Here is a short memoir about the right sizing function happening at all major organizations in 2023.

Businesses Cycles are Real​

Warren Buffett is a renowned investor who has made a fortune by investing in undervalued companies. He is also known for his wit and humor. One of his most famous quotes is:

"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

This quote, which was originally intended for investors, is also applicable to corporate employees. Not long ago, we experienced a period of rapid hiring, with employees receiving multiple offers and corporations going on a hiring spree. During this time, employees were able to negotiate favorable terms, such as high salaries, compensation packages, and positions. However, economic cycles are real, and eventually, companies become overstaffed and their financial results suffer. As a result, companies begin to lay off employees.

The quote "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked" is a reminder that economic conditions can change quickly, and that companies need to be prepared for downturns. When the economy is strong, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement and make decisions that are not sustainable in the long run. However, when the economy turns, companies that have been overextended will be the ones that suffer the most. The employees at these companies will suffer the most.

2023 is the year of right-sizing companies, and it is having a significant impact on Indians working in multinational corporations.

The media and press have been reporting on layoffs, and this has created a sense of anxiety and uncertainty among employees. When a common person meets a techie, they often inquire about their job security. The abbreviation "CFBR" is also becoming increasingly common on LinkedIn. This stands for "Commenting For Better Reach," and it refers to the practice of commenting on posts from people who are looking for work.

There are a number of factors that are contributing to the right-sizing of companies. These include the global economic slowdown, the rise of automation, and the increasing competition from emerging markets. As a result of these factors, many companies are finding it necessary to reduce their workforces.

The right-sizing of companies is having a significant impact on Indians working in multinational corporations. Many employees have been laid off, and those who remain are facing increased pressure to perform. The job market is also becoming more competitive, as more and more people are looking for work.

Observations​

Here are your observations about right sizing and how to mitigate risk, in a more professional tone:

There is no good news​

Right-sizing, or downsizing is the process of reducing the size of a company's workforce. This can be done through layoffs, attrition, or a combination of the two. Right-sizing can be a difficult decision for companies, but it is often necessary in order to remain competitive.

There is no good news for employees who are affected by right-sizing. The job market is already competitive, and right-sizing can make it even more difficult to find a new job. In addition, right-sizing can have a negative impact on the morale and productivity of the employees who still remain with the organizations.

Most companies are not actively hiring during this economic downturn.

The Education material may not help you greatly​

Right-sizing can lead to an increase in demand for education and training. Employees who are laid off may need to upskill or re-skill in order to find new jobs. However, the education sector may not be able to keep up with the dynamic market nature.

In addition, employers may be reluctant to hire employees who have only recently completed education or training. They may prefer to hire employees who have deeper experience in the field.

Everything looks scary, Generative AI & Self Doubt​

Right-sizing can be a very stressful experience for employees. It can lead to feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. In addition, employees may start to doubt their own abilities. They may worry that they will not be able to find a new job, or that they will not be able to find a job that is as good as their old one.

Generative AI and other new technologies can also add to the stress of right-sizing. These technologies can make it easier for companies to replace employees with machines. This can lead to feelings of insecurity and obsolescence.

Multiple rounds of layoff disturb morale at work​

Right-sizing can have a negative impact on morale at work. Employees who are laid off may feel betrayed and resentful. In addition, employees who remain may be worried about their own job security. This can lead to a decrease in productivity and an increase in turnover. Both physical and mental health will suffer.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst​

There is no surefire way to avoid being laid off. However, there are some things that employees can do to increase their chances of surviving right-sizing.

• Join a profitable company. Employees are more likely to be laid off from companies that are struggling financially. Therefore, it is important to join a company that is profitable and has a good reputation.

• Ensure that your work has a business value. Employees who do work that is essential to the company's operations are less likely to be laid off. Therefore, it is important to make sure that your work is valuable to the company.

• Become a valuable asset to the company. Employees who are valuable assets to the company are less likely to be laid off. This means being able to do more than one thing, being able to work independently, and being able to think outside the box.

• Be positive and proactive. Employees who are positive and proactive are more likely to be seen as valuable assets to the company. They are also more likely to be able to find new jobs if they are laid off.

• Have a financial cushion. Employees who have a financial cushion are less likely to be stressed out if they are laid off. This means having enough money saved up to cover your expenses for at least six months.

• Embrace rightsizing as part of career and plan accordingly. Avoid spending on lifestyle inflation like a fancy car, flat, etc. Instead, spend time on marketing yourself like personal website, network, etc. Employees have a shelf life like any other commodity.

