arbit – Page 4 – Karthik Shashidhar

arbit, business colour preferences, constraints, couple of days, different styles, dozen pairs, floaters, formal shoes, good marketing, hard time, jayanagar, kilometre, management guru, new pair of shoes, ping, sales reps, shoe shop, style preferences, those shoes, whore, willingness

Shoe Shopping

November 22, 2009

Ok this is a typical management guru/corporate whore kind of post. ******************* Last weekend I needed to buy a new pair of shoes. My last pair of black formal shoes had broken a couple of days earlier and I urgently needed a new pair if I were to wear something decent to office on Monday.…

arbit, business, religion, work astrologer, astroogy, combinations, correlation, earth, indian astrology, jupiter, mystique, nine planets, rahu, substring, sun and the moon, uranus and neptune, variables, vector length, western astrology

What’s your Raashee? Astrology and Vector Length

November 18, 2009

The problem with western astrology is that there are way too few categories of people according to it. Western astroogy uses a vector of length one – the part of year in which you were born in, and then concocts a story based on that. According to that, people can be classified into twelve categories…

arbit, business, economics, finance, fundaes, randomness, relationships accounting statements, aggregate, amp, balance sheet, bryan caplan, corporates, domination, headache, incremental change, interpersonal relationships, intervals, judgment, loser, major components, occasions, randomness, taleb, time period, volatility

A Balance Sheet View of Life

October 31, 2009

The basic idea of this post is that interpersonal relationships (not necessarily romantic) need to be treated as balance sheets and not as P&L statements, i.e. one should always judge based on the overall all-time aggregate rather than the last incremental change in situation. Just to give you a quick overview of accounting, the annual…

arbit, technology, work age, ctc, cv, due diligence, entertainment, evenings, expectation, face value, formal india, formalities, formality, formals, generality, headhunter, hometown, liking, linkedin, market, marketers, neting, orkut, peers, periods, profiles, rhetorical question, testimonials, work, writing

LinkedIn recos

September 16, 2009

LinkedIn in general is a useful site. It’s a good place to maintain an “online CV” and also track the careers of your peers and ex-peers and people you are interested in and people you are jealous of. If you are a headhunter, it is a good place to find heads to hunt, so that…

arbit, work coffee breaks, conversations, expense accounts, free riders, salary, studs, trousers, water cooler, whoredom

Return to corporate whoredom

August 16, 2009

Waking up early in the morning Formal shirt and trousers, neatly pressed An hour’s commute each way Conversations by the water cooler Team lunches; Expense accounts Hourly coffee breaks Meetings. Conference calls. Presentations Studs. Fighters. Free-riders. Reviews. Deadlines. Status reports. Salary credit!

arbit, business, cricket, fundaes, sport, studs and fighters, work backburner, corporate affairs, crap, enthu, google, handful, inclusion, inspiration, last job, mitchell johnson, moments of brilliance, nightmare, occasional moments, office politics, stud, test match, third test, wickets

Studs and Fighters and Form

August 2, 2009

It’s been a long time since I wrote about the Studs and Fighters framework. I had overdosed on it a few months back, when I’d put some 3 posts in 4 days or something, but that was when I was hajaar enthu about corporate affairs. It’s been almost two months since I quit my last…

arbit, education, finance, fundaes, IIT, work academic life, assignment submission, axis, concave curve, downside, eighty twenty, law of diminishing returns, paragraph, perfectionist, philosophy, rewards, straight line, wokr

The Eighty-Twenty Rule

June 3, 2009

I first got this idea during some assignment submission at IIT. One guy in our class, known to be a perfectionist is supposed to have put in 250 hours of effort into a certain course project. He is known to have got 20 out of 20 in this project. I put in about 25 hours…

arbit, business, descriptive, personal blade, flings, forward direction, gillette sensor, hindu customs, lenin stalin, long vacation, mach 3, mao, marx lenin, maximum time, o clock, one piece, portraits, safety razor, safety razors, sideburns, time in my life, two minutes, wilderness

Hajaam

May 31, 2009

This Monday, for the first time in my life, I got myself shaved by a hajaam (barber). Yes, for the ten-odd years that I’ve been shaving, I’d so far never let anyone put a blade on my face. However, a long vacation in Bangalore, absence of my usual Mach-3 and constant jibes by my mom…

arbit, fundaes, work blog, career development, cash flow, comfort zone, expectation, job, jobs, minded folks, monetary terms, money, opponents, rest of your life, sake, salary, several times

Compensation Etc.

May 19, 2009

For a change I’m keeping up a promise that I’ve made on my blog – I’m actually writing a follow-up post that I’d promised. In the past, I’ve guilty several times of promising to continue something in a follow-up post and then conveniently forgetting about it. So I had mentioned in my last post that…

arbit, personal, work Add new tag, carcopious quantities, cool things, corporate ladder, dahi, financial services, formulae, increments, karnataka, last time, left index finger, mileage, new guitar, pickle, rat race, roadtrip, sacks, sake, stage of life, vague sense

Work Etc.

