This essay is for every engineer who has ever code-switched mid-sentence, filed a visa extension during a project deadline, or had to explain to HR why they need a different kind of leave to attend a festival that doesn’t exist on the Australian public holiday calendar.
I want to tell you something that doesn’t fit neatly into a résumé. I have spent fifteen years as a software engineer. I’ve worked at Atlassian, led teams at Bugcrowd, and now architect full-stack systems at Weel. By any standard metric, the career has gone well. But the story that metric tells is missing the most important context: I did all of it while being a stranger in at least one room at a time. I was born in Hyderabad. I trained in Mumbai. I built my mid-career in Sydney. And at each stage, I was carrying two identities — the engineer the room expected to see, and the Telugu-speaking son of a family that still doesn’t fully understand what a “Staff Engineer” does, but is proud of it anyway. This is the essay I wish someone had written for me in 2012, when I landed in a country where the weather was upside-down, the plugs were different, and the office culture assumed a fluency in irony that I had to study like a second programming language.
The Three-City Arc
Mumbai — where I learned to build fast
My first job was at Valuepitch, a small software house in Mumbai. The work was unglamorous: enterprise portals, data dashboards, forms that went 30 levels deep. The salary was modest. The pressure was not. Mumbai gave me two things I still use every day: a ferocious bias toward shipping, and a very high tolerance for ambiguity. In a city where everyone is building something and no one has time to tell you how, you learn to ask precise questions or you don’t get answers. You learn that perfect is the enemy of done, and done is the enemy of nothing. I also learned that I was good at this. Not because anyone told me — they didn’t, particularly — but because the code kept working and clients kept returning. Confidence, when no one gives it to you, has to be built the same way you build software: one function at a time.Hyderabad — where I learned to think in systems
Moving back to Hyderabad for my next role felt like a step sideways. But it was where I met the first engineers who thought in systems rather than features. People who asked not just “will this work?” but “what happens in three years when this doubles in scale?” It was also where I first encountered what I now call the immigrant’s dilemma of ambition: wanting to push for more, but not having the social scaffolding to know what “more” looks like. Who do you ask for a promotion? What’s the right move? In a family where engineering is the ceiling (“you made it — what else do you want?”), the next rung is invisible. I didn’t know then that I was learning a skill that would become critical: operating without a map.Sydney — where I learned to be a foreigner
The visa came through in 2015. I remember the day I landed — not because of anything dramatic, but because of something small: I couldn’t understand what the customs officer said to me the first time she spoke. Australian English at speed, with a regional accent, after sixteen hours of flying. I nodded. She repeated herself. I nodded again. She waved me through. That moment — the nod — became a metaphor I thought about for years. How much of my early career in Australia was nodding? How much was performing fluency I hadn’t fully earned? The honest answer: more than I admitted at the time. And less than I feared.What Immigrant Engineers Know That Others Don’t
After fifteen years, I have a short list of things I genuinely believe immigrant engineers learn that their locally-grown counterparts often don’t — or learn much later.1. Code-switching is a superpower disguised as a burden
Every immigrant engineer learns to read a room from the doorway. Before you speak, you calibrate: What level of formality is this? Is humour appropriate? Is directness valued here or seen as aggression? Is my accent a barrier today? This is exhausting. It’s also extraordinarily useful. The same cognitive skill that lets you navigate a meeting between your Australian CTO and your offshore team in Hyderabad — switching register, context, and communication style in real time — is what separates average engineers from the ones who can lead across time zones, org structures, and cultures. I wasn’t taught this. I was forced into it. But I’m grateful.2. You learn not to confuse belonging with competence
There is a type of confidence that comes from being surrounded by people who look like you, talk like you, and went to similar universities. It’s a real kind of confidence. But it’s not the same as competence. When you’re visibly different from everyone in the room — accent, name, cultural references — you learn that the only currency that sticks is work. The architecture that holds. The code review that’s right. The call that was correct six months later. This is a gift and a tax. The gift: you don’t spend energy managing perception because you know it mostly doesn’t work. The tax: you often work twice as hard to get credit half as readily.3. Distance teaches you what actually matters
I haven’t attended a family wedding in four years. I missed my cousin’s graduation. I send voice notes at 6am before the work day starts because that’s when India is awake. Distance — sustained, compounding, geographical distance from the people who made you — is a very efficient filter. It shows you what you’d actually choose, given the choice. What you miss and what you don’t. What values you’ve inherited and which ones you’ve revised. I’m a better engineer because distance made me a more deliberate person. I prioritize ruthlessly, because I learned what things feel like when you lose access to them entirely.4. Building for yourself is different when “yourself” is a demographic of one
When I built AviWealth — financial calculators for immigrants navigating the Australian property and offset mortgage landscape — I wasn’t solving a problem from a design sprint. I was solving my own confusion from three years ago. The best products I’ve shipped were born from needs I couldn’t find solutions for. That’s the immigrant founder’s natural advantage: you live in gaps that the mainstream doesn’t know exist. You know what it feels like to search for something, find nothing, and realize you’re not alone in that search.The Tax
I want to be honest about what this has cost. There is a loneliness specific to immigrant life that’s hard to explain without sounding ungrateful. You chose this. The visa was something you wanted. The career is real and the salary is better. And yet. There are dinner parties where you don’t have the shared references. Movies and cricket seasons and political moments that the whole office is talking about that you’re learning in real time. There are moments when your child asks you something about your language — something you should know — and you have to think for a second before answering. That pause. That’s the tax. My Telugu is preserved in amber. It is the Telugu of 2015, the year I left. New slang, new cultural shorthand, new references — I’m behind. When I go back to visit, the city has moved on and I’m recalibrating constantly. I built Nishabdham partly to prevent that amber from becoming permanent. Writing in Telugu, even imperfectly, is a practice. It’s how I keep the language alive in my hands.How /avi Holds All of It
This site — /avi — is an attempt to hold everything in one place. The engineering. The thinking frameworks. The Telugu writing. The immigrant guides for Australia. The products built for problems I lived. Most personal sites choose one identity and build around it. I tried that. It felt like a lie. I am a Staff Engineer who writes Telugu poetry. I am a systems thinker who makes decisions about family and culture using the same frameworks I use for architecture reviews. I am an immigrant who built financial tools because no one else had built them for people like me. The tagline — Build. Think. Write. — isn’t three things. It’s one thing, done in three languages: code, ideas, and Telugu.Curious about the technical side of this career? See Professional →. For the tools and thinking systems I use daily: Thinkish →. For the Telugu writing this essay references: Nishabdham →.