clog

I am convinced that I look really gullible after being attacked by folks from amway thrice in my life. I have nothing against them and I think they are doing good for themselves but its funny that they are so easy to spot and predictable. After the first encounter, I almost felt like asking if the person is from Amway the moment he asked for my phone number, but I stopped short. He almost proved me wrong by never reaching out to me again until one day after three years I get a call from him (yes I did save all their numbers and I remembered them). The third time, I did the rude thing, the next day as soon as I got a call from the friendly guy I asked him if he is by any chance associated with bww and it ended abruptly.

They are all trained by Britt World wide and use a template based approach to (s)talking

- They will always stalk you in a mall in the checkout queue or a book shop or on a road on the pretext of asking for directions.
- They will find a way to complement you - your job or your clothes(?) or anything at all.
- Then they will ask for your phone number and promise you to keep in touch.
- Then wait for x amount of time before they will call you with a business plan for which they are looking out for ambitious young people like you. This x varies from one day to up to 3 years based on my experience

They tend to oversell their idea to the point that they make rudeness the easiest alternative, which I haven't tried.

Also, there is a flaw in their basic advice that it is easy to sell stuff to friends and family. In fact it is the worst thing you can do for your relations. The moment you exchange money with your relatives or friends you start on a journey to screw your relations.

While dealing with your relatives in the domain of lending/borrowing, here is the sequence of events in increasing order of disastrous-ness.

- Lend without charging interest and never ask it back. Not even a possible time line
- Lend without interest and ask it back
- Not lend any money
- Lend and charge interest (doesn't matter less than the market rate)

These experiences have made me really suspicious of any stranger trying to make small talk with me any more.

This was one of the movies that I knew I would like even before I saw it and I did. The trailer showed glimpses that the backdrop of the movie was somewhere in the Hindi heartland of India, the area where I come from. The movie turned out to be shot in Raisen, even closer and the state is called Mukhya Pradesh, a not so subtle reference to the state. Well, this post is not about the movie but about my experiences here which I always wanted to publish.

Every once in a while I make journeys in buses and trains there, more specifically these are non ac buses (the only ones we have there)  and general compartments of trains. I do it with minimum of liabilities (i.e. no luggage, no company) because I believe I can’t do it peacefully anymore with luggage. Every single time I do it, I feel fortunate that I don’t have to do it as a need or as a regular part of life.

MP is unique in the sense that there is as much poverty as most other popular poor states i.e. Orissa, Bihar etc. but it never makes any news for it. The invisibility is what defines it; nobody knows about it and doesn’t care about it either.

Peepli live paints a very real picture of how majority of the villages are. Abject poverty, overfilled tempos (locally called bhatsuars), a real huge market for desi thurra, an abundance of time and acute lack of work. Now at the verge of labeling folks here a total loser, a comfort is there in their own condition and no real effort to get out of it. Highlighted by the fact that Nattha’s plan out of his misery was not to try harder but to give up and die, the only possible state more laidback than his current one.

A major part of the state is immune to shining India’s GDP growth of post liberalization era. The state is somehow against emigration to other places (mostly true for unskilled labor which forms the major part of the population) in search of jobs unlike Bihar which is accused of spiraling out everywhere. In fact one of their pet peeve is people coming from outside and spoiling their state of being (if that is indeed possible).

It is stuck in some kind of treadmill time, it keeps slipping by your feet, yet everything stays as it were.

Every time they enter a queue to buy a train ticket, I think they are prepared to have a fight; the next one would be when they enter their compartments. Classic case of scarcity of resources! It is easy for me to be patient since it’s not a daily routine for me but for them showing any kindness is damn too difficult if not impossible and yet you see them doing that quite often.

The buses here still play the music of 90s like the songs of “Dilwale” or Altaf Raza. I found this similar to the fascination a few friends and I share for the songs popular during my college years. May be it is indicative of our desire to be in that time, like my state’s desire to still remain in 90s, a time they are comfortable to live in.

While a lot of places have issues due to increased traffic, we are facing the same. Only difference is that we have it because of lack of roads and not due to any increase in traffic which would be a nicer problem to have.

In one sweeping analysis, I am inclined to label the problem is a lack of vigor/life. Indifference, idyllic drinking, drugs and endless and mindless discussions about everything around yet without any desire to ‘do’ anything even for their own good.

Like every time you cite a problem you should have a solution, I don’t think I would like to do that because the problem seems to be more basic than systemic. At the bottom of it is probably laziness or some such silly reason. The morose attitude once replaced by a little enthusiasm can take care of most of the issues in due time.

