I had a lot more to say via Boyish, but I had no energy left. To be precise, I had no rational energy left — Boyish had not found any semblance of financial sustainability in its first 2 years of inception, and I had no appetite for putting more time and money in it when I was on the cusp of fatherhood. The bills were not going to pay themselves.

A newsletter dedicated to examining masculine norms in the context of India is undoubtedly a niche endeavor and not the most financially savvy decision by any standards. I did not birth it because I conducted exhaustive market research or because I devoured a compelling business case study. I launched it because I personally needed it.

It was only after I started it and researched more about the state of masculinity in India, that I gained undeniable conviction that something like Boyish, a publication aiming to become the contemporary men’s magazine, is actually a very rational idea from an enterprise point of view as well.

After all, men’s magazines are a centuries-old enterprise. The first men’s magazine, “The Gentlemen’s Magazine,” was printed in London in 1731. So, it’s actually an idea that has passed the test of time; but where all men’s magazine have succumbed so far is that they have failed to transition from the salon to our homes.

Why is that? Because ultimately, all men’s magazines have consistently perpetuated patriarchal tropes of power, privilege, and dominance, rallying men around these ideas. And deep down, men don’t want to subscribe to such relentless ideologies within the sanctuary of their homes or during moments of authenticity. Most men may not openly admit it, but the outcome of past iterations of men’s magazines demonstrates this truth.

Boyish aims to be a different kind of publication, one that challenges these norms, and to become the contemporary men’s magazine in India that men pick up to read for reflection and self-care. Why? Because men in India are struggling. Three out or four deaths by suicide in India are by men. Heart attacks and cardiac arrests are well known to claim more male lives than other genders, and let’s not forget the countless male lives that we are losing to alcohol and substance abuse. Men are literally working themselves to death, all on the pretext of patriarchal mores.

Ironically, as the founder of Boyish, I found myself falling prey to the same ideas of constant growth, progress and success that Boyish actively challenges. I viewed Boyish’s lack of financial sustainability as personal failure.

In March 2023, I joined the 100-day EJCP program at CUNY on the heels of feeling like a failure. Not an ideal move. But fast forward to June 2023, I am relieved I did because I have made progress towards silencing my inner critic, suspending self-judgement and embracing the opportunity to unlearn and re-learn.

The program has had a profound impact on me, leading me to resume Boyish. What I once believed to be finished, I now see differently. Each day of the program made one thing abundantly clear: The odds of success are low only if you allow others to define success for you. By setting your own pace and continuously refining your personal definition of success, you are guaranteed to succeed and continue publishing.

Throughout the program, I had the privilege of hearing from numerous individuals who graciously shared their journeys in creating media enterprises. They emphasized how they survived and ultimately thrived when they took control of their own definitions of success.

While I initially thought that 2023 would mark the end of Boyish, my perspective has shifted. I now believe that 2023 will be the year when Boyish solidifies its position as a unique voice in the discourse of gender and masculinity in India.

2023 will see Boyish bring its first children’s book to life, and take its mission forward by reaching its most cherished audience — young impressionable boys. This book, painstakingly and critically developed over two years, is unparalleled in its nature. It represents a remarkable body of work as it invites young boys and all children to explore hobbies outside the limitations of gender norms.

I am taking the initiative to self-publish the book. Before the program, I felt ashamed for not securing a publishing contract. However, after EJCP, I am genuinely excited about its prospects and the possibilities that lie ahead.

If you have read this far, do consider picking up a copy for yourself or your loved ones from this link: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/boyish/e/144905

100 days with EJCP was originally published in Journalism Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

He walks in. I stand up to greet him. He looks tired so I try my best to relax him with some phatic expressions. In a short span of 30 secs, he shoots his first question and gets comfortable in his seat, pulling out his diary to start writing.

I talk endlessly for 2 minutes. He is scribbling. By this point, he has decided that my answer is wrong. Instead of stopping my thoughts and nudging me in the direction he would like to engage in, he just lets me ramble on. He is out of energy to even care. I look up and pause several times to force the guy into a dialogue. He continues to scribble instead.

His next question, “Tell me another project where you were involved in strategy?”

I mention that I have been a part of making a comic book that teaches young girls about menstruation. He stops scribbling. To emphasize on the strategy bit, I mention that the book has been bootstrapped to 100K copies in sale and is published in 15 languages. He is nodding but has no questions. The interview ends. Fake smiles and a weak handshake, we part ways.

