Shraddha: Very excited to be talking to you. We just recently connected and I’ve interacted with your peers and they have such a high regard for you. I know that you did amazingly well in your college and then you went on and did very well in your career. And what got us very excited is actually many things! One of them is that you are a girl with such an independent, beautiful and powerful voice of your own. Today you are working at Apple and you are in the US. You’ve charted a journey from India to Apple. Tell us about your journey! It doesn’t have to follow a pattern. Whatever comes to your mind which will be very useful for everyone. Every young professional, student, girl looking to be in the place where you are.
Aaksha: Sure. Happy to talk about it. The way I got started on this career path is…basically the internet revolution was happening when I was in college and I was just blown away by the fact that I could open Wikipedia and learn about anything that I wanted to. Also when I graduated, online courses were really picking up and Coursera had just come up. The fact that I can listen to a subject matter expert on any topic that I want to. Like the best professors and the best people. This blew my mind. And one day I thought to myself, “hey why am I not a part of this?” This is the third information revolution that is happening in history and I was just like, “I have to be a part of this.”
I literally got started in machine learning by actually doing a MOOC, a massively open online course by Andrew Ng, which is still one of the most well regarded and designed MOOCs out there.
I always wanted to be in that space where I think…I mean we are moving from data to information, the information revolution is maturing and we’ll soon be going into a space where information to knowledge, that transition is also going to speed up and I want to be in that space, contributing to that next transition of humankind. I guess thats a big word but that’s what inspires me to get up every day and go to work.
Shradha: Yesterday I was talking to a VC and she said something very interesting. You know everything about Indians is you know right and bang on to be big. And to do big things, we have the best talent, the best innovation coming. And she said, “But one thing I would like to see is young people having much bigger ambition”, right, and much bigger ambition and dreams, bigger hopes and I think what you are saying is about this ambitious big dream right.
Aaksha: The potential of India, the number of people we have, the variety. As young people we do need to dream that big if we are to make the transition of our community. I mean we cannot benchmark ourselves to what has been done in the past. I feel that we do have the scale of consumption and the scale of problems as well. On both of those fronts, we cannot look at old benchmarks. The scale that our country demands, our community demands and such a large group of people who are not well represented in the conversations that happen about the future.
Shradha: Were you always thinking like this? Of course you had exposure to the internet and MOOCs and exposure keeps widening the horizons. But I just want to understand, internally did you always have big ambitions. And don’t mind me saying this but you are a young girl and in the whole world we have this conversation. The view that there are such few women in tech and you’re right up there. A woman in tech, at Apple, in Machine Learning. How does this happen?
Aaksha: Thankyou for that question. I don’t get that very often but its very important to me and everyone who gets to be where I am in whatever way they do. I feel like I was fortunate enough to have people in the form of my parents who genuinely believed in…like they pretty much protected my self esteem. I did not understand this as a child but once I stepped out into the world, I found the things that I took for granted at home, uncommon for other people. For example, you know girls can be interested in physical fitness. I mean that was a given in my house but that is an uncommon concept. When I was in high school, I thought it was completely normal to take part in the longest marathon like race and everybody else found that so weird.
So I think it is that protection of self esteem that I feel is really important. Somebody needs to do this for every young girl, somebody needs to sponsor a young woman and that is the key to being able to think big and to be able to protect your self esteem. Necessary protection from so many attacks that it is going to face as a minority and as you try to present your vision and try to live your life consistent with that vision.
Shradha: Did you practice something? Did you channelize your thinking in a particular way which helped you?
Aaksha: I think I always felt that I should do service to my potential and be in the driving seat. To not let anyone else drive the direction of my life. I don’t think its something people “should” do. I think its almost like “necessary” if you want to do anything meaningful, also because then other people can be meaningful allies to you. Nobody can actually change your life. We are given this idea somehow that there’s going to be a savior or a hero. Like religion sells us this idea, governments sell us that idea, the next politician or next X is going to come and do this for you. But thats not how it is. You have to do it and then other people can be allies for you. So I think thats something that I internalized very early on as a child.
Shradha: There’ll be so many people you know competing across the world to be in the place that you are, so many people your age or younger wanting to be there. If you had to give them practical insights and tips that okay these are 2-3 things that maybe you could consider as you plan to be where you are.
Aaksha: Very practical advice would be that be on the lookout for what online courses are about. I know its quite literal but its very actionable. I think that gives you the direction of whats going to be relevant 4-5 years down the line. A skill that you should atleast know about or should be able to speak its language.
When I was graduating, I currently work in NLP(Natural Language Processing), but that was not such a big thing at that time. When I started getting into ML and looking at what are people publishing, what are the papers that people are excited about. This gave me the insight that Computer Vision and NLP are the 2 fields that people are excited about and its going to be something in 4-5 yrs.
You also have to give a significant weight to your interest because…I’ve written a lot about this in my blog posts…things are changing very fast. A lot of the change curves are transforming from linear to exponential. And if you want to survive those changes, you have to have a why which is different from the money and the prestige that comes along with anything you do. It will allow you to say, “okay maybe no one’s appreciating this now but I believe that this solves some problem that convinces me in a very important way.” That will give you an edge.
