Ready Set Do

Shrey Shah never applied to Microsoft.
Microsoft executives watched him give a talk on AI coding workflows, then reached out. Meta came knocking not long after, asking for something similar.
Here's the part that stings a little: that wasn't luck.
It traces back to a decision he made years earlier, when senior engineers around him said going all in on AI-assisted coding would hurt his career. He ignored them. He was building with agents before agent jobs existed, and using Cursor before most engineers could spell it.
In this episode of Ready Set Do, Shrey — now Senior Software Engineer, AI at Microsoft — walks through how inbound offers actually happen in tech, and what he did to make himself findable.
We get into the interview loop too. Four rounds, two technical, zero LeetCode. One problem was so big he had to keep solving it out loud while talking to his interviewer. He explains why that format tests something the standard algorithm grind never touches.
Then the harder conversation starts. Shrey doesn't believe in resumes anymore.
His argument: every resume is now tailored by the same AI tools, every application lands in the same ATS pile, and the traditional job application is finished. (If you're applying into silence right now, you already suspect he's right.)
So what replaces it? Visibility. Posting what you learn. Forming your own point of view on what you read. Building a public track record long before you need one.
He gets specific about what to build, what to post on LinkedIn as a software engineer, and how he never runs out of things to say. He also breaks down how meetup and conference speaking invitations actually arrive.
Then the technical gut-check. Most engineers using AI tools can't explain the difference between a skill, a sub agent, a hook, a rule, and MCP — or when to reach for which. Shrey can, and he lays out the architecture in plain language.
We close on his 2028 prediction. He doesn't think AI takes your job. He thinks roles merge, everyone carries more scope, and the new jobs created won't line up with the ones that vanish.
Worth your 45 minutes if the job market has gone quiet on you. 🎧

Timestamps:
00:00 Cold Open: How He Got Hired at Microsoft Without Applying
02:10 Hired at Microsoft Without Applying — How Inbound Offers Happen
03:42 Microsoft AI Interview With No LeetCode: What They Test Instead
09:46 Forward-Compatible Software: Building Agents That Survive Model Updates
13:29 How to Get Recruiter Inbound in Tech
20:57 Are Resumes Dead? Why AI Broke Job Applications
23:44 Personal Branding for Engineers: Visibility Before You Need a Job
27:58 What to Post on LinkedIn as a Software Engineer
30:57 How to Get Invited to Speak at Tech Meetups and Conferences
34:08 Vibe Coding Mistakes Most AI Engineers Still Make
36:08 Skill vs Sub Agent vs MCP: AI Tool Architecture Explained
42:27 AI Job Loss 2028 Prediction: Roles Merging, Not Replaced
Guest: Shrey Shah — Senior Software Engineer, AI at Microsoft
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyshahh/
Host: Naman Pandey
readysetdopodcast.com
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Thirteen years at Google. Trust and Safety in Hyderabad first, then the Bay Area, then most of the back half inside YouTube — finance, then analytics, then managing YouTube inventory and monetization.
Then Aishwarya Raghavan quit. No job lined up.
Two months later a friend referred her to a company she actually wanted. She didn't get it. That rejection landed right as the layoff headlines were peaking, and that's where this conversation starts.
Most advice about the AI job market in 2026 is built to make you feel behind. Aishwarya's take goes the other way.
She says a lot of postings that say "AI skills required" mean something far more basic than you'd guess. The people who never start are usually the ones who jumped straight to AI agents, decided it was too hard, and quit before level one.
(If that's you, no judgment. It was most of us.)
So she walks through four levels anyone can climb. Level one is small enough to feel silly: getting ChatGPT to stop sounding like a stranger. Custom GPTs come later. Agent orchestration comes after that.
Is that really enough to get hired in AI? Her answer is more specific than yes.
We also get into why she couldn't just move into AI work internally at Google, even with the badge and the tenure. How to read a job description and tell whether a company has actually thought about AI or is checking a box.
And the interview skill she rates above every technical signal. Fair warning — it has more to do with storytelling than with reciting the STAR method at a hiring manager.
Then there's the networking habit she regrets not building while she still had the Google email. Nobody tells you that your network has an expiration date.
She's now a principal product manager at Arrivia, wiring AI into a travel business full of legacy systems. Different problem entirely from YouTube creator monetization, and she's candid about what transferred and what didn't.
If you're a student, or a few years into your career and quietly worried the market already moved past you, start here.
Chapters below. If this helped, subscribe on YouTube and Spotify. 🎧
00:00 - Aishwarya Raghavan on Leaving Google After 13 Years
04:12 - How AI Is Changing Big Tech and Product Management
07:14 - Product Manager Job Search Advice in a Tough Tech Market
10:09 - Product Interview Storytelling: How to Stand Out as a PM
13:24 - Why Product, Engineering, and Strategy Roles Are Blending
16:10 - Best AI Tools and Workflows for Product Managers
19:08 - AI Agents and Agent Orchestration: The Next PM Skill
22:03 - Job Search Lessons After Leaving Google
25:17 - Travel Tech and AI: Modernizing Legacy Product Workflows
30:45 - YouTube Monetization, Creator Tools, and AI Product Strategy
35:59 - Networking Without an Agenda for Big Tech Career Growth
40:23 - Final Advice for PMs Building Rare AI Skills