After a series of blunders and poor privacy implementations in their software of choice, I somehow got access to their internal feedback:

Him: I just came out of an interview where the guy was talking about menstruation.
Colleague(a woman): Lol. Someone is having a bad day.
Him: I cant believe he mentioned period panties.
Colleague(a woman): What the f..

I wasn’t shocked at the rejection. I wasn’t even shocked at the mockery and complete disregard of the topic. I was shocked by the participation and disappointed that I felt too small to do something about it.

Privilege is not knowing that you are hurting others and not listening when they tell you.

We are all in this together, the solutions as well as the problems.

Stand-ups are part of the common lore in software development teams. I have personally been part of several of them and have always had a love-hate relationship with them.

Most stand-ups I have been a part of tend to eventually become bleak and almost a chore. I have seen teams getting crippled under the weight of them.

People forget a “stand-up” is short for a stand-up meeting. While a meeting tends to have discipline and careful scrutinization of its purpose, stand-ups seldom are given the same rigor.

This is what I have learnt when its comes to stand-ups:

1. Don’t assume its format is set in stone. There is no set way of doing almost anything in life. Adapt quickly as your team dynamics change.
2. Don’t make it the signal for start of the day for your team. It will lead to a lot of abuse and confusion. When not done right, bad stand-ups are an incredibly toxic way to start your day.
3. Product Managers MUST attend stand-ups. There are no excuses here. Infact, they should run them. The right Product Managers take this stage as an opportunity to prevent tunnel vision in their team.
4. Encourage everyone to say “Time out”, “Take this offline”. When done right, this helps keep the stand-up disciplined. Other benefits include slowly reducing the implicit power play that your team might have accrued.
5. Actively discourage update like “meetings”. It doesn’t add anything to the conversation. It cultivates opaqueness.
6. Kill it when its not working. Maintaining something which majority of the team is ambivalent on is rigidity.
7. End it with everyone drinking a glass of water. I am not kidding. Even if I am, you are still better off by drinking that glass of water.

By talking about, I mean building actual systems that work, not linked lists.

If you have the heart to build a 10+ year old business, allow these engineers to meander when they are onboarding, as they will set the coarse straight wherever they roam. Don’t do the rookie engineering manager mistake:

he/she seems to be not getting bullied into the tasks I had on the roadmap but wants to fix inconsequential pieces in code; hence, he/she is not a good fit.

To measure performance of these folks, relentlessly ask other team members on whether they have helped in cleaning up some of the ugly corners. Maintaining hygiene must be the first rule of a growing family.

If you have the genius of building/selling a business within 3–4 years, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say; don’t hire them unless they are as big fans of trailblazing as you are. One is not to believe that such a combination (trailblazer + seasoned) engineers does not exist. You can possibly find one if you look hard enough, but you really really really have to do the work before onboarding begins, where you clearly and repeatedly explain where the buck stops.

Regardless which camp you reside in, its naive to assume “mission accomplished” once you make the hire. An engineer who has been around the block doesn’t necessarily has been around yours. So education while onboarding is critical.

Outrageous and redundant hiring practices in the tech industry is a huge problem that the industry has been more vocal on in the recent past. Cases of bad employer-employee fit are part of the common lore in tech companies these days.

What aggravates the problem is that as Software Engineers, we suck at interviewing. The state of the art of software engineering interviews is an extremely frustrating experience. As developers, most of us only focus on the part on how to answer their questions best. When it comes on us to ask questions to them, We often just wing it and make decisions on pure whim and how we feel during the interview.

As a developer myself, I have struggled for the longest time in understanding how to assess companies for myself. In my sum total of interviewing experience (in double digits), I have almost always felt hurried through the interview cycle and struggled on what more I can ask to weed out the bad apples.