Shradha: In your blog you quote, “Sometimes the music is not in the notes but in the spaces between them.” So powerful. In that context, can you elaborate for everyone, we are all experiencing the pandemic, what do you have to say about the notes that we can or can’t hear when it comes to signaling about how things are going to change when it comes to particularly the future of the way we work?
Aaksha: In one sentence, what that would be is that this is a time of acceleration of questions. Questions we were asking ourselves even before the pandemic, I think they have been accelerated now. So things like students asking themselves, “Why do I go to a university?”, “What value do I get out of going to a university?” Now those questions are bang on the table. They were questions because student debt crisis has been around for a long time but now this is in your face. “What is the value I’m getting out of the work I’m doing?”
Shradha: Right so when it comes to the future of work, the question I have is related to job security. In India we are all big fans of a secure stable job. Do you think that’s going to change?
Aaksha: I think it has changed already. We’re just not accepting it. We need to factor in or maybe change the interpretation of job security. What I mean is for example when google was in its early days, it used to have this idea of 20% time, so one day of the week where an engineer gets to work on any crazy idea they have. This was sold as a perk. And I feel that now with the way things are changing, the life cycle of technologies, this is going to become a necessity. So when you think of job security, if the idea of security is being able to do the same task for the same value that you get then that that interpretation has to change. The new definition comes from “Am I delivering value to some business? To some problem that exists and if I’m delivering value to a problem that exists today, how do I try to predict a problem that’s going to come up next?” It doesn’t have to be wildly different from what you are doing but you do have to spend 20% of your time thinking about what is the next important problem. That has to be factored into the way people work so I think that that mindset shift has to be there and then I think with that framework in mind, then job security will exist. It’s a change in the meaning. It’s not very easy to accept but that’s how I look at it.
Shradha: If you had to say to all the young engineers, developers, all the entrepreneurs out there because machine learning to me is a very big buzzword, right, like today you see any presentation “machine learning, AI, NLP” is in it. But if you have to deconstruct and say machine learning is relevant and powerful and it’s going to define our future. If people have to think of building their career in this space what are some of the things they need to do?
Aaksha: Machine Learning is basically statistics with scale at scale. You should have a strong foundation in statistics and you should have a strong foundation in scale. What I mean by scale is being able to handle data that does not fit in your computer, it’s literally that simple. These two fundamentals should be in your toolbox.
The way the field is going, already it’s been specialized into computer vision and natural language processing. These were two fields that were just single courses a few years back and now they are full-blown degrees because that much progress has been made. Similarly you should find your own field, I think you can marry to a large extent machine learning with a field of your interest and find that specialization of machine learning that really connects with you. Then that would be a good space to be in.
Shradha: What gets you to write the way you do? And second what are some of the subjects that interests you? And this is for everyone watching this, I want them to follow your blog!
Aaksha: There are things that I observe and then I feel like no one’s talking about it and then I have to write it. It’s almost like I can’t sleep without having done it. It’s like the greek concept of a muse you know. Once a muse has done the honor of sitting in your brain, then I feel compelled to do justice to that idea and to being inhabited by that idea.
Feminism is very very important to me. I will always write about it not because there’s so many things that are happening and are invisible. People are obviously missing it and I want to write about that from a very first principles approach. Technology because that’s what I do with the remaining of my life, like i breathe live eat technology. So these 2 themes, I will always write on them.
Shradha: There’s so much of conversation around women in tech. And for the right reasons but still in spite of that we’re not seeing such a huge momentum in terms of women actually getting in tech or into senior and powerful roles. It’s not just an India phenomenon, it’s world over. From your lens what are some of the things that can be done right?
Aaksha: In the Indian context I feel that we do have a lot of “corporate initiatives”, sometimes called diversity hiring. There is a lot of conversation but I feel that we have not stepped out of the framework of Favor and Liability. What i mean by that is that in homes, the way our traditional society is, all the ideas surrounding women at the core have this idea of Favor. “Hey, we are letting you have children, we are welcoming you into a home after marriage, so it’s a favor on you”.
Before marriage, the way you talk about a daughter is that it’s a Liability. A lot of conversations are about, “Hey, we educated our daughter, thats a Favor”. We have not stepped out of that framework of Liability and Favor. For example we’ve changed the definition of what it is to raise a daughter well and that definition now includes education. But at the end of the day a lot of people do it because they think that that’s going to get your daughter a better husband, not because your daughter will get more autonomy and agency This is why nothing’s changing.
Yes corporations can have diversity hiring drives, we can have maternity leave by law but at the end of the day, the question you need to ask is “Can I see this person who happens to be a woman as a person first and a woman later?” Yes your company might have diversity hiring and you might do a lot of things like arrange off sites or whatever other initiatives, but if you think that you are doing a favor to society by hiring a set of capable individuals to be able to work in your office, then that initiative is going to die.
Over the past 10 years we are seeing that the participation of women in the “formal” economy has dropped. Things are not automatically going to improve. We have to work to make it stay on a positive trajectory. We need to stop thinking that just having a diversity hiring initiative in a company is enough because the conversations we’re having at homes can’t be shut down when we go into office because everbody still has that engine running in their head.
Shradha: Thanks for joining us today and this conversation!
Leave a Reply