Other myths​

Sure, here are some myths related to right sizing in tech companies, along with some clarifications:

Myth 1: Young and low-level engineers are exempted during right sizing.

Fact: Everyone is examined through a different lens, regardless of experience level or position. In some cases, young and low-level engineers may be more likely to be laid off, as they may be seen as less essential to the company's operations. However, this is not always the case, and there are many factors that companies consider when making layoff decisions. No department is safe during right sizing including human resources and accounting.

Myth 2: Seniors and managerial staff are most hit during right sizing.

Fact: While managerial staff layoffs and top level exits are widely discussed. In fact, in some cases, companies may choose to retain managerial staff in order to maintain continuity and leadership during a time of change.

Myth 3: Contractors will be let go first.

Fact: Contractors will be impacted, but they are not always let go first during right sizing. In some cases, companies may choose to retain contractors in order to finish the ongoing projects. Once the work is done, their contracts may not be extended.

Myth 4: Companies cut all the extra costs before considering right sizing employees.

Fact: While companies may try to cut costs in other areas before laying off employees, this is not always possible. The fancy pantry, expensive office buildings will still operate with some modifications. In some cases, the only way for a company to remain profitable is to lay off employees.

Myth 5: Jobs cut in high-cost centers are moved to low-cost centers.

Fact: This is not necessarily true. While companies may sometimes move jobs to lower-cost centers, this is not always possible or feasible. In some cases, the only way for a company to remain profitable is to lay off employees in all locations.

It is important to note that these are just some of the myths related to right sizing in tech companies. The specific factors that companies consider when making layoff decisions will vary from company to company.

Summary​

To sum up, right-sizing can be a very stressful experience for employees. It can feel like a runtime exception at work, where everything is suddenly thrown into chaos. However, by following the tips above, employees can increase their chances of surviving right-sizing and finding a new job.

Only during right sizing activities we realize the value of money and time.

Here is the story behind functional custom email address balaji@dhbalaji.dev

Why custom email domains​

The custom email addresses look more professional on the resume or back of the truck, hope you got my point. I have seen all sort of weird email addresses on the resume like sureshnaidu1929@gmail.com but the improved version would be contact@suresh.dev

Most developers have a website, why not a custom working email address

Steps to create a functional custom email address​

• Create a custom email on your domains registar which in my case is Google Domains

• Setup email forwarding

• Create an alias in your gmail

• Set app password

• Use gmail smtp settings, gmail address and app password to login

• Confirm the alias addition to gmail

• Voila, we are done.

• Extra steps, like custom signature for the domain could be added

Next steps​

Before we go any further, let me clarify two things.

1. I am not going to pen down every step in this process, instead I will share valuable blog posts which I referred and grateful for

2. This is a technical one.

   a. Set up email forwarding by following Google documentation.

   b. You will not create a new gmail inbox but add an alias to the gmail. The gmail UI will show a select dropdown with newly added custom domain

   c. Read the Google Documentation

Do most resumes come off the MS Word assembly line?

As an interviewer, I have seen a wide variety of resumes, from one-page to eight-page tomes. Very few resumes are well-written and impressive, while others are just lengthy documentation. Some resumes are difficult to read while others have information hidden inside paragraphs of text.

However, the best resumes are those that are visually appealing infographics which are easy to glance and understandable by the interviewer in under 10 seconds. Remember, less is more when you try to make an impression through words and copywriting.

If you are serious about marketing yourself, I encourage you to invest time in creating a catchy infographic resume. This type of resume can be a great way to stand out from the competition and show potential employers that you are creative and innovative.

I recently created a few infographic resumes, and I was even awarded by Canva for my iterative design work on my resume which happened because of my unsettling design spirit. If you would like some help creating your own infographic resume, I would be happy to assist you.

Contact me today to learn more about how I can help you create a winning infographic resume!

My tools of trade​

The tool which I recommend for creating infographic is Canva. To understand how to make infographic resumes work for you, read the book "The Infographic Resume: How to Create a Visual Portfolio that Showcases Your Skills and Lands the Job by Hannah Morgan"

The book "The Infographic Resume: How to Create a Visual Portfolio that Showcases Your Skills and Lands the Job by Hannah Morgan" does a good job of presenting multiple infographic resumes written by candidates holding diverse job profiles like accounting, senior management, etc.

Here is my infographic resume variant​

Post covid, I do not attend in person meetings. Hey Covid, you added bunch of excuses to the list. I do not use Groww app however I decided to attend this meeting to hear the financial jargon. This meeting was first of its kind, a meeting about finances is not something that happens often in upcoming cities.

Venue and arrangements​

The venue was in district headquarters or Taluk. The hotel was in a decent location, well-connected to all means of transport. Event had adequate branding arrangements. Not too flashy or the absence of it.

