[Techie Tuesdays] 'Tech vaani' - 26 pearls of wisdom from the masterminds

For more than two years, we have been sharing the stories of techies from all across the world. In these 100+ journeys of creating value, one could find a lot more than just grit, determination, passion, innovation and inspiration. Today, we revisit them to share some of the most valuable pieces of advice with the young techies.

“It’s not advisable to build a product and then retro-fit it for the purpose. This might land it to an obsolete product. The deployment and life of a product have to be considered equally important.” – Prasanna Gokhale

“Success is getting where we want, and happiness is wanting what we got. There’s a saying: If the gods want to punish us – they answer our dreams.” – Moran Cerf

“It’s important to keep the child in you alive irrespective of the age. Learning is a lifelong process and not some paper certificate. We have to become better every day.” Parimala Hariprasad

“Sometimes the most technical solution might not be the best solution.” – Karthik Balakrishnan

“As a coder, do not despise marketing.” – Kiran Jonnalagadda

“I’d rather have a guilty person escape than an innocent person persecuted.” – Vikram Vincent

“Engineers are fundamentally artists which is one reason why I just hate code monkeys. I pray to god that organisations that we see in future are the ones which foster the culture creativity.” – Amod Malviya

“With time I’ve learnt that it is possible to be honest without being rude.” – Deepa Pottangadi

“There’s science and engineering (application of tech) for answering most of the questions that we human beings have. At the end of the day, we need instruments to understand things around us and to go further. We can create better experiences using technology and design.” – Harish Krishnan

“Technology is not only about hardware and software it is more about people and that trumps everything.” – Adityo Deshmukh

“Starting up is like performing a heart surgery where you understand a problem and operate on that. You can adopt, pivot but you can’t quit in between. Sometimes it’s fast and sometimes slow. You just need to have patience, perseverance and an ability to iterate fast.” – Lohith Vrushabendrappa

“Go ahead and build stuff. Don’t wait for your semester projects to come. This is the best way to learn.” – Shubham Malhotra

“To build products for others, you have to not just rely on your own brain but ten other people as well. It is that art of getting people together conceptualizing what you can do and then using technology to build that. This is where I get pleasure out of it.” – Shamik Sharma

“Ask questions, be curious and don’t get stuck on GPA 9.0.” – Madhu GB

“We need a better balance between ‘theory’ and practice. There is a lot of talk about teaching methods, but I think the real problem is that the content is lacking in appropriateness; not that the delivery methods are inadequate (though of course that is also a problem in many places).” – Bjarne Stroustrup

“If you don’t have an opportunity to break, you don’t have an opportunity to build.”(Google Philosophy)- Vinodh Kumar

“Do what you love and do it so well that you take it to a level where no one has gone before.” – Monica Rastogi

“A lot of people know facts, a lot of people have expertise, the real wisdom is the synthesis or analysis of that information. It is not important to be intelligent, its not important to be smart, it’s important to be wise.” – Shamik Sharma

“I started thinking in code and when I used to look at people I used to visualize them as objects (in object-oriented languages). Someone was a for-loop for me while somebody else was an if-statement. One of my classmates was a timer object in VB.” – Kailash Nadh

“Be passionate, work hard, try new things. World is full of interesting problems waiting to be solved. There are lot of interesting problems around us, we just need to look around.” – Anand Chitipothu

“Regardless of how smart/senior/experienced you are, working with live production data is always dangerous, and you always need to be really careful. Unfortunately, people don’t learn this lesson until they actually mess something up on production.” – Vedang Manerikar

“I think you have to learn to question everything and once you do, you give yourself a lot more freedom to be yourself. I think you should always do something that you have decided to do and not something that is expected of you.” – Kenneth Reitz

“Don’t learn just to change jobs or get onsite assignment, learn to excel and consider four years after college as engineering/MCA part two. Learn as much as possible to have a smooth ride later. And have mentors.” – Dhananjay Kumar

“I always start at technology because that’s the base where the innovation has to come from. But you’ve to understand that when you plant a 1000 seeds only a 100 flowers will blossom as sunflower and you’ve to understand which one will bloom. That requires product thinking also.” – Shamik Sharma

“Sharing is caring, always give back to the society; contribute to online projects to appreciate the effort of people who are working to make the world a better place.” – Karthik Bhat

“Don’t restrict yourself to technology; and as an aside quips, “don’t spend time reading about such advice, instead go out and build things to learn. We are all musicians, painters and artists, everything else is just a way to pay the bills.”- Ankit Daftery