The decision to join a new firm may not always sound prospective, especially if one is comfortable at their current workplace. It always comes down to a leap of faith to disrupt one's comfortable space to switch jobs. However, an Indian techie is now regretting his decision to let go of an offer from Aravind Srinivas, the Indian-origin CEO of the AI search engine Perplexity AI.
Aditya Baradwaj recently took to X to share a screenshot of his chat with Srinivas dating back to July 2022. Srinivas can be seen asking Baradwaj, who goes by the handle @aditya_baradwaj on X, if he was interested to join as the founding engineer at Perplexity AI. Baradwaj, however, gave it a pass and chose a safer bet. "I said no because of how well things were going at Alameda Research/FTX," he reasoned, terming his rejection his "worst financial decision".
However, FTX and Alameda Research, both founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, went bust. In November 2022, less than six months after Baradwaj turned down Srinivas' offer, the two companies filed for bankruptcy.
Srinivas reacted to Baradwaj's post with a cryptic "e/acc bs effective altruism." It refers to a philosophical debate between those who push for rapid tech acceleration (e/acc) and those who focus on ethical, evidence-based progress (effective altruism).
Baradwaj's post elicited a similar response from other users. "i declined to interview at perplexity Oct. 2022 because i was 'too focused' on my promo packet at Airbnb lol... now i use perplexity almost every day! big fumble," shared a user who goes by the handle @whymauri.
"I feel your pain... I installed the node_modules at AssemblyAl. Was doing some freelance and stupidly didn't take it very serious. (Just had a lot of other work at the time)," shared another user.