
Happy people don’t leave jobs they love - BerislavLopac
http://randsinrepose.com/archives/shields-down/
======
TeMPOraL
This article implicitly assumes that the employee wanted to be in the company
for life, at least initially. Which is strange, given the average life-span of
a contemporary company, software or otherwise. Still, maybe if the company
asks new prospects during their job interviews whether they want to stay in it
forever, and rejects those who say no, this may be applicable. Otherwise, it
seems a bit like an inflated sense of self importance.

You see, your company is probably not SpaceX, nor NASA. It's not pushing the
frontiers of what's possible, or helping make the world a better place. That
iPhone-app-cranking shop is just a marketing gig, nothing important on the
face of this planet. And many people, many employees, have dreams. Or seek
fulfillment, which they may not find in shipping out yet another webapp. They
are in your company because it's fun to work on the problems it has - and it
pays well - but that's not the extent of their dreams. Especially in this
industry, where a lot of people were originally hobbyist programmers, which
means tech is for them a part of life, a part of themselves, and not an
otherwise uninteresting money-making skill set.

Happy people may very well leave their jobs, even if they love them, because
it's unlikely that their life goals are perfectly aligned with company goals.

~~~
gcb0
nobody (should?) looks for satisfaction at work. that's the marketing human
resources and PR feed you so you spend more time at work.

work is a means to sustenance. you help someone make a lot of money (either
exploring space or showing ads in a plagiarized fart app) for a paycheck and
then you use that money to sponsor your life style.

work is not supposed to be a hobby.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I used to believe that when I was younger; a little experience cured me
successfully :). It's not that it isn't possible to have a job that also is
your hobby and your passion - it's just _extremely difficult_ to find one.
That is, unless you're really accepting and easy to please, or young and still
in crush with programming. I've seen quite a lot of the latter types among
young developers. Sadly, I've entered workforce long past my crush period, so
you couldn't make me satisfied with life by offering to pay for making a
random website in currently hot framework.

The most realistic shot at really working on what you love is to start your
own business, but even then you often have to pivot to something less
interesting to you, and either way, in time you're likely to end up doing
mostly administrative work.

So yeah, I ended up assuming that work will _not_ be my hobby, and it's up to
me to maximize its profit while minimizing time spent on it.

~~~
gcb0
starting your business is already on the area i like least: dealing with
clients.

impossible to start my dream job, and i already tried twice

------
sandworm101
Happy people leave jobs they love all the time. Not everyone is an in-demand
tech genius with no life outside their career. Not everyone has a buddy at
another company who can promise a job. People leave jobs they love every day
not because they want to, but because they have to.

Real people have real families. Kids grow. Parents age. Sisters have car
accidents. Dogs rip their ACLs. At any moment any realworld person may have to
walk away from the job they love to accommodate the needs of a family member.
Maybe they need to go to a higher-paying job (if they are lucky) but more
realistically they need a job at a different location or time so they can
spend more time dealing with things totally outside the job.

Real people have real bodies. They get sick. They have heart attacks. They get
devastating news from doctors. They need to spend less time at the keyboard
and more time at the gym. The job you love, that you are willing to spend 24/7
working to improve, is often the job that is killing you.

