I might die soon...

2007-06-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

The no strings attached blog.

After over a year and a half of creating this blog, I have chosen the 'Bazaar' as a real place for it than the 'Cathedral' :-) . Long live, the freedom of expression !

2007-06-01T01:34:00.000-07:00

Do you want to work in a place where majority of the employees care the most only about their salary ?

I would not... at this point in time. And if I wanted to make more money I would rather find better ways of doing it. Hopping companies, searching for better paying jobs, wont take me anywhere. I might as well do contracting myself, or build up on my own ideas which I think would make my pockets heavier than bargaining for pennies from my employer.

But on the other hand, I was trying to reason out , why people care so much about their salary, and why that is their only motivation to work for a company. Only things I could reason out were personal commitments which might include taking care of dependants, clearing previous debts, paying up loans (house loan, student loan) etc... Some people, come from a traditional Indian government job perspective , and hang on to a stable, well paying organization through their entire life. Such a "stable, well paying" job helps them sleep happily after going back home :-)

As long as people make the money in a decent time its fine , but some people will work without passion throughout their life, only thinking about the present situation they are in, and trying to make the most of what their employer can offer. Their thinking will be limited and narrowed.Whats more disheartening is that these impassionate people have to work in a collaborative environment, where they will pollute those who are really passionate about making a better world for themselves.

It is the same theory that is applied for programmers. If you dont love to write code, please dont code for the heck of it. If you dont like working at an organization, for what it stands for, then please leave it. If you wanna make money, there are a ton of better ways for doing that rather than bargaining for salaries from an employer!

Update : Prashant (thanks ! :-) ) pointed me to Guy Kawasakis blog entry on "Myths of the workplace" which gives a really different perspective and definitely worth reading.

2007-05-13T07:05:00.001-07:00

[Diary Entry # 1] Journey of a confused college kid.

When I passed out of college, I never had a great goal in life. I was a confused kid who did not know what he wants to do next. I hardly knew much about technologies in the market and the "corporate culture" as people used to call it. All I knew was a bit of C/C++ and a pinch of Java, when I got a lucky break in Thoughtworks.

If not here, I would have most likely studied for an MBA degree in finance, in a decent B School in India, and would have pursued a regulation Analyst job. Or what was more likelier, was that I would have been working for an Indian software company, one of the big names ofcourse, a regular developer job, and a satisfied life. And dont you dare think that it would have been a boring and unambitious one. I would have spent all my life, trying to work out politics of that organization, and the how tos of climbing the corporate ladder. All I would have done is, think about how to become a team lead , become a team lead, become a project lead, become a blah lead. In all I would have been leading a great life :-D.

All that did not happen because some visionary half way around the globe had started a consulting firm called Thoughtworks. But even that was ok, the problem was when he decided to open an office in Bangalore (where i fortunately studied) and ended up hiring me. I then joined this place, where everyone was way more smarter than me. So, I , who was largely a confused soul in this world, now had a small goal in life, to survive in this place with such smart people. And then I carved my most obvious goal #1 "to learn and apply all the cool technologies in the market, so that I can work effectively with my fellow colleagues"

Even that would have been fine. Within a couple of months I realised that the people in this organization are the weirdest people on earth and awsome to hang out with. Within six months, I was spending even my weekends in the office playing Age of Empires on the network and ordering pizza by the side. I carved my goal #2 "learn to build bigger armies, economies and get the wonder down in 400 years " ;-).

It was all smooth till now, but not until when I started to understand XP and other Agile methodolgies properly. It took me a good six months to a year, to find out why it was such a big deal ! To me it sounded initially like all the things in the books were mostly common sense, until I realized that commonsense was kind of uncommon in the IT industry. Here i carved my goal#3 "Learn to apply things like TDD, continuous integration and other XP practices,since I started seeing value in them " . After some time I must admit I became really passionate about them.

