Scaler Pod - The Software Engineer's Podcast

In this episode of Scaler Pod, we have Nirdosh Chouhan SVP of Engineering at OYO, Chouhan is an aspiring leader in software engineering with over 20 years of strategic growth experience in managing teams, and distributed enterprise products and applications, and previously worked in companies like Apple, Oracle, and NetApp.   An alumnus of IIM Bangalore, he's leading OYO's Platform and Revenue Technology with a team of 150+ engineers and had worked on building products for OYO to support Pricing, Invoicing, Availability, Booking, Payments, Communication, and Identity.  In this Podcast, he shares his experiences in silicon valley and working at Apple, about the hospitality industry and new innovations happening, and the Indian Jugaad culture/ mindset.    Timeline:   00:00 Teaser  02:34 Introduction   03:02 Day in the life of Nirdosh  05:44 His journey in the tech industry and early days  17:00 Engineering in OYO and tech challenges in the hospitality industry  21:25 Arnav's experiences while working in Zomato   22:45 OYO's diversified market  26:30 Custom filters and challenges with large data  30:09 Changes in hospitality and product functioning  34:20 His learnings while working at Apple  38:10 Global business spread and customer satisfaction  40:50 Work culture, hiring, and feedback  45:00 Challenges for engineer's growth in India  48:02 Thoughts on the Indian tech ecosystem  50:10 Future of the Hospitality industry and catering experiences   54:09 New changes and possible technological ways for engineers   59:39 The India Jugaad mindest, Ipad launch, and the difference between India and the silicon valley  01:11:00 Advice for young engineers/ freshers  01:14:28 Outro #Scaler #OYO #Podcast #Technology #Hospitality #Engineering #ScalerPod

In this episode, we have Prasanna Sankar the CTO and Co-founder of Rippling.com, which is currently valued at $10B. Prasanna had also co-founded companies like LikeaLittle, a campus social network that grew from 0 to 20M page views in 6 weeks.   He is a two-time world finalist at Google Code Jam and ACM ICPC and held the rank one position at TopCoder while in college. After moving to the US he worked with companies like Microsoft and Zenefits but was always curious about real-world problem-solving and building startups.    Listen to this Podcast where he shares his encounters with 6 sigma events, startup experiences, raising funding from major VC firms like Ycombinator and a16z, stories with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and his belief in blockchain technology for a better-decentralized future.  Timeline:  00:00 Introduction 00:43 Understanding 6 sigma events 02:21 How he started with TopCoder 06:50 Microsoft, Interactions with Paul Graham(Y Combinator) and his first Startup 19:30 About Like a Little and hyper-growth 23:47 On turning down offers from Google and Facebook, investment with a16z 29:04 Failures and Downfalls while building startups 34:46 Zenefits story 42:35 How rippling started and engineering culture 47:42 Managing large tech teams and his learnings 59:40 His first principles 1:03:25 6 sigma events in current times and Blockchain Technology(Crypto) 1:12:35 On Decentralization, cryptocurrencies, and Uniswap 1:17:53 His Optimism, beliefs, and life experiences 1:22:19 OpenAI and the Elon Musk story 1:27:47 Outro #PrasannaSankar #ScalerPod #Podcast #Scaler #Blockchain #Ycobinator #Startups #Rippling #Crypto

In this episode of Scaler Pod, we have Akash Saxena who is the CTO at Hotstar and previously has been with OpenTable for about 12 years. Currently, he focuses on building & scaling Disney+ Hotstar to reach millions of users across the globe and to provide entertainment through digital content and live sports streaming.  As the ICC T20 World Cup is on the line, let's talk with him about Cricket, Ind vs Pak games, Handling Live Streaming for Scale, and the Future of OTT Platforms in India. #Hotstar #ScalerPod #Podcast #Scaler Timeline: 00:00 Introduction 00:52 A day in the life of Akash Saxena 04:33 On his journey before Hotstar 15:57 Getting started with Hotstar, Initial days, and Ind vs Pak 20:55 Making an Inhouse streaming platform and overcoming challenges 25:50 Preparing for massive scale and his F1 racing approach 36:23 Handling live buffer and delay latency 42:45 Concurring distribution and video quality 48:17 Optimizing user data and team culture 56:50 Building Watch and Play on Hotstar, Microservices 1:05:13 Scaling tech teams in Hotstar 1:15:55 Hiring requirements for the tech team 1:19:55 Advice for young people building their own Startups 1:26:06 Leadership approach, crisis management, and being customer first 1:35:41 Arnav tells about challenges he faced while his early startup days 1:37:49 Importance of modeled testing 1:40:58 Thinking for the engineering team and planning for their growth 1:47:31 Advice for freshers and about personal growth 1:56:23 Use of AI, Machine Learning in Hotstar, and the future ahead 2:02:49 Vastness of content and geographical diversification 2:06:18 Hotstar Multiplex and how watching movies is changing 2:09:35 Future of media and OTT content domain 2:12:27 Outro