Want to keep employees onboard? They want two things more than anything else:
Either more money, fewer hours for the same money, or some balance between the
two. That's what keeps people from leaving. It allows flexibility when that
day comes that they would otherwise have to walk. Everything else is just
icing on the cake.

~~~
r2dnb
I agree 100% on your point about flexibility. I personally value three things
: fair compensation (both because I know I'm good and because I don't like to
let people make a number on me), the company's mission and it's flexibility.

The first two are obvious. The way I see the third one is that I prefer when a
company respects my life, value entrepreneurial mindsets, and will let me
accommodate the evolution of my personal projects over time. Too many
companies want to own your life and influence your lifestyle. They have a one-
sided approach to employment.

I once met a different kind of employer. I told him I was passionate about
something and left my job a few months before to start a startup that was at
the time already on the market. He asked me if I wanted to work part-time of
full-time, if I wanted to be on the payroll or if I'd preferred to invoice the
company, and if I wanted to work from home or to commute.

This is the sort of company one wouldn't leave for sure, and it really
triggers a deep sense of loyalty. Respect and flexibility are the key things.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> I once met a different kind of employer. I told him I was passionate about
> something and left my job a few months before to start a startup that was at
> the time already on the market. He asked me if I wanted to work part-time of
> full-time, if I wanted to be on the payroll or if I'd preferred to invoice
> the company, and if I wanted to work from home or to commute.

These sorts of managers/founders/owners/clients are worth their weight in
gold; I follow these people to the gates of hell with suntan location in hand.

------
fsloth
"When that mail arrived gently asking you about coffee, you didn’t answer the
way you answered the prior five similar mails with a brief, “Really happy
here. Let’s get a drink some time!” You think you thought Hmmm… what the hell.
It can’t hurt. What you actually thought or realized was:...( _miserable past
experiences_ )"

No, that's not me. When someone asks me for a coffee in these circumstances I
go out of curiosity - it gives me an opportunity to probe the career market in
an indepth way and lets me upkeep contacts.

I'm happy where I work but I do need to know my market worth and what the job
market is like just in case the management three layers up decides to do
something which affects my position negatively.

I'm a neurotic about things that just need to work and my familys financial
situation - for which I'm greatly responsible - is one of those things.

Networking and flirting with other employers is not treachery, it's common
sense.

Also, I claim there is a hell of a statistic bias going here - I bet he does
not collect this information from the people who are staying and which parts
of this heuristic dataset actually explain why the people who left, left. One
would need to compare these factoids with the population who stayed first. I
understand the need for rules of thumb of course - just as long one remembers
they mighy be completely wrong.

~~~
hibikir
One thing is networking, and another is to do onsite visits that are clear
recruiting pitches. I have a friend that, since she's become relatively well
known and travels a lot, gets a lot of those recruiting pitches. Has that made
her happier? Nope: It's not hard to see the grass greener on the other side
when everyone around you is doing their best to make things seem amazing.
She's never sat in the same place for more than a year in the last 6, so she's
not really had time to leave her mark anywhere. Not one major work
accomplishment in years. And now, the minute anything starts to look
difficult, she gives up, and jumps ship again. It's like dumping partners
after 4 dates: Never having enough time to building anything remotely
meaningful. When the honeymoon phase ends, she's gone. In her case, her public
face is what keeps people coming back. But really small stays are a red flag.

In a company, it's not as if you need people to stay for 10 years to be
successful, but it's hard to go anywhere when 10 months is already considered
a big tenure.

At the same time though, I also worry about having a core of people that never
leave. A few jobs ago, I attended a 15 year celebration. 15! Straight out of
school, to architect, without having ever worked anywhere else. Management
never figured out that those 15+ year tenures were the reason many new senior
hires were coming in and leaving quickly: Why would you work at a place that
has such a long standing, very tenured network of people that trust each other
more than anyone new, and that they'll never leave? You better love those
people, because they are the technical ceiling of what you'll get.

~~~
fsloth
"Why would you work at a place that has such a long standing, very tenured
network of people that trust each other more than anyone new"

In general, trust and longevity (in addition to a smallish size) are desirable
qualities in a technical team of experts.

The product itself signals then the technical merits of the team.

There is the 'expert beginner' idea that it's easy to stagnate and entrench
oneself in a dysfunctional organization.

A long lasting team of expert beginners is an antipattern of course.

But the way to get a high quality team is not by churning through hires - it's
by successfull hiring.

------
colomon
This article (and most of the comments thus far) seems to completely ignore
the fact that work might not be the only thing in your life.

As an example, seven years ago I asked my wife to leave a part-time job she
loved. I was the family's main breadwinner, and spending 30 hours a week being
a solo childcare provider was crushing my productivity.

She left that job. But it wasn't the job's fault in any but the most vague
theoretical way, like "If they'd paid her a million dollars a year to work
part time, we could have afforded a nanny."

(That change triggered additional positive changes in our lives, and today we
are in a much nicer place for us to live, and she has a full time job she
likes, though perhaps not quite as much as she loved that old job. But the
environment that made that old job great ended years ago anyway, as her boss
moved on to greener pastures.)

~~~
ricardolopes
The last job I left was an extremely fulfilling job that I'd gladly stay in
for a lot longer. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, work is not the only thing
in life. Together with my fiancée, we've decided to move back to our country
of origin, due to many personal reasons. This change had nothing to do with
work at all.

