Divya Jain

Sharing a few of my recent Amazon shopping experiences here to confirm a few observations from people who may know. This is the third time in last few months when I was unable to return/replace the items I purchased. The product in question was a high ticket item and eligible for return/replacement. I was also able to place return orders for them smoothly from the Amazon shopping app. However, on the day of return pick up, I got an IVR call from Amazon saying the return pick didn't succeed because I wasn't present at pick-up/delivery address. In reality, I did not receive any phone call from any delivery agent and nobody came home to pick up return or deliver the replacement item. The call says pick-up/delivery will be attempted again twice and the same incident repeats the day after and the day after that. Now the order is forever stuck in return started/return failed state. And there's no way to mitigate this as Amazon app or website doesn't have the option for talking to a human customer service agent anymore. I think the delivery agents are well aware of this and they are exploiting it by not even attempting to deliver/pick up the items they were supposed to. Would like to know if anyone has experienced this and found a way to raise this issue and/or directly talk to a customer service agent. Appreciate your time and response. Thank you.

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For all the folks who got laid off from their tech-company role and are still searching--my empathy and best wishes, first off! <shortdesc>There is a job for you out there. It doesn't always feel like it, and sometimes you have to make BIG CHANGES (salary, role level, or even industry), but there are jobs out there. When you feel the waves of despair lapping at your consciousness, hang on. I was fibrously depressed by it all in mid-Feb. By mid-March, I had prospects! </shortdesc> Some numbers from my search, followed by a few untested conclusions: * Years in the same role (at varying levels) {redacted, but it's a lot of years} * Days between layoff and new start date: 104 * Previous max days of unwilling unemployment: 14 * Applications submitted: 54 * Number of ghostings: 1 (hey, it's was TikTok, not surprising!) * Rejection of app with no meetings: 46 (This one really hurt, because in previous years, I almost always got at least a recruiter interview to any job I applied for. I applied very seldom, very selectively in the past.) * Rejection after recruiter meeting: 2 * Rejection after first interview: 2 * Cancelled while in progress after accepting an offer: 3 * Offers: 2 Some Untested Conclusions: * It didn't always matter if I worked there before or knew the product. * Knowing someone at the hiring company helped sometimes but not other times. * Having a lot of experience helped sometimes and hurt sometimes. * Writing a cover letter in my natural voice almost always helped me get at least a recruiter call. However, it cost me 45 minutes per application. * Tweaking my resume for specific companies (not *lying* but emphasizing different things) often helped. But it cost me at least 30 minutes per app. * The first job I applied for after being laid off in January 2024 received 1,110 applications for a tech writer role. Insane. * Sometimes, my authentic self was *NOT* what the company sought. But that's a good thing. It would suck to get hired into a company that didn't care for my authentic self. * Often, writing as my true self IN SHORT BURSTS in the cover letter helped me get at least a recruiter call. I agonized for a long time about whether to write "Put me in, Coach!" before I went ahead and did it. (That company didn't hire me, but they did talk to me.) * If a company called out "must haves" from "desired but not required," not having all the must-haves means I never got a recruiter's call. * It felt like ageism was at work in some companies, but not all, and never consciously, explicitly. * How soon you answer an ad matters if there's someone perfect for the role who beats you into the pipeline. * I picked the 100% remote company over the hybrid company. It was not the only reason, but it was definitely a factor. I'm lucky to have a start date for a great company where I will learn SO MUCH. The same can happen for you. Move past the "no thank you" messages: you just need one yes.

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As wrong piece to puzzle can turn the whole picture upside down. Similarly, one bad hiring can collapse complete performing team. #HiringMatters #RightFit #TeamSuccess #QualityOverQuantity #SmartHiring #TeamBuilding #ImpactfulHiring

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I’m happy to share this blog which introduces how we leverage embedding to improve job seekers experience in LinkedIn. https://lnkd.in/g2m2vWTT

