Thirteen years at Google. Trust and Safety in Hyderabad first, then the Bay Area, then most of the back half inside YouTube — finance, then analytics, then managing YouTube inventory and monetization.

Then Aishwarya Raghavan quit. No job lined up.

Two months later a friend referred her to a company she actually wanted. She didn't get it. That rejection landed right as the layoff headlines were peaking, and that's where this conversation starts.

Most advice about the AI job market in 2026 is built to make you feel behind. Aishwarya's take goes the other way.

She says a lot of postings that say "AI skills required" mean something far more basic than you'd guess. The people who never start are usually the ones who jumped straight to AI agents, decided it was too hard, and quit before level one.

(If that's you, no judgment. It was most of us.)

So she walks through four levels anyone can climb. Level one is small enough to feel silly: getting ChatGPT to stop sounding like a stranger. Custom GPTs come later. Agent orchestration comes after that.

Is that really enough to get hired in AI? Her answer is more specific than yes.

We also get into why she couldn't just move into AI work internally at Google, even with the badge and the tenure. How to read a job description and tell whether a company has actually thought about AI or is checking a box.

And the interview skill she rates above every technical signal. Fair warning — it has more to do with storytelling than with reciting the STAR method at a hiring manager.

Then there's the networking habit she regrets not building while she still had the Google email. Nobody tells you that your network has an expiration date.

She's now a principal product manager at Arrivia, wiring AI into a travel business full of legacy systems. Different problem entirely from YouTube creator monetization, and she's candid about what transferred and what didn't.

If you're a student, or a few years into your career and quietly worried the market already moved past you, start here.

Chapters below. If this helped, subscribe on YouTube and Spotify. 🎧

00:00 - Aishwarya Raghavan on Leaving Google After 13 Years

04:12 - How AI Is Changing Big Tech and Product Management

07:14 - Product Manager Job Search Advice in a Tough Tech Market

10:09 - Product Interview Storytelling: How to Stand Out as a PM

13:24 - Why Product, Engineering, and Strategy Roles Are Blending

16:10 - Best AI Tools and Workflows for Product Managers

19:08 - AI Agents and Agent Orchestration: The Next PM Skill

22:03 - Job Search Lessons After Leaving Google

25:17 - Travel Tech and AI: Modernizing Legacy Product Workflows

30:45 - YouTube Monetization, Creator Tools, and AI Product Strategy

35:59 - Networking Without an Agenda for Big Tech Career Growth

40:23 - Final Advice for PMs Building Rare AI Skills

Should an international student still move to the US for a master's right now?

That's the question sitting in thousands of inboxes and WhatsApp groups this admissions cycle. Not "which school," not "what score." Just: should I go at all?

Naman put it to someone who has watched this play out for over two decades — and who has no reason to sell you the dream.

Professor Benjamin Dunford taught leadership and management at Purdue's Mitch Daniels School of Business, where he was academic director over the full suite of Purdue MBA programs. He also taught in Kellogg's family business executive program, and most recently at the Indian School of Business in Mohali.

His answer on the headwinds international students face in 2026 is more direct than you'd expect from someone inside the system. He names what's real. Then he tells you what actually still holds up.

A big piece of it: work experience. Ben is blunt that it's the biggest differentiator in MBA admissions, and the thing most applicants under-invest in while they optimize everything else.

Which brings us to the 4.0. If you're chasing a perfect GPA, he'd argue you might be playing it safe — picking the courses you'll win instead of the ones that will stretch you. (Yes, this is going to sting a little. Sit with it.)

We also get into why so much leadership advice falls flat. The gap between the real and the ideal. Why change is a choice, not a command. "Compliance theater" — that thing where everyone nods in the meeting and disagrees in the hallway after. And how to influence people when you have zero authority over them.

Ben's research on pairing accountability with forgiveness comes up too, including why CEOs get visibly uncomfortable the moment you say the word forgiveness in a boardroom.

Then there's his work at ISB Mohali, teaching 20-something CEOs who inherited Indian family businesses. How do you honor your parents and still change the thing they built? He's watched a lot of people try. 🇮🇳

We close on where business education is headed as certificates and badges start pressuring traditional degrees, what AI is doing to how leadership gets taught, and the difference between advising and consulting.

