Sameer Bhardwaj’s Post

When I joined Flipkart as a backend dev, I’d never seen batch jobs that processed millions of records in one go. It was mind-boggling and honestly intimidating at first. When I broke a pub/sub pipeline for the first time at Flipkart, I realized how humbling the scale really is and how much just one mistake can cost you. When I joined Google, something similar happened. I went from building REST APIs to learning what true “global” reliability and compliance mean. Google’s scale was even bigger than Flipkart, and again I felt out of depth. When I started Layrs after quitting my 9-5 at Google, I was out of my depth again. But this time I had no manager, no legacy code; it was just my whiteboard, me in my flat with my co-founder, and we were juggling a thousand unknowns. I had to learn AI pipelines from scratch, learned how to build a scalable frontend, manage payments, and make an interactive tool that benefited users. If there’s one thing I have personally realized in the last 5-6 years of my life is that: You’re never 100% ready for the next step. You’re always out of your depth somewhere, whether it’s a startup or FAANG. But you grow into it. You learn to live with it and become a better engineer. Don’t let “I haven’t done this before” stop you from doing it anyway. You’ll learn more in the arena than you ever will from the stands.