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This is an unpleasant, but important one. Layoff. I have faced this question several times last year in 1:1 “How can you keep your head steady on work when so many roles are impacted around you? Does that not concern you?” My shorter response had been - “If I tell you I am not concerned, I will be lying. But, if you can convince yourself that layoff is not the worst thing that can happen, that will take the pressure off”.  Then I shared 3 stories from my professional journey: Fresh out of collage, I joined a software company back in 2005. I had a plan and a dream to be successful, but someone else had a different one. That company laid off 40% of its population in 3 months, including me. I felt broken, humiliated and scared. I did not tell my parents about this for a week and was searching for jobs walking door to door of each tech firm. But, no company in town offered  job to a fresher. Ultimately I revealed the situation to my parents and they offered me what I needed most: a hug and assurance. Eventually got a job; but I had to leave safety net of my hometown. But this is where my career acceleration started. Most importantly, I learned how to survive by myself in a different city. That layoff, which seemed catastrophic at that moment, actually set the foundation for my career. 4 years later, I applied for a job in US and relocated. Again, I had plan and a dream. But, I ended up being in a project that had no material connection to Company’s mission. Team members started leaving and that included my hiring manager. There was no one to support me. My employment visa did not even allow me to switch job or city. So, I was stuck and stuck bad. I wished everyday, this team just let me go. My inability to take action and decision, pushed my frustration to its limit.This is when I decided to join academia and completed my masters in CS.  It was hard to dual between job and study; but it was beautiful. I could not change my professional situation, but enhanced my education. 3 years later, I joined Amazon. Walking into Amazon was like a dream come true. Very soon, I realized - this is way advanced game than what I was accustomed to. The speed of the company, the intense focus on solving complex problems and the culture is something I am not made for.  I declared at home - I won’t survive here. My family again shared what I needed the most - a hug. Rest is history. I started believing into Company’s mission, culture and myself. I worked very hard to elevate my skills. I kept delivering most fascinating customer experiences for Amazon and raised rank to Principal engineer.   Morale of the story:  1. Control the input metric and don’t wrestle with output metric. 2. Your family is your most valuable asset. Protect it more than anything else.  3. Layoff is not the worst. So why to be scared. 4. Job can be eliminated, not your career. Focus on your career and job will follow.

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The below article resonates with the blog post from Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh on how they scaled Zerodha during 2020-2021. The Zerodha blog for reference 1. https://lnkd.in/gt5qRCiT 2. https://lnkd.in/gXqXzAfv

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I just completed Shreyas Doshi's course for Managing your PM career on Maven this weekend. It is just what I needed right now in my career. Here are my 3 immediate take aways: 1. Define what success means to me 2. Set a 3 yr goal and grow my product competence 3. Framework to convert competence to reputation

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For years, I've led and mentored diverse teams of software engineers, and one gripe consistently surfaces, irrespective of team makeup or project nuances: "Why do I have to resolve conflicts when cherry-picking commits from the master branch?" 🤔 This complaint hits home. Engineers crave independence to innovate and deliver swiftly, yet software development thrives on collaboration, demanding robust code management and teamwork. 🚀💻 Cherry-picking commits can be an efficient way to incorporate specific changes or bug fixes into a hotfix branch or release candidate, but it often triggers conflicts as changes collide with ongoing developments. This conflict resolution process can be time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating for engineers, detracting from their productivity and morale. 😫⚔️ The absence of a structured cherry-picking process exacerbates the problem. Here's a simple fix to avoid conflicts: 1️⃣ Track the last merged PR number into the base branch when cutting release/hotfix branches. 2️⃣ When receiving a cherry-pick PR, confirm its base branch PR number. 3️⃣ Ensure all PRs between the last merged and new ones are cherry-picked before merging, preventing conflicts. 4️⃣ Once merged, update the base PR number of the last merged cherry-pick for the next cherry-pick PR review can be verified. Yes, adopting this process entails a bit of change, but the dividends in smoother workflows and happier engineers are well worth it. Let's make life easier for our fellow coders! 💪🛠️ #SoftwareEngineering #CodeReview #Collaboration #ConflictResolution #Teamwork #DeveloperLife #CherryPicking #CodeManagement #ProductivityTips #EngineeringCulture #TechTips #Mentorship #WorkflowOptimization #CodingCommunity

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If Intuit had to #layoff, #reorganize & #restructure its business for cost savings, they had a win by laying off anyway. The move of calling laid-off folks underperformers reflects bad practices at Intuit. Layoffs are the result of wrong hiring & bad planning. Fellow software professional at Intuit, your leadership is an underperformer, not you. While a layoff can be overwhelming, as a community, the least we can do is help each other in such situations. Blue Yonder is growing & hiring. Check out open roles here: https://lnkd.in/dzqXYiKm & feel free to ping us for help with referrals or any information you need. #hiring #BlueYonder #Intuit #Layoff

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‼️Most of those who have been told to leave the Bay Area company, 1,050 out of 1,800 employees, are not meeting Intuit's performance expectations, Goodarzi said, adding that Intuit is not firing people to cut costs. ‼️Others are being let go as a result of Intuit eliminating more than 300 roles across the company "to streamline work and reallocate resources toward key growth areas" and the reduction of the number of executives by approximately 10 percent. 📌In the same note, Goodarzi also announced that Intuit will be hiring 1,800 new people "primarily in engineering, product, and customer facing roles such as sales, customer success, and marketing." He added that, as a result of the new hiring, Intuit expects its overall headcount to grow in the fiscal year 2025 "and beyond." 📌Employees laid off will have their last day on September 9. They will receive, according to Goodarzi, a "package that includes a minimum of 16 weeks of pay, plus two additional weeks for every year of service" to help them financially through the layoff.