I was planning a really cantankerous (my word list mugga session acting up after may years) post after reading the following articles. But I think I let some of the steam off by writing comments on them. On second thoughts, I might have ended up writing a self flagellating post, but then, what the hell. But hopefully what follows at the end doesn't have that much of a sting.

Someone ashamed of her Indian identity
If you do click on the link and read the article, look at the extreme reactions of all sorts. The last one (first one to show up in the comment list) is definitely not the least. My relatively moderate comment is hard to find in the sea of comments.

Few more
A little more balanced one
This one takes the cake simply because of the popularity of the medium - Time magazine

and here is my little classification of Indians abroad

While selecting a job or work, if there are many competing factors (within reason) and people is one of them, I would say choose people over anything. Go to place where you think people are good, whatever your definition of good is. The chances are you will do well. The more work experience I gain (really?) I think the work at some point will become a fucking pain. So, the chances are you will enjoy doing shit if you are doing it with good (again whatever your definition of good is) people.

I apply the same theory to relatively smaller decisions like attending sessions, apart from the topic, if I know the speaker is good, I usually go irrespective of the topic.

This is how I had theorized this at some point, being a cynic, it was about avoiding stuff rather than choosing.

Main chutiya kaam kar sakta hoon lekin chutiyon ke saath kaam nahi kar sakta

(For my non Hindi speaking readers, if there are any - it translates to: " I can do shit work, but I can't work with shit people").

The following link confirms the title of this post.

Pakistan 10th most failed state of the world
Finns are happiest, Indians 45th, Pakistan last

Look at what Pakistan has done for herself giving in to temptation of being more fundamental than it needs to. This is perhaps one reason why they seem so eager to inflict pain on others. It is the desperation of a falling guy who wants to taken down with it everyone else possible. Icing on the cake would be if that someone turns out to be your sworn enemy. For all its soft stance India has been doing fairly well comparatively given that they came out of the same shell at the same time. We had bigger diversity issues owing to the size and heterogeneous nature of our state. At the end, with all that, we haven't become the best we could, but have done at least reasonable for ourselves. A case to continue living with high level of tolerance in every aspect.

As for managing our neighbor, there are only two possibilities if you will. Either pull them out of the rut and get them on the path of accelerated growth, leaving them motivated to live rather than having a morbid fasciantion to kill or die. This is far easier said than done, the other option is to 'stay away' just watching out to minimize our losses in these conflicts. A full blown engagement would only lead to them getting a purpose for their fascination and their millitary leaders would be prompt in putting a garb of martyrdom or something like that to mislead their directionless masses.

This is not an anti Pakistan post even though it may sound so. I am trying to put to attention the benefits of being a tolerant nation to the zealots amongst us. While I cannot say that is 'the reason' why we are doing how we are, but I am very certain that it has some part to play in it. I would be happy if our neighbors recognize the same and take care of themselves rather than snowballing themselves to a ditch. If we can't help break their fall, the best we could do is to avoid getting sucked into it leading us down with them.

It's like Batman would say,
It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me

Joe (click the link to know more about Joe) would say it's not what i do at my desk, it's what I do while fetching my coffee that defines me.

I have seen Joe walking intently to fetch his coffee peering down at the cup or just to the restroom. It is no ordinary walk. To an untrained eye it may look like he is studying the coffee like a lot of people who read tea leaves. In reality his mind is busy doing calculations of unimaginable complexity. He probably is working out the price of his next multi-billion dollar acquisition

I have been told, however, that may be this isn't what Joe thinks during his walk. May be he is thinking about the expansion of the company. Like admiring the new chick he sees on his way to pantry. Or at times, he might be thinking about his next strategic move like whether he should go to pee on his way to pantry after all restroom won't be a really big detour. Well, he could do that but then where does he keep the cup? Oh, here comes Senior Joe, so that makes his decision easy. He decides to keep his line and say hello to him. OK, so its final, Joe decides to have the coffee and come back to pee, the coffee would add to the pressure making it a more fulfilling release.

Joe is great at keeping up appearances, in fact that's one of the few things he is good at. If not careful enough, he might create a first impression on you that you will live to regret.

Recently while I was attending a conference call I heard a name John Doe a couple of times. Same evening I was watching a movie where the name came up again. Coincidence? That's what I thought until a friend enlightened me the practice of referring unknown people (usually suspects) as John Doe or Jane Doe for reference.

I have been meaning to create a character for my blog especially the ones where I rant. My pet peeve all my life has been shitty Managers. It is always easy to deal with shitty developers since they can do limited damage. I was looking for a name for the guy (hope females won't be looking to be treated equally here) and I came up with Joe, an average manager just like an average Joe and then the first paragraph happened.