Still going strong, I realised after a year, that this corporate world was a lot different from the ones people used to tell me about when I was in college. I did not have to report to people here. I had no well defined leads. I did not even know that the guy from US who sat next to me was the CTO of this place. I did not know that people would openly debate about issues in the company
from salaries, review processes to why a person was fired. I did not know that the huge guy who used to come with me to eat idly vada was actually the global head of recruiting. And why was one of the Directors getting us all luncn to celebrate ugadi ! This was crazy, this was like one big nice family. Everyone cared about everyone else !. This was when I really understood what an "open culture " really meant. goal#4 "Do anything to retain this open culture, since that was majorly what this place stood for !" And then life changed a bit, I became quite passionate about this one big family of mine !

2007-03-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

Heart or mind

An organization's culture is made by employees who think from their heart. An organization's business is made by employees who think from their mind. And you should always strive for an equal mix of both, to build an organization that lasts and stands for the right values!

Random thought ;-)

2006-12-30T10:07:00.000-08:00

What is the job of analysts in XP Teams ?

Majority of business analysts(BAs) I have interacted with believe they are good at their work, if they do the following well.

* Writing smaller stories.
* Planning stories to be played in a release/iteration with iteration managers.
* Acting as a bridge between users/clients and developers who implement the functionality
* Talking to clients and gathering requirements at regular intervals

What I have never seen BAs doing well, is talking to the clients/users and pushing back on the following

* Agile allows users to prioritize their requirements. In huge business firms such as Insurance, Leasing etc...the users themselves are a lot confused (also 'cos they are new to agile) on what has to be high on their prioity list. Most of the time the analysts try to go ahead with whatever the user has prioritized without thinking much about the impact it will have on development. I have seen cases where things with the least impact on business are built in the initial releases and when the time comes to implement the core business feature, the team is already under tremendous time crunch.

In an insurance project I was on last year, for some reason we were building some Events and Triggers Outlook like mechanism for the application as a part of the first release. A lot of time was spent in chalking out the exact functionality. It was only in the second or third release when we were actually developing the core business domain code, we realised that the amount of time we had spent on the first release would hardly have any great business impact! We could only wish, we could have spent the initial energy on developing the core business functions.

* One more very important thing for BAs is to develop their domain knowledge. Some BAs are of the mindset that being on a project on a specific domain will help them gain some domain knowledge from their clients, and also allow them to deliver the project. It works to a certain extent but not all the time. If BAs cannot push back to the clients, and suggest different alternatives to their current inefficient business processes ,enabling to change those, I consider them weak at their job. BAs need to know that this is important, because it will go a long way in the way the developers implement the functionality as well.

I have seen cases where the clients have an age old business process, which they want automated, and we do not suggest drastic changes in their process strongly, only because our BAs do not have a lot of knowledge and expertise on the given domain.

2006-12-17T05:14:00.000-08:00

Partial classes to the rescue

A bunch of us have been working with a huge legacy code base , having lots of data holder classes (eg: Message classes with just getters/setters) being auto-generated. What this had caused in the past , was that the behavioral methods operating on the data these classes contained were scattered outside everywhere resulting in a lot of semantic duplication. We had no way of changing the actual classes to add methods , since they were being auto-gen.

C# 2.0 's "partial classes" came to our rescue. We could easily make the auto-gen classes "partial" and plugin another partial class in the same namespace with behavior methods. Sweetly applied !

2006-09-10T11:23:00.001-07:00

How good is your codebase ?

Sriram asked me over dinner the other day, "how good is your codebase?". The question is interesting at this point in time, when we are running on a tight schedule. I walked around the codebase today and was not that happy. In trying to retrospect the current state , I found some main possible reasons

* Usablity of the application - We have concentrated very little on building a very usable GUI. That reflected a lot on the code itself. Since we were using domain objects on the client, this became even more tricky. This has been the biggest lesson for me, not to underestimate usability.

* Project Planning - We were/are working on a real tight schedule to deliver business stories. In a bid to do this, we have definitely made some compromises in the codebase. Some refactorings took place at the right time, there are a lot more pending, and some have been postponed. Due to the pressure to deliver, I see very few spikes being taken up on trying out better stuff.

