Yet another life update

Once again, I take a break from corporate life. This time, I'm planning to do something different

Yesterday, I walked into the Delhivery office for one last time, and handed in my laptop and ID. It was exactly three years since I had started working there (though, since I joined in 2020, I hadn’t gone to any office on my first day - my laptop had been sent home to me). The "exactly three years” was by design - I chose my date of resignation (I officially sent in my resignation on a Saturday) such that yesterday would be my last day.

It was a good three years for me here. This was the first time ever that I was working in some organisation at a fairly senior level (having completely skipped “middle management” thanks to a decade of freelancing), and this gave me a completely different view of how companies are run compared to my earlier stints.

Also, I ended up working far more closely with technology than I ever had in any of my consulting gigs - doing the analysis against a live database rather than a snapshot that some client had provided had been a gamechanger.

Then there was the lack of “transaction costs” in doing something new. The good part of it was that it was rather easy to scope out a new piece of work and start executing on it. The not so good part of this was that I could get flooded with work, since I was contracted to work there.

The other issue that got to me was the lack of control over my time. My hours were themselves not very long (I largely worked 9-5, five days a week), but the fact that someone else had an “option over my time” was a bit irritating.

There was this day when I had scheduled a lunch meeting with a friend, where I turned up half an hour late because an office meeting overshot by that much. Another lunch meeting was disturbed by a flurry of messages from office. Soon I massively cut down on meeting other people, or making plans outside of work.

And as I had documented a few months back, the one thing I missed by being in an “internal facing job” was the lack of interactions with new people, and consequent (possibly) interesting conversations.

Back to the better stuff - heading data for a reasonably large sized company meant that I got a much better idea into the nuances of getting data to work than I had as a consultant. There was this period when I was convinced that real value add can happen only if I’m doing jobs, and not if I’m a consultant. That later got balanced out by some stuff that reminded me why I don’t like doing jobs in the first place.

Also, working for a largish company meant that for the first time ever I got exposed to data engineering - which, over the course of time, I took to actually liking. I’m not really good at the “engineering” aspects of it, but I like all the conceptual stuff there, and given that I specialise in analytics, that is a good adjacency to have. And stuff like “semantic layers” and “metric stores” are things I drop in regular conversations now. And I’ve also put it in the product description of what I’m planning to build.

So yeah, that’s what’s next. I’m planning to start up. In the business intelligence space. I have what I think is a pretty strong idea - and like most startup ideas, this comes out of one of my pain points in my last job. I won’t talk about this more here - instead, I’m resurrecting my “art of data science” Substack where I’ll be “live blogging” the company starting process.

So follow me there, and you’ll know what I’m upto professionally. This is the beginning.