Combining the two of them, without any further ado, please welcome Joe Don, our average manager who by definition would be crappy. All things you dream of not becoming while you are growing up.

* This sounds like a real name though I don't know anyone by this name. I don't intend to mean any disrespect if a person with this name exists. If you are the one, and chance upon this blog and have objection, feel free to drop me a line and I can make amends.

Multiple conversations about reading fiction vs. non fiction led me to the conclusion that we are always seeking something. I started my reading in childhood with whatever was available like champak, chandamama, all in hindi. During my engineering I discovered my love for fiction and I went on reading as much as I could. And then I started reading non fiction. The ratio of fiction to non fiction has been going down recently. A couple of friends also claimed a similar pattern and they said they have stopped reading fiction because they realized they weren't 'gaining' anything by reading fiction.

I share the pattern, but not necessarily the reasoning. One of the points I brought up was you can see new ways of thinking and seeing things by looking at fictional characters. Now, I don't know how that would be useful and may be it's not. But, claiming that you know what would be useful knowledge (or not) for you in future considering life is so diverse, would be rather too presumptuous. It's like one of the learning from Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford, where he talks about connecting the dots. You don't always know the immediate benefit of something you are doing. But the fact that you like doing it should be reason enough to keep you going. I would be quick to add a disclaimer here to rule out habits like doing drugs from this category.

So, even if overall our lives are about seeking things, why make it rule every part of our being. Especially when it comes to things like reading which most of us classify as hobby and not work. Also, in large number of cases not reading fiction may not translate in reading non fiction. It probably translates into doing something else, perhaps not as worthwhile or nothing. There I go seeking again !

Social Studies used to be the most difficult subject to score really good marks but the easiest to score average marks. This peculiarity is attributed to a phenomenon known as partial marks. You can study a very limited portion which can most easily be plugged into any question. Irrespective of the question asked, you can put some general stuff and your teacher would willingly give you a few marks helping you get passing marks overall.

This probably gets so entrenched in our minds that I see the application of this principle so often at work. As always, its hard for people to say I don't know. To respond to something they don't know, they would tell whatever they know without really caring about the question. Often times, they would go on explaining that what they are telling is more important than what is being asked. Well, of course, it may be true in some cases, but not when the partial marks guys are the ones explaining.

For the same reason why a lot of attractive girls are not smart or funny or creative. Now this will sound like a gladwell-esque statement but unlike him I have no stats to prove this right or wrong.

But, being attractive sometimes can cause people to not focus on trying to be smart or funny because they don't need to. In case of IITians, they are usually smarter than the average folks and all they need to or want to rely on is their intelligence. In their over reliance, they tend to ignore a lot of other qualities that make up for a successful career. The big bucket of which is Inter-personal skills and soft skills.

Now, I don't mean they fail, but rather underachieve their potential a lot of times. Granted that the entrance exam is meant to test raw intelligence but the students should have the good sense on build on their raw intelligence.

Contrast two people who do similar in their academics, one brighter than the other. The bright one scores without much effort and the other one does the same but as a result of lot of diligence and hard work i.e attending classes, being nice to the professor, participating it the class by asking questions and may be even dressing well in vivas and classroom. Now, assuming the output is usually same for both of them, the latter would be much more successful in a professional setting. The diligent one is used to being nice to professor and can do the same for his/her superiors. They focus on forming relationships, socializing and in extreme cases just plain old sucking up.

Also, doing something easily some times undermines the value of the work done, so again, the diligent ones score better. Overall, there is more sympathy towards them and they have the right 'look' and usually there are more of them as compared to the brighter ones.

On the other hand, the bright guys don't stop at being careless, some times they develop contempt for lesser able folks (sometimes their bosses) and that is a true recipe for disaster in a team setting. Part of it comes from the culture propagated at IITs. Hard working people are not often seen very kindly there even if they do well. Worse is someone trying to suck up to make up for it. If I have to draw a quadrant, this is how it would look.
Now, even though I have generalized it for IITians, I have seen enough non IITians who's over reliance on performance and complete disregard for everything else has been disastrous for them. This argument may not be valid in all the settings. More or less all the jobs need easy to average problems to be solved and hence other things become more relevant.

However, if you can get to a place where the problems are genuinely tough and there is a clear case of some people doing it clearly better than others, the 'non performance' things may become less relevant. So, for someone with this issue, choosing the right environment may be the easiest and most sustainable solution.

There are people who are easily accessible and then there are those who are not. The ones who are easily accessible are always helping others (foremost condition is they should be capable). Most of the times they get their due, but do they always? They become like pee pots in the corner of a restroom, used most often but not necessarily designed/rewarded for that.