------
fredwu
Unless the employee leaves for a role (more senior, more pay, and/or more
responsibilities) which at his/her current company simply isn't available or
feasible.

I have experienced this from both ends, as the employee who outgrew my current
role, and as a manager who my direct report outgrew their role. In this case,
apart from trying to create a similar role (which often than not is
impossible), the best you can do is to wish them the best, and be proud of the
fact that you've worked with such an awesome colleague that they have now
surpassed what the role could do for them. :)

~~~
mooreds
This, exactly. I left a great company because I was at the top of the (small)
technology department and didn't see any chance for further technical career
development, either in management or in technology. It didn't make sense for
the company to radically change their technical direction nor to hire a larger
team.

At least that was my assessment. Nine months after I left they spun off a
small start-up that, if I had known was coming, would have made me more likely
to stay.

------
xiaoma
The biggest problem with this blog post is its assumption that there _are_
"shields" to begin with.

Whatever I'm doing there's always a possibility of something better out there.
Rather than throw up "shields" and shut off all possibility of serendipity, I
just evaluate opportunities vs what I'm doing now (and factor in some
switching cost). Obviously if I'm heavily invested in a long-term track, it
would have to be something amazing to make me leave. But why would someone set
up mental defenses against even the _possibility_ of something amazing?

~~~
azernik
And I think the "shields" wording implies that jumping jobs is a bad thing
that workers need to protect themselves from.

It might be comforting for the ex-manager to say "their loss, not mine," but
that's not a very useful framework for analysis.

------
rfeather
One of the great things about my boss is that he talks frankly about the fact
that many of us will move on and actually gives advice on what to try in your
career "someday". This isn't because we express, or have much reason to
express, dissatisfaction. It's simply pragmatic. Highly skilled workers have
options and often ambition and curiosity too. Searching for " software job
tenure" seems to indicate that most go through many companies in a career.
Sometimes a company really does fail it's employees, but sometimes it really
is just a chance to try something new. The point being, the author is speaking
in too general terms. It's probably ok, even necessary, to not be everything
to every employee.

------
rsp1984
This whole talk of _shields up_ and _shields down_ is of a suggestive
psychological kind and it bothers me. Taking _shields down_ implies that
shields have been up before, yet the article fails to explain why we're
dealing with _shields_ in the first place.

To me the best employee is one that doesn't have to use any kind of shields at
all. If using shields is the only way an employee can pretend (to others or
himself) he's happy in his job, he probably isn't.

I've left a great job to start a company. And I've had good engineers leave at
my startup. Nowhere in there I noticed any _shields_ going up or down. It just
wasn't a good fit. End of story.

~~~
gkop
Are you in the Bay Area? The sheer intensity of everybody constantly asking if
you'd consider working for them means that you _naturally must_ put up some
defenses in order to stay focused.

------
fsloth
"The reason this reads cranky is because I, the leader of the humans, screwed
up. "

Not necessarily. Your organization might just not pay the same as some other
equally pleasant place. Salaried employees now live in a world where it feels
it's best to hoard as much money as possible throughout ones career _just in
case_. It's not greed. It's a fear of destitution and miserable old age.

------
ThomPete
When I founded hello, a design agency, we had one rule around people leaving.
It was always our fault. Whether they left because they found a better job,
didn't like their manager, got better compensated and so on.

What I found was that the real reason people left was when they couldn't feel
their own contribution in the company or when they couldn't grow insight the
company anymore.

People will stand up to a lot of things as long as they feel like their
contribution is part of the reason the projects succeed. It also turned out to
be a great way to figure out how many people should be on a project. We would
never have someone there just because we didn't know what else they should do.

As a founder leaving a company the reason at least for me was a little
diffent. I left hello to join 80/20 because I felt we had the wrong
conversations. I.e. I was spending too much time convincing the other partners
of how the world looked like and they probably felt like they spent a lot of
time trying to convince me how the world looked like. This is akin to having a
relationship where you argue a lot about the symptoms and never about the root
cause for the symptoms.

It always somehow about meaning.

------
Mahn
Strange article, as if people needed to be "shielded" into their jobs.

Also I'd argue that you can be perfectly happy and still resign. Sometimes
someone simply comes along and offers more money.

