Resting on Your Laurels

He was short and chubby, only 13 or 14 years old. He was preparing tandoori rotis. He’d tear a handful of flour from a large white mass in front of him, and start rolling and pressing it between his palms. After a few seconds of rhythmic kneading, he’d slap the ball of dough on a pan. Then he’d press it flat with his knuckles, roll it up, knead it some more and slap it down again. After doing this a few times, he would put the roti on a cloth pad and stick it to the inside of the tandoor.

This memory is from a restaurant I visited 12 years ago. It was nothing I hadn’t seen a hundred times before. People cooking around outdoor ovens is a common sight at weddings and restaurants. But I don’t know why I remember this boy so vividly.

He was surprisingly dexterous. As he worked, his entire upper body moved with a singular purpose. His movements were precise, but not mechanical. They felt intentional and thoughtful. It wasn’t a chore. It was a performance. He moved like the conductor of an orchestra.

But what struck me most were his eyes. He wasn’t looking at his work at all. His hands knew what to do. They did not need the help of his eyes. Instead, he was gazing across the whole dining area - moving his stare from the waiting customers to the empty tables, and at the waiters walking up to the kitchen with their notepads. Even his gaze had a rhythm and a purpose. He looked like he was in charge - of his sight, his body, and the dining area. If someone told me that he was the manager, only temporarily filling in for the chef, I wouldn’t be surprised.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that there’s something wrong with this memory. Something doesn’t fit. I’m certain it happened in 2012 at a restaurant in Pune - but there’s something dream-like, surreal about this memory, as if I’m missing a crucial detail. Perhaps, it’s simply that he was so young. I saw neither the nervous fidgeting nor the self-consciousness of a teenager in him. Instead he looked like someone who has mastered their craft.

Now, I’ve had the pleasure of watching masters at work, and the privilege of working with them. But they’re certainly not teens. Maybe what bothers me is that I myself don’t remember being that skilled at something.

But then I’ve never really thought about my skills very seriously. I’ve always felt like talking about one’s own skills is abhorrent. Part of this is cultural conditioning. I hate talking shop with people who are not colleagues. My father never talked about his work. There’s not much that an OB-GYN can say about his work to his two not-so-sensitive sons. But he had enough friends who loved to talk about their work all the time—every dinner conversation with the extended friend and family circle was about work—and he made no secret of his disdain for it.

Another part of the reluctance to talk shop is just laziness. It takes a special kind of effort, to enumerate what you’re good at. You could be good at a lot of things, but it’s not easy to divide your skillset into neat bullet points that are all marketable and largely relevant. This is why my CV is constantly out of date. Moreover, skills are transient. As new skills surface, old ones gradually wash away. My skillset today is very different from what it was a decade ago, and what it will be a decade hence.

But there’s also a third, inexplicable part. This is the part of you that feels like talking about skills is petty, and that your work should speak for itself. I myself have felt often that it is beneath me to have to furnish proof of my proficiency at a set of skills. If you know me, you should know what I’m good at.

What do I do? System architecture, networking and security. No one in this house can touch me on that. But does anyone appreciate that? While you were busy minoring in gender studies and singing a capella at Sarah Lawrence, I was getting root access to NSA servers. I was one click away from starting a second Iranian revolution. I prevent cross-site scripting, I monitor for DDoS attacks and emergency database rollbacks and faulty transaction handlings. The internet—heard of it?—transfers half a petabyte of data every minute. Do you have any idea how that happens? All those YouPorn ones and zeroes streaming directly to your shitty little smart phone day after day? Every dipshit who shits his pants if he can’t get the new dubstep Skrillex remix in under 12 seconds? It’s not magic, it’s talent and sweat. People like me, ensuring your packets get delivered, un-sniffed. So what do I do? I make sure that one bad config on one key component doesn’t bankrupt the entire fucking company. That’s what the fuck I do.

—Bertram Gilfoyle

There’s the rub. I’m being complacent. My tacit answer to “What skills do you have?” is “You should not have to ask.”

I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I used to carry around a quiver full of skills I had and the hardest problems I had worked on. In 2018, I met S Anand at a conference where both of us were speaking. I told him I was looking for a job, and asked him if he knew someone who would hire me. He looked away beyond my shoulder, seemingly in deep thought about who would hire me. Secretly, I wanted him to hire me—so I started reciting a series of programming languages, web frameworks and other technologies I thought I had mastered—all proper nouns. After listening for about three seconds, Anand shook his head irritably and said, “Shush! When can you join?” Two months later, I joined Gramener.