The point is, the pot has hardly anything to gain from being the most popular to be picked up for the dirty job. It happens in an environment where there is no good work. If you are good (like the strategically located pot is for "pee-rs" - pun intended), you will end up doing the dirty work more often than others (for yourself and others) and a lot of times to no end.

There is a book written by someone called "The No asshole rule". I am not going to bother googling and finding out the author or putting a nice link to the book on amazon or wikipedia. I am being lazy. If anything, the title of the post should give you the idea that this isn't going to be a nicely written post, rather an impulsive entry. I don't know of the definition that this guy used for his assholes, I have my own and somehow I am getting a feeling that the two may not be that far off.

I am tempted to write this post because today I faced the challenge (once again) of not falling in the vicious circle of assholeness. The assholes will always play their game, and the only way to counter them is by being one of them. You have to become an asshole to beat another one if you are not exceptionally stronger in which case asshole would be sucking up to you and the question wouldn't arise. Well, so coming to the play part. That indeed is their play. To beat them, be one of them and in the end if you beat them by being an asshole, you become a part of that asshole cartel. Whoever wins or loses, the cartel gains. Also, as a newly transformed asshole, you will start learning the alphabets and the other experienced assholes will hold an advantage, until you become better than them. At this point, you would probably have become a bane on civilization, not visibly so, but I can assure you that the world would undoubtedly be a better place without you.

Now, at some point or other we all behave like assholes, but are we conscious of it when we do. If we are, that's half the battle won and trying to avoid being an asshole is as far as most of us can go. What happens usually is, once fallen into this asshole trap, there is no looking back. The pit is slimy, keeps you from getting out.

The only way out of asshole-dom is to get rid of assholes. If you can't, run away from them.

This post is scheduled to be published at a random date in future. So, this doesn't reflect my current (the date of this post) state of mind. However, I am very sure I will always stand by this. I am in the thick of things, posting it now would give the asshole away to the folks who know me. But I want to get this rant out nevertheless.

Here is a slide from a presentation given by DHH ("Hacker of the year 2005") in a Ruby on Rails conference.


"I’m not in this world to create Rails for you. I’m in this world to create Rails for me and if you happen to like that version of Rails that I’m creating for me, than you are going to have a great time."

Look at the 'subtle' choice of words to get his message across.

Cursing is like dark arts- you have to mean it to make it effective.

I have always been of two minds when it came to profanities in my blogs and professional interactions. So far I have stayed away from it (almost). There are, however, too many advocates of swearing in my circle with their fair dose of workplace rants or casual remarks in colored language. I agree to this in part, because sometimes the best responses in a lot of situations sound something like ".. because you are fucking insane/unethical/stupid/anyOtherWord".

I had once thought of a matrix for creating profanities, put a relation in one axis and some body parts on the other one. You will get a nice mXn matrix of random abuses. Apart from this one there are some other categories, few of them are:

Equating to Animals: You used them when you didn't know any better.

Character assassination:

• Realistic ones - kamina, nikamma, nalayak, saala etc
• Character assassination: Most of the standard ones (*c variety) come under this category
• Character assassination (Sentences) -This was when the above kind of abuses became way too common to have any effect at all. People graduated to sentences thus allowing them much more creative freedom and you know what, when someone creates a sentence based one, (s)he means it. So, there you go.

After this long piece, here is what I actually wanted to say; I will experiment a bit with some strong un-parliamentary language here and there in my future posts. Let's see how it goes.

I have always held the opinion that people in private sector are on an average more honest than people in public sector. People in any kind of job are more honest than people in politics. I am not so sure any more. It seems to boil down to opportunity.

To put the question more bluntly, would you steal when no one is looking. How hard would you play when no one is watching. How hard would you work when you know you wont't get the credit(but the project will get boost). Even worse someone else will take the credit. Would you take credit for something someone else did.

And when I apply this, I guess most of the people I have come across in my work life would go for an unfavorable response on these questions. A lot of them seemingly nice and hard working. They probably have worked out an acceptability threshold to corruption/immoral behavior and politicians would be justified when they say (they will never) that they just pushed it.

The Dark Knight, one of my all time favorite movie has an excellent premise. The villain isn't out to get money. He is out to prove his theory - "When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other". I, kind of agree to his theory. You will see the masks falling at the slightest chance of trouble/possibility of gain and everyone almost feels justified in doing that. The movie however, ends on a positive note, because in the face of death, people decide to do the right thing. And Batman, figures out that the greater good lies in sacrificing himself, does so. But that was in the movie, right.