May 17, 2009

There are these days when you wake up and start wondering what the fuck you are upto. You start asking yourself why you are where you are, doing what you are doing. You ask yourself why you are not on that monthlong roadtrip of rural Karnataka, with the hope of maybe producing a shelf of…

arbit, business, economics, work bowling, chutiya, colleagues, double edged sword, international trade, intuitive sense, kaam, productivity, stud, theory of comparative advantage

Theory of comparative advantage and chutiya kaam

April 26, 2009

Suppose you and me together have to do two tasks A and B. We need to decide who does what (let’s assume that we need to pick one task each). Now I’m a stud and you are a chutiya so I’m better than you at both A and B. So how do we split? It…

arbit, fundaes, studs and fighters, work blog, blogging, blogs, boss, crib, fighters, four quadrants, headless chicken, inefficiencies, insight, insights, job, jobs, match, maybes, mismatch, possibilities, process, productivity, scalable, scope, structuring, stud, studs, two kinds, work

Don’t use stud processes for fighter jobs and fighter processes for stud jobs

April 11, 2009

When people crib to other people that their job is not too exciting and that it’s too process-oriented and that there’s not muc scope for independend thinking, the usual response is that no job is inherently process-oriented or thinking-oriented, and that what matters is the way in which one perceives his job. People usually say…

arbit, fundaes, work baada, hyperspace, information asymmetry, job requirement, jobs, match, medium term, option value, productivity, skill sets, universe, vector

It’s about getting the Cos Theta right

April 8, 2009

Earlier today I was talking to Baada and to Aadisht (independently) about jobs, and fit, and utilization of various skills and option value of skills not utilized etc. So it is like this – you possess a variety of skills, and the job that you are going to do will not involve a large number…

arbit, economics, finance, fundaes, work analogy, blog, blogging, blogs, clue, correlation, debates, denial, diversification, drift, evenings, financial instruments, fraud, friedrich hayek, friends, handful, intellectual, investment philosophy, investments, mistake, money, mr brown, observation, offerings, portfolios, possibilities, private property, proportion, severity, signature, two instruments, weightage, work, writing

Intellectual Property

March 25, 2009

A blog post earlier this month on Econlog finished off with a very strong quote by Friedrich Hayek: One of the forms of private property that people cherish most is their ideas. If you convince them that their ideas are wrong, you have caused them to suffer a capital loss. I ended up liking it…

arbit, personal, work BASE, bombay, cesares, clue, constraints, countries, drunkard, engineering, english, evenings, fighters, finance, fundaes, gurgaon, iimb, implementation, job, kannada, lala, market, marriage, money, office, phrase, profession, professions, quants, recession, sensex, story, stud, studs, trades, uncle, work, writing

How do i describe my job?

March 19, 2009

One of the “problems” with my job, if I can describe this as one, is that it’s tough to explain my job to a layman. There are multiple levels of disconnects here, and multiple “pitfalls”, if I can call them that. So when someone asks me about my work, it gets tough indeed to describe…

arbit, economics, fundaes, general 2000s, accidents, bangalore, bike, bust, car, compromise, delhi, economic meltdown, friends, handful, high, home loans, home ownership, implementation, implication, improvements, incentives, jai, job, neighbourhood, ninja, ownership, personal safety, perversedriven vehicles, proportion, road safety, severity, subprime, taxis, theory, vehicle safety

Car Ownership

March 6, 2009

People, especially in the US, make a big deal about home ownership. In fact a large part of the current economic meltdown has its roots in the American craze for home ownership. Fannie and Freddie were created to help home loans become cheaper, then there was the CDO wave. Then came subprime. NINJA (no income…

arbit, fundaes, personal, studs and fighters, work achievement, books, bugs, cash management, chootiya, clue, discretion, evenings, fighters, hypothesis, immortal words, implementation, improvements, insight, insights, instinct, inventor, job, jp morgan, kaam, logs, maybes, offerings, patterns, process, strategy sheet, theory, trades, train, work

Process

February 26, 2009

A couple of days back, I was debugging some code. And yes, for those of you who didn’t know, coding is a part of my job. I used to have this theory that whatever job you take, there is some part of it that is going to be boring. Or to put it in the…

arbit, business, fundaes, media advertisement, advertiser, advertisers, copyrights, eyeball, hue and cry, latter model, new paradigm, thirty seconds, tv channels, two kinds, virtual money, watching tv

A new paradigm for selling advertising slots

January 14, 2009

There are fundamentally two kinds of videos – videos for which willing to pay to see, and videos which you are paid to see. It is intuitive that advertisements fall in the latter model – for watching an advertisement, you are being “paid” a certain sum of virtual money which gets encashed when you watch…

arbit, economics, politics baada, china, chinese threat, counterbalance, currencies, current account deficit, downturn, economic crisis, external debt, foreign exchange reserves, fsm, god, hindustan times, india, pakistan, rmb, suicide bomb, terrorism

Thank God for the economic crisis

December 11, 2008

This post is based on my discussion with Baada yesterday. I hereby acknowledge his contribution to this post. One of the hundred thousand random headlines that The HIndustan Times put on their front page during the last couple of weeks was a statement that China won’t hesitate to help out Pakistan in case India were…

arbit, business, food, media, personal 10th standard, 1996, 9th standard, bet, blade, high school, pepsi, pepsi cup, perk, pursuits, rakhi, school, world cup

Of Pepsi and Perk

December 1, 2008

Can be best described by looking at the “objects” that defined our bets at different points in time. Most of those phases seem to have faded away, but I clearly remember two of them – the Pepsi phase and the Perk phase. The Pepsi era started with their “nothing official about it” campaign during the…

arbit, fundaes, studs and fighters, work brain, engineering, fighters, fundaes, insight, liberal arts, neural networks, process, studs, theory

Extending the studs and fighters theory

November 11, 2008

In a seminal post written over a year back, I had classified people into two, based on their working styles. I had called them “studs” and “fighters”. Studs, I had argued were people who had the knack of finding the easy way out. Who liked to work around corners, and find short cuts. And who…