Growing Up in 10 Cities: What an Army Background Taught Me About Tech
I went to 6 schools across India before finishing high school. That kind of childhood does something to you. Turns out it was the best preparation for a career in enterprise tech.
My father was in the Indian Army. That meant moving every two to three years — new city, new school, new friends, new dialect of Hindi that the other kids would laugh at until it became yours. By the time I reached engineering college, I had lived in more cities than most people visit in a lifetime.
What Constant Change Does to You
You get comfortable being the new person. You learn to read rooms fast. You develop an instinct for what matters in a new environment and what's just noise. You stop being precious about starting over.
I didn't realize until my first client engagement that these were professional skills. Being dropped into an unfamiliar organization, quickly understanding the power dynamics, figuring out who the real decision-makers are, earning trust fast — that's not something most people learn in a classroom.
The Enterprise Parallel
Every enterprise engagement is a new city. Different culture, different politics, different way of doing things. The consultants who struggle are the ones who try to apply the same playbook everywhere. The ones who thrive are comfortable with ambiguity and fast at calibrating.
Adaptability isn't a soft skill. It's the meta-skill that makes all the other skills portable.
San Francisco as the Latest Chapter
I landed in San Francisco a few years ago and it felt, weirdly, like the most familiar kind of new. A city that attracts people from everywhere, where nobody has been there forever, where what you're building matters more than where you're from. It fits.