End of Day 4/42: Weight loss challenge

3/5/19: 201lb
3/7/19: 196lb


Looking at my diet intake on Lose It app, my colleague said that this sounds like a super crazy weight loss plan. That is when I told him(and myself) that this is not a lifestyle change, but instead an experiment for just 6 weeks. Even if I was doing something super unhealthy, it won't have long lasting effects on me. So, better to try and do something rather than just thinking about losing weight the right way :)

Happy to be eating vegetables and cooked food rather than packaged foods. The only supplement is the one protein bar per day, given the random junk I used to it, this didn't feel too risky :P

Eating 5 times a day. Super strict diet, no salt no sugars. Cooking food with no salt is the only complaint I have at the moment. But given my history of how I quickly lose weight whenever I go to Tropical places, I think the lack of salt is definitely helping me with losing the weight. The other minor complaint is that I'm not able to figure out how to add variety to my diet, to continue this for the next 38 days :)

I'm happy that this diet allows for brown rice. Ate salad the other day and the whole day was messed up. The only thing I could think of was to eat some rice. Eat before you get hungry is definitely true for this meal plan, because the food is not going to be super yummy, so you better fill up that tummy and not get to a stage where you'll gobble up anything you can find.

Talking about the torture in the bootcamp, I'm realizing that I'm in a super bad shape :) The goal is to keep finishing the 4 rounds of all sets of exercises every day, so if that means I reduce the intensity of each individual exercise, that is ok. I'm hoping this will allow my body to get used to the routine and I can maybe push it harder next week!

The good thing about the bootcamp torture, that backpain I used to have every time I slept? It vanished right after the first day of bootcamp. Maybe the exercise pain was higher than the pain I got in sleeping position? :D

Fire the fireplace

The next crazy thing on my mind - General Contractor!(Or Handyman as wifey puts it)

The thing that we don't at all like in our house - the fireplace. Just feels like an unsafe structure(for a 63 year old house) and never liked the brick surround on the fireplace and the super old looking tile in the living room. Got a contractor to look at it and he quoted close to $7K to take out the entire fireplace and put drywall. We decided it wasn't that painful inconvenience and left it alone :)

Given my free time, my thoughts started off like this:

* why not try to change the old brick surround and put in new tile surround(Prasad had done it all by himself and it looked good).
* While at it, why not take out the raised tile hearth and level it with the carpet and put new tile there?
* Why the heck not take out the entire fireplace and put new drywall and maybe change out the carpet to fill up the hearth place as well?

Lots of options. :) I felt taking out the entire fireplace might be lot of work, but the chances of screwing up is actually low. It might take me a long time to get things into good looking shape, but I don't think I'll end up bringing the house down. And if things do really go south, I'll just pay that contractor the same amount to finish the job that I started.

Challenges:

The top of the fireplace is 15' high. How do I get up there safely?
  --> Maybe a super tall ladder?
Where do I place the ladder? On the fireplace that I'm going to smash down?
  --> For now, yes. I don't think this is safe :)
How do I carry the bricks down?
  --> Maybe throw them down the fireplace instead of going up and down on ladder?


Checked that the fireplace is not part of structure, just sitting at the end of the house structure and no support beams on top of it. Waiting for the sunny days so that I can start demolishing. What will I really gain? To be honest, mostly nothing. Just doing something different in the break time :P

Cut it!

3/8/19 will be my last day at VMware and I had no plans of what to do next. I get an email on 3/1/19 saying that a 6 week weight loss challenge is starting from 3/4/19. Pay $297 to use the meal guide and all the bootcamp sessions(Fit For Life Solutions) for next 6 weeks and if you end up losing 20 lbs in those 6 weeks, you get your money back. It just felt like perfect timing! My previous 'investment' of $600 into 2 year 24 Hour Fitness didn't work out well, but given the different format and the free time ahead, I thought this was interesting.

Started off with 203lb(-2lb to account for dress+shoes) weight check-in on Monday evening, 3/4/2019. Tried to follow the meal plan for dinner, 2 boiled egg whites and 6-7 florets of broccoli at 10PM(Went mad for 3 hours trying to figure out a decent dinner plan). After dinner, I saw that the Mtn View location has a 9AM class that works better compared to the last class at 8AM in Sunnyvale location, I figured that I would have to give my initial weigh in again. Why would I want to starve and lose my advantage of higher initial weight? So, ate good quantity of milk and cereal at 11:30PM to put as much weight as I can in one day. :P Followed that up with wifey's special Siva Ratri meal for breakfast. New weight on 3/5 morning - 202lb :( (My body weight swings about 4-5lbs between morning and evening). Luckily, the person who weighed me in at Sunnyvale location on 3/4 was working at Mtn View on 3/5 and she decided to help me cheat and put the initial weight of 203lb. Let's hope this 1lb will help me with winning the challenge of losing 20lbs by 4/15!

Fight to get fired!

I had been thinking of leaving my job at VMware for over an year and half.