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From Astrologer's Whispers to Real Connections: Reclaiming Belonging in a Lonely Age Have you ever consulted an astrologer, their predictions swirling in your head, only to feel empty when your day takes a different turn? The emptiness might not be about the details themselves, but about seeking outside approval for your happiness. This same feeling can creep in even when you achieve success. Remember climbing the career ladder, landing that dream apartment, only to find yourself lost in a quiet emptiness? In India's bustling cities, it's a familiar, painful emotion. We're surrounded by people, yet there's a little loneliness at the edges of our lives. Thinking back to Mrs. Deshmukh, your friendly neighbour with the legendary Til Gur Barfi's, who brought the whole neighbourhood together with tea and friendly chats. Those evenings of shared stories and laughter, a web woven by simple human connection, feel like a distant memory in our super-connected yet broken world. We chase success with thumbs glued to screens, building online bridges that leave us feeling more alone than ever. The pressure to create a perfect online self-drowns out the whispers of our own desires. But here's the real deal, that shiny designation and fancy car can't fill the hole left by genuine connection. There's hope, though! We can rewrite this story. Let's ditch the small talk and chase deeper connections. Share your fears and worries, break free from feeling isolated in this sea of ambition. Remember the warmth of family gatherings, the joy of shared childhood games? Revive those small traditions. Pick up the phone for a real heart-to-heart conversation rather than What's Apping. Every act of connection, no matter how ordinary, how small, builds a more satisfying life. Imagine hearing back from an old friend, reliving an old laugh, and being surrounded by people who truly see us, where we belong. Isn't that what life is all about? Together, one conversation, one meal, and one act of kindness at a time, we can tear down the walls of loneliness. We can rewrite the narrative of modern society, where connection becomes the foundation of a life well lived. It's not too late, or is it? #HumanConnections #BelongingMatters #OvercomeLoneliness #RealConversations #MeaningfulRelationships #CommunityOverConnectivity #AuthenticLiving #SocialWellbeing #RedefiningSuccess #TraditionsRewoven #FightIsolation #VulnerableAndReal #KindnessRevolution #SmallActsBigImpact #ReconnectingHumanity #IndianSociety #UrbanLoneliness #DigitalDetox #QualityOverQuantity #ConnectionCures Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

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A Decade at Amazon - Reflections After a 10-year journey at Amazon, I recently transitioned from a yellow badge to the red corporate employee badge. While there is room for improvement at Amazon, I'm struck by how much I've learned and grown, thanks to Amazon's culture and leaders. In my last 10 years, I've had the opportunity to work across different organizations in stores, AWS, and Alexa as an individual contributor and as a manager in technical program management and engineering disciplines. Some of the most profound lessons that will stick with me include: 1. Following leadership principles unifies a company's culture and boosts productivity. 2. The importance of deep understanding, practice, and insisting on the highest standards. 3. Driving outcomes over empires and being strategically patient yet tactically impatient in pursuing customer obsession. 4. Having an insatiable curiosity and beginner's mindset. 5. Every customer issue represents an upstream process deficiency that needs to be identified and resolved urgently. 6. Prioritizing and tackling the hottest, highest impact items first. 7. Being "green-lighted" doesn't mean risk-free, and transparently calling out risks with projected issue dates. 8. Prioritizing input goals you can control before output goals, and optimizing inputs relentlessly. 9. Goals are directional, not dogmatic, and undershooting or overshooting can be acceptable if customers are delighted. 10. While off-the-shelf solutions can cover 80%, investing in tailored solutions for the remaining 20% is critical. 11. Simplicity, incremental progress, and smart automation are core philosophies. 12. Transparency in prioritization rationale and openness to adjusting the roadmap based on new inputs. 13. Sticking to your strongest points persuades better than attempting to discuss everything. 14. Removing blockers is your responsibility, not someone else's, and committing 100% once a group decision is made. 15. Embracing failures as learning opportunities in complex operations. This enriching decade has been about customer obsession, frugality, ownership, never stopping learning, highest standards, and delivering robust solutions. I'm grateful for the growth I've experienced here.

