craft, not a transaction. Most people who ask me for career help do not actually need a tactic — they need a frame. The frame answers: what kind of work, with what kind of people, at what kind of cost, for what kind of life? Get the frame right and the tactics start to fall into place.
What I bring to it
Fifteen-plus years across TCS, Yahoo, Samsung, Microsoft, and Salesforce. I have been through promotions, plateaus, lateral moves, reorgs, and the surprise of being told a team I had built was being merged into another. I have managed engineers who became VPs and engineers who quietly chose to step off the ladder and were happier for it. There is no one right path — but there are recognisable shapes, and I can usually help you see which shape your moment is.
What we usually talk about
- Promotion thinking. The packet is the artefact; the work is two years of relationships and signal. How to start early, build the right evidence, and protect against the predictable failure modes.
- Influence building. Especially for ICs and first-time managers — how to grow influence without the politics that make you tired or someone you don't like.
- The first manager job. The hardest transition in a tech career. The skills that got you here will not get you the next step. We map what changes and what to read.
- Plateau and reinvention. When the curve flattens — is it the role, the company, the moment, or you? The four answers each have a different remedy.
- Big jumps. Internal mobility, switching domains, leaving for a startup, leaving for a bigger company. Decision frameworks, not advice.
- Education choices. Whether for yourself or a child — undergraduate, graduate, certification. The honest economics, separated from the marketing.
A bias I name up front
I am biased toward long-term thinking and toward staying long enough at one company to actually ship the second-order work. I have seen too many talented engineers spend their careers always in the first six months of a new job. If you are looking for permission to chase the next bump, I am the wrong mentor. If you are looking for permission to stay and go deep, I am probably the right one.