Beati pauperes spiritu, or how I got a job

Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed herein are the author’s personal ones, and as always the characters, sequences and identities are all spun impromptu.

Finally, Mr.Average engineer got a job in a prestigious software company. He’s termed as a “fresher” by many of his fellow species. He gets a warm red carpet welcome and is showered with lot of “to be followed” rules and regulations during the first course of the week. That is the heaviest dosage of powerpoint presentations he’s probably ever exposed to in a lifetime. He’s as ebullient at first as a puppy with new teeth. Least does Mr. Average know that long in the future, he’s going to return home with sore eyes and an aching back. That brings us to one important point. Occupational hazards of the software industry.

Back in those yonder years, when computing was mostly done in pen and paper, there wasn’t any software industry. Well, all industries had a product cycle, be it a telephone, or a chip, or even a ball point pen. They had their own customer base, acceptability criteria etc to fulfill. One fine day, software industry also felt the dire need for this lingo. I am in perfect concordance with the fact that, software industry, is a service industry under the deception that it’s a manufacturing industry.(not me, Eric Raymond said that). Mr. Average writes several “Kloc” of code, he fixes so and so defects and fills up a lot of formal documentation for the above process, and boy, that’s an overkill I tell you. These are the canonical mandates confronted by any Mr. Average lurking around in the industry, and take my word for that.

When I was in college, I loved coding( yes I  really did!). I didn’t bother in the heaven’s name about time constraints, quality assurance and other cribs back then. But this is a different place altogether. Mr. Average is first made one unwritten rule clear, software projects are mission critical, nay I prefer to use the fancy term “real time”. It’s a euphemistic way of putting that if you don’t write bug free code, bid goodbye to your job, and at times, your organization. And you that it was easy!

I had all the time in the world and dictated the “customer” as an armchair programmer. Mr. Average has a lot of things to live up to. If the rules of the game were followed ideally, he sailed his way smooth and nice. But it doesn’t happen that smooth always. God said “let there be code: and there was bugs.”

Bugs are the biggest predicament facing the programmerkind and robbing Mr. Average of his sanity and after-work life. Ask any random software engineer and he’ll say a quick “yes”. The software industry spends generous amounts on fixing bugs. Not to mention the countless overtime hours, caffeine and empty pizza boxes spent by plenty of Mr. Averages annually. Sadly, bugs are man made. Believe it or not, Mr. Average is the brainchild behind every unsquashed bug. After years of retrospect, may smart folks figured out ways to minimize bugs by lot of methodologies. And they were the people who mined gold in software industry.

tedium and Boredom are a dangerous effluvium.(otherwise I wont be hanging around in the bloggosphere while at work ;-)) . I mostly try to avoid decision making aspect here and there, and I leave it to my peers, no matter how crucial or how trivial it sounds. It might sound to most people that I’m getting it personal here, but I always give a choice to Mr. Average regarding the decision making of his decision making. That was the prime cause for me to stick to my stand as a no-frills technical guy, and not to become a manager.

I don’t loathe people wearing suits nor am I telling that managers are technically incompetent nincompoops, but I am naturally inclined to the geeky component in me. You call it my inability to make decisions or what ever you want, but I sweep all decision making under the carpet. I prefer spending my weekend fixing umpteen bugs rather.

Being a manager is more or less like being a parent or grandparent.(yawn) more in the next blog……..