After several failures, I am finally devising a handy list of questions that guide me in scoping out what life would be after the honeymoon period ends. Here are some questions:

• Can you briefly summarize how you deploy code? Do you auto-deploy?
  If there is no process or one that is hard to explain, its a huge red flag. Ideally, this should be down to a single line such that everyone can deploy without being a dev-ops person.
• How many people have joined/left the team in the last 12–24 months?
  If people churn has been high in the past, it is more likely to be high in the near future as well (if churn involves mostly of the rank and file engineers).
• Is there a system of on-call for system uptime in which each engineer has to participate?
  This can be extremely helpful if you are anyone other than the dev-ops engineer. Oncall rotations work with smaller teams and smaller codebases and it not always a good idea to put every application or test engineer oncall on large complex systems.
• Has any parts of the system built by contractors or outsourced?
  I hate playing along with the old cliche that contractors are a signal of poorly written code but I am yet to see the inverse happen.
• What are the other responsibilities of the Engineering Manager?
  In many tech companies, the people manager and the project manager is the same person and they default to managing the project first . Its important to figure out where they stand on this spectrum.
• How is code tested? Are there unit tests? Is there a QA team?
  Its ok to get ‘developers test their own code’ as an answer. However, along with that if you get, “we don’t have good test coverage yet and have been manually testing it so far but would really like to get there”, its typically a red flag.
• What is the average experience in the team?
  A good mix is a healthy sign. Any extremes here are a red flag.
• How does the team run metrics?
  Answers like “We have a dashboard to track them” are potential indicators that its fuzzy and they might be skirting the whole thing. Its indicative of metrics being handled by people higher in the chain and perhaps, not distilling down in the organization. Clear good answers are precise and include a mention of a few top metrics that run the company.

If you take nothing from this article, just remember this: if the hiring team or manager doesn’t have time to answer your questions in detail and you feel like being pressured to make a uninformed decision, they are most probably looking for a cog in the machine.

Any team which thinks you’ll add value beyond the job description will go the distance of patiently answering your questions. Good teams hire right, not hire fast.

Its great to see some publicly visible momentum on this topic and there is even a repository full of relevant questions to ask your future employer.

People become their inputs (specs) and their outputs (code) and people are layered in the same way code is, like an assembly line. And since the inputs and outputs are standardized, whole layers can be outsourced. As a business owner, I can appreciate the benefits of predictable results, but as a developer and a human, I can’t justify hiring someone who is simply a cog in a machine and happy being that. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11475605]

I am no one to predict the future but I strongly feel we are going to look back and feel pretty bad when we realize that we were the generation that not only permitted but actually made a culture destroyer like Facebook thrive.

In my own small little world, Facebook has single handedly eroded so much cultural and social capital that its unfathomable. The way I look at it, Facebook is an absolute raging financial success but also a giant cultural failure. Looking back, I am not proud of spending my personal time on it and I am constantly trying to change my habits around my usage and consumption of it. I use the word ‘consumption’ as I feel like a friend of mine, who is trying to fight smoking.

I have been on Facebook for about 8 years now. I cant really recollect how I felt when I joined but as far back as memory serves, I recollect being mostly bitter and in a bad mood while and after using it.

It slowly started making me more envious of others lives, by pushing fabricated “happy” content from seemingly random people. Only after someone coined it for me as FOMO, I started wrapping my head around the deadly psychological concept and how Facebook might be a cultivator of that.

Personally, I have tried like hell to make peace with the tool. Over these years, I have religiously tuned my news feed to an extremely minimal set. I have went on personal facebook-detox sessions for long periods of time where I have deactivated my account or blocked myself access to it. But every once in a while, I still catch myself burning valuable minutes on Facebook, out of the 1,440 that I get in my day.

Its funny that my friend has gone ahead and is very close to conquering smoking. He can now go up to 4 months without it and he has intentionally build enough friction in his life to prevent it. In my case, Its been harder. Facebook is omnipresent. Even after removing it from my phone, blocking it on my desktop and suspending Instagram, I still feel trapped. I use WhatsApp liberally and fear an incarnation of facebook feed will show up there some day too. Early enough I committed the blunder of using Facebook Connect to sign-in to several services and I am now realizing the leash Facebook has around my neck with that.

Growing up, I had several moments where picking up the cigarette was the cool thing to do. Somehow, I dodged that bullet. Now I wish I would’ve dodged the Facebook bullet more than the cigarette. Oddly enough, It is only now that I am coming across people within my social circle who realize that it is more than a nagging bad habit and trying their best to quit it. The struggle is absolutely real.

If you have your own personal story in trying to quit the Facebook ecosystem, let me know in the comments.

