Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One time, my 8 yo daughter said she wanted to be a lemonade vendor. Another time, as someone who loves dogs, she said she wanted to be a vet. My wife suggested that she should be the vet at a zoo so she could treat the widest (and wildest) variety of animals. The next time the topic came up, my daughter shamelessly claimed that the zoo idea was her’s all along: “You think I can’t come up with ideas? I have brains”, she declared, tapping her head. When it comes to studies, like most kids, she dislikes maths. I tried reasoning with her in terms of what she cares about. You want money, right? All the best paying jobs are based on doing well at maths. I made as much progress with that argument as Calvin’s dad had made. In recent times, my daughter has learnt the word, “hacking”. Hacking is a very positive term in her peer group, apparently. She announced that one of her friends has hacked her classmate’s account and thus gets to copy their (online) homework! Isn’t that cool,...

In his book, The Black Swan , Nassim Taleb classifies professions as scalable and non-scalable. Huh? Here’s what he calls the non-scalable: “Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time…In these professions, no matter how highly paid, your income is subject to gravity.” And the scalable ones? “Other professions allow you to add zeroes to your output (and your income), if you do well, at little or no extra effort...If you are an idea person, you do not have to work hard, only think intensely. You do the same work whether you produce a hundred units or a thousand.” Software development was always one of the scalable professions. In recent times, it has become über-scalable. Sam Gerstenzang has a few examples : “WhatsApp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired (for $16 billion). Imgur scaled to over 40 bill...

When you are a kid (school kid or college kid), you look at different professions from a certain perspective, a kid’s perspective. And since most of us never have a chance to talk things out with a real (let alone good) career counselor, we end up making choices without fully understanding what life in that profession will be like. Which is almost tragic, given that the choice impacts the rest of your adult life. So I wonder why career counseling isn’t more into telling kids what a profession is like. Like telling them an engineering degree is valid across countries. Or that people skills are critical to being a doctor, not just being good at academics. Or that a medical degree isn’t valid across countries, and even requires periodic re-certification if they plan to go settle in the West. Or that a lawyer’s life is tough (in India) unless you have family or other connections in that field already. Or that an MBA in marketing would create lots of travel (not all to glamorous are...