Should an international student still move to the US for a master's right now?
That's the question sitting in thousands of inboxes and WhatsApp groups this admissions cycle. Not "which school," not "what score." Just: should I go at all?
Naman put it to someone who has watched this play out for over two decades — and who has no reason to sell you the dream.
Professor Benjamin Dunford taught leadership and management at Purdue's Mitch Daniels School of Business, where he was academic director over the full suite of Purdue MBA programs. He also taught in Kellogg's family business executive program, and most recently at the Indian School of Business in Mohali.
His answer on the headwinds international students face in 2026 is more direct than you'd expect from someone inside the system. He names what's real. Then he tells you what actually still holds up.
A big piece of it: work experience. Ben is blunt that it's the biggest differentiator in MBA admissions, and the thing most applicants under-invest in while they optimize everything else.
Which brings us to the 4.0. If you're chasing a perfect GPA, he'd argue you might be playing it safe — picking the courses you'll win instead of the ones that will stretch you. (Yes, this is going to sting a little. Sit with it.)
We also get into why so much leadership advice falls flat. The gap between the real and the ideal. Why change is a choice, not a command. "Compliance theater" — that thing where everyone nods in the meeting and disagrees in the hallway after. And how to influence people when you have zero authority over them.
Ben's research on pairing accountability with forgiveness comes up too, including why CEOs get visibly uncomfortable the moment you say the word forgiveness in a boardroom.
Then there's his work at ISB Mohali, teaching 20-something CEOs who inherited Indian family businesses. How do you honor your parents and still change the thing they built? He's watched a lot of people try. 🇮🇳
We close on where business education is headed as certificates and badges start pressuring traditional degrees, what AI is doing to how leadership gets taught, and the difference between advising and consulting.
If you're a student, a recent grad, or early in your career and weighing a move abroad, this one is required listening.

Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Professor Dunford on Purdue MBA Programs and Executive Leadership Education
00:03:59 - What Separates Elite MBA Students From Average Applicants?
00:06:12 - Perfectionism vs Excellence in Business School
00:07:45 - Should International Students Still Pursue a US Master's Degree?
00:11:59 - Why Students Should Stop Chasing a 4.0 GPA
00:17:09 - How AI Is Changing Leadership Education and Business Schools
00:20:02 - Will Certificates and Badges Replace Traditional Degrees?
00:23:42 - Best Advice for Early Career Leaders: Keep Going and Iterate
00:25:44 - Why Leadership Advice Feels Too Theoretical
00:28:40 - Change Is a Choice, Not a Command
00:29:38 - How to Influence Without Authority at Work
00:30:20 - Why Accountability Needs Forgiveness
00:34:26 - Teaching at ISB and Working With Young Family Business Leaders in India
00:38:53 - How Family Businesses Can Honor Tradition Through Innovation
00:43:32 - Consulting, Advising, and Why Human Problems Still Need Human Solutions
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Somewhere it's 3 a.m. and a Kubernetes pod just quietly died. A guy in a different time zone taps his card for coffee and it works. He'll never know how close that was.
Keeping him from finding out is Sai Joshitha's job. She's a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Visa.
Here's the part I care about for anyone sitting on an F-1 right now. SRE is one of the most underrated doors into the US tech market, and almost nobody in the international student group chats is talking about it.
Everyone's fighting over the same software engineer postings. Meanwhile there's an entire discipline hiring for a completely different skill.
Start with this: SRE interview loops have no LeetCode. None. Someone hands you a system that's on fire and watches how you think while it burns.
Is that easier? Definitely not. It's just different, and it rewards people who like fixing things over people who ground through 300 array problems.
Joshitha breaks down what the job actually is day to day — monitoring, deploying, automating, and hunting for root cause when dozens of connected systems start acting strange.
Then we get to how she got there. She finished her MS at University of Michigan-Dearborn and walked into one of the ugliest markets in years, firing off 200+ applications a week before she changed the whole approach.
What worked was fewer applications, aimed better, with the resume rewritten per role and real recruiter outreach instead of apply-and-pray. (We've all done apply-and-pray. It's a petri dish for burnout.)
She also lays out the exact stack recruiters screen for. Kubernetes and Docker, one cloud learned end to end (not three learned halfway), observability tools like Grafana, Prometheus and Kibana, scripting for automation, plus the networking fundamentals holding all of it up.
Her honest take? Knowing the tools matters way less than knowing how to solve a real problem with them.
We close on where this is heading — how Visa is folding AI into on-call work for repetitive incidents, why she reads AI as a teammate instead of a replacement, and what she'd say to someone who wants a tech career but got scared off by coding-heavy roles.
If you're a student, a recent grad, or someone quietly plotting a switch into reliability engineering, this is a plan you can start on Monday. 🙂
Connect with Sai Joshitha — https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshithak/
Chapters:
00:00:00 - Sai Joshitha on Becoming a Site Reliability Engineer at Visa
00:00:20 - What Does a Site Reliability Engineer Actually Do?
00:02:59 - What Happens During a Production Incident?
00:05:18 - How SREs Use Logs, Metrics, Alerts, and Monitoring
00:08:19 - How Sai Joshitha Discovered SRE and Cloud Infrastructure
00:10:23 - University of Michigan-Dearborn MS and Starting a US Tech Career
00:12:14 - How to Break Into SRE After a Computer Science Master's
00:13:37 - Applying to 200+ Jobs Per Week in a Tough Market
00:16:11 - SRE Job Strategy: Targeted Roles, Resumes, and Recruiter Outreach
00:19:52 - What Is the SRE Interview Process Like?
00:23:20 - Are SRE Interviews LeetCode-Heavy or Troubleshooting-Focused?
00:24:48 - Must-Have SRE Skills: Kubernetes, Cloud, Observability, and Scripting
00:28:43 - Why Troubleshooting Matters More Than Just Knowing Tools
00:31:41 - How AI Is Changing Site Reliability Engineering
00:36:09 - Best Advice for Future SREs: Networking, AI Tools, and Programming