* Team rotation - In TW every developer is passionate about technology and the way code should be written. There are people who manage to convince the decision makers on a certain way. Inconsistencies creep in the code , when key decision makers are changed , and half the screens are developed in one way, and half using some other. Not only in this project, but in another I had seen at least 4 different O/R mappers being used across, and around 3 different versions of the build script. I have hardly seen people bother about refactoring the code written 6 months back.

2006-08-26T03:17:00.000-07:00

Are you planning for a Distributed Agile disaster ?

A good amount of articles have been written about Distributed Agile by lot of people. If you have read these, my first advice for you is not to do it. Read this for sure, before you think of any benefits from it. But if you still insist on doing it, then I must warn you about certain issues you might face, which might make a big impact on your project.

Get the right people
Most of the Agile methodologies are people driven. Distributed agile ( henceforth DA ) takes it even further. People on both sides of the ocean need to trust each other. If you have developers on one side , believing that developers on the other side are technically incompetent, the first thing you should do is to change the team composition. It might be a harsh truth but in this offshore era , there are people in the west who still have a negative attitude towards people from eastern countries. It will always be tough to collaborate with them, no matter how many chances they get. Don’t make a mistake of getting them on a DA project.

Never split the team based on functional areas
I saw this on one of the projects , I worked on, in which both teams were working on different modules, which later had to interact with each other. When the time came, we realized that it was a black box we were building, and had lot of issues in understanding what the other team had written.. We infact had multiple versions of the same core classes (eg: Policy etc..) with different implementations, which was a pain to merge later. Try to work on the same codebase and module as much as possible

A Distributed Agile project needs a good foundation.
Have equally competent developers from both sides of the ocean go to the client, preferably in equal number, and work for atleast 2-3 months. The main task should be building a stable, sustainable architecture/framework on which , both teams can build on.. The mix of people here is important as well as the number. This will ensure that none of the teams feel left out in contributing to the initial architecture. Also having equally experienced people, ensures healthy technical arguments which never end one sided all the time.

Swap leads if possible, either Iteration managers or Tech Leads.
So for example if your project is distributed between US and India, try to get an IM from India to lead the US team and vice versa. This will ensure that people trust each other between both teams and lot of communication issues are resolved. And importantly, if there any people in the team, like I mentioned in the first point, they will be known very early in the timeline.

Make the ambassadors stay longer
Inter team rotation is very important. More important is for people traveling to atleast stay for a release with the other team. A 1-2 week stay is hardly of any use. Most of the time goes in visiting places in the new city, and less writing code ;-)

Follow the same process on both teams
More issues tend to crop up when teams on either side are following slightly different processes. For eg: if there is regular pairing on one side of the team , and not on the other, things can go a bit awry. At times, its for the ambassadors to spread the practices across teams. Things like estimation techniques etc... should be mandated by the IMs to be same across the board

I have worked on 3 Distributed Agile projects before and only 1 of them was a real success. So determining what works the best for you is not really that easy.

2006-08-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

Process abuse ?

I have seen some people trying to abuse collective code ownership by not taking any responsibility for code written in a project at all... I was more surprised to see some IMs, trying to pump in velocity by calling a story 'BA tested' , to just appear good in front of the clients, and later allow some 20 CRs or bugs on the same card in QA. Some one told me its an age old recipe in many companies, and some even release the software with hundreds of known bugs, to meet the deadline. Wonder whom are they fooling here ?

2006-08-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

A Death March with more soldiers will never succeed

When a project is behind schedule even when people are working crazy hours, the only thing that comes to the mind of the management first is to add more resources. No matter how much they try to explore other things such as replanning etc... deep inside their mind, they are still thinking of adding more people. Somehow they have that feeling, that it will surely help, even if every good book they read about managing software teams, says everything against this. Wonder why ?

2006-07-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

"Promoting" minorities in a system...but at what cost ?

