India Covid Estimates

On the day of this writing, July 26th, India has 14lakh covid cases

Goal

There are several people stuck in foreign countries who are making tradeoffs about flights, timing, travel, medicines. The goal of this post is to help people plan their lives by laying out how the future is looking like from here. 

I made one of the earliest predictions of first hundred cases in bay area which helped some people realize what is coming : https://siliconvalleystories.blogspot.com/2020/03/coronavirus-in-bay-area.html

Projections

july - 16 lakhs

aug - 40 lakhs

sept - 1crore

oct - 2-2.5 crore

nov - 4-5 crore

dec - 8-10 crore

Assumptions

• Doubling rate is 20 days
• Testing rate continues to support CFR around 2.5-3%, so India will scale testing as the cases grow 
• They dont do renewed country wide lockdowns

How to hold compounders

1. Think of stock ownership as a percentage partnership in the business
2. Good businesses with strong revenue growth and high profit margins will seldom come cheap at a discount, you will get them expensive
3. Focus on moats 
4. Keep time on your side, a great business with >20% revenue growth may start to look like a bargain after holding for 2 years
5. Dont sell the stock if it reaches a certain price
6. Keep re-evaluating the moat erosion or new moat creation and not the stock price
7. Double down on future discounts
8. Remember that you are always in the eight innings of a never ending game, as look as you can maintain that perspective, you will do well in the long term
9. Remember the price can go higher than you can imagine when there is irrational exuberance. 

Funny Template Jokes

Software Engineers

1. I have a joke on selection sort, but it will take a lot of time to tell it
2. I have a joke on Djkstra's algorithm, but I am finding the shortest path to tell it
3. I have a joke on Dynamic Programming, but I forgot to memorize it

Society

1. I have a joke on universal healthcare, but not everyone will get it
2. I have a joke on Covid, but I dont want anyone to get it
3. I have a joke on trickle down economics, but 99% of you will never get it

Design interview questions - FAANG

Interview Questions

1. How would you design Instagram
2. How would you design Messenger
3. How would you design a Microsoft Word/Microsoft Excel
4. How would you design Youtube
5. How would you build the backend of Google Search
6. How would you design Uber's Marketplace
7. How would you build a News Feed
8. How would you design and distributed key value store / Cassandra ? 
9. How would you build a load balancer ? 

Reading Material

1. Scalable web architecture and distributed systems
2. Numbers everyone should know
3. HDFS Internals
4. The architecture of open source applications
5. Redis use cases
6. What to chose for your synchronous vs asynchronous communication
7. Nosql patterns
8. Scalable system design patterns
9. Bigtable vs Casandra vs HBase
10. Mesos
1. Application aware scheduling Mesos
2. SMACK stack
3. Docker vs Kubernetes vs Mesos
11. Zookeeper 
1. Explaination video
12. Spark
1. RDD Explanation
13. Hive
1. Schema on read - metastore, HCatalog to export the schema
2. Why HDFS
14. Facebook
1. Scribe
2. Scuba
3. Cassandra
15. sd
16. 
    

Preparation References

1. http://highscalability.com/
2. System Design Primer github link
3. Awesome scalability github link
4. Azure system design patterns
5. System design interview 

The 5 biggest forces in the financial markets

These 5 forces are logarithmically decreasing from top to bottom. 

• Federal Reserve

Here is the Federal reserve balance sheet from 2008. S&P500 indexed over the FED balance sheet is at 2010. So we are in a recession, we have lost a decade. The market does reflect the economy adjusted by Fed balance sheet.

The mother of all asset bubbles is coming. 

• US Congress
• Big Tech (FAANGs)
• US Dollar
• Vanguard (Buy and hold, buy the dip investors)

Collection of Investment Letters during Covid

1. 2020 Q2 Bronte Capital letter
2. Warren Buffet on the stock market in 1999
3. Which way now - Howard Marks
4. Ballie Gifford's letter
5. Blog on kelly criterion
6. Timing the bottom
7. The market indexed to the Fed balance sheet
8. vltvafund june 2020
9. 
   