1. It started with the MTS3 --> Sr. MTS promo that came with a 3% hike. That straight up felt like an insult, it was probably the lowest increment that I got in my 10 years of s/w job(Microsoft and VMware). The RSU refreshers remained at 25K regardless of MTS3 or Sr. MTS position. I was told that the lower hike is because of the hike in target bonus(12% --> 17%). Didn't want to continue that argument anymore, just said fine and started looking for jobs outside.
2. The feeling got stronger when I screwed up providing estimates for creating a new microservice and was not given a decent chance to adjust the estimates(It took double the time to finish what was promised, so a big time screw up on my side - learnt my lessons on estimations :) ). Felt like going to office and saying 'I quit' almost everyday for couple of months! Working close to 14 hours a day, while taking care of 2 kids was not fun, and feeling the pressure to try and bring in the feature even sooner only made things worse.
3. Got my green card in Jun 2018, got a decent financial cushion from the sale of our rental house towards end of 2018 <-- very important events that allowed me to even think of taking a break.

Tried interviewing at couple of places(FB, LinkedIn), screwed up one out of five interviews at every onsite. I could clearly see that the 20% effort I put into preparing is only going to get me this far and to be able to crack the interviews, I need to put a lot more effort(Jai Leetcode!) and that too consistenly for a month or two. With 2 kids and a job that has on-call plus weird hours because of London and Beijing offices, being able to put that level of effort for interviewing felt a bit like torture. I didn't see why I had to go through that much trouble when I was confident that with a month of dedicated practice, I would be technically ready to crack the onsites.

My thinking was something like this: Take a month off, relax, do something crazy/fun. Take a month to prepare and then couple more months to find a job. That should get me a 300K/year(a colleague at that time got multiple offers and this was the lowest offer he had from one of FANG) job after 4 months of no pay(Thank you for the cushion San Jose house!) and the loss of 4 months of pay would even out due to the higher salary in new job. And in the worst case of not being able to find a fulltime job, I was confident that I can score a contracting job that would pay me around $170K/yr(my TC at VMware was close to $220K including base+bonus+RSU). That felt like a decent backup plan. Also, with our dual income, it felt like it was time to stop worrying about total comp and look at the minimum we needed to keep our lifestyle for the time being. Once the kids(6&2) grow up, we'd have plenty of time to spend at work and try for bigger paychecks if we wanted to.

Coming back from a vacation to India, I decided to break the news to my manager. But I was also sympathetic towards my new manager's condition, as he was trying to form a bigger local team(solving one of the problems due to which I was leaving) and there weren't enough senior people left to train the newly hired people. So, I told him that I don't have an urgency to leave, but I want to leave. Need to give credits to my manager who was able to pursue me to stay for 2 more months and was doing his best to give me interesting projects and keep me in the team. Although I liked that the manager wants me to stay and is doing things to make me happy, I wanted to leave. When the layoff happened, I sent him a message saying Intel allows for volunteering for layoff, could you please lay me off. Unfortunately I was turned down, otherwise I would have had 5 months of pay in hand. :) I almost gave in and told him that the 2nd new project that he gave me does sound interesting and that I'm ok with a long term commitment with this team. I told him that I would talk to him about my expectations of a pay adjustment and he agreed to have another meeting about it.

I was serious about getting a good hike and decided to create a slide deck of what have I done in the past, what was my impact till now and how critical I would be for the team going forward. While looking at all the features that I've done and the things that I could do in future by staying there, the feeling of leaving my job only got stronger. I felt that the 2 major features I worked on would never leave me, the guy who almost took up one of the features from me got fired and there was no one senior enough to be able to handle the 2nd feature - both of them involve lot of customer issues troubleshooting. I didn't see a way forward, to be able to hand these features to other people while trying to work on newer features looked impossible. Add the awesome geo distribution of our team to the mix(6 official site and 2 remote people), I didn't feel like this is the place I want to spend half of my active hours in my life.

Went back to the manager the following Monday and said I'm done. I didn't want to go through another round of convincing as I'm really done this time, so I gave him a firm date of 2 weeks from that Monday(last week of Feb). I didn't feel like picking up anymore work and didn't want to stay in this job any longer, as I kind of started feeling guilty that I'm just sitting around and not being useful to the team and pulling a salary for just being there. For some reason, the manager was adamant about me staying till end of March, I'm not sure why. Maybe he genuinely wanted me to get my bonus on that day and get out? I didn't feel that I should be paid any bonus as I was not satisfied with my work in second half of 2018, so gave him a strict date. After some heated arguing, we decided to keep things friendly and part on good terms. I felt that the final conversations about quitting could have been handled a bit more gracefully, but everyone has a different way of dealing with things I guess :).

So, Mar 8th 2019 will be my last day and the first time I'm going to be free without any work or plan on what to do next! Last time I remember having a 2 month break was after my Undergrad(13 years ago :P)


Lots of crazy thoughts:

1. Take an year off and roam around the world(Guess who came up with this idea? :P)
2. Maybe it's time to finally finish that Real Estate Agent course that I started 3 years ago(Rajesh, Kalyan?)
3. I am still serious about that south Indian food truck and Bindu's idly/chai stall!
4. Try contracting roles and build up some architectural knowledge across multiple products

Hello World!

The first one shall always be a Hello World! Doesn't matter if it is code or a blog :)