Picture running a resort deep inside Jim Corbett National Park. Tigers on one side of the fence, guests on the other, and a family business you never actually applied for...
That was Abhinav Jindal's twenties. The business did fine. He didn't.
That gap — doing well on paper, feeling hollow off it — is where this episode of Ready Set Do lives.
Abhinav is an empowerment coach and a certified master practitioner of NLP and MER®, plus the founder of Cydir. He got there sideways. A manifestation course in Delhi in 2019 that he only half believed at the time. (He admits the eye-rolling was real. He went back anyway.)
Then 2022. He did emotional baggage work that he says reset his business and his marriage in the same stretch. Not a slow drift toward better. A hard reboot.
So what happens when a second generation business owner stops running on his father's scoreboard?
We get into why New Year's resolutions fail by the second week of January. Short version: your conscious mind writes the goal, your unconscious mind quietly vetoes it, and nobody told you there was a vote.
Abhinav calls that unconscious programming. The stuff wired in before you turned seven, still humming in the background while you wonder why the gym membership went untouched again. Understanding the conscious vs unconscious mind split is the whole ballgame here, and he explains it without any woo.
His four steps for making change stick: clear the emotional baggage, set goals your entire system agrees with, take purposeful action, then stay present on the path. That third one is where most people fold.
We also dig into how to set goals that survive contact with your own limiting beliefs — a different exercise than writing a list in January and hoping.
Then there's the client story that stuck with me. A guy who quit every job right before he was about to succeed. Not once. Every single time. Abhinav traces it back to one childhood moment, and watching him unpack it is the most useful stretch of the episode if you've ever sabotaged yourself and couldn't name the reason.
We close on AI. Where AI coaching and therapy genuinely help people, and where they run out of road. His read is more generous than I expected, and more specific. 🙂
Call it manifestation for skeptics. Buy into it or roll your eyes at it — as a mindset coach and transformation coach, Abhinav still hands you a framework you can use, especially if you're mid career pivot and stuck between success without fulfillment and no clear next step.
If you've been treating personal growth as a someday project, this one is a nudge. Finding fulfillment isn't a reward for hitting the number. Turns out it's the thing that makes hitting the number bearable.

Connect with Abhinav: https://www.instagram.com/abhinavjindal.coach/Cydir: https://www.cydir.com/

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction to Second Generation Entrepreneurs
06:04 - Understanding Fulfillment-Driven Success
11:06 - The Impact of Internal Programming
16:15 - Common Pitfalls in Business Ownership
21:14 - Abhinav's Personal Journey to Coaching
26:27 - The Concept of Manifestation
27:55 - Transformative Breakthrough Sessions
30:26 - The Importance of Goals and Action
32:08 - Skepticism and Openness to Change
34:04 - Qualities of an Effective Coach
35:51 - Unique Client Stories and Breakthroughs
40:29 - The Process of Unpacking Client Issues
43:22 - AI vs. Human Coaching
47:33 - Future Aspirations and Impact