So in any system where you try to promote the minority group, it always comes with a cost. For eg: say in an organization where there are very less women leaders, do we promote a woman, even if there is a man who has worked equally hard for it, but just for the diversity cause ? Will the majority group (in this case the men) accept the decision , even if they stood an equal chance? Wont the majority group become sceptical about the decision making authorities henceforth ? Wont the minority group ever take undue advantage, because of this one decision ?

2006-07-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

Which project do you want to go today?

In my consulting career, sometimes I have been given an option of choosing which project I wanted to work for. Most of the time, I made the decision based on technology, and how much I will be able to learn from it. But I now realize that it was a mistake. The main criteria should have been the kind of people you have in the project. By that I don’t mean how technically great they are, how many conferences they speak in, and how many book they write. It really boils down to what kind of attitude they have towards the project and the team in general. If the people are delivery focused, and believe in learning from each other, mentoring each other, you get to work under great team dynamics and it really brings out the best in you. Such a team can even meet the worst deadlines set.

2006-05-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

From Practices of an Agile Developer...

"If you have problems with absenteeism, slackers, or outright saboteurs,
this is probably not the approach for you. You’ll need something more
heavy-handed, slower, and less productive. Otherwise, you can begin
developing in the agile style."

Perfectly sums up why no one should try enabling those kind of people with agile. It only leads to more frustration, and a wastage of time and money!

2006-05-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

Passionate arguments, are they really necessary?

We have a highly opinionated bunch of people in our organization. But some of them are so passionate about certain technology, tools etc… that they end up in lot of arguments when opinions differ. Sometime they end up loosing focus on what the end goal is. For example, arguing about dynamic programming advantages, when the application to be delivered has to be in .net platform, Or for that matter arguing about the wonderful Java collections API versus C# one for a .net project. Passion is necessary for what you do, but too much is surely overkill.

2006-05-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

Respecting other’s code

I learnt something amazing from my pair Yasser today. I saw a piece of code which I thought could be written in a better way. I immediately started refactoring the code when my pair stopped me for a bit. I asked him why and he said “I always respect any code that I have not written, and if some code is written in a certain way, I feel someone would have written it for a reason. Everyone in our team is a smart developer. I first think about any possible reason, for the code to be that way, and then either ask colleagues if possible, and then go ahead and refactor” . Thinking about the code on those lines took five minutes and then we started refactoring. But really, how many of us think like that. Really an amazing thought, and really a lot to learn for me.

2006-05-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

Distributed Agile and different “Team Cultures”

I have been working on a distributed XP team working across both Bangalore and Chicago. Both teams work out of Thoughtworks offices itself. We have been trying to follow a rotation policy where people try to move across teams. This, and almost all of the best practices that Martin Fowler recommends are followed in this team. But one think struck me when I came to Chicago, that even though we are one team , we have a very different Team Cultures across both our teams, due to a lot of background reasons.

Thoughtworks(TW) does not do much local consulting work in India and hence 90% of the time, 90% of the consultants in Bangalore are in TW office. And when in office for so long , there is a lot of bonding between colleagues as they spend a lot of time together. Since they gel together so well, they are really enthusiastic about working as a team, helping each other, being partners in mistakes, correcting them together, making fun of each other etc… However, without much travel, and being at the client office, they sometimes take things for granted (like cracking nasty jokes etc…) , and are thrown off guard if they have to work at a client having many consultant companies on board, with very few Thoughtworkers. They really find it hard to work alone.

Thoughtworks in US is a different scenario altogether. Here 90% of the time, 90% of the consultants are at the client offices, obviously due to local clients to whom we sell. Consultants here, are so much used to travel, that they can take the next day morning flight from San Fransisco to Chicago, if they are asked today night. Being a niche consulting company, sometimes we end up deploying a small number of consultants to the client site. This makes consultants here work alone sometimes, or with a very few number of people All team members are brilliant in their roles of developers, analysts etc… but unfortunately, they are so used to this way of working that they can’t work as a cohesive team when working out of Thoughtworks office with a good bunch of Thoughtworkers. Even with a whole TW team, people feel comfortable to work alone, and being a bit aloof.

