Year was ~2007. I had a rare 1-1 with a CEO of an outsourcing company I worked for. The company was based in the USA while engineers were in Serbia. I as a somewhat longer tenured employee was asked to share what I think about the company, the local team, etc.
…
Me: …I think we have a lot of talented engineers. Person A was a gold medalist at IOI, Person B achieved <this> which no one in the last few generations at the University of Nis was able to achieve, etc. I feel like we should advertise our talent more…
CEO: Who? They are nothing in US.
(…Topic closed…)
Fast forward 10 years. Person A is one of the very high level ICs at Meta (reporting to VPs) while Person B became a director at Google (now CTO of a very large company).
I feel very lucky for being able to say I worked with them in the past and nowadays can learn from and get a piece of their wisdom.
Another situation…
While I was still in Serbia and focused on my PhD studies submitting my work to peer reviewed journals – I read about the 3 MIT guys that did this: https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414 The linked article is from 2015. but their work was published in ’05. Fast forward 12 years I got to meet one of them in person – Dan Aguayo – as a colleague at Meraki. Crazy. Especially, given that I don’t read that many papers.
At Samsara I got to meet Chris Frost who is one of the coauthors of the most influential paper in the last decade in the Operating Systems field – ACM hall of Fame from Nov 2022. He is also a really nice guy. I am yet to asses his volleyball skills, but he knows infra stuff for sure.
What is the point of this post? I don’t know. I felt good about knowing them wrote that down.
After all – a blog is supposed to be a journal, so… Cheers!🍷
Also, my spouse is extremely important to me. She is also smarter and more beautiful than me. ❤️❤️❤️
(she was peeking in my screen and was like – “wth is he doing this late…”)
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