“He, who does not obey himself, will be commanded.” - Nietzsche


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Impostor Syndrome

I had enrolled myself in a live project to develop a hospital management system during my first year of computer science engineering. I had to work on the patient repository module for the hospital, which would accept patient’s date of birth as an input and show his or her age in years, months and days as the output.  I wrote a long piece of code for this with my very limited understanding of programming languages. It was essentially just a very large sequence of nested if-else statements. I tested it rigorously to include odd and even months, leap years and whatnot. It was not the smartest piece of code that I ever wrote, but it worked. Always.  When my project lead saw my code, he asked me why I didn’t use any libraries in it. I told him “because I’m still learning and I wasn’t aware of the library you’re talking about”. My code was rejected and I was fired from the project.  I was never able to get over it.  I went on to do well in college — I got in the merit lis...
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Should you switch jobs? - A quantitative decisioning framework

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A friend recently reached out to me and sought my advice about a new job offer he had received. Good, reputable firm, decent hike in compensation, same role but elevated title. The role required him to move from Bangalore to Mumbai, but the company was ready to pay for the relocation expenses. The only caveat was that they wanted a confirmation from my friend by the end of the day. No stress, should have been quite a no-brainer to take this job. Or was it? While making decisions, especially when we are restricted by time and with too many unknowns thrown in front of us, we instinctively turn to bounded rationality for aid. Bounded Rationality is the idea that our decision making is limited by the information we have, the cognitive limitations of our minds, and the finite amount of time we have. We also let our cognitive biases influence our decisioning. The new employer can try to anchor our decision by offering a higher title or by offering a higher compensation 'as per ind...
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Give them a chance

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