Definitely each team has a lot to learn from each others culture, and this can only happen when on both sides people are ready to give and receive feedback and try and adopt some of the best culture practices developed from each other.

2006-04-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

Working under constraints...

As a developer on a project I am often constrained by what I am supposed to do and what I can possibly do. No matter how open the culture of the team is, I cannot question certain things due to the kind of role I play. Sometimes it maybe project planning, tracking, analysis, staffing, client management, customer feedback etc…Being a developer in an XP team , I can ask myself in detail what business value a story provides before implementing it. I can check for impacts on various other stories and the system as a whole, but not some of the things I mentioned previously. It hurts when those unquestionable key things start impacting what you are currently doing. For an example, what if you spend nights writing well tested, Object Oriented code, all for a project that stopped because of bad planning/client management, which was never in your hands.

2006-04-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

Should you be emotionally attached to the work you do ?

As a developer my primary job is to write code. And when I am part of a team being built from scratch, an application being built from scratch, I kind off develop an emotional attachment towards it. (Think it maybe as great as watching your baby grow up :-) ). That really motivates me for working towards making the application better, and building a better team. It helps me in maintaining great energy levels at the workplace. But at the same time, it really hurts , when things are not going well with the project as such.

Unfortunately, some of the decisions are beyond my reach, and I can hardly affect them in any way. Most of them done by the clients, account managers, iteration managers etc… Sometimes even decisions are taken to the extent of scrapping the whole project. (Imagine, the baby I was talking about I gone.. poof! Overnight)

So I wonder if it is justified, having an emotional bonding with the work you do ?

2006-04-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

Doing cool stuff v/s providing business value.

I have been working in project teams where “Keep It Simple and Stupid”, “Do the simplest thing that works” , and “You Aint Gonna need it again!”, kind of principles are more or less a norm. On one hand, since we have all smart people, everyone wants to prove that they can do cool stuff. More so is the case with senior experienced developers, who feel that, working on a business story (getting values from DB and throwing them on a fancy screen, or vice versa) is so uncool ! On the other hand, I have also seen fairly new developers focused only on tasks that are given to them and after finishing them they feel they have done their bit.

In my opinion, as developers, doubling up as consultants, we should try to draw a balance between both the attitudes described above. Just focusing on business stories without looking at technical tools that ease the job is as useless as building generic cool frameworks, without any business value. You cannot after all give 100% unit tested code to the client without any business functionality in it.

2006-02-05T00:29:00.000-08:00

Why some people do not speak up at your workplace?

I have seen a lot of people who face lot of issues in the company and not speak about it at all. They prefer to keep quiet because of various reasons but one common reason was the fear of losing their job if they voice their opinion. This reason being supported by the financial pressures they face with the kind of loans they have taken, and the kind of family commitments they have. Just for the above reasons, these individuals choose to bear the brunt at their workplace, toiling 8 hrs everyday, without any real passion for the kind of work they are doing. Basically taking crap all day and keeping their mouth shut, leading to a lot of frustration day in and day out at their workplace!

I think this fear would never surface in one’s mind if one does not have confidence in himself. Rather than surrendering to the circumstances, one should rather work on building up his confidence, maybe by upgrading his skills, trying new ideas etc. This would make one look at his workplace a lot differently, and make one do what he really believes and is passionate about, or at least strive towards that. (The “I am not going to take this crap, even if it costs my job.. heh.. I can always find something better to do” kind of attitude)

Eight hours of work is one-third of ones day and sacrificing it for doing some work one doesn’t really believe in is not at all justified!

2006-02-03T04:04:00.000-08:00

The Dark side of buying real estate..

I had been avoiding this for a while, but was pushed to buy a small flat in Bangalore since I was tired of paying rent and shifting every now and then.

But I hardly knew much about what happens in this whole process of the so called “Sale”. I thought this was a very less complicated sale with all clear papers, and a decent owner, hence I can do things the “right way”, but I was unaware of a lot of realities.

Applying for a loan.