In our lust for the so called innovation (read money) at nothing short of speed of light, It seems we have innovated a way to be stubbornly foolish and utterly blind, because we seem to not be able to distinguish at all that this age’s ‘software developer’ is markedly different from the previous, and hence we need new ways to assess them.

So for a refreshing change, trash your Linked List implementations and maybe try some of these new’ish ideas around interviewing:

1. Ask the candidate to prepare an interview question(in advance) for a small role reversal session. This will illuminate a lot about the candidate’s teaching and collaborative ability from the vantage point of an expert on a problem. This is a valuable indicator of whether your potential new team member can teach others or not.
2. Hand off to the candidate a branch having a few commits for ‘code review’ and making it ‘pull request’ ready. This would test basic revision control skills (squashing, rebasing, moving etc.). Candidate will be able to demonstrate eye for documentation and ability to ask questions around code. If constructed intelligently, you can also test potential knowledge of a tech stack (like Rails, for instance).
3. For interviewing Front End engineers, conduct a session where the candidate pairs with the designer in the team for a ‘pixel tuning’/ ‘polishing’ task. The task should involve making final touches to match an implementation with the mocks. The scope of the task should involve mostly touching CSS and re-factoring some markup. This shall help catch candidate’s eye for polish/perfectness and general awareness around responsive design in today’s multi device world.
4. Conduct a session where the candidate is asked to just write tests. Implementation is given. Candidate is assessed at the ability to write tests and think through all test cases. It will be interesting to see how they think around generating mock data. Again for front-end engineers specifically, it can be fun to build a problem where they have to stub XHR calls and test asynchronous UI behavior.
5. Give the candidate a small feature implementation. The task is to step through the implementation code and add simple logging statements for the purpose of data collection and tracking some metrics. Candidate will first be tested around defining key metrics and then later figuring out the right places in code to install tracking code at for those metrics.

Are you annoyed after reading these ideas and think that this is bullshit of the highest order? You feel like this is lowering the hiring bar and will corrupt the tech industry, if allowed to spread. Here: https://www.careercup.com/. I hope that makes up for the lost time reading this article.

Are you smiling after reading these ideas because you have already tried them or you think you have an interesting spin on them? Then I would love to hear how they fared for you or your incarnation of these ideas.

Like most other kids, I latched onto the dreams/vision of my parents whenever I was unable to dream on my own and out went I for anEngineering* undergraduate degree after school. This is where things started to feel different. As I started mingling more with growing minds of my own generation, I began sensing a weird tension between my social and aspiring professional self.

Becoming an ‘Engineer’ was not cool.

Part of it was because of the huge lack of opportunity to mingle with the opposite gender. Its a systemic widespread problem that the industry as a whole is still waking up to, but the 18 year old me didn’t have the brains to understand it or be patient.

The other issue was that engineering was simply not social enough as other professions. It required extreme amount of presence of mind and focus and that generally prevented opportunities for casual banter. It was often a very solo journey, and hence challenging for a young boy, who like most other people his age just wanted to be at the center of all social interaction.

I am not sure if I slowly fell in love with the profession or just didn’t have enough courage to change career paths, but its 2016 and been 6 years since I have been the cliche Engineer from India and during this time, from slights to jestful jabs, I have seen it all.

At many points during these last 6 years, I have wondered what it means to me and whether its a respectful identity or not. After all, are we not the generation where our professions defines us? Several times I have wondered, Am I the mindless worker of our new age, a semi-skilled worker who executes the vision of those who think and dream?

This appears to be the story of multiple people in India, leading to a slow but massive (numerically) migration from engineering for other fields. This is not necessarily bad per say, given the absolute numbers of our population but the line of thought that its not ‘cool’ or a ‘creative’ field is toxic and largely what I like to term as horse shit.

Its largely untrue and ‘Engineers’ have no one else to thank but the Internet.

The Internet is the single biggest invention of human race. Its astronomically bigger than the printing press. What is about to unfold in the next few decades because of the internet is probably unprecedented in human history and as an ‘Engineer’, you are at the vantage point of understanding it and shaping it. You truly have an opportunity to be remembered as a digital artisan of our age.

In my limited professional experience (6 years is a blip on a 10–20 year timeline of a software professional life), I have already seen enough ‘Engineer’ folks who are doing tremendous things with their time on this planet. Their engineering background is a solid foundation to navigate the increasingly complex digital age we are living in.