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The journey towards gRPC starts by understanding RPC conceptually. That's what this video by Arpit Bhayani is all about. https://lnkd.in/gaUGrGGP

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Totally shocked to see mass layoffs at intuit and what is more heartbreaking is that they are publicly naming out 1k+ employees as low performers who did not meet expectations. I am very sure that not even half of them would have got a poor rating before. In case you are impacted - 1. Please take some time off. Spend time with your friends/ family, go for some vacation. This is not the end in any way. 2. I am happy to help in any way possible. Reach out to me and I will try my best to get referrals within my network. Willing to get on a call if you just need someone to vent out. 3. Rest assure, the next phase will be better than the previous one. #layoff #tech #impacted #referral #mentorship #support

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It's really tough to see certain companies doing mass layoffs and blaming employees for low performance, especially in this rough job market. This not only hurts hard working folks but also overlooks bigger economic issues. Being publicly labeled an under-performer will also make it harder for these folks to find their next job. Citing AI as a reason also leads to some seriously mixed messaging. Why not retrain existing employees to work on AI instead of laying off and rehiring others? Remember Richard Branson's words: "Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your business." Leaders need to step up, take responsibility, and support their teams during these times. To those affected by these layoffs, remember that your value goes beyond your current role. Stay resilient and open to new opportunities.

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I'll fully accept that sometimes CEOs need to make very difficult decisions, but this explanation from Intuit's CEO below is truly atrocious. It is frankly impossible that they've suddenly noticed 1500 of their staff are not meeting expectations and, if it was possible, that would very much be a failure of the CEO for allowing the situation to get that bad. No matter how you look at it, the magnitude of the layoffs forces one to conclude only thing thing - it's a larger problem, the buck therefore stops with the CEO and, as such, one would expect a level of compassion and contrition as the CEO dishes out consequences to much-less-powerful people who aren't them. Gergely summarises the rest far better than what I can, but I really think those who have influence in a company should pay attention to what he writes with regards to what the CEO gains from making such a statement. When you're writing an explanation for lay-offs, ask yourself why you're writing it. Then read the statement from the perspective of your laid-off staff, from your surviving staff, and from the average member of the public. If you come across worse than you would do if you said nothing, then why release those words as they are? In doing so you destroy all possible benefits from writing a statement in the first place and it results, as we say in Germany, in a Verschlimmbesserung (google it, it's a great word). And for heaven's sake, don't introduce a fantastical projection of blame on 1500 people by suggesting you're giving them "the respect and compassion they deserve". That just makes it ripe for a @bestoflinkedin Instagram post.

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This is continuation of my previous post and it's about “Learning from Gen Z”. Working alongside Gen Z colleagues has been a transformative experience in my role as a Senior Engineering Manager at Hinge Health India. With a team of 18 software engineers spanning different generations, including Gen Z members and seasoned professionals, I've gained valuable insights that have reshaped my approach to work and leadership.
 Gen Z brings a unique perspective shaped by their digital upbringing and innate familiarity with the latest technologies. For instance, during a recent project sprint, a Gen Z team member proposed using a GraphQL-based API for a new feature rollout. Their suggestion not only streamlined our backend operations but also improved data fetching efficiency, thanks in part to tools like GitHub Copilot, which helped automate routine coding tasks and accelerate development cycles.
 Beyond technical innovations, I've learned from their approach to collaboration and agility. Gen Z colleagues are often quick to adapt to change and embrace new methodologies like Agile and DevOps. Their enthusiasm for continuous improvement has inspired our team to adopt more iterative development cycles and integrate automated testing frameworks, enhancing our product quality and speed to market.
 Moreover, Gen Z's affinity for digital communication tools has revolutionized how we coordinate and communicate within the team. Platform like Slack have become indispensable for real-time updates, facilitating seamless collaboration across distributed teams and ensuring everyone stays aligned on project milestones.
 At Hinge Health, we encourage a culture of mutual learning and mentorship. Gen Z team members actively seek opportunities to share their knowledge of emerging technologies, while seasoned professionals offer guidance on complex problem-solving and industry best practices. This exchange not only bridges generational gaps but also fosters a dynamic learning environment where everyone contributes to our collective growth and success.
 As I continue to learn from my Gen Z colleagues, I’m curious to hear about your experiences. What’s one thing you’ve learned from the younger generation that has influenced your approach to work? How do you promote knowledge sharing and collaboration across different generations in your team?

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🚀 Understanding Hick’s Law in Product Management 🚀 Have you ever felt stuck choosing between too many options? That’s Hick’s Law at play! Learn how simplifying choices can dramatically improve user experience in my latest Medium article. In this article, I dive into: How to make sign-up processes smoother 📝 Streamlining UIs for better usability 💻 Prioritizing what really matters to users ⭐ Strategies to prevent information overload ⚖️ Let’s keep it simple and effective! Discover the power of Hick’s Law and how it can transform your product management approach. #ProductManagement #UXDesign #HicksLaw #UserExperience #Simplicity #DesignPrinciples

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