Waterloo Engineering, Tech over Consulting, Doing PM in Silicon Valley: Umesh Khanna – Atila TV 7

The Atila Podcast

Umesh is a currently in the Waterloo Systems Engineering program. He is an incoming product management intern at Credit Karma in San Francisco. He has previously worked at Flexport, Toast, Clearbanc and Shopify in a mix of product and engineering roles.

In this episode we talk about why he chose Tech over consulting and Product Management over software engineering. Managing mental health and burnout in the high pressure Waterloo Engineering and California tech cultures and much more.

Timestamps

What was the hardest internship to get? [20:00]

Advice for getting a job in tech? [23:00]

How you got into Waterloo Engineering, one of the most competitive programs in Canada? [4:45]

Why he switched from electrical engineering to systems engineering? [8:50]

How do you decide what companies you want to work for? [13:15]

Tomiwa and Umesh Debate working for small company vs. big company [14:50]

Why he chose startup PM at Credit Karma over consulting at Deloitte and Oliver Wyman and PM at Microsoft? [32:15] -> [32:33]

When he realized he didn’t like coding even though he was in the engineering program [36:33]

Finding work-life balance and managing mental health in the high pressure Waterloo Engineering and “cali or bust” Tech cultures [39:20]

What drives you to work so hard? [44:40]

Prepping for a PM interview vs prepping for a consulting interview? [31:55]

Links

Professor Bill Anderson’s Waterloo Engineering Blog: https://profbillanderson.com/

Podcast Umesh is Currently obsessed How I built This Podcast: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this

The organization which Umesh and Tomiwa recommend young people to Join: Shad and TKS

https://www.shad.ca/

https://theksociety.com/