~~~
pavlov
If you're perfectly happy, you're probably not going to leave to get a 10%
raise.

If someone comes along and offers you 50% more than you're currently making,
doesn't that implicitly mean you're not being properly compensated at your
current job?

I guess that's the "shields down" moment, when you realize that you'll become
chronically underpaid if you stick around.

~~~
blakeyrat
Everybody has different priorities.

I'd easily take a 20% pay _cut_ (all else being equal) if I could find a job I
don't need to commute into Seattle, Redmond or Bellevue for. Unfortunately,
I've had zilch luck so far.

~~~
vmarsy
Another option could be to find a place with flexible hours, during NON-rush
hours, the commute around the places you mention isn't that bad!

------
pheroden
I hate to break it to HN, but we are not the norm. We're here because we long
for more, and have the skills to make that yearning reality. So while every
anecdote in the comments is true I'm sure for that person, for the vast
majority of people, this article is pretty accurate.

------
Fede_V
There's certain questions that you can ask, but you will almost never get an
honest answer, because the downside of potentially upsetting someone far
outweigh the upside of being completely frank.

It's the same reason HR never gives an honest answer when someone is declined
for a position. There is no upside whatsoever for them to be honest about the
reason, and lots of potential negative negatives.

------
rloc
Not always true. I'll soon leave my job in one of the biggest US software
company. I'm very happy there and love working with so many clever minds.

But the reason I'm leaving is to pursue something else in my life. I want to
own my destiny, reach for what I consider freedom and make something I'm
passionate about and that'll make me proud even if I don't succeed. I'm
creating my own company.

I didn't see that mentioned in the article and I don't think a company can do
much about it to retain its talents.

~~~
collyw
To be fair that sounds a bit like number 2 on the list, with a broader
horizon.

------
S_A_P
Things may be different this time around as I am now a business owner but I
usually grow bored with any job at about 2 years. I've had many situations
where I did not respect the person in charge which makes it hard for me to
stay around. The times I did really like my boss his boss would usually change
something that made work lose its appeal to me. I'm kind of at the mercy of
the consulting work I'm doing but at least I don't have to report to anyone so
maybe I will stay with it

------
Lambent_Cactus
Serious question: when did your shields go down at Palantir?

------
6d0debc071
The article's title is bad but the core of it seems to be that IFF there's a
perceived desires/offers mismatch on the part of the employee, then that
employee will investigate the labour market.

If your company isn't aligned with the employee's process or life goals,
that's a desires/offers mismatch. It may not be possible for the company to
solve that, but it doesn't change the underlying pattern.

And then the person is not unhappy, but they look for a better match. To use
the terminology of the article their 'shields[1]' would be down.

I don't think it's perfectly accurate, the core of the piece, mind. Because I
go out with friends who work for other companies - so inevitably hear about
them - as part of _having a life._ I've not had as many job changes as I've
had coffees with friends. But it may be a reasonable heuristic.

\---

1\. As a language point, I detest the idea of calling it shields. It makes it
sound like it's something that protects the employee, but of course it
doesn't. It protects the employer for you not to be looking for something that
better satisfies your desires.

~~~
mark-r
I see a lot of people in this thread misunderstanding the "shields down"
phrase. If you get a cold call from a headhunter you've never heard of before,
are you less willing to consider their opportunity than when a good friend
makes the same request? That's because your shield was active - it's a
psychological way of coping with unwanted input.

~~~
6d0debc071
Mmm. There's a connotation with shields that they are just as you say,
protective in nature. There's consequently a negative association with their
removal. However, the person's still being protected from undesired input
while they're looking for a job: The criteria for desirable/acceptable have
changed. Their 'shields,' using those criteria, are still up.

It's a tricky analogy that, as you note, is easy to misunderstand. The writer
may not have meant it in the sense that it was received.

------
BrentOzar
In a way, it's like cheating on your spouse.

I know folks who had a perfectly happy marriage and everything they wanted,
but when someone new said, "Hey, you're hot - let's get together," things went
off the rails. Sometimes it's not about whether you're happy - sometimes it's
just the temptation that grass is greener on the other side. (And hey,
sometimes it actually is.)