At FamPay, Shobhit is helping build infrastructure to handle millions of transactions and delight the young generation with new experiences. He talks about his journey starting from being an Engineer at Goldman Sachs, working through big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon, trying hands at a startup to working at Whatsapp. He also discusses some of the challenges they are solving. Timeline: 00:00 Introduction 00:25 A day in the life of Shobhit Gupta 02:46 On Work-life Balance 04:13 His journey and coming back to India 12:25 Culture in Big Tech Companies(FAANG) 16:57 Designing systems for scale 20:05 Difference in Big Companies vs Startups 28:44 Why did he choose Fintech Industry and his thoughts on UPI 34:54 Challenges when handling Millions of users 40:52 Experience in building for the Young teenage audience 46:55 Product launch checks, security, and testing 49:58 Work structure within the company 54:57 Overcoming referral reward issue at Fampay 01:00:55 Hiring at Fampay and challenges 01:05:56 Fampay Interview and Hiring process 01:11:15 How to design systems in a better? 01:15:55 Dealing with Rules and Regulations in Fintech 01:22:15 Future of Fintech in India #Fanpay #Scaler #Podcast

Dr. Kailash Nadh, Zerodha's CTO is famous for his countless side projects on his GitHub, his blog that thousands of software engineers follow, and for building the tech infra at Zerodha that is run by only 35 engineers but supports over 1 crore traders! Let's talk with him about hacker culture, working on open source projects, and how to scale up tech and tech teams with common sense. #Zerodha #Scaler #podcast #Entrepreneur #Tech Timeline: 00:00 Introduction 00:40 A day in the life of Kailash Nadh 02:55 Writing code as a CTO 04:25 How to react to regulation as a Fintech team 07:35 Maintenance windows and reconciliation/settlement time for trading apps 11:15 How Zerodha manages with such a small team of 30 people in tech? 19:55 Tech Culture at Zerodha's Tech Team 22:55 How engineers can grow more to learn product/business domain 30:55 Why all companies must focus on better tech culture 35:00 Team dynamics that make tech teams grow better 37:35 Learn technology by building projects 43:55 Kailash's dns.toys side project and why he made it 48:25 Arnav's share time side project 52:40 Open source is important for engineers as well as orgs 1:01:55 Getting started with open source for those new to it 1:04:55 Hacker culture among Indian engineers 1:14:55 Open-source is, in a way, altruism 1:18:55 Future of tech in fintech domain 1:26:25 Why Zerodha picked Flutter for mobile? 1:33:55 (Arnav ranting about hyped up tech stacks 😅) 1:35:55 Zerodha's backend tech stack 1:43:55 When Zerodha first started using Go lang 1:46:55 Database choices, and Clickhouse and Postgres 1:49:55 Managed services vs doing things in-house 1:56:55 CI/CD setup at Zerodha 2:01:55 How to take good tech-stack choices early on?

At Dukaan, Subhash and his cofounder Suumit are building the e-commerce infrastructure on the edge of the cloud for the next billion! Dukaan lets anyone build their online store in minutes, and Subhash talks about their journey from SEO optimization to building a Shopify challenger over the last decade and how their team is surmounting challenges of extremely low latency page loads of shops on slow mobile internet connections across the globe!  #scalerpod #dukaan #podcast  TimeStamps  00:00 Teaser  01:50 Introduction  02:50 Day in the life of Subhash  15:00 Young software engineers today 21:30 Making software reliable, and improve UX for users  24:30 How engineers work and work-life balance  27:00 How do you hire people ? 31:00 Subhash's early career experience  36:30 Job security, hiring and firing  42:00 Early SEO optimisation as freelancer 52:00 Meeting cofounder Suumit Shah  01:00:00 Building the first product company 01:04:00 Early idea of Dukaan from whatsapp-commerce  01:16:00 Expanding on SaaS offerings  01:20:00 Mindset of SaaS in India 01:24:30 Better CDN and Edge-level low latency content 01:32:00 Building an edge-computing stack  01:52:00 Edge level SSL, domain handling over BGP and anycast 02:00:00 Maggi Delivery Network (don't miss this!)  02:15:00 Competing with Shopify  02:19:00 Mobile-first D2C commerce shop pages  02:26:00 Innovating hiring strategy at Dukaan 02:36:00 Work Environment at Dukaan 02:39:30 Stress Free Zone at Dukaan office  02:43:20 Conclusion

