I’ve been building for 9 years now. Along the way, I’ve realised what really matters isn’t the title, but the bar I set for myself.
I am one of the rare fortunate folks who found what I love early in life and what I loved is what is valued. I love the craft of solving puzzles. Physics, Chemistry and Math were puzzles to me early on in life and then Computer Science where I spent most of my waking time till 2011. During undergrad, I learnt that real world interactions are harder puzzles and hence more fun so I got attracted to robotics. Oh man, the feeling of mixing code, mechanics, electronics, and lack of sleep, only to crash a 30k flying robot on a tree.
So, I have always treated myself like how a coach treats an athlete - keep pushing. For 200+ days a year, I go to bed only after writing or staring at my next day’s todo list. I’ve been doing this since 2013.
Over time, I’ve built a vocabulary for the values that shape me. This is my bar.
I hate being pigeon holed into roles. I don’t like being called a CTO because that pigeonholes me into “technology”, “Software engineer” into “software”. Engineer is the way I love being identified as true to its meaning - ingenium — to be an engineer is to create with intelligence, imagination, and care. I don’t like to be “typecast” into any form of engineering. I believe I can “engineer” anything - digital products of storytelling to rockets to human cells.
In my second job, I joined as the “founding engineer”, very soon I became the IT admin, facilities manager and my favourite - forward deployed engineer. That got me to travel most of South India with a medical device in the car giving demos and selling to medical universities, living in motels for months.
My inner dislike towards “roles” automatically paves the belief of ownership. Whatever I do, I own every aspect of what needs to be done. Delegation does not absolve me from ownership. Lack of skill is not a valid reason for driving to conclusion. Lack of skill or support is never a reason to stop — it just means I need to create the path.
If ownership is about taking responsibility for everything, curiosity is about making sure I actually understand it. Learning to learn is the only skill that matters. It may take time, effort and discipline, but everything is learnable. As a chemical engineer, I learnt to see the world differently than most computer science folks, and that shaped how I thought about math and computer vision. When I first touched microprocessors, I spent a night rewriting C in assembly.
Later in my career, I obsessed over kubernetes — staring at its documentation for weeks to make sense of it. The first time I broke production because I didn’t understand enough about kafka, I studied it every free moment for a month. Once I wrote an incorrect SQL that may have caused an incorrect insight, I learnt enough overnight to make sure it never happened again.
These days, half my ChatGPT history is biology chats, because I hate not understanding what my cell biologist really means. Not knowing what I need to know is unacceptable to me.
Curiosity keeps me awake at night, but discipline gets me out of bed in the morning. As much as I have observed people who seem to be gifted, my observation has been 99% of the time, it’s just showing up. I believed if I just showed up every day, I’d get better.
And showing up doesn’t mean dumb attempts. It means strategically thinking how to get better and be at it for a reasonably long time.
I jumped to every incident available in my last job to see people debug or debug myself whether I needed to or knew enough. I participated in ~25 hackathons from 2016-2018 to understand what it is to build MVPs fast. I have been working out 2+ days a week since 2016. I have data about myself for years on metrics.soumyadeep.in.
For people who know me, know that I have a very busy calendar because that’s practically my todo list. So, I show up! I have felt discipline is the super power that supercharges all other powers!
But showing up isn’t enough if you don’t care. That’s where giving a shit comes in.
I care. I care about my stakeholders. I care about my creations. Be it code, a document, a presentation, an org or even how I look. I care about the craft I use to derive an output.
My first professional task in a job was to measure and log the wifi speed of the new office we had moved because it was flakey. I spent an entire night after it was done to make the visualisation for it responsive because I thought most people will open it on their phone from slack.
While making a hardware stand, I once spent 6 hours extra in SP Road to find extra material because I wanted the height of the stand to be perfect for a 5ft 7 inch man to keep things on it because that’s the median height of Indian men.
Startups numb you with shortcuts. I’ve always feared that. So I’d rather take the pain and keep caring — because the day I stop caring, I stop being an engineer.
At the end of the day, I’m just an engineer. And to me, being an engineer means one thing: hold yourself to a bar that hurts to miss. This is the bar I set for myself. Not because someone else asked me to, but because I can’t imagine living any other way. And if you’re around me, I’ll hold you to the same bar — because that’s the only way we build things that matter, together.