💀The Interview Illusion: An Art of War

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” — WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1874–1965

⚔The Chinese military general Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War advises to smartly keep your enemy busy in mundane tasks so that you can focus on the larger goal and at the same time keep your competition at bay.

👉Remember: War is not fought only on battlegrounds, but it is the reality of our day to day life. We are constantly at war against forces acting against our interest.

🤔Think: How do you create monopoly yet maintain the face of the one helping others grow? How do you grow your own prowess and manage to restrain growth of your competition? How do you advance your weaponry yet keep it unreachable from the common folks?

🕵Understand: War is not fought on one front. War is multi-facet and to protect an empire, you have devise strategies to weaken the blow of your enemy.

💻The IT WAR

The giants at Silicon Valley are no different. Once they created their respective empire, they had to make sure they protect it at all costs. They had to build fences around it, which prevents the competition to breach their territory. But how do you distract the competition yet play the long game of being Noble peacekeeper? The answer lies in details. Help them grow but keep them busy in mundane goals, while you grow your armory.

🐝The Open Secret: Rare has been the case, when the core engine of a product was developed by engineers who have been hired via multi-interview rounds. The core engine of a product is developed or designed by some close-knit associates, who are in sync with long term product vision. Once the engine is ready, components are added to it and maintained by the hired manpower, while the core team prepares itself for the challenge ahead.

Knowledge is not Power, Ability to apply it to achieve goals is ultimate power.

📑In the information age, we are overwhelmed with data and information. It takes years to build a successful product as it evolves through time. When the focus is on building a concrete product, one can always find ways to work with technologies which will help to sustain the development and design the architecture of the core engine to make it flexible and robust to adapt to changes going forward with your vision in mind.

🚩When one knows the destination, one can use even a bullock cart or an aero plane to reach there, but what if one is not aware of where to go? What do you make of the tools if you don’t understand what are you building?

😇In the Renaissance Age, individuals were polymaths, they not just focused on ‘what’ but also ‘how’. And that is the reason, we had some great artists, engineers, etc. of that era, whose work could never be matched again. In last 50 years, the segregation of work has been made on ‘what’ and ‘how’. Conflict between Project Managers and Developers is the classic case and needs no further elaboration.

🏹The Point is when you are kept busy in gathering tools and weaponry (read technology, Algorithm Knowledge, etc.), you live in illusion of involvement, however, to build a sustainable empire (read career/product), you need vision, motivation and association (read networking).

🗽An empire is built by taking risks, a soldier grows in ranks by helping the king to defeat their adversaries. If your only goal is to join a fleet of soldiers, be prepared to be the collateral (read fired/dropped) when the empire is constrained with budget yet aims to fly (read Recession/Inflation).