The first step was to get a loan from a bank for a decent interest rate. I knew that there were variations depending on fixed/floating and also depending on the duration of the loan. What I did not know was that the interest rate offered by the bank could be bargained. I was amazed by the strategy of claiming that you have a better rate from bank B, just to get a lower interest rate from bank A. And I thought such bargaining is used only to buy potatoes and onions from the local subzi mandi not multinational banks.

That’s not all you can bargain. You can even bargain the processing fee for the loan. Some people even ask the bank to return the processing fee if the loan does not get sanctioned.

Bank verification of the property

The bank sends a person with a civil background to verify the property details furnished by you in the form of legal documents. Even this guy, who just has to take pictures and verify the plan, can create some nuisance for you. He might say something is not as per plan etc… and threaten that the bank valuation might be low and you might not get the loan desired. A 100 rupee note to this guy might just solve the problem. Who told that only govt. officials are guilty of this?

Registration cost.

When you buy a property you need to register the sale with the govt. The amount for registration is calculated on the actual value of the property (around 10% of property cost). People usually try to reduce the amount shown in the final sale deed so that they need to pay less to the government in form of registration. Even banks allow this kind of jugglery if they are well informed beforehand. Sometimes the seller of the property might not be interested in registering for the actual (read higher ;-) ) sale value, since it is an income for him and he is due to pay tax on this. Thankfully my seller was not interested in all this.

Property Registration.

The registration office is thoroughly corrupt to the core. Since I was a novice finding my way out, I had ask some people as to why everything here happens only with money. The answer I got was that ministers in that particular area demand a certain sum of money for every registration taking place in their area. So from the Minister to the Registrar, sub-registrar, to the broker on the ground, everyone wants to make some money in between. Even if you find a decent lawyer who does your papers etc… you will need to cough up a lot of money over and above the registration cost for getting papers signed within a day.

Else you will be standing sweating in a serpentine queue where govt. officials will be sitting in chairs taking coffee and lunch breaks every now and then. Your paper will be lost somewhere down, and people willing to pay “extra” will have there papers lined up far higher in the pile.

2005-12-27T05:24:00.000-08:00

I work for a global IT firm which employs people from around the world, from various countries, states, cultures etc… For a long time, people used to have conversations, even jokes, only in English. We used to talk in Hindi occasionally when knowing everyone around could understand. I dint mind that since it was the countries’ national language and I definitely had decent sense of patriotism in me. (Maybe I was wrong here itself)

Now I hear people talking in all dialects like Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada etc… even while pairing! (Lol !). I do not know whether this is really wrong but hearing such conversations surely leaves a bad aftertaste within me.

2005-11-24T08:16:00.000-08:00

Its only words...

Some phrases I have been hearing around me of late...

'Polish your words', 'be polite when disagreeing', 'offer constructive arguments', 'make an impression by talking', 'don’t give direct feedback', 'people cannot take immediate feedback','dont put people on defensive','don’t question everything', 'choose a proper forum'.

They basically say 'Don't speak your mind all the time' . Wonder whether I should change myself or the people around me !

2005-11-08T07:13:00.000-08:00

In the simplest of words this is what I think… Organizations bring in consultants to help build their software because their own inhouse IT department does not have the right skill set to deliver the same, with the expected level of quality and within the given budget.

Now contracts with consultants obviously happen at the “management level”. This is when the organization’s management is fully convinced about the incapability of their delivery team. Unfortunately the real delivery happens at the “ground level” where consultant developers work with client developers (who are judged to be lacking in skills by their mgmt.). I have hardly seen these client developers ever convinced with their management views. (Its like a Murphy’s law for the software world !)

On the ground this is what happens. The attitude with which the client developers work is mostly negative, discounting the 10% who want to learn.

If 90% of the client developers believe that consultants are not required, how does one expect a consultant to carry on delivering joyfully by being part of such a team ?

You might ask, Why cannot we exclude the incompetent client developers from the delivery team ?

Simply because…

Most of the time consultants are rewriting applications , and the client developers have lot of knowledge about their legacy/ancient code which a consultant may take some time to discover.

