Hey, Prasad here 👋
You didn’t get a newsletter from me last Thursday. That was a miss, and I want to talk about why, because I think the miss is as useful to you as most of what I’ve published this year.
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The two misses
1. I skipped a week.
One of my goals for 2026 was to publish one newsletter article every single week. Last week I didn’t. The two weeks before that were entirely eaten by BeSA Cohort 10 prep: 10,000+ registrations, provisioning AWS sandbox for hands-on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore workshop for 2000+ people, a fireside chat with Matt Wood, and 10+ AWS volunteers to coordinate. Something had to give, and the newsletter gave.
2. Zero out of three Claude certifications.
When I passed the Claude Certified Architect Foundations exam, I shared it here and on LinkedIn. My plan was to finish the three newer Claude certifications by the end of August. It’s the 27th. I haven’t sat a single one. I haven’t even properly started studying.
If I’m going to share the pass, I should share the miss. Same rules both ways.
What LinkedIn doesn’t show you
Ritendra Datta, who leads engineering at OpenAI, posted something this week that stuck with me. His point: LinkedIn’s feed is survivorship bias in action. People are living through their own hard stretches and posting only the highlights. In his words, “Nobody is posting about the hell.”
Read his full post below:
If you are feeling low staring at all the LinkedIn updates about someone’s funding round, someone’s fancy new job, or someone’s fancy new title from a promotion, while you struggle with your own situation, let me remind you: like most social networks, LinkedIn’s feed is a case study in survivorship bias. Everyone is living through their own hell; they’re just sharing the very best things happening to them. Nobody is posting about the hell. Behind every successful funding round are countless failed pitches, every landed job comes after rejections and ghosting, and every promotion has its share of negotiations, disappointments, politics, heartbreaks, and failed attempts. And that's just those with *some* good news to share eventually. There are many still waiting for that moment.
Nothing new here, but a reminder from time to time helps.
How do I know? Well I don't, but it's a good guess based on anecdotes. The ratio of good news to bad news people share with me IRL is usually much worse than what their feed represents. These ratios seem to be drawn from very differently shaped beta distributions. I also don't really post about my own failures, and I've failed many times, e.g. I once got a very good leadership job at LinkedIn and didn't take it. Couple years later, I applied again and failed the interviews 🤷. I wouldn't have shared that in isolation, sharing only because context and it feels 'safer' now.
Failure is where some of the best learning happens. But when a platform overwhelmingly distributes success stories, it teaches us to share just the good news, and the learning gets minimized while comparison and regret get maximized. You see everyone else’s outcomes while living through your own process, and that is a fundamentally distorted comparison.
I get incredible value from Linkedin because I've learned to use it in specific ways that work for me as a learning platform. Perhaps the most useful thing to learn from LinkedIn, then, is how not to be fooled by LinkedIn posts: take the feed with a grain of salt, build resilience, recognize the survivorship bias, and learn to separate signal from noise.
He went further and shared that he once turned down a strong leadership role at LinkedIn, applied again a couple of years later, and failed the interviews. That’s a senior leader at OpenAI telling you he got rejected. You would never have guessed it from his profile.
Now look at my LinkedIn. It may seem like I do everything.
I don’t. You’re seeing the output. You’re not seeing the process. You’re not seeing the number of failures leads to the output you are seeing. WHY? Because I don’t share my failures as openly as I share the success. And everyone is doing the same - sharing only their successes.
Ritendra put it well: you see everyone else’s outcomes while living through your own process. That’s a rigged comparison, and you will lose it every time if you don’t notice it’s rigged.
Missed goals are a signal, not a verdict
Here’s how I think about it. If I’m hitting every goal I set, my goals are too small. Missing some of them means I’m aiming at things that actually require stretch. Shoot for the stars and you’ll still reach the moon.
That’s not an excuse to be sloppy. It’s a reason to look at the miss and ask what it’s telling me.
What the miss told me
Ritendra’s post had one more line I keep coming back to: failure is where some of the best learning happens. So here’s the lesson from mine.
I cannot do everything alone.
I already know this. BeSA is proof. It works because it’s not my project but a community’s project. Ashish and Parna delivered the technical session at the kickoff. Volunteers worked relentlessly behind the scenes for setting up the logistics. Community Volunteers supported the workshop over the weekend. I’m one of many hands now, and that’s exactly why it scales.
I’ve been running this newsletter the opposite way. Every idea, every draft, every edit, every send: me. That worked until it didn’t, and last Thursday is when it didn’t.
So I’m changing it. I’m hiring someone to help me run Big Tech Careers newsletter, on the content and growth side, to take it to the next level. I’m always open to work with creative and dedicated professionals. So hit me up for a chat if you’re interested to know more.
📣 I’m hiring: Content & Growth Lead, Big Tech Careers newsletter
Big Tech Careers is a Substack publication with 35,000+ subscribers, helping tech professionals excel in their careers through behavioral skills. You’ll work directly with me on content and growth, and shape where this newsletter goes next.
👉 Check the role description and apply here
Know someone who’d be a great fit? Forward this to them.
Your turn
If you’re behind on a goal you set in January, you’re in good company. Most of the people whose posts made you feel behind are behind on something too. They’re just not posting it.
Look at your miss. Ask what it’s telling you. Then fix the system, not your self-esteem.
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