Note 1

June 17, 2025

I was 17 when I failed school for the very first time.

I was in the 11th grade and if I’d continued at that school, I’d have failed in 12th, which is a whole lot worse, apparently.

I was studying at the Oxford Senior Secondary School (CBSE), and I’d done poorly on all my subjects that year. Primarily, Biotechnology, which was promised to be the “great big thing” that decade. I scoff at that now, and I hated the subject and the teacher.

All my teachers hated me, and I suppose a large part of that had to do with being a neurodivergent kid, but I will not claim I was a “nice kid”. I was an ass, and my attitude showed.

I failed that year, and my father took me out of that school and put me in the state-board branch, the Oxford PU College, affiliated to the Karnataka State Pre-University Board. I also got into some tuitions, and did fairly better. I didn’t do too well in the 12th grade, mostly because I got cocky and thought I had it in the bag.

I, in fact, didn’t have anything in the bag.

I got into Engineering, studying a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering because my scores were so absymal in the exams that I couldn’t get Computer Science like I wanted. I was already neck-deep in computers. I was studying C and C++, I was already using Linux as a daily driver because my old Pentium 4 CPU couldn’t handle anything more than Windows XP.

I did decent at Engineering, managing to top my class from time to time. I was almost always within the top 3. I didn’t fail any subjects, but I didn’t realize life had other plans for me.

After my Engineering, I failed to get a job, repeatedly. I joined the Indian Institute of Science, where after a gruelling 6 months, I left after my professor yelled at me for being too slow. I blamed him (only internally) for not guiding me whatsoever. I remember him saying he wanted me to login to a remote computer to run some simulations. I didn’t know what he meant, and even though someone showed me the ssh command, I didn’t know what he meant.

I feel the irony from typing this in neovim, to tell you the truth.

I left IISc and spent about 5 to 6 months without job. A cousin got me a temp role at Harita Fehrer Ltd, where I joined as a Quality Engineer (Temp), and was paid in cash with all the wage workers. I was just happy to get paid.

I worked my way up, “failing” sometimes, and “succeeding” other times.

I consider moving from factory roles to a role as a content writer my biggest success. Working at Flipkart where I was being paid triple what I was paid at my first factory role, and then picking up Python to help the content team is still my biggest win.

I worked my way up, and I think that sometimes I didn’t always do my best, but I showed up, repeatedly. I wasn’t the smartest developer you could hire, but I loved the craft and strove to build user-centric tools and libraries. I was always sympathetic towards users because I have been befuddled by tools and libraries that take this world for granted. I still facepalm when I come across a github repo that has a couple thousand stars and doesn’t have an elevator pitch in the very first paragraph, or screenshots of what the UI looks like and does.

So what am I writing about here?

I joined a company (Let’s call them Company C) in 2025, and stayed there only a month. I didn’t feel like a good fit, and I left of my own accord. I don’t know what it was that made me feel everything in my gut tell me that it was a bad fit, but I wanted to ponder about my time there and talk about how I feel about failure.

Failure is a strange thing. I say this as someone who took months to learn to swim and still doesn’t consider himself comfortable in the water.

I don’t feel like my time at Company C was a success. If anything, I feel like I fell flat on my face. I remember wondering within my first two days there if I was out of my depths. That still feels a little true, mostly because I came with a ton of burnout at my previous job, but I also felt like I was watching a process fail entirely.

I wondered a lot about this during my time at the job and since leaving it. I’m not fully convinced about my thoughts, and I wanted to write this out in a post so that I could share it with some friends.

Failing at a job is different from failing in school. It’s not like there were scores to measure. At school, my teachers were clear. I failed. It took me years of thought to wonder why they never questioned if they, too, failed at teaching me. At this job, I didn’t fail. I wasn’t a fit, and the interview process failed. If anything, I didn’t bother to question if this was a company I wanted to be at, and they didn’t question if I was someone they wanted to be at their company.

There are still flaws to this thought process. I don’t feel bad after quitting within a month. I am in no rush to go back to a job, and I want to take some time to rejuvenate and address my burnout.

