Ready Set Do

Picture the 2024 job market from the inside. You finish a one-year master's, open LinkedIn, and every analytics role already has a wall of applicants ahead of you. (If you searched that year, you just felt your shoulders tense.) Samridhi Vats got through anyway. She went from a chemical engineering degree she did not pick, to two years of work in India, to the Purdue MS Business Analytics prog...

Thirteen hundred applications. Thirteen callbacks. At one point, that was Bharath Vemula's job search math. Today he's a Meta engineer working on the company's model training stack. (The twist? He never applied to Meta. Recruiters found him on LinkedIn.) So what was on that profile? We pull it apart, along with the LinkedIn habit that got him headhunted. If you've ever wondered whe...

Updated to 3,750 characters total, chapters included, so you have about 250 to spare. Akash prepared full time for India's UPSC civil services exam for two years. Eight to nine hours a day, two attempts. He didn't make it. Then he gave himself three days to decide on a third try, and barely slept through any of them. He walked away. (Spoiler: what came next was far messier than "UPSC...

A week before we recorded this, my nephew asked why I'd started posting on LinkedIn. He'd just finished college and started his first job, so I gave him the textbook answer about networks and opportunities. (I watched it bounce right off him.) Fair enough. If you're a new grad deep in a graduate job search, "build your network" sounds like homework with no due date. So I brou...

Shrey Shah never applied to Microsoft. Microsoft executives watched him give a talk on AI coding workflows, then reached out. Meta came knocking not long after, asking for something similar. Here's the part that stings a little: that wasn't luck. It traces back to a decision he made years earlier, when senior engineers around him said going all in on AI-assisted coding would hurt his caree...

Thirteen years at Google. Trust and Safety in Hyderabad first, then the Bay Area, then most of the back half inside YouTube — finance, then analytics, then managing YouTube inventory and monetization. Then Aishwarya Raghavan quit. No job lined up. Two months later a friend referred her to a company she actually wanted. She didn't get it. That rejection landed right as the layoff headlines were...

Should an international student still move to the US for a master's right now? That's the question sitting in thousands of inboxes and WhatsApp groups this admissions cycle. Not "which school," not "what score." Just: should I go at all? Naman put it to someone who has watched this play out for over two decades — and who has no reason to sell you the dream. Professor Be...

Somewhere it's 3 a.m. and a Kubernetes pod just quietly died. A guy in a different time zone taps his card for coffee and it works. He'll never know how close that was. Keeping him from finding out is Sai Joshitha's job. She's a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Visa. Here's the part I care about for anyone sitting on an F-1 right now. SRE is one of the most underrated doors...

Picture running a resort deep inside Jim Corbett National Park. Tigers on one side of the fence, guests on the other, and a family business you never actually applied for... That was Abhinav Jindal's twenties. The business did fine. He didn't. That gap — doing well on paper, feeling hollow off it — is where this episode of Ready Set Do lives. Abhinav is an empowerment coach and a certified...

Here's the description, formatted for RSS/Spotify (timestamps on their own lines with spacing so they don't collapse): Seven years ago, Kunal Mishra was a summer intern at DRDO, facing the choice every engineering student knows: take the safe campus placement, or bet on the harder thing. He bet on machine learning. 🎯 That bet ran through a master's in the USA at Northeastern University and droppe...

I still have the exact one-page PDF that got me shortlisted for a Program Manager role at Apple. No headshot. No skill bars pretending "80% Excel" means anything. And here's the part the chapters give away early: I didn't get the job. (We get into why at 13:15, and it's the most useful thirty seconds in here.) So this episode is me pulling that resume apart, line by line. Not...

Aashita Jain's H-1B didn't get picked. She was on an L-1 visa at Informatica, working against a clock that wasn't hers to control. Most people in that spot panic and start mass-applying to any job that will sponsor them. She built an O-1 visa case instead, and turned herself into an AI governance architect. That's a job title most engineers have never heard of, and one that barely...

I asked Jimi Gibson how attention actually works. Ten minutes later he'd named a card I picked inside my own head — live, on camera. (I've rewatched the clip. Still can't explain it.) Here's the part that pays rent: that trick and a LinkedIn post that blows up run on the identical script. Jimi spent 16 years as a working magician before becoming the voice of Thrive Internet Marketi...

