A story

A little longer, but I think its funny.

Let me tell a story. A story about computer application class, their teacher, a campus recruiter and a testing tool :) .

Now Disclaimer “To suit the story I may mold some principals and it may resemble a little realistic, but it’s imaginary” (yeah, believe that and you’d believe vaccinations are bad for health).

Any way a campus recruiter distributed students of this class in different teams and gave all teams same problem to solve. Time 3 hours (as decided by all) and Teacher wrote this problem in bold on the board.

“Give an implementation of a Fibonaaci series in Java”.

Team X googled fibonaaci and started working on the program.

Team Y also googled and then went back to teacher to verify the problem. These being favorite team of teacher (any guesses why??), he explained to them that problem is to give implementation of a fibonacci series and not The Fibonaaci series.

Team Z had no clue of the problem so, teacher patiently explained, A fibonaaci series is a series where the Nth term is sum of previous 2 term. The implementation is to provide 2 functions, first to give Nth terms given initial 2 terms and value of N. Second is to offer sum up to N terms.

Still, Team W had no clue(these will not be recruited) and teacher told them that they could write a loop from 0 to N, with 2 or 3 variables they could write a function that could do both, or better still functions could be written separately.

Still, some of team members were not happy with the clarity but that’s life.

90 minutes later

Now I’m reinitializing the team names because I with my limited creativity am running out of names.

Team “mere programmer” started working on a java class, they created a program that assumed only one parameter as input, assumed 1^st 2 variables were 0,1 and created a function.

Team “process programmers” did the same thing, but they wanted to avoid review comments so, they made initial parameter constants.

Team “senior process programmers” had a lot of knowledge of GoF and J2EE patterns so, they started with 3 layers and started writing a data layer that read initial parameters from database and computed the sum.

Team “Geek” actually wrote 3 functions

getNextTerm(1^st term,2^nd term) ,

getNthTerm(N, 1^st term,2^nd term) called function above to get to nth term,

and calcSum(N,1^st term,2^nd term) and used functions above.

Then one portion of the team first created some unit tests for all 3 functions and started writing their java class.

Looking at geeks teacher asked everybody to write Unit tests.

Programmers wrote only one, it was good enough.

Process Programmer didn’t like it but wrote one.

Senior process programmer got resentful and said it should have been told earlier as now they require a running database to run unit tests and it could not be done.

Now the fun begins :)

Recruiter in the meanwhile understanding the credo of the institute for “automation” downloaded a testing tool of java. This tool was good, it generated random initial parameters but to test fibonaaci implementation it required the API provider to stick to an interface. Teacher and students cried loud that it should have been told earlier. Recruiter responded that although he expected teams to be agile but considering the situation (he is stuck with class as he could not go to another institute just like that), he offered 15 more minutes. Although by now teacher realized his own mistake of not realizing the need of interface earlier, admitted his mistake. He requested 45 more minutes in good faith and apologized for his mistake. Everybody haggled and teams got 30 minutes finally.

160 minutes later

Geeks changed their code, wrote an interface and Adapter (googled GoF) and were almost ready.

Everybody else was re-writing their program. But data layer, constants (these in itself are not bad, actually very good, but should be used when required, says Eric a.k.a. GoF) were still there. It may sound weird but senior programmers in order to implement interface were fixing their data layer to insert parameters in database. Mere programmers and others were doing what they did best, copying seniors. :)

Looking at this, Recruiter downloaded another version of tool that generated random parameters and dumped those in a database.

He told this to class :) and teacher. And it started chaos again. Teacher got dissatisfied with recruiter, recruiter (since he did it to help teams) thought teams were bad, and Geeks were thinking now how to incorporate this.

Everybody started haggling again and finally class got 30 more minutes to incorporate changes. Teacher and Recruiter were worried, the whole thing was going over budget. They had allocated the infrastructure for 4.5 hours only. Beyond this could mean stiff penalty for teacher. Students were to go to another campus after 5 hours (Mere programmers knew this and rejoiced at it). Recruiter didn’t want to lose good students and was worried.

210 minutes later

Geeks had written a controller, implementing the same interface (they googled GoF and figured out a factory and decorator) which picked up the parameters from database (copied that code from seniors) and called their original java class. Geek tested their controller manually.

Seniors dropped their insertion code and were testing their class.

Rest copied seniors.

215 minutes

Testing tool had a bug. Both versions had the same bug. Some time it did not generate all the parameters and sometime it generated value of parameters so large that it crashed the hardware.

Now recruiter was very worried, so was teacher. Seniors were angry at them, but actually happy with themselves as their program was throwing (no not Null Pointer), but IllegalArgument (process helps :)). Geeks looked at their code, wrote a parameter valuator, wrote unit tests for that and created logical default for every wrong parameter (e.g. Nmax = 1000) .Offered default values via a capability interface as well.

