Immigration Sales Consultant

Using grapes to spy on company communities

With Salt's recent reward (didn't that compromise his identity, tho?), I think we're going to have a lot of Grape fishing posts and I'm sure the Grapevine team can't reward us all with Airpods, as deserving as we are. I propose, therefore, a mechanism by which grapes can be used to spy in company communities for non company folks. As someone who's unlikely to ever be a part of any of these groups, I really want to know if that wife screaming post stirred some controversy in the Meesho group, or how different companies handle layoffs, or just basically get some goss on random unknown people.

India's education system is failing techies; my opinion

First off, the curriculum is outdated. We're still being taught programming languages and technologies that are no longer relevant in the industry. When I was in college, we spent so much time on C and C++ but barely touched on Python or JavaScript, which are in high demand right now. The industry moves fast, but our education system doesn't keep up. Another big issue is the lack of practical experience. Most of our education is theory-based. We memorize algorithms and data structures but don't get enough hands-on experience to understand how to apply them in real-world scenarios. I remember cramming for exams and then forgetting everything a week later because I never actually used that knowledge in a practical setting. The focus on rote learning is another problem. We're trained to score high marks in exams rather than to understand and innovate. This creates a mindset where students are more concerned about grades than actually learning something useful. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people with excellent academic records struggle to solve basic problems at work because they never learned to think critically. Also, there's a huge gap between academia and industry. Professors often have little to no industry experience, so they can't provide insights into what skills are actually needed in the job market. When I started my first job, I felt like I was starting from scratch because so much of what I learned in college was irrelevant. Lastly, there's the issue of soft skills. Our education system doesn't emphasize communication, teamwork, or problem-solving skills, which are crucial in the tech industry. I had to learn these on the job, and it was a steep learning curve. So, in my opinion, yes, India's education system is failing tech professionals. We need a complete overhaul to make it more relevant, practical, and aligned with industry needs. Until that happens, we'll continue to see a gap between what students learn and what they need to succeed in their careers.

Is Product really for me?

Need advice from experienced Product Managers at tech product companies. This is my first job. I come from an IIT with top of the class grades (in a non-IT branch with no DSA prep) and had very strong extra-curriculars too. Having said that, I was a top candidate for consulting roles as well as product roles on campus. As fate would have it, I got into a PM role. Now I have always been fascinated by the role solely because it was always glorified as 'the Entrepreneur to be' role. (at least to me, that was the entire USP of it). It has been a few months for me in Product. During the prep, there is all the Product thinking and user empathy, maybe some ask of data analysis. But when it comes to the real job, I am barely ever able to get my hands on the first two. All the time gets used up in execution because my company is too lean to have any dedicated project managers (the pay is great though). The remaining time goes in data retrieval (not analysis) because apparently PMs and SPMs don't write queries or interact with users. They opine (what their manager opines up the ladder) I fear if it's the same everywhere else. It was like this at my previous organisation (internship, non tech) where the CEO yelled at people when on-ground numbers did not reflect his thoughts. The only difference here is that there is no yelling, just subtle corporate HR cushioned pressure. Maybe it is the 'fast moving' nature of the organisation but the best that I can describe it as is a feature shipping factory with no aim for differentiation whatsoever. All ideas are built from the incumbents' implementations. Any attempt at differentiation is shot down (by middle management) whose primary metric is the number of features against their name at the end of the appraisal cycle. While top down, this may look great: we are trying 100 things, getting 90 of them correct. But there's a possibility that we could have done 92 things, 91 correct, 1 wrong. But the 1 extra correct thing could have been something novel that the users actually wanted. The chances of this happening are not so bleak, in my opinion, because the high level (upper management) cannot possibly be in touch with the on ground reality (no matter how much they claim it in their linkedin posts). I am told that I should push engineers towards the solutions that will be the fastest (even if they callout potential tech debt) so that more features can be shipped in the least amount of time. Now, I really don't aspire to be like the people who are above me. And I don't know if it's a normal thing. I don't want to become the person who imposes their 'hunch' (just a copy of what some other app did 2 years back) onto the actual owner of the project when data is inconclusive. I don't find any intellectual stimulation in it. Am I PM-ing wrong? Am I PM-ing in the wrong Org? Or am I not meant to be a PM?