If you're a student, a recent grad, or early in your career and weighing a move abroad, this one is required listening.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Professor Dunford on Purdue MBA Programs and Executive Leadership Education

00:03:59 - What Separates Elite MBA Students From Average Applicants?

00:06:12 - Perfectionism vs Excellence in Business School

00:07:45 - Should International Students Still Pursue a US Master's Degree?

00:11:59 - Why Students Should Stop Chasing a 4.0 GPA

00:17:09 - How AI Is Changing Leadership Education and Business Schools

00:20:02 - Will Certificates and Badges Replace Traditional Degrees?

00:23:42 - Best Advice for Early Career Leaders: Keep Going and Iterate

00:25:44 - Why Leadership Advice Feels Too Theoretical

00:28:40 - Change Is a Choice, Not a Command

00:29:38 - How to Influence Without Authority at Work

00:30:20 - Why Accountability Needs Forgiveness

00:34:26 - Teaching at ISB and Working With Young Family Business Leaders in India

00:38:53 - How Family Businesses Can Honor Tradition Through Innovation

00:43:32 - Consulting, Advising, and Why Human Problems Still Need Human Solutions

Subscribe on YouTube and Spotify for new episodes.

Somewhere it's 3 a.m. and a Kubernetes pod just quietly died. A guy in a different time zone taps his card for coffee and it works. He'll never know how close that was.

Keeping him from finding out is Sai Joshitha's job. She's a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Visa.

Here's the part I care about for anyone sitting on an F-1 right now. SRE is one of the most underrated doors into the US tech market, and almost nobody in the international student group chats is talking about it.

Everyone's fighting over the same software engineer postings. Meanwhile there's an entire discipline hiring for a completely different skill.

Start with this: SRE interview loops have no LeetCode. None. Someone hands you a system that's on fire and watches how you think while it burns.

Is that easier? Definitely not. It's just different, and it rewards people who like fixing things over people who ground through 300 array problems.

Joshitha breaks down what the job actually is day to day — monitoring, deploying, automating, and hunting for root cause when dozens of connected systems start acting strange.

Then we get to how she got there. She finished her MS at University of Michigan-Dearborn and walked into one of the ugliest markets in years, firing off 200+ applications a week before she changed the whole approach.

What worked was fewer applications, aimed better, with the resume rewritten per role and real recruiter outreach instead of apply-and-pray. (We've all done apply-and-pray. It's a petri dish for burnout.)

She also lays out the exact stack recruiters screen for. Kubernetes and Docker, one cloud learned end to end (not three learned halfway), observability tools like Grafana, Prometheus and Kibana, scripting for automation, plus the networking fundamentals holding all of it up.

Her honest take? Knowing the tools matters way less than knowing how to solve a real problem with them.

We close on where this is heading — how Visa is folding AI into on-call work for repetitive incidents, why she reads AI as a teammate instead of a replacement, and what she'd say to someone who wants a tech career but got scared off by coding-heavy roles.

If you're a student, a recent grad, or someone quietly plotting a switch into reliability engineering, this is a plan you can start on Monday. 🙂

Connect with Sai Joshitha — https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshithak/

Chapters:

00:00:00 - Sai Joshitha on Becoming a Site Reliability Engineer at Visa

00:00:20 - What Does a Site Reliability Engineer Actually Do?

00:02:59 - What Happens During a Production Incident?

00:05:18 - How SREs Use Logs, Metrics, Alerts, and Monitoring

00:08:19 - How Sai Joshitha Discovered SRE and Cloud Infrastructure

00:10:23 - University of Michigan-Dearborn MS and Starting a US Tech Career

00:12:14 - How to Break Into SRE After a Computer Science Master's

00:13:37 - Applying to 200+ Jobs Per Week in a Tough Market

00:16:11 - SRE Job Strategy: Targeted Roles, Resumes, and Recruiter Outreach

00:19:52 - What Is the SRE Interview Process Like?

00:23:20 - Are SRE Interviews LeetCode-Heavy or Troubleshooting-Focused?

00:24:48 - Must-Have SRE Skills: Kubernetes, Cloud, Observability, and Scripting

00:28:43 - Why Troubleshooting Matters More Than Just Knowing Tools

00:31:41 - How AI Is Changing Site Reliability Engineering

00:36:09 - Best Advice for Future SREs: Networking, AI Tools, and Programming