These are the developers who will be in the end maintaining the application so they have to be an integral part of the team

You have the hope that their attitude will change over a period of time, and they might start learning and contributing effectively.

I always wonder

This being such a common problem in the software world, why cannot the management of an organization hire consultants only after their delivery team is convinced that consultants are needed ?

Is a consultant also responsible for changing the attitude of the client team members, while still delivering quality code ?

Client developers start assuming that their jobs might be taken away by these new consultants who have been hired. This leads them to be possessive about the information they have about the business domain, the legacy application etc… with a view of keeping their jobs secure since information is power ;-) ! Is the frustration that a consultant has to go through because of this, billable to the client organization?

2005-10-30T23:03:00.000-08:00

When a project fails , whose bad is it anyway ?

A couple of drinks with Thoughtworkers , is like asking for hours of debate over some hot issues. This time it was not only developers, but even some manager “types “. The topic of discussion was that if a project fails, who is most likely to be in the firing line, the project manager or the lead architect.

I think Managers

Have the most interaction with the clients (whether useful or not ;-) ).
Are answerable to the client why functionality was not delivered in an iteration when the technical team was playing technical cards, refactoring, clearing technical debt etc…
Do the project planning/scheduling etc… which has more visibility to the clients.

The technical team on the other hand

Has to figure out a way to deal with legacy codebases
Work with less skilled client developers
Keep clearing technical debt etc…

All while trying to deliver required number of story points in an iteration.

Also not to mention the salary for yours truly Project Manager is far too high compared to a Technical Lead in the team. Wonder why ?

2005-10-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

I was pondering over why I should be so much bothered about changing certain things in systems around me (project, teams, family, and society), so here goes my thinking…

Human beings are imperfect. To err is human. So at an individual level a person cannot be perfect in all that he/she does. Then what happens when human beings collaborate in a “system” which comprises of other people as well. The system is definitely prone to a lot of imperfections.

To be clear by a “system” here, I mean a group of people collaborating for a specific purpose/ to achieve a common goal. Examples might be your current project team, the organization you work for, the political system/govt. in your country etc… All are imperfect !

Knowing that each and every system has room for improvement, it is up to the person who is a part of the system to make efforts to change things in it which are causing problems. No system will accept anybody from outside trying to correct it.

Imagine if someone just tells you that the code you have written is bad, you will not accept this unless he comes and shows you how the code can be made better.

People often crib about the government being inefficient, corrupted and being run by politicians who do not have the right skills and education. But still not many from the younger generation want to join polictics and show the country that they can make a difference! (Truly inspired from Mani Ratnam's 'Yuva' here) There is no point cribbing if you do not want to be a part of this system and correct it.

Each and every member is valuable to a system. If this person does not bother about correcting the system, and so do others, then the system can never be improved.

You are a part of a project team where certain decisions are being taken which you think may impact the team in a negative way. But you don’t care and just get your own work done everyday. Imagine if everyone in the team starts doing this, then how will things improve ?

We think that without being concerned about the world around us we are leading a “cool” life. People often complain saying “Why should I take be so much stressed about these matters, when I can lead a tension free life?” The reality in my opinion is such people are making a compromise in their lives. They are just accepting whatever comes in the way without questioning it. They think by adopting such an attitude towards everything, their impact is neutral to the system. But the real fact is that it is negative and a lot more negative when more of such people add up to the same system

2005-10-08T07:27:00.000-07:00

Does everyone’s life start and end like this?

[Curtains open.]

Life starts. When you are a kid, your parents send you to school; expect you to score really well in your board exams so that you get a seat in a good university. Your parents will be skeptical if you tell them you wanted to take up say singing/painting/cricket as your profession without getting a bachelors degree. Once you pass out from college, you are expected to be employed with a good multinational company (thankfully the govt... sectors are out of fashion these days).