Life in Quotes

Here is my list of favorites. Please comment with your favorite quote below and I will add the top ones to this page.

1. Never let a good crisis go to waste

A tale of two halves - Big Tech Earnings 2020 Q1

How not to do layoffs

How not to prioritize : Death by a thousand cuts

How to get into FAANG

Coding Interviews

Two words : Leetcode Hard

System Design Interviews

WIP

Behavioral Interviews

WIP

Referrals

Referrals count at FAANG. Hypothesis is birds of the same feather flock together. Smart people know other smart people. Referrals decrease in value in the following order

1. Your manager at a previous company who now works at FAANG
2. Co-workers who you worked with in past companies who have first have knowledge of your work
3. Co-workers in other teams who have second hand knowledge of your work
4. Friends from grad school
5. Social Contacts

Social contacts referral may not count in signal value added but can certainly help you with getting an interview call. 

Reasons to buy a home in Silicon Valley

Big Tech

1. Home prices in silicon valley track Nasdaq - basket of tech stocks 
2. Silicon valley is headquarters of top S&P500 companies - Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Paypal
3. As tech companies become winner take all market leaders, housing seems to be a great diversification from company specific equity.
4. Google, Facebook, Apple pay hefty refreshers. Any engineer who has worked in these companies for 2-3 years can come up with a 200k downpayment in the bay area, which is needed to get a starter 1 million condo. If you are not working in FAANG(Facebook, Apple, Amazing, Netflix, Google), bay area real estate is your only way to play Faang equity refreshers. For context, Facebook E5 engineers make 120k and Google E5 engineers make 100k refreshers every year. An Engineering Manager in these companies in bay area easily makes north of 600k which is higher than Vice Presidents/Directors in many fortune 500 companies in New York, Toronto, London. All these folks buy a home where they live in, ie in the bay area. 
5. Low interest rates(<=3%) in the last 10 years has propelled asset prices

Startup Ecosystem

1. Silicon valley is the start up capital of the world. Startup IPOs continue to mint new millionaires in the area who buy homes. For eg : Uber, Lyft IPOs of 2019 pumped up bay area housing prices. Bay area startup IPOs are the greatest millionaire generating machine today. 
2. Top venture capital funds are all located in Sand Hill Road, Palo Alto. Easier to raise funding in the bay area. Andresson Horowitz, Benchmark, Sequoia Capital are all based our of Bay Area. 
3. More IPOs produce more founders, more capital, that keeps this innovation engine going. 
4. Startup talent : given all the startups and big tech, bay area has an ecosystem of startup talent and knowhow. 
5. Biotech hub : South San Francisco is the home of biotech. Biotech is going to be the next big disruption. 

China 

Chinese all cash buyers propel prices in the bay area.

1. Limit on owning home in China for more than 70 years
2. Rich Chinese buyers buy bay area property  
3. Chinese kids who study in US often come to bay area and buy houses with all cash down payments from payments
4. Chinese people have generated enormous wealth in the last 2 decades with companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu having big IPOs. Bay area real estate is a great diversification play. 

Covid

This is a surprise one. 

1. San Francisco is one of the few top cities worldwide which has truly flattened the Covid curve. Also San Francisco is home to UCSF hospital and Chan Zuckerberg hospital. UCSF ranks among the top 10 medical units in USA. 
2. Covid will accelerate the adoption of tech worldwide. Tech companies will win and their stock prices already reflect that. Increased tech stock prices will continue to support bay area home prices
3. Federal reserve money printer will continue to print dollars. These dollars will have a trickle down to real assets and asset price inflation will continue as interest rates continue to be at historic lows. Due to Covid, there will be unprecedented economic job losses and  Fed will continue to support low interest rates thus creating another mega asset price bubble.  
4. Chinese economy will come out pretty much unaffected. Any softness in bay area home prices, will be great opportunity for all cash Chinese buyers to gobble up. 
5. If you are too worried about remote work affecting home prices, look at cities like Wellington, Vancouver, Melbourne who never had top tech jobs to support sky high real estate prices. 