230 Minutes

Geeks could handle this. Seniors could as well but they were now beginning to think and appreciate geeks. Rest had no idea what was going on.

250 minutes

Everybody had their program but only Geeks were offered job .Now, I tell you a secret, recruiter was working for a freshly funded start up company that offered loads but needed the best (Some how I think every story should have a happy ending, don't know why).
Seniors got their offers based upon an interview in the next round, but not that great salary. Rests of students were recruited by big U.D.T and are going through fresher’s training.

The End

Replace teacher with your project manager/architect/leader, replace recruiter with your customer/partner and replace tool with the market and you'd know what I'm talking about.

Now the crib

I am perhaps somewhere in between process and senior group but boy I’d give my arm and a leg to become a geek. I’m worried about seniors though; these are sincere people and work most. They should not be angry and feel frustrated.

And what do you think about Team X, Y, Z, and W. Team X is risk, they might be genius but it may be a disaster as well. And Team Z and W! do everybody like them. Wow, I don’t.

Well, that’s it, I hope I clarified few things, but if I didn’t, remember vaccinations are vicious marketing campaigns of multinational giant pharma companies.

Appreciation

These days we all are getting the appreciation mails :) . And this gets better and better. People are getting appreciation for doing their standard job. And being happy about it.
This may be motivating for whole lot of people but some how I find it funny. Appreciation for anything seems like taking away the value. I'd like my contribution to be acknowledged and thats all. Not really made out an example for anything.
The doing of a job gives me pleasure. A work well done, I don't need appreciation for it. I already know if I did a good or bad job.
Do I need appreciation for things I just did, w/o my heart in it? More pertinent question, why did I even do it?
Primarily appreciation/acknowledgment is motivating only when it comes from people I respect and I anyway know I did a good job according to my standards. Now, an appreciation w/o a definition of standards is truly limiting.

Salary is low

Why do we continue to crib about low salary? Is it low? OR it is low in comparison to everybody else?
Can I make my ends meet and save some for my 100 K? Yeah, I can and I don't want to compare my salary with equivalent profiles (it is low actually :) ). Should it affect me? I don't think so.
Two people are never same, some just negotiated better, some passed out from IIT etc.These will be rewarded no matter what.
Ok, let me ask a more pertinent question. Will I leave if I get a 20% raise from the competitor company? No, I don't think so.
I may leave because of following reasons
1. My colleagues think they are too smart and can go back to their stated commitments (verbal , so what) and then write mails like -"hey Gagan, I think there is a disconnect here, What I said was not this(whatever) but blah, blah ....." .
2. How many times I'm disturbed from doing what I like doing. At my place if I'm reading a book I'm not disturbed, but in office on an average I spend 30% of my day in meetings :) . Truly hateful. I'd prefer keeping a day aside for status, skip, and other management meetings, just don't be there everyday.

What to do with life

Few things, wasting my time on.
In the nutshell how do I answer "what do I want to do with my life?" .Truthfully, nothing, just allow me to read books, sleep a lot and generally allow me to be a bum. But nobody accept this answer. Essentially they say, I should do only what I want to do but "what I want to do" should be a secure choice and ultimately should lead to a paycheck :) . Too bad but I want to be a bum, thats it.
Alright, let's explore this further, I agree that I should do what I truly, sincerely believe in, what I'm good at, time loses its meaning when I'm doing it and once I go for the smoke after indulging in it and I enjoy that too. wow, lets decide/discover that. Let's give it a 'Dil Chahta hai' test for 2 minutes.
zzz.......
Alright 2 minutes are over, and do I know what I want to do? Boom, still I want to be a bum.
Now we can explore this decide/discover part a little later, or perhaps in another post.
Here is how I want to go about it.
Let's go with needs an desires -:)
What I desire is a bungalow with a private beach and a hill resort cottage, good food (read Lebanese), good wine(read not too fancy but good red wine ) :) and be a bum. About 100 millions $ -:)

What I need is a monthly pay rent,some budget to buy books, surf net and standard Dal,Roti.About 100,000 $ :)
Ok, I can start being a bum pretty early i.e. when I have 100k invested, isn't it? I don't have to get a paycheck necessarily to be a bum . I can be little more responsible, a little more patient till I make 100K. After that I'll be responsible/patient only for those who don't stop me(actually only those who help me) being a bum.
Wait a minute, this gives me little insight in my CEO's behaviour, how come he is so patient with me, I'm not great conversationalist, I don't do engaging conversation, I'm more of a blunt guy but he is still paitent with me. Only 2 reasons
1. I help him doing something he truly likes
2. He is making his 100K (Whatever that may be)