Cynthia Wagner almost quit art in high school. Not because she lacked talent — because building a portfolio felt so intimidating she figured she'd rather not try. (If you've ever stared at a blank page and talked yourself right out of something you actually wanted, you already know the feeling.) She didn't quit. She got into a competitive design program, spent years doing brand and cam...

Shreya Shravini graduated from the University of Chicago with a masters in public policy and had every reason to stay in the US. Good job market, OPT STEM extension, a real shot at sponsorship. She packed up and went back to Patna instead, to work inside the Bihar government. If that sounds like the plot of Swades, that's because it basically is (minus Shah Rukh Khan & NASA). This episode...

What do you think the richest 5% of urban India earns in a month? I guessed ten lakh. The real number is twenty thousand rupees — about $200. And that was the least surprising thing Professor Jishnu Das said to me. This one rewired how I see my own country. We started with a health insurance plan called RSBY, built to cover millions of poor families. Then Jishnu told me how one misfiled word — som...

I walked in ready for the usual "AI is coming for your job" sermon. Then a PayPal AI engineer — a guy who's also logged time at TikTok and JPMorgan — looked at me and said he's never once watched good code make anyone a dollar. One sentence, and the whole hour reset. Sohil is early enough in his own story to remember the scramble, and senior enough now to see what big tech actual...

Someone slid into your inbox last week offering Forbes for a thousand bucks. Maybe you almost said yes. 😅 Vaishali Gauba spent years inside CNBC, NBC and CBS newsrooms before starting her own PR agency, and she'll tell you flat out: that yes quietly costs you the exact people you were trying to reach. Here's the uncomfortable part about how to get into Forbes with a credit card. The crowd...

Saurav is twenty-six and lives in Delhi. For five years he's worked fully remote for companies in Israel and the Czech Republic, and he gets flown out to developer conferences across three continents. The part that stopped me cold: he's never once clicked "apply" on a job portal. Not once. So how does a kid from a government school in Delhi end up speaking on stages in Nigeria, P...

Shriya left India for Germany to do a master's in Human-Computer Interaction. Her tuition bill came to zero. (Read that again. Zero — not "discounted," actually free.) If you've been stress-googling "masters abroad" at 2am, stuck in the loop most Indian students hit after a B.Tech, this is the conversation you needed. US debt, Canada's wait times, or the rumor that...

Six thousand followers. That's the number that should not work. Most people would look at Alisha Gupta's Instagram and assume she's stuck. Too small for brand deals. Too niche to get booked. The kind of account you scroll past on your way to someone with a verified checkmark. She's spoken at Harvard. She books out university stages across the country. Brands pay her to post. And sh...

Most people treat LinkedIn like a résumé site. Daniel Greenberg thinks that is exactly why they stay invisible. Daniel has racked up 8 million impressions on LinkedIn and co-hosts Connection Accepted, a show about communication and online influence. So when he says the feed now behaves more like TikTok than a digital CV, I paid attention. Here is the part nobody wants to hear: posting on LinkedIn...

Picture this. You spend a few weekends building a small web app to track garbage piles in your city. You post about it once on LinkedIn. You go to sleep. You wake up to 250,000 users and your local government quietly using your tool to clean the streets. That's Jyothish's actual 2025. The app is Namma Kasa. It does one thing — lets Bangalore residents drop a pin on a map when they spot unc...

Picking between Duke MEM and Purdue MEM is the kind of decision where Reddit threads contradict themselves. Program brochures sound identical. And the people who actually survived it have already moved on with their lives. So I tracked two of them down. Fiza Patel finished Duke MEM in 2025 and works as an Associate Product Specialist at STIHL. Bhushan Chougule is still in Purdue MEM and co-oping a...

Two years ago, Anas lost his full-time UK job. He went back to Upwork — the platform he'd already used to make over $80K while studying — and within months landed an 18-month Swedish contract that generated over $5M in client revenue. His unfair advantage? A 60-second intro video that gets him hired in 24 hours. In this episode of Ready Set Do, I sit with Anas, a Top Rated Plus Upwork freelanc...