Cities

1. Bay area has two major cities : San Francisco and San Jose 
2. Three International Airports : San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland
3. Cities have major network effects. Think about New York City, Mumbai, London, Vancouver, Toronto. Bay area home prices are cheap compared to these cities given high per capita income. Bay area has the lowest barrier to entry compared to these cities because there are enough jobs available who can pay you to support the home prices.
4. Public transport connectivity through Bart and Caltrain between SF and SJ

Weather and Natural Beauty

1. Last but not the least, amazing weather. You get what you pay for. You are not holed by half the year due to snow or rain here. 
2. You have Yosemite, Tahoe, Sequoia, Lassen Volcanic national parks within 3-4 hours driving distance
3. You have the beautiful beaches and the pacific coastline - the scenic CA-1 drive filled with amazing natural hikes

Education 

1. Two top universities : Stanford and Berkeley are located in the bay area. They attract top talent from all over the world. Top professors want to teach in these universities because of the bay area living
2. University of California : The UC system has top colleges like UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, UC Los Angeles. Cash rich foreign parents often buy homes to establish residency for their teens so that they can get admitted to UC system as local on lower fees. 
3. Top private schools where kids of tech professionals go to : Stratford, Harker
4. High property prices support high public school funding. Top public schools : Palo Alto High, Mission San Jose. 
5. Good supporting universities : University of San Francisco(Top 10 hospital in the country), UCSF, SJSU

If you have read till here, you can also break into Bay Area big tech : read my Engineering Management blog here, articles free of management jargon, real insights that will help you advance your career. 

Executive Communication for Engineering Managers - Guide to give an effective roadmap presentation

Audience

Directors and cross-functional stake holders

Subject

Engineering Roadmap Presentation

Points to remind yourself as an Engineering Manager 

Speak slowly, may be 2x slower than you normally speak. You have been spending day and night preparing this roadmap presentation, but your audience hasnt. You have way more context and will naturally speak fast to the subject. Its important to go slow, give the audience a chance to consume the context, keep the presentation interactive and take them along the roadmap. So speak slowly, give pauses, take questions. 

Set context about the

1. background of the team and the overall goal and strategy
2. workstream breakdown within the team and how it fits into the goal
3. sizing comparison legend and costing granularity (design + engineering + ML + iOS + Android) which will be dimensions your projects will be compared on
4. staffing and distribution of staffing across workstreams
5. definition of P0s, P1s, P2s. This is the definition I like to use : 
1. P0s - team will absolutely cover it or the team fails
2. P1s - stretch goal
3. P2s - good to have
6. opportunity sizing, costing and strategy to motivate your P0s and the difference with a P1. More than the what highlight why is something a P0. 
7. staffing crunch to highlight what is being dropped to P1. Ideally quantify P1s with missed impact. This can help you create a case for new Head Count. Noob managers often overlook the P1s and dont talk about it because they are not working on it. 
8. measurement methodology for tracking goals
9. goaling details and project level breakdown with motivation behind why your goal is a P10, P50, P80
10. risks - a good manager should always call out risks. if this section is empty, then the team is not aggressive enough and coasting. Or the manager is flying blind and not aware of variables

What is America/California searching

Canada PR Process

Express Entry Pool

1. IELTS
2. ECA (Educational Credential Assessment) - needs transcripts
3. Express Entry CRS score

PNP - Provincial Nominee Program

British Columbia PNP - Tech Draw

1. Need a job offer
2. No Express Entry Pool Entry needed
3. Create a BC PNP registration - No IELTS required
4. Get a PNP
5. Create an Express Entry Pool Entry

Video reference - British Columbia PNP Tech Pilot Program

OINP 

Employer Job Offer Category

Human Capital Category -> Human Capital Priorities Stream

1. No Job offer needed
2. Express Entry Pool Entry Needed
3. OINP searches EE Pool and invites you to apply for OINP

Video reference - Ontario Human Capital Priorities Stream

1.