I know that some of my friends won’t understand this approach, so I’m not going to explain myself to them. This is mostly a record to myself so that I remember what I felt when I quit Company C.

I quit because I didn’t enjoy a culture of zero empathy for your colleagues and users. This is a hard problem to solve and comes from hiring “hotshot developers”. I used to be one myself, but I’ve since realized that I don’t want to be one. I didn’t enjoy the culture of working till 0400 every night, and the unsaid expectation that if you weren’t churning out AI-powered code, you were not productive. I have always thought the lines of code are a poor metric to optimize against, but I really don’t want to compete in an environment where it feels like my team is against me, not with me.

And, I’ve written this before, but I’ll repost this on my new blog just so that it’s more accessible, I wish people would build units and not teams. It’s sad that Company C wasn’t focussed on that. They had a hot product that they could realistically reach for the moon with, but they are faltering to get up to speed just because they’re not functioning together. They’re trying to 1Up each other, and this shows in their code.

I feel disappointed if nothing else, that I couldn’t sniff that out. I left after seeing that the company didn’t offer me at least two of three things. I only got money, no semblance of good people or work. I didn’t belong, and neither did they.

Note 2

September 5, 2025

I’ve been thinking a lot about my career and how I feel right now. It’s September, and I left Company C after a little over a month there in the first week of June.

I have struggled with burnout for a while now, a little over 2 years. I started at my previous company, ChainSafe, in November 2022, and I can tell you for certain that I did nothing of note there.

It isn’t me being insecure, or me having Imposter’s Syndrome, but it’s the raw truth. I didn’t have anything to do at ChainSafe, and I also grew complacent. I didn’t spend time learning, I didn’t spend time studying, and I certainly lost my creativity as a result.

I wondered what the point of it all was, when I wasn’t using any of the things I’d learnt by myself in a silo when I was at GKN Aerospace. I worked there for 3.5 years and built wonders. I ran an Elasticsearch-powered search engine for the company by myself. I built tiny applications that made other engineers ask me to build more each week, and every week I had an “app of the week” request from my German manager.

I was making things that made me happy, and eventually, that joy left me by the time I was at ChainSafe. I also surrounded myself with people who would tell me “why do you bother”, because they couldn’t fathom why I did these things. My natural creativity tanked, and so did my cognitive acumen.

I felt slower than I was. I felt like I was unable to think coherently. Self-reflection led me to believe I had cognitive disabilities and I let the thoughts of others shoehorn themselves into my own.

It is an odd thing, failure. I have written about it before, but this time, it feels oddly intimate. I have failed in many things before, but I’ve also always been the person to think my way out of things. I think from 2021 till 2025, I began a decline that I am only now trying to fight back.

Someone once asked me how I managed to think my way out of things, and I think there was a certain level of privilege to my success as well. I was lucky, and at times I think I was luckier than I deserved to be. I didn’t use said luck good enough, and my career has signs of survivor bias.

A part of me also tells me that my career has ended because I didn’t keep up with AI over the last two years. I had a chance to, but I was… unable to focus.

Note 3

September 26, 2025

It’s been 25 days since I wrote the previous note, but I wanted to expand on what’s been going on since then.

I attended PyCon India 2025 and IndiaFOSS 2025. Both of these helped me a bit, but I think it was mostly unrelated to the conferences themselves. I thrive in tech conferences. I’m a loud extrovert there. So much so that sometimes I wonder if I should have been a DevRel. I know I cannot keep that energy up, but it helps me know that there’s a crowd out there who I love to interact with.

I’m learning Ruby these days. I have put my distributed systems learning on pause to do so, because I’m trying out a temporary role at a company. I like what they do, and they asked me to learn Ruby because that’s what they use.

Learning Ruby is teaching me a lot about myself, and I think that it’ll add to the list of things that heal me. That list is rather personal and I don’t expect it to help anyone else, but if you’re close enough to me for you to have seen this article, ask and I’ll talk about it in person.

I’m doing a lot better than I was when I started this year, my anxiety is under control and my interest in technology is alive again. I think I will continue to do better, and in time, I might look back at this and be able to articulate what went on.