I'm Arnav Gupta, Director of Engineering at Jio Cinema. Ask me anything!

He signed an NDA

Ever since getting a car I am inclined to reply to this with the words of famous Yo Yo Honey Singh

"Hello, uncle, namaste, chalo kaam kee baath pe aathe hain" "ab aap ye puuchhenge ki "aap kithne paise kamaate hain?"" "bas jitna aapakee beti ek maheene mein udaati hain" "ek hafte mein meri gaadi utana tel khaatee hai"

ReddyAnna from malleshwaram asking the right questions

@championswimmer are you also gets micro managed and the performance of the jio cinema could be better having you would have got control and decision ?

I don't think he can have an alt account as one phone can have only one account... Unless he has two numbers 😅

A1: yes I do, ofcourse :)

A2: It obviously "depends" - but I would say it starts to matter when your products focus starts to emphasize retaining users as much as it emphasizes acquiring users. Usually as you hit PMF, and you start having few thousand users coming to your app/website every week, the retain-vs-acquire battle takes an even foothold, and doing things the right way becomes important from then

Grapevine wants to know what you do with the champion swimmers

Not 'married', but I live with my partner for 2+ years now. Will get married one of these days because it does help legally on stuff like bank/insurance nominee, work visa / dependent visa, etc etc.

About the second part - you need to understand who you are, and what you want, and then find someone with whom you can share that. Other people (parents/friends/some algo on some app) cannot do that for you - if you're lucky you'll end up with someone whom you can live with for the rest of your life, but most likely you'll just sign up for a lot of pain and suffering and blame others for it.

Have had opportunities in India that have catapulted my growth and learning to levels that were not possible with the kind of opportunities I had gotten to move outside.

Zomato, Target, Scaler and JioCinema have all been pivotal in learning crucial skills and also helped me grow in really varied ways (in terms of engineering skills, team building ability, product knowledge and business understanding)

I do feel long term I want to move out - the direction the social fabric of the country is taking is not much to my liking. Also better quality of life and infrastructure in some places that are on my shortlist.

Your top 3 locations if you ever decide to move out of India for work?

Two things

Just as Arnav: I was a bit tired of the fact that all "tech" content in Indian ecosystem is mainly about how to get into tech. And not much about how to grow late stage tech careers or how to build and run tech teams (not just how to write code yourself, but how to grow a team that builds great systems). And I wanted to start such conversations in the ecosystem

as Arnav, Head of Product & Strategy, Scaler: We needed to have conversations with leaders of the tech ecosystem so that engineering leaders know more (and respect more) Scaler - and thus consider Scaler as a viable place to hire engineers from when they hire people in their teams

Both professional and personal interests came together, and the podcast started. Thanks for watching them :)

As Arnav, Head of Product & Strategy at Scaler, you did fantastic work. Nowadays I listen your podcast daily and I must it is very inspiring and insightful for people like us.

Jio cinema shows total viewers (like views on YouTube), whereas Hotstar shows total concurrent user (live at the same time).

☝️what Dhoni said

I would say Target is more well known than Lowe's

Before joining Target, I didn't know they had an Indian office. The first person under whom I interned in life many years ago was Director of Engineeinr of the mobile team at Target in India, and he wanted me to come join his team when he learnt about me leaving Zomato. ( I did eventually let him down a bit as I left Target quickly - because the pace of work and scope of ownership the India team got was not something I was comfortable with )

Target has great employee-friendly policies - will never forget how they took care of everyone in US as well as India during COVID. It is a 100 year old company it regards itself as the corporate guardian of Minneapolis - literally takes care of the city like its own - and that culture shows up everywhere, even in the India office. Engineering was also great - there were many ex Google / Facebook / Apple people - setting up lofty standards. 100% CI existed. Huge % of frontend code was e2e test covered. Accessibility, analytics, security - everything was taken seriously - I would definitely recommend working here. The data platform team was pretty well known for producing cutting edge stuff!

Bhai ki LinkedIn dekh le

Bhai Forrest gump se swimming race me jeete they

On Discord there is "The Engineering Org" (slightly senior) and "The Real Dev Squad" (slightly junior) which are good servers where engineers hang out and build stuff.

If you have a remote job, I'll say maximise on life - go to the gym, cycle 2-3 times a week, go out to pubs with friends and sing at the karaoke, go to board game meetups, go to dance classes - meet new friends (possibly with different professions).