https://anindya.dev/blog Essays on engineering, leadership, and building things. en-us https://anindya.dev/blog/post/managing-someone-who-knows-more-than-you https://anindya.dev/blog/post/managing-someone-who-knows-more-than-you Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMT It was my third week as a manager, a Thursday afternoon one-on-one with D, who had been on the team for four years and knew every service, every dependency, every reason behind every strange decision in the codebase. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/letting-someone-go https://anindya.dev/blog/post/letting-someone-go Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMT The conversation had been six weeks in preparation. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-meeting-where-the-decision-was-already-made https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-meeting-where-the-decision-was-already-made Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMT The meeting invite arrived at 4 PM on a Thursday, subject line "Direction discussion," with an attendee list that included two directors who had never attended this particular meeting before. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/reading-someone-elses-code https://anindya.dev/blog/post/reading-someone-elses-code Sat, 22 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMT It was my second Monday at Meta, nine in the morning, and the coffee next to my monitor had gone cold while I stared at a diff with four hundred files in it. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-sunday-call-home https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-sunday-call-home Mon, 08 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMT My mother's face fills the entire screen when she video calls on WhatsApp, her forehead cut off at the top, her chin at the bottom, as if the phone is something she is trying to look through rather than at. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-visa-stamp-on-page-seven https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-visa-stamp-on-page-seven Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:00:00 GMT The US consulate in Delhi has plastic chairs arranged in rows, the kind you find in hospital waiting rooms, and a number display above the window counter that moves forward with no discernible pattern. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-copilot-is-becoming https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-copilot-is-becoming Tue, 15 Apr 2025 07:00:00 GMT In 2021, when I first told people I was building the AI assistant in Outlook, the response was a polite variation of "interesting, what does it do." https://anindya.dev/blog/post/samsung-amazon-microsoft-meta-microsoft-again https://anindya.dev/blog/post/samsung-amazon-microsoft-meta-microsoft-again Sat, 08 Feb 2025 08:00:00 GMT The thing nobody tells you about changing companies is that you keep arriving as a beginner. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/why-i-came-back https://anindya.dev/blog/post/why-i-came-back Tue, 04 Feb 2025 08:00:00 GMT The conversation with the Microsoft team started in November 2024, with a message from my former skip-level, who was now running a broader organization and wanted to talk about the Copilot work. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-authentication-problem-in-a-virtual-room https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-authentication-problem-in-a-virtual-room Thu, 03 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMT When you put on a VR headset, the familiar anchor points disappear. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-it-is-like-to-be-an-ic-again https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-it-is-like-to-be-an-ic-again Tue, 17 Sep 2024 07:00:00 GMT The first week of code I wrote at Meta was an authentication middleware layer in Kotlin, and I wrote it alone, on a MacBook Pro that Meta had shipped to the house, sitting at the desk in the home office at about eleven in the morning on a Thursday in February 2024. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-difference-between-microsoft-and-meta https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-difference-between-microsoft-and-meta Mon, 03 Jun 2024 07:00:00 GMT The thing you notice first at Meta, coming from Microsoft, is the pace of the document culture. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-first-copilot-feature-nobody-saw https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-first-copilot-feature-nobody-saw Thu, 11 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT We shipped a voice assistant into Outlook in 2021 that almost no one used. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/why-i-left-microsoft-for-meta https://anindya.dev/blog/post/why-i-left-microsoft-for-meta Wed, 22 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT The honest version of why I left Microsoft in late 2023 is not the version I gave in exit interviews. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-enterprise-software-is-actually-like-to-build https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-enterprise-software-is-actually-like-to-build Wed, 27 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT Enterprise feedback doesn't come to you directly. It comes filtered through your PMs, who heard it from a partner, who heard it from a customer's IT department, three meetings removed from the actual problem. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/cross-team-dependencies https://anindya.dev/blog/post/cross-team-dependencies Thu, 18 May 2023 07:00:00 GMT In the spring of 2023, there was a team whose timeline controlled ours. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/writing-a-performance-review https://anindya.dev/blog/post/writing-a-performance-review Mon, 06 Feb 2023 08:00:00 GMT The Microsoft performance cycle ends in August, and for the three years I was a manager, I started writing reviews in late July, in the hour before the family calls and after the evening's meetings. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-chatgpt-moment-from-inside-microsoft https://anindya.dev/blog/post/the-chatgpt-moment-from-inside-microsoft Wed, 14 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMT ChatGPT launched on a Wednesday in November 2022, and by Friday my calendar had three new recurring meetings on it. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-i-got-wrong-about-being-a-manager-the-first-time https://anindya.dev/blog/post/what-i-got-wrong-about-being-a-manager-the-first-time Wed, 12 Oct 2022 07:00:00 GMT The first team I managed had four people on it. https://anindya.dev/blog/post/being-inside-a-company-when-it-decides-to-change-direction https://anindya.dev/blog/post/being-inside-a-company-when-it-decides-to-change-direction Thu, 22 Sep 2022 07:00:00 GMT In late 2022 we were building a feature that the company was about to rename, reframe, and put on the front page of everything.