Here are two questions that I will leave you with:
- If the only way forward for your team/project is by sacrificing yourself, would you do it?
- If the only way you can make your presence felt is by letting things fail, would you do it?

It would be highly unlikely to find a person who hasn't commented on the topic of fat bonus of wall street employees as the cause of financial meltdown. In spite of all the excess coverage, if there is someone who missed it, here are a few thoughts of my own, mostly repackaged from others much like the repackaged CDOs.

Starting with the simple mathematical explanation. Consider your bonus is 10% of the profit you make, but you don't get penalized for losses. If you can make a profit of $100 across two years, here are two scenarios.

1. You make a profit of $50 each year earning a bonus of $10 for two years.
2. You make a profit of 1000$ in year 1 (bonus=$100) and net a loss of 900 in year 2 (bonus=0). You end up with a net bonus of $100.

So, in short there is no incentive for creating long term wealth. This was one reason so many of investment banks that prided their ability to help companies go public were wary of becoming corporations initially. As partnerships, they were assured of loyalty from the top executives, unlike public company model where a major component of earnings is non-returnable hard cash.

The second, more philosophical explanation is of morality [my favorite topic :)]. Increasingly, the whole world is working towards an optimization of everything. Some of the cliches that I think create a wrong framework for growth are:

• Don't fight your perception; perception is reality - then why not work on just that. Just put up an excellent show.
  
• People remember your peaks/troughs - much like the wisden greatest cricketer of all time rating, consistency be damned.
• Your success depends a lot more on who you know than what you do - there you go.

Mind it, none of these are made up, they are real. And in places where success/performance isn't measurable so easily (thankfully IT industry in most of the cases will not be part of this), they have the potential to rot the whole culture.

So many of these supposedly career building mantras become fundamentally disconnected with your real contribution. I would have been happy only if they were combined with advice about improving the contribution and ways towards it. Isn't the most popular competency an MBA can offer to a recruiter is - I will be whatever you want me to be, if it is immoral, so be it.

This is what you do when you are generally pissed off. No, I am not talking of creating graphs, that you do when you just have some time to kill. I meant posting that crap on blog. Here you go, make some of your own, its fun






PS: As usual, this is a fun post and is not intended to be a reflection on my past, present or future employer and not to forget employers from my past births.

Hiring is an extremely complicated problem. It is extremely difficult to judge a candidate's success in a given setting given it is a function of infinite things, a lot of which are things that the candidate doesn't control like the work environment, co-workers etc.

I have often thought about how majority of people would hire or not hire people in software companies. Some of the common reasons for people in technology industry would look like [they might not admit it ;-) ]

• He wasn't non technical enough to be a software engineer
• He didn't use words "scalable" and "business value" enough in the interview
• He knows about Data Structures and algorithms
• In cases where he didn't know the answer he just said "I don't know" instead of trying to justify that knowing those things is not required and isn't helping deliver business value. I would have loved if someone had gone one step further and claimed that not knowing them would bring valuable "layman's perspective" in the system which no other person in the team would have.
• He didn't think our company was the greatest place on earth to work for and we were just an option.
• Instead of agreeing to something wrong that I said, he tried to correct me. Didn't help that he did it politely.
• Didn't know enough American politics and sitcoms.
• He was smarter than me.

Disclaimer:
1. This is not a reflection on my past, present and future employers, is written as a non serious comment.
2. Using only he in the post is not because of any gender prejudice but just for the ease of writing.

Process is one of those holy grails or holy cows that are sacrosanct in software development not open to questioning. A question posed is enough to label a person heretic, rebel, bad influence or any such thing.

There are three fundamental parts to the execution of a project. The classic trio of people, process and tools/technology. Any failure can be attributed to one of them and fixed appropriately ensuring it doesn't repeat itself.

The most common response to a broken process, causing issues downstream, is an additional process introduced to check it. Seldom have I seen people looking at the real cause before applying the fix on the process part. Isn't that the part project managers love most.

The right way out would be to first analyze why the process was broken, adding a process to avoid breakage of another is a self serving cycle with no gain for anyone but the process itself.

The people part in this triangle can offset the other two, but not vice-versa. Hence, it is extremely important to identify people failures and then treat them as such. A process cannot offset for a person not doing his job right.

In most of the cases, adding processes to offset for incompetent people(team) ends up in a bureaucratic team. And an over-process environment _slows_ everything down giving an impression of number of mistakes going down. Processes become tools for assigning blames in case of failures rather than being tools to stop them.

If you ever face issues in this trio, fix the people issues first and rest will fall in place in time.