First Principles

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Edition #82   •   9 Feb 2025    •   14 min read

Careers as “Tours of Duty”

The length of the employee-employer relationship has been falling and will most likely continue to do so. What if we embraced it?

by Rohin Dharmakumar

The length of the employee-employer relationship has been falling and will most likely continue to do so. What if we embraced it?

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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Welcome back to Sundays, and lying back and reading. Our day of the week! And the hero of my week has been the sun.

This last week in Bengaluru has been what I call the liminal sun week. You see the sun has gotten warmer, but is still in that phase where you can enjoy its rays on your face in the morning and its warmth on your skin through the day. Just about.

I suspect that by the end of next week, it will have moved past comforting to just tolerable.

And then the week after? Hot.

Yeah. Bengaluru speed runs from winter to summer as far as weather goes. The roadside trees and the skies might still signal spring, but not the sun.

Indiranagar, where The Ken has its offices and where I spend most of the week, is wonderful right now. Many trees are shedding their leaves while others are growing new ones. The sunlight dapples through all of them. It’s perfect for walking about and meeting friends and colleagues at the numerous cafes in the area.

My favourite spring tree, the Pongamia, is present on most roads. Its ridiculously bright and iridescent new leaves virtually radiate spring happiness. Apple Photos’ AI identifies it as all sorts of trees—Japanese Maple, Japanese Pagoda, Kentucky Yellowwood, Chinese Chastetree—except what it really is.

Here’s everything we have for you this week: 

1. “Tours of duty”
2. Everyone’s turning pages 📚
3. FP Playlists for January and February 🎵
4. The sun in our eyes 📸

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1. “Tours of duty”

Each week, my newsletters often “take me” to newer places and discoveries. This week, I ended up writing a job description for a product designer at The Ken once I was done with the mise en place for the actual edition. I’ll explain as we go along.

A recurring theme in this newsletter and in our conversations has been the gradual-then-sudden disruption of professional careers.

This isn’t a one-sided problem. For every professional, young or old, who wonders what the appropriate way to think about their own careers is, there is also an employer, startup or established, which is wondering about how best to think about the careers they offer to employees.

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