5 year retrospective

It has been 5 years since I started working. I still work at Goldman, although I don’t work with data anymore. I do App development now. In a truly agile way (A 5 year sprint? Don’t hire me as your scrum master), I have decided to write a retrospective. What went well? What did not go so well? What could be better? But more importantly, what did I learn?

Before I started working, life was like sprinting on a track. Your lane is set, and you run to set a time that you are happy with. I was never one to push myself to the extremes. I managed. I managed quite well at times, but I gave my freedom (of thought, movement, and time) a lot more importance than it deserved. And for me, routine was enemy of this freedom. Over the years I have realized that if you want to push beyond a certain level, you need to burn out the processing cycles of your brain for the important stuff. This doesn’t leave you with enough energy and brain power to live life as it comes. You need a routine, where things happen in a predictable way. I sleep early now and wake up early. I go to office every day whether I need to be collaborative on the given day or not. I exercise in the morning. The average volume of work I can do has improved significantly. I feel like a fool sometimes that I haven’t always been doing this.

I never really thought about economy before I started working. And I definitely never thought about macroeconomics. But it turns out that it has a major role to play in how we earn, how(and where) we work, how we plan our futures, and how we live. I have seen some of my smartest peers get fired for reasons beyond their control. And I have seen some peers earn enough money to retire during the post covid highs of the market. I was mostly a passenger. The highest highs and lowest lows didn’t affect me much at all. I realized that you need to know how your team earns money. You need to gauge how your work helps make money. Who sponsors your team, and what’s their opinion of your team and your products? Is your team’s work important for functioning or is it strategic to their future? Will they invest in it even when the market cycles are bad? Are the leaders in your team involved in decision-making at the top? If you are already in a team that directly sells something and makes money, then that’s the best place to be. But it’s rarely the case for most people. So you need to show interest in the “business side” of things. It helps you plan and make better decisions.