There was a small stage suitable for one speaker to stand and present his contents to a room of 50 to 75 people.

I reached the venue first, and it was an empty room but towards the end, the hall was full.

Audience​

Free tickets were to be booked on eventbrite platform in advance.

The room had people who where in their teens until retirement. I think the Groww team estimated the audience demographic details by their experience. They had a certified financial planner to give a financial talk for close to 1.5 hours.

Speaker​

His name is Karthik, and he is a CFA. Because that's all we know about him. There was hardly any speaker introduction or hype or welcome address.

The speaker also did not do PR for Groww. The speaker maintained a neutral view without being sales focused.

Key takeaways​

The general purpose of a speech presented by the CFP would essentially be around having a financial plan in place, identifying goals and arranging corpus for goals. The speaker delivered a well crafted speech backed by research and data.

Let me present the unique points apart from stock selection theory, retirement planning, investment choices which were spoken on the stage.

Comparing similar stocks before buying​

Let us assume you are an informed investor. You would select a sector, then industry, and then the stock. But have you compared the stock pick with the peers thoroughly? I do not do that because I know only about company X and not its peers.

The simplest way to compare would be to use screener website peers table or make your own table with key KPI and access the peers closely. We might pick a better stock in this approach.

There are 18 sectors listed on NSE.

Evergreen funds and SIP Millionaires​

The average SIP tenure is about 3 years.

We have seen the fancy Groww SIP calculator throwing 8 figures when you input a decent SIP number and 15 years of tenure but how many really get to realize the numbers? Not many of us, because markets are volatile, scary and nerve wrecking when the corpus gets bigger.

In short term the market generates losses but in a period of 10+ years the chances of market investment making losses is very low.

An average investor tends to take the money out of MF or stop the SIP process. This is preventing people from becoming crorepati.

The assumption is that you invest your money into flexi cap fund or some evergreen funds which are professionally managed. Mutual funds can be compared to market performance. If the MF is consistently underperformed for multiple years in a row in spite of markets going upwards, then you may have to switch the MF.

High P/E stocks essentially means that in case of crash, it would take longer time to recover from the crash.

Approaching investments​

The speaker did not say mutual fund sahi hai at all. The speaker was an advocate of tagging an investment to a goal. Tagging investment to a goal relieves the investor from emotional conundrums like should I take my money out or should I worry about the crash, etc.

Let us say you are saving for child college, then the ripe time to think of withdrawing money would be 3 years before college. Withdrawal can be done in SWP.

As long as the financial goal is met, the investment vehicle hardly matters.

Investment options should be evaluated in the context of risk and return.

Trends​

Everyone like to be a part of a trend which is bullish, has a long run raking profits for its share holders.

Here are few things we need to be aware of

• Markets follow cycles like accumulation phase, distribution phase, bull phase, bear phase, etc
• Trends arise out of new market opportunities or opportunities in particular sector
• Be good at
  • Identifying trends
  • Taking calculated risk
  • Reading trend lines
  • Trend reversal
• If you can spot trends ahead of one quarter, then you are going to make profit or book profits.

Summary​

Money decisions should be logical and not emotional.

An evening well spent with good amount of information and surprise goodies which was a T-Shirt.

You can have a good financial future if you have a

• Steady income
• Wont make big losses
• Save consistently
• Plan ahead
• Won't make emotional spends.

Save first, spend next.

Disclaimer: Works only on mac OS & Linux

When you work with modern and legacy codebases, we have to switch the node versions that fits the project.

Most developers are familiar with nvm aka Node version manager.

While we switch to a codebase which uses a different codebase, use nvm use command. But its not a magical command to analyze the node version requirements.

Make sure to add .nvmrc to the project root with the minimal node version.

v18

The terminal output would be

> nvm use
Now using node v18.15.0 (npm v9.5.0)

Interestingly the global node version across the machine is not impacted. The changes are restricted to the terminal.

Checklist​

• Install NVM
• Add .nvmrc with minimum required version number
• Run nvm use command
• Notice the change in the version in the terminal

1. Input​

Chatgpt - text based dialogue like queries

Alexa - voice based interface

2. Output​

Chatgpt - text based on the input query

Alexa - voice, can perform action and do small tasks

3. Usability at work environment​

Chatgpt - can be used a quick research tool, good at organizing and listing facts.

Alexa - can be used as a timer, Its more of a personal device.

4. UI​

Chatgpt - Its well thought of and you can organize your work within chatgpt. Goto previous queries etc.

Alexa - Its a exceptional tool to manage all things personal/office like music, devices, simple queries, etc.