Jacob is a seasoned tech leader in the startup world, having been CTO of  Grofers (now Blinkit) and has also spent a stint at Sequoia as  CTO-in-residence.  He now works with CTOs, CPOs and their teams to be a sounding board for  their ideas, and help grow the cultures and systems they dream of. Contents:  00:00 Teaser 01:42 Introduction  02:05 Life in a day of a CTO 05:00 Peacetime vs Wartime CTO  06:50 Challenges for a CTO at different startup stages  10:00 Tech vs Business 14:30 What motivates engineers? 19:00 How EMs can keep their teams engaged ? 24:30 Why Engineers should focus on writing? 30:00 Importance of conferences, blogs and open source participation 35:00 Developing the art of communication and documentation 38:30 Personal Branding for Software Engineers  43:00 Open Source contributions and hiring via open source 45:00 Role of Public Speaking in Jacob's career  49:00 Importance of Developer Advocacy  52:00 Engineers can smell bullshit 54:30 How can one move into Developer Relations? 58:30 How is the 2022 downturn/recession playing out?  1:00:30 Things that will still grow despite the downturn  1:03:00 Advice to budding tech entrepreneurs 1:06:00 Emergence of Vertical SaaS 1:08:00 ML/AI and generative tool applications 1:10:00 Pains of Mobile Developer experience  1:13:00 What's next for Jacob in life?  1:14:25 Jacob's passion for early child education

Welcome to the SCALER Pod series! In this first episode, we have Arnav Gupta (Product & Strategy, SCALER) in conversation with Jitendra Agrawal, Global CTO, CARS24. They discuss about engineering management, scaling up of engineering teams and importance of mobile development. About Jitendra Agrawal   Jitendra is currently the Global CTO of CARS24 expanding the tech team that works on CARS24's international products. He has spent a significant about of time in engineering leadership roles previously too, including being CTO of SpringBoard and LendingKart as well has being VP of Engineering at HotStar.    Timelines    00:00 Teaser   01:30 Introduction   02:00 Day in the life of a CTO   05:30 Tech Team Structure of different sized companies   08:00 Working on B2B vs B2C tech   11:00 Tech Teams communicating with Business/Products   12:30 Jiten's career story so far  17:00 Key ingredients to hire and retain a great tech team  23:00 Career choices for mid-senior engineers   28:00 Being 'language-specific' in hiring   35:00 Importance of Mobile Engineering

About Amod Malviya:    Best known in the startup ecosystem for building Flipkart’s technology backbone, Amod Malviya is the renowned co-founder of Udaan, a B2B marketplace that notably raced to unicorn status in less than 26 months. Amod is a highly skilled technologist whose experience and interests are commendable in his great contribution to the tech industry. Graduated from IIT Kharagpur, Amod’s consistency and dedication leave an inspiring mark on every detail of his developments. His skills and expertise have been consistently demonstrated in the technical mastery of programming languages, building strong scalable infrastructure as well as network architecture. 0:00:00 Teaser       0:02:00 Intro       0:02:26 Why do you still continue to code ?       0:07:50 You were making weekend dev challenges on Twitter. Why did you stop?       0:14:25 What motivates engineers go deep into systems and languages?        0:18:00 What is your advice for engineers who are overwhelmed with multiple languages, tech stacks and frameworks to learn?       0:24:40 How to transcend from thinking in a framework to thinking in a concept?       0:30:20 What is your advice for mid-senior engineers to grow in their career?       0:41:00 How to take time out for learning when working at startups?       0:47:00 Why is it important to keep learning throughout the career ?       0:52:50 Should we learn Computer Science fundamentals? Or we can just start building projects?       1:05:00 Learning for short-terma vs long-term goals?       1:12:00 Importance of skills vs degrees       1:25:00 How to create a peer group that helps you to learn?       1:27:00 Should engineers think of going into Product Management?        1:35:00 How to judge what is hype and what is subsstance when picking a new domain?       1:55:00 How to discover, and get involved in good open source projects?       2:00:00 Words of advice for engineers beginning their careers in tech      

Employees are offered compensation packages that include other components apart from basic such as ESOP, RSU, and ESPP. As an employee, are you aware of all these different terms and how these are calculated in your CTC? In this live session, Abhimanyu Saxena (Co-founder: Scaler Academy) and Arnav Gupta(ex-Engineering Head of Zomato Android App), break down the CTC packages for techies. Here are the topics covered in this video: 0:00 - Introduction 0:46 - Current situation of jobs and CTC due to pandemic 3:14 - Company CTC and package distribution 7:23 - What is joining Bonus 11:22 - What is a retention bonus 14:55 - Is there Tax cut on joining bonus 16:29 - What is a performance bonus 19:51 - What are stock price-based incentives? 21:24 - Non cash components of the Package 26:59 - What are RSUs 29:25 What is a Stock option 34:10 Cliff and vesting 39:18 - What happens when you leave in 2 years if the company vesting period is 4 years? 46:54 - Why is the whole stock amount calculated in annual CTC? 51:11 - How important are other benefits like Health care etc? 58:35 - What happens to ESOPs if the company is acquired by another MNC? 1:02:31 - Is taking a hit on Salary in return for ESOPs normal? 1:07:23 Gratuity component of CTC?