~~~
chafir
The difference being that with your spouse you often have an explicit promise
of fidelity. You don't owe your employer yourself, they pay you for your time.
I think the assumption that "accepting the coffee" equates to an assessment
that the current job is unsatisfactory is not as consistently correct as the
author implies.

Sometimes accepting the coffee is just taking the opportunity to learn more
about the ecosystem you're in. A job can satisfy you in terms of the work, the
environment, and the pay, but it can't teach you what it feels like to stand
somewhere with a different view. "Accepting the coffee" is an opportunity to
stand there.

You don't start learning a functional language because you've made an
assessment that you've reached the limits of imperative languages – you learn
a new language because in part because it gives you new perspective that,
critically, often cannot be gained without going there yourself.

------
Peroni
To give Rands the benefit of the doubt, I'm assuming the shields analogy is
from the employer perspective. I don't believe he's suggesting that protective
psychological barriers are consciously (or even subconsciously) raised to
protect an employee from the temptation to join another employer.

Employers are unbelievably vulnerable. The single biggest commodity in the
tech industry globally, is talent. When you employ people who do a good job
you immediately become vulnerable. You attempt to cultivate and craft the
perfect company culture. You try to ensure the work is pushing the boundaries
and challenging the great people that are bringing you closer and closer to
profitability. You convince yourself that its worth paying your staff
ridiculous salaries because if you don't, someone else will.

The single biggest _challenge_ in the tech industry globally, is retaining
talent. You spend every waking hour questioning whether or not you are doing
enough to keep your people happy. You assume they have shields when in
reality, they just want to be happy.

Happy people leave jobs they love all the time. Not because you failed to keep
them happy or because they believe another employer can make them happier, but
because they are people. No-one will ever craft the perfect company where
employee turnover is 0%, it's literally impossible but personally, I love the
fact that so many companies are trying because ultimately, it means they are
trying to make _people_ happier.

~~~
sandworm101
'The perfect company culture' is all well and good so long as it is for the
immediate benefit of employees and only secondarily the long-term benefit of
the company. Too many senior managers maintain a top-down approach to culture
and forget that employees care first for their own needs.

Friendly work environment free of inappropriate humor = Good thing. Happy
employees = longer retention.

Forbidding any discussion of pay/raises during work hours to foster better
cooperation across pay grades = evil. Keeping employees in the dark may
increase retention, but does real harm to individuals. (Also probably illegal
despite being a widespread practice.)

------
nitin_flanker
When an employee leaves, it's a collective failure. Failure of his mentor, his
colleagues and the senior leadership.

~~~
edent
Utter tosh! I actively encourage my employees to think about a future outside
their present company.

Sometimes people take the job they need - not the job they want. If you're
stuck programming databases for a bakery, and NASA asks you to help land a
rover on Mars - what can the baker do to keep you employed?