5. Common drawbacks​

Chatgpt - Good at facts but content lacks personal touch or anecdotes or stories

Alexa - As good as the alexa skills but most specific questions are taken to web search

Summary​

AI tools have entered into our life like a bicycle for a kid. We have to learn to use the bicycle else there wont be much fun. Identifying professional use cases for AI without compromising data security and privacy is a challenge like the kid ensuring not to fall from cycle before his friends while learning to drive it.

We have reached a time in history where one newspaper does not fit all. One music app does not fit all, one form of text communication does not fit all. The same holds good with our efforts to keep ourself updated.

Why feedly​

Feedly has been in the market since a long time. Feedly excels at keeping up with sources emitting their updates over RSS feed. Lets say you visit 5 different web sites or news sites every day. Instead of consuming content on their website, we can achieve from one interface inside feedly.

Feedly free version leaves you behind when it comes with keeping up with other information streams like twitter but I feel its a good trade off.

With a setup like feedly, you are isolated from ads and promoted content that deter your focus

Categories inside feedly​

Before I proceed further, I would like to confess that I had setup feedly before many years and it failed. One of the main reason was that I overloaded the feed with multiple channels. This time I want to keep it simple.

7 categories of feeds for each day of the week starting with financial news on Sunday

Here are my categories

1. Financial news

2. Tech Blogs

3. Professionals

4. Engineering

5. Hackernews

6. Lifestyle

7. Newsletters

Filtering quality content​

If you want quality content, then we need to find quality sources of content. I followed the trusted, reputed and relevant sources only.

Avoid repetition of content which reduces the number of news items to view.

PS:​

On a side note, I am taking refugee from all things social media till Aug 15 this year. I have installed a chrome extension to block all websites that distract us.

Verdict​

Old school method of consuming content with RSS feeds might look so old school but thats one way to avoid click baits, trackers, etc. Lets get focussed and acheieve the goal to keep yourself updated at things you care about.

We all have biases. Biases help us make quick decisions and helped us as an important survival mechanisms. Understanding our biases and using them to our advantage is the motive behind taking up the video course on cognitive biases.

Confirmation bias​

Lets say you met with an accident due to negligent driving at some point in life and you survived. For the rest of your life, you will be quick to spot negligent drivers and even predict when they would fall from the bike. Two things happened to you in this situation

1. Something happened to you which affected you emotionally
2. Based on the past event, your mind is taking decisions

Thats the high level overview of confirmation bias. Lets look the advantages and disadvantages of confirmation bias.

** Advantages **

You can quickly infer that based on situation that the same set of actions give same results. You are sure of it and even go about spreading the word about your observation.

In professions like law, you can quickly get into the shoes of your client and offer legal services with confidence.

** Disadvantages **

You do not validate your data again. For instance, technogical advances would have offered better bikes which can be driven at higher speeds but you would be still believing that high speeds will only result in accidents.

Falsification is an important step to break confirmation bias. Instead of using the language that confirms the biased person, ask them why they are unsatisfied with the situation. While falsifying their data, they get better and come over their bias.

** Traits **

The person with confirmation bias exhibits the below behaviours

• Operate like an echo chamber. Shows preference over the data points or stimuli
• Does not take the risk of falsyfying his data or habits
• Exhibits drawer effect where he shows only the hits and hides the misses
• Practice selective recall of events/data
• Most of the decisions are memory based
• Design their methodology to make their thoughts to suceed. It could be a algorithm thats designed to maneur their thoughts and operate in that direction only.
• Occassionally make illusionary associations.

** Work around **

For people with conformation bias, they need to pair up with skeptics as they need good evidence.

Pareidolia​

Pareidolia is about how we associate random shapes to something that we already familiar with. For example, we can identify familiar faces even in a packed crowd of people.

Humans have large brains, there is a center which is dedicated to recognizing faces and patterns.

** Advantages **

By observing patterns we can quickly arrive at a conclusion. Pareidolia makes dealing with large set of unpredictable stimuli easier. If something has sharp teeth and agressive, its a dangerous predator. If something has eyes to the side, its a prey.

Allows us to take snap decisions based on familiarity with the shape or pattern

** Disadvantages **

Relying on familiarity with patterns over organized knowledge or schemas is a risky behaviour.

When we lack social connect with humans which is our first choice, we tend to look for social connect with pets and anything that can be recognized as a face. For instance, a car with 2 lights and a grill looks like a human face and people tend to give it a human name or pet name.

** Work around **

Just like confirmation bias is about data, pareidolia is about patterns and affinity towards shapes. We need to be aware of it.