My lunches in Cisco is particularly interesting, my lunchmates are mostly my team members and to be honest often only one of my team members, Alberto. And it is particularly interesting because we generally have amazing topics to talk about during our lunches. And one topic that came into the discussion about 2-3 weeks ago, became the inspiration for this writing. The topic was, "As millennials, how are we doing on Scientific, Humanitarian and Leadership ends compared to our previous generation?"
I am not going to talk about how we are doing on Humanitarian and Leadership ends. We are seemingly not doing that well. But I am more focused on our position on scientific end.
If millennials are famous for one thing, then that is their stubbornness for doing things their own way. And I think that is something very very visible when you check out top 10 most downloaded Android apps. We are the generation who invented asking a person out avoiding the need for social engagement [refer Tinder] and found values in cat filters where your face is augmented with cat ears and tongues [refer SnapChat]. We are more driven by what is ‘cool’ compared to what is right and valuable. Which brings me to my main topic today.
Are we doing the best thing we could have done with our time?Truth is many of us, even including me, consider working is Google, Facebook, even the companies I was belittling a moment ago to be very cool. And that is very cool! Working in these companies entitles you to be smart and makes you look cool. Some of the best problems in socio and scientific fields have been solved by these companies. Wanting to be part of these companies is truly great. But what we do in those companies matters too and that's a bit we often miss. I have encountered several occasions where very smart people have explicitly come to me and suggested me to move from Cisco Research to the cat filter company (read SnapChat) just because Cisco doesn't sound fun and SnapChat is so cool! And that is explicitly my concern. We are giving in to the popular sense of what's cool and what's not. We are not focusing on the hard problems. And just because we can't show our work on the hard problems to the general people in the form of left swipe or right swipe doesn't make it uncool. Hard problems are not always fun either; actually, most of the times it is boring as hell, as hard as it could have been and often it asks for true blood and sweat. But that doesn't mean we can simply avoid those hard problems and only keep doing those fun stuff.
Now, a fair question is, who am I to say what is a hard problem and what is not? That's a fair question and I don't have a definitive answer for it. This is something a person has to define for him/herself.
But at the end, somebody has to solve the hard problems. And that is my realisation after working in Cisco Research for about 10 months and that is my advice to all millennials. Crave for hard problems.