The back story

Before the letter, a bit of context.

I have an idea — almost a hobby by now: mailing people to share a story or a perspective, and seeing whether it leads to a better outcome. This is one of those mails. I sent it to someone I think of as a junior — not in any hierarchical sense, but the way universities hold that word. Across my career, the people I’ve met who started down the same path a little after me, I quietly keep as juniors in exactly that spirit.

It came out of a disappointing stretch. During my internship search there was the usual wall of “we’re hiring” posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, and I did the usual things — messaging, replying, mailing. Almost nobody replied back, and it didn’t really help. But somewhere in that, a different thought landed: even if people don’t reply, maybe the move is to tell our story — and to learn to tell it far better. Not performance, not marketing or branding, but actually conveying the story and the purpose you intend.

So I tried an experiment. I put the story up as a link on my Instagram, with a simple ask: if you’d like to receive a mail from me — a story, a perspective, maybe over a shared meal — send me your email ID. Purely to see what would happen. One of the people who wrote back was a junior fellow Mu Sigman who shared his email, and the letter below is the mail I returned to him — written in the hope that it might help.

And then I thought I’d want to share it with a lot of people walking the same path, which is why I framed it the way I did — do you think you should quit this job? Don’t you think you should quit the job? It’s meant as a retrospective question, a calling to step back, far more than a literal one.

The letter

I’m writing this to a fellow Mu Sigman — and that phrase carries more than it looks like it does. There’s a saying that once a Mu Sigman, always a Mu Sigman, and I’ve never quite observed that kind of bond at any other company. Not the ones I’ve worked at, not the ones I’ve heard endless stories about from friends and my inner circle.

I left nearly four years ago now, but I remember you from one of the cohorts I was running when I taught machine learning and Python. We’ve had some good conversations since, including recently — so this is really me writing the email I’d want to receive if I were standing where you are. A letter to my own self, in a way. And I have a fairly clear picture of what three or four years at the company does to a person, so I’m not guessing at your experience; I’m writing from a shared one.

Because that’s the thing — we started at the same place, went through similar stories, carried similar rants and similar moments to cherish, walked similar career paths. There’s a like-mindedness and a shared context there. I’m not saying we’re all the same or that there’s no uniqueness in it — every Mu Sigman is genuinely unique as an individual — but underneath that we share a behavior and a way of seeing things. That shared ground is exactly why I want to write to you.

I want to keep this centered on the one thing we were all trained to do: solve problems. And the problem I have in mind scales all the way up. It runs from an individual’s career and quiet existential crises, to a hard decision or the chaos someone’s sitting in, all the way out to the world — where AI feels like it’s arriving to create chaos. You’ll remember a phrase we heard over and over: creating order out of chaos. Picture that from the individual to the world. Maybe it’s all centered on AI, maybe on humans, but really it’s about how we humans and AI are going to coexist — and as problem solvers first, how that journey reshapes our careers along the way.

So here’s a title for this thread, just so we remember it: don’t you think you should quit the job?

Let me be clear, because that sounds harsh. I’m not advising you to leave the company. I mean it as a problem solver’s question. Are we limiting ourselves with redundant things? One thing I always keep in mind is optimizing for interestingness — and interestingness can come from something as simple as a new kind of conversation. I don’t think you or I have ever talked quite this way before. Most of our conversations, with friends or with anyone, tend to be scattered — jobs with one friend, hobbies with another. What I’d like is for you to consider me someone you can switch context with in a genuinely helpful way. Fellow Mu Sigmen have that empathy — we actually understand each other, and we tend to read reality a little more clearly. I’ve spoken with hundreds of Mu Sigmen over the years, not thousands, but hundreds, and I always end up wishing them well, because we came from somewhere comparatively rare.

That’s why I still vouch for the phrase “Mu Sigma as a university.” I really believe it’s true. We come from the same intellectual ground, the same canvas, the same platform — and from there we get to explore completely different career orbits. And yet I think we sometimes think about the job we do, or the role we play, in an underwhelming way. We underestimate ourselves. I’ve watched it happen: we start out with real curiosity and high expectations, and after a certain point it plateaus, it saturates, and we get pessimistic and skeptical about crafting the rest of our careers. Maybe this email can kindle that curiosity back — maybe it gets you thinking, maybe this thread becomes a series of conversations that sparks a new direction in how we solve problems, how we learn, how we seek out opportunities.

We also have this incredible intellectual ground we kept returning to — complexity science, discussed over and over in town halls and everywhere else. It’s genuinely lodged in my mind, and it helps me move between an individual’s problem and the world’s. When I started reading seriously — actual reading, around 2022 — I started finding the pattern that we’re all fundamentally data professionals, and I realized something: those three and a half years at Mu Sigma were like a compressed version of hundreds of books. Pick a book at random from the management shelf, the business shelf, the startup stories, the self-help section — and there’s a lesson in it that the Mu Sigma ecosystem already taught us, well-tested and well-established. I don’t want us to lose that. I want to keep that signal strong, so we never miss how original and peculiar the experience we got really was.

Because here’s the thing about how people arrived at Mu Sigma: it was natural and serendipitous, not performative. Nobody knew what would be in the interview, nobody prepared situation by situation. People’s true identity led them there. We weren’t built to prepare for one scenario at a time — we were meant to decode and build things from first principles. That’s the art of problem solving we went through, not a checklist in hand. And that’s exactly why we’re made for any situation. Not just the rapidly growing agent wave or the buzz around it — we’ll be essential, and we’ll withstand whatever the post-AGI world looks like.

So read it out loud: do you think you should quit the job? Don’t you think you should quit the job? Again, it’s not about the company or the role — it’s about what we do. And I’m asking it of myself too. It’s 11:57 p.m. as I write this, and tomorrow I start my internship, which means right now, in this moment, I don’t even have a job. So even as someone without one, I ask myself: should I quit this job? Because this “job” is really the mission I’m on. Knowingly or unknowingly, we’re all on a mission, an arc, a trajectory — and that question is just a calling to step back, retrospect, and take real time understanding what we’ve been doing, what we actually need, and what the world needs from us.

I hope this sparks something. Let’s make it a series of conversations. Have a good day — see you soon.

Prabakaran