Three years later, Anand introduced “The Skill Index”, a checklist of technologies categorized by role against which every engineer would be ranked. Those who excelled in specific areas would be encouraged to round up their colleagues who did not have the corresponding skills and mentor them.

For the longest time, I did not take the Skill Index very seriously. I did not believe that anybody would take it seriously. I felt like my team should know me better, and I was mad at them for not knowing what I’m good at, even as I enjoyed the faint glint of admiration from a colleague who did not expect me to fix a bug that wasn’t in my supposed area of expertise.

I’ve had long, meandering conversations with friends about skills and hard problems. What is striking about them is that not one of these people—many of whom are first-rate professionals—have a clear answer to what their skills are or what the hardest problems they’ve solved are. Anand, who is consistently ranked as one of the top data scientists in the country, admits that the hardest problem he’s solved is a personal one. When it comes to technical problems, he says he gives up on more of them than he solves. When I point out that he’s the one people call when they give up, he says, “Them giving up is not a problem. I can solve their problems just fine.”

When I asked Anuvrat Parashar about his David and Goliath story, he went blank. Only when pressed, he remembered how he’d scaled a webscraping system from processing 6,000 pages in 24 hours to processing 2 million pages per hour. It wasn’t his hardest problem, but it was the most memorable one. Shivani Bhardwaj said that the hardest thing she does at work is always whatever she’s dealing with at the time. And, if there is indeed something harder, it’s not something she can quickly summon up and talk about. All of this is because, as Anuvrat said, “Once you’ve solved an insurmountable problem, it’s no longer hard.”

If every solved problem immediately disappears from the ledger, then no life’s work can ever accumulate into evidence. Which is why Shivani has since kept detailed journals of her work.

So there seems to be at least a little dose of impostor syndrome when people can’t ’toot their own horn’. But on the other hand, a few people seem to have figured out how to address this problem of self-promotion without being a cringy LinkedIn Lunatic about it.

There are more dignified ways of examining your skills and achievements—far removed from both bragging and the caricature of the underappreciated genius (which, let’s admit, most of us are not). Cal Newport calls it career capital. Julia Evans calls it a brag document. I still wince at the word “brag”, but perhaps that is the point. The discomfort is part of the exercise. It is not obvious to the universe that you are good at what you do. It may not even be obvious to you. In fact, it can even be interpreted in the spirit of Socrates: if the unexamined life is not worth living, then the unexamined skillset is at least professionally negligent.

Dagna Bieda, a software engineer who coaches programmers, makes a compelling case for self-branding on an episode of the Stack Overflow podcast. “My work should speak for itself” sounds dignified only because it lets you avoid the indignity of explaining yourself. But work does not speak. At best, it leaves behind traces: commits, dashboards, design documents, fixed bugs, relieved colleagues, avoided disasters. Someone still has to translate those traces into value. Managers do some of that translation, but they already have too much to translate. Teammates translate it into trust. Organizations translate it into promotions, compensation, and survival. If you leave all of this translation to other people, you lose credibility, while mistaking it for humility.

As for my own Skill Index, when it became inevitable (partly because of peer pressure), the process proved to be surprisingly enjoyable. In the beginning I was still flummoxed by the absurdity of the task. For me, being asked to establish that I know Python, git, bash and vim is like being asked to prove that I can read and write.

But if I had to double down and actually prove that I know Python, where would I look for evidence? My GitHub profile, of course, or at least a specific project in it that demonstrates a nontrivial use of Python. Where would I look for proof that I know vim? Why, my YouTube channel has a few screencasts that show me using vim and bash extensively! And so, I went on a day-long expedition digging up artefacts from my blog, tweets and other sources. People compare it to coming back to your childhood home and spending a whole day cleaning up your old bedroom.

You find sources of both pride and shame. You’re as likely to find embarrassment as you are to find trophies. And while you may be greater than the sum of your embarrassments and your trophies, they are inextricably yours. They are a part of you. Acknowledging your accomplishments and thinking of them fondly is not the same as resting on your laurels. As for failures, you can just as easily laugh at them as feel embarrassed by them.