That's not a failure - a person's needs doesn't always align with business
desires.

~~~
geofft
Maybe a better phrasing is that when an employee leaves _unexpectedly_ , it's
a failure of management. Which it is, because the very purpose of management
is to keep things managed.

So you can either pretend that employees will never leave and try to make that
as true as possible, which is a poor way to manage the situation (but better
than not paying attention at all), or you can try to figure out which
employees are likely to leave and what you should do about it.

------
tahssa
Corporate workplaces really are designed for humans who mimic robots.

Some people can do a better job mimicking robots that others and some can keep
it up for longer. For most, the longer you keep it going the more robotic you
become. People leave because they need to feel human again. No one likes to
admit this truth because once they do they have to live with it.

I can even see it in the authors writing; on two occasions he refers to his
employees as "humans" as opposed to just 'people' or 'employees'. That's
typical dissociative behaviour and the kind of stuff that leads to people
feeling less than human and eventually leaving via whatever alternative
reasoning.

------
workitout
I remember back when I was in the valley, I'd go to a job interview and be
pitched by one or more of the interviewers about side projects or equity only
opportunities on the side. It happened more than once. That place is or was
crazy and I loved that about it! The cost of real estate is high which is why
we left but traditional companies elsewhere in America could learn a lot about
running like an entrepreneurship in the valley than a staid corporation.

------
petke
I don't stay in any programming job more than 2 years max.

When you start at a new job you want to prove yourself. Learning the code base
and the system is new and exciting and a bit scary. After two years you feel
like you have a good grasp of everything can relax, but then the fear and
excitement is gone. The motivation is gone. I start slacking off, looking for
the next job.

------
asimjalis
I have left jobs I was happy with because they paid below market and were not
taking into account how expensive living in the San Francisco area has become.
It is absurd to me that even now companies will negotiate salary down by
amounts like $5k or $10k when to the employee this delta could be significant.

------
known
Humans are susceptible to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)

------
shadowfax92
So true, "Humans Never Forget"!

------
mabbo
It's interesting reading this having recently moved divisions. Four years
where I was, love the business domain, but certain things happened and, as the
author said, shields went down. Then there's a couple of really great leaders
setting up a new division looking for talent.

------
endemic
I'm glad I'm not a manager. Humans are too complex.

------
LargeCompanies
I'm suffering a bit now due to this happening to me recently....

I had a great work from home job... one that was allowing me to learn a ton of
new skills (im an expert html,css, photoshop front-ender yet my JS skills are
still at a beginner level). All my co-workers were awesome .. they liked me..
i liked them and they would give me kudos for the hard work I loved doing for
them and the company.

Then...Knock, knock, knock .... is heard at my door from a casting director
for a new startup/inventor reality TV show. They sent me a message saying we'd
love for you to be a contestant on our show you are perfect. These people
arent small no names and I initially said no thanks I dont want to risk my
job. Though they chased me; made me think this was the way to fulfill my
ultimate dream job/professional life goal...a successful & prosperous
inventor.

Needless to say, I gave up my job for the reality TV show and well now I am
jobless and the TV show was another losing hand!

My New Years and forever year resolution is I WONT EVER RISK STABILITY again
FOR ANYONE ELSE WHO KNOCKS ON MY DOOR UNLESS THEY ARE HANDING ME TONS OF
MONEY. A few similar and outlandish opportunities knocked previously on my
door, yet they too all left me in the long run with a losing hand!

~~~
buckbova
Here's an upvote.

Consider your audience. This is a message board with the startup crowd as
their target audience. They are not risk averse by definition.

If you have certain obligations where stability is an absolute must then I
understand, otherwise you got to take chances in this world to grow.

~~~
LargeCompanies
Thanks!

I've lived my life for years not adverse to risk, but at my age and with my
startup war wounds and no financial success yet..I must tweak how I deal with
risk.

There is a time when you get fed up with being the nice inventor who jumps at
outlandish opportunities yet gets nothing in return.

I've gotten to the point where NO I WONT DO YOUR TV SHOW ... no Google I won't
demo my tech to you, etc ... YOU PAY ME AND YOU PAY ME NOW, before I risk any
stability in my life for your advances!!!

------
bobby_9x
I always hate a job after a year, when a manager or boss eventuallu forces my
hand and we do something that is stupid or leads to failure.

High salary and perks could never fix this for me.

So, i startd my own company about 5 years ago, and never looked back. I'm
working more, but I'm the happiest I've ever been and never get tired of it.

It helps that my wife not only supports me 100%, but helps me run tje company.

~~~
dudul
That's awesome. I'm the same, after a year or so I lose interest in my job.
Everything is done, and just working. I've been trying to devise a plan to
start my own company, and I would love to have my wife on board to help :)

~~~
bobby_9x
My wife does all of the the financials and product management, while I
Concentrate on the tech side of things.

It really made our relationship stronger. We also see each other 24/7, which
could be a problem for some couples.

------
ilostmykeys
Happy people don't leave a restaurant they love.

Happy people don't leave a pair of jeans they love.

Happy people don't leave a city they love.

Happy people don't leave a way of being they love.

Wait a minute, is he saying that happy people are averse to change? And that
change is bad.

I can't believe this got so many up votes and comments. The premise is that if
you are happy then you don't like change.

The only relations a happy person won't leave are those which continuously
both challenge them and nourish them, and that's deacribing a vested familial
relationship, not a f*cking job.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
I left a job I loved to follow my wife in her career.

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vasundhar
[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-sins-avoid-while-
still-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-sins-avoid-while-still-
matters-vasundhar-boddapati) My two cents on this

