Welcome to My Blog

Another engineer has started a blog. I'll give you a moment.

I've been writing on Medium for a while, but I wanted somewhere that's actually mine — no algorithm deciding who sees it, no "you have 2 free stories left this month" ambushing someone who just wanted to read about Kubernetes.

So here's a brief and mildly embarrassing account of how I got here.

The TCS years, or: what's behind the curtain?

I started at TCS. If you've done time in Indian IT services you already know the texture of it — the process, the ticket queues, the strange comfort of a machine that keeps running whether or not you're thinking especially hard on a given Tuesday.

And like roughly everyone else in that building, I spent a non-trivial amount of my twenties wondering what it was actually like inside the big product companies. MAANG, FAANG, whichever letters we'd settled on that year. I had a whole mental image. It involved whiteboards, distributed systems being casually invented over lunch, and absolutely nobody anywhere filling in a timesheet.

I was very curious. I was also very wrong.

Amazon, Hyderabad

Then I joined Amazon and moved to Hyderabad, braced for the transformation.

Here's the anticlimax: it felt pretty much the same. There are meetings. There are tickets. Someone, somewhere, is always asking for a status update. The laptop still takes nine minutes to boot. Nobody pulled me aside and told me the secret, because there isn't one.

What was different — and it took me embarrassingly long to notice — was the people.

The person next to me had read the paper. Not the blog post about the paper. The paper. Somebody would push back on a design and the argument would be genuinely technical instead of genuinely political. People competed hard, but they competed in the right direction — on whether the thing was actually correct, not on who got to say it first.

That's the bit nobody puts on a careers page. The buildings are just buildings. The difference is that the ambient standard around you is higher, and it quietly drags you up whether or not you'd scheduled that for this quarter.

The mindset that had to go

The most useful thing I lost at Amazon was the service mindset.

Not the work ethic — the framing. Services trains you to ask "is the task complete?" The ticket closes, the SLA is met, everyone goes home. It's a perfectly reasonable way to work and it will carry you a long way.

Product work asks something else: "did this actually help anyone?" Those two questions look like cousins and they are not even related. One of them you can answer by Friday. The other occasionally takes six months, and sometimes the answer is just no.

Learning to sit with the second question is, I think, the actual promotion. The title change is paperwork.

Roche, and doing platform engineering on purpose

Now I'm at Roche, doing platform engineering.

I'm not going to talk about the work itself — not mine to share. What I will say is that this is the first place that handed me the whole thing. Design it, build it, architect it, stand up and present it, then own it when it falls over at an hour you'd rather be asleep.

Which sounds great, and is. It's also a lot more exposed than "the ticket is closed." The first few times you present your own architecture to a room full of people who are paid to find holes in it, you become vividly aware of every assumption you'd been quietly waving past.

It has not been a straight line up. There were stretches where I felt like the sharpest person in the room, and stretches where I was certain I'd fooled everyone — usually the same month, occasionally the same meeting. If you're currently somewhere in that oscillation: that's not a bug, that's just the job.

The part where I got to go places

Somewhere along the way this career started handing out passport stamps.

AWS re:Invent. I walked an obscene number of steps, understood maybe eleven percent of the keynote in real time, and spent the following year catching up on the other eighty-nine.

KubeCon. Where I learned the deeply reassuring truth that everyone else's cluster is also held together by optimism and a Helm chart inherited from someone who has since left the company.

And Switzerland, for Roche. The mountains are, irritatingly, exactly as good as the photographs. I had assumed that was marketing. It is not marketing.

I'll write about all of it properly — the travel, the food, the part where I got lost — over in Travel, because none of that belongs in a post about Kubernetes.

What's going where

• Platform — platform engineering, cloud, Kubernetes, and the occasional cost-related horror story
• AI — model APIs, tooling, and what it all costs once the free credits evaporate
• Travel — conferences, trips, and the practical details nobody writes down
• Casual — whatever this is. Career things. Opinions. Stuff I got wrong.

No posting schedule, because I'd only be lying to both of us.

If you want the tidy version with the job titles in the correct order and no jokes, that lives at vijayrmourya.com.

Thanks for reading this far — genuinely more patience than the algorithm usually affords me. Stay tuned.