So shed the toxicity around the field and get down to building a better world.

— — — — — —

*I have loosely used the term engineering in place of software engineering for conciseness. I cant exactly speak for other disciplines in engineering but I feel they are in the same bucket as well.

In 2010, 9 months after graduating, I finally got the call from a Silicon Valley tech giant eBay. Now eBay is no longer counted amongst valley’s top tech giants, but there was a time when it did.

Regardless how you perceive it, I felt relieved and pretty stoked then. Why?eBay is a brand name. My family had heard of it and didn’t have to shy away in mentioning to others. It was ‘success’ as per most middle class Indian households.

7 months in and even before the usual 12 month handcuffs are off, I decided to jump ship into a smaller company of 30 odd people. Needless to say, it was a tough decision for a 25yr old recently graduated me. I was leaving significant money on the table. I wasn’t berated for it too much but I wasn’t allowed to roll with it as well. I was reminded quite a few times by well wishers and dear friends on the absurdness of my action.

Now, this is not a turnaround story of how I went from there and made myself millions and became famous in typical Silicon Valley fashion. Thats an outlier. If you are looking for that, I would encourage you to read this first.

However, If you are just out of school and a newbie to the tech industry in the valley and trying to scope out how an average story enfolds in such scenarios or just plain curious, read on:

Its 2016. I have spend majority of my time after eBay at a couple of tech startups. Here’s simply a dissection of what that decision costed me financially over the past 5 years:

I got 625 stock option grants of Ebay in 2010 vesting over a typical 4 year schedule when I joined it. This is what I would have earned from that had I stayed put.

Ideal Case ( Taking Closing price for eBay stock at end of vesting period each year)

163 Shares in 2011 * 29.49 = $4806.67
163 Shares in 2012 * 48.37 = $7884.31
162 Shares in 2013 * 55.80 = $9095.4
162 Shares in 2014 * 56.63 = $9714.06

Total: $31500.44

Best Case (Taking the all time high of eBay’s closing price over 2010–2014)

625 Shares * 56.63 = $35393.75

By leaving eBay in 2011 in just 7 months, I lost anywhere from $31500 — $35400 by forgiving my stock options.

In terms of base pay, I have been fortunate enough to get a pay in a similar bracket at the companies I have worked at. Startups in Silicon Valley typically match the base pay (if you come across one that justifies not doing so, run away ASAP unless they are talking a founder level role).

Do I repent the $35K hit? Honestly, the answer doesn’t matter. Its not pennies for a person like me but the answer is irrelevant as significance of money is unique to each individual and time. However, I hope that if you are at the same point in your life where I was in 2010–2011 and wanting to scratch that itch (and by all means, you should in my honest opinion), this breakdown helps give you a rough idea of how it might enfold for you as well perhaps.

Grudgingly, I still picked up the book. Its full of stories on how a simple tool like Checklists help even in today’s hyper technical age. The TLDR on the book is “Start making checklists”, so I did.

Its been 6 months of using Checklists as a tool and here is a summary of things that have happened to me since then.

• Checklists help me kill procrastination.
• When I put my thoughts down in a list, I take my first steps towards agreeing with the tangibility of my random idea.
• I put down everything in a checklist that I would like to achieve, from scheduling home cleaning to starting a twitter based sitcom. Everything from the most absurd ideas to mundane tasks, they stay in my checklist for a while.
• With each day of a task living in my checklist, its weight on my shoulders increases. Instead of procrastinating about new things, I continue to procrastinate on the idea/task jotted down.
• The increasing weight acts as a forcing function to either take action or to come to the realization that this might be not tangible and out of scope.
• The task gets done, giving me confidence of knocking down another thing that I intended. Or the task gets removed from the list entirely and I forget about it, which helps me avoid self-criticism and makes me feel less guilty of not attempting at something.

The only negative of incorporating Checklists that I have come across so far is that it makes me feel like a beat-up robot sometimes, going after a seemingly varied set of utterly random things.

After careful introspection, I have realized that is happening because anything and everything goes in my checklist and I don’t feel like I am progressing in one direction. Thats fine for now, as chaos is fundamental to creativity and progress. I am happy to live with it at the moment as the upsides are too good for me to safely overcome this occasional feeling.

And incase you are wondering, Yes, this writeup is also the result of an item in my checklist.