[Early 20’s]

You work passionately during the first couple of years, learning your way through the industry, seeing the world in a different light, with a rising energy within you to change the things which you feel can make the world around you a better place. You have that strong urge to take certain idealistic decisions which you know can make a lot of great things happen. If not to succeed you want the satisfaction of the fact that at least you tried. You know you are different from the rest of the world. You are unique!

[Late 20’s]

In the very middle of this exciting journey your parents will expect you to get married and “settle down” . Imagine what might happen if you want to take a radical career decision at this point in your life, that which you were really passionate about doing. Of course the response from the people around you would be definitely negative. In due course you are married and poof all of a sudden you are in a world of responsibilities.

[Early 30’s]
You have a wife now, so both of you need a house. But you have a stupid salary of 20,000/= a month, so you go for the easiest solution, you take a house loan. Pretty soon than you think it can happen, your sweet wife will spot the latest cool car on the block. Yes you have a car loan, and you buy that cool car to make your sweetheart happy! Now you are a happily married couple with a car and a house, so what’s missing eh? Yup, you want kids, and after that happens you have a complete family to take care of. Now you are paying loans, paying insurance premiums, sending children to school and dropping your wife to office. You come in the night after a day’s stressful work to read your favorite best seller after dinner, and all you are thinking of is whether you have paid your electricity and phone bills. You keep thinking of where all to put your savings to make the most of your monthly pay slip.

[Late 30’s]

No sooner, you are all of a sudden just another person around the block, with all the cool ideas you had buried way down in a pile of responsibilities. You look back and see, if only you would not have taken that one decision, how different your life would have been today. But alas, it’s too late! It’s just another life now!

[Curtain falls]

2005-09-26T10:25:00.000-07:00

I see three kinds of people at work…

The Shoe Lickers

These are the people who have no intention of working at all… forget working hard. However these people want huge salaries and also big hikes every now and then. They manage this by licking their managers shoes as and when possible and strategically enough to not let their manager know directly , that they are being licked ;-) .Heh ! These people go up the “ladder” ( I hate that word here but cannot help it…) by doing this throughout their lives.

The Do Your Work and Go Home Type

These are the people who come to the office, get their work done, and go home. They hardly bother about what is happening outside their microscopic world view. They do not even care much about how, the work they are doing, is creating an impact on other people’s lives. These are the people who are easily tricked and trapped (and taken advantage of...) by the untrustworthy managers of this corporate industry. IMHO it’s a waste of life being such a type.

Idealists, Revolutionaries and Go Getters

These are the people who take the organization as their responsibility and work towards achieving the corporate goals by taking baby steps, like contributing effectively in their given roles, questioning decisions being taken, brainstorming, mentoring etc… Most of these people I have seen are strong in their ideals. They cannot sleep peacefully without questioning… if a decision is being taken in the organization which they feel should have gone the other way. They want to create an impact in the organization with the kind of work they do.

I wish to write more about these 3 kinds of people, but maybe some other time!

2005-09-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

Not only is there politics in running the country, it also comes to play while running an organization or a project a team. I have seen so many manipulative people people in the software industry that I get really frustrated. There are some who keep licking their manager's shoes to go up the ladder . This continues, and once they become managers they expect the same to continue with their subordinates. I have seen people who will make others do the work and go and report to their managers at the end of the day, cleverly taking the credit. More so .. there are people who say different things when you meet them personally compared to when you meet them with a few others around.

Inspired by Amitabh Bacchan's dialogues , "gattar sey nikalney waaley keedey ko maarney key liye flit (baygon etc.. ;-) ) market mein available hai, lekin samaajh ki gandagi sey nikalney waaley keedey key liye market mein kuch naheen hai ! " Leaving such people alive is the biggest crime God is comitting till now. If I were God , I would have shot them at sight ! But sad that I do not have the right to take people's lives even if they corrupt our society.

2005-09-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

Until now people used to dig up autobiographies, manuscripts, diaries etc.. to know about certain dead people.I have always wondered, that in this new era, henceforth whether people will dig up blogs of people who have died, to know about them ? Just a thought... What if I die soon.. I guess the fastest way to put my crazy thoughts might be this blog !