My CV of Failures

Listening to one of the episodes of Hidden Brain, I was intrigued to hear that the professor of psychology who was being interviewed on the show had maintained a Resume of Failures. She was inspired to do so by another professor who had published an unlikely CV - that of his failures! He was inspired by Melanie Stefan who wrote an article in Nature about why one should keep a running tally of failures. 

This was a great idea since it shows the people aspiring to achieve something, that the path to success is riddled with failures. It might look "cute" when published by highly accomplished people since they  also have an "actual" resume listing their accomplishments. I began to wonder if mere mortals could also have their own CV of failures. This article is a result of that thought and here we go. 

I have divided my failures into two categories, first - where was I in a leadership role and could influence a group, and second - my individual failures. It is by no means my exhaustive list of failures but the ones that I could remember and I plan to keep updating it. 

Leadership failures

• Failure to influence the HR that my team-member could leave the company if his immigration case wasn't taken up right away. I had newly become a manager and didn't feel safe enough to voice my concerns. (In hindsight, it was probably good for the person who left the company since years later the company shut down our center during COVID pandemic).
• Instance when I couldn't prevent a couple of drunk people from creating a lot of noise while camping as a group (In fact, I facilitated getting a second bottle for them). As a result, the whole group was chastised by the campground staff.
• Giving in to gut feelings and anecdotes while ignoring the data.

Individual failures

• Exams I failed
• GATE qualification exam for getting into IITs for grad studies 
• Schools that I rejected my application
• University of Maryland
• University of Arizona
• Arizona State University
• Oregon State University
• Publications that were not accepted
• MWSCAS - due to lack of new topics
• SOCC - due to lack of data
• ISCAS - due to lack of new topics
• Companies that I interviewed for but couldn't get a job
• ADI
• Butterfly Network
• Intel
• Nokia-Siemens
• Panasonic semiconductors
• Broadcom
• Cadence
• Not making full use of the internal network to come up with research topics for next generation products.