IT: Layoffs

Every day, a small Ant arrives at work very early and starts work immediately, no browsing, no checking cricket scores, no tea break even before starting the day. Ant used to work with 100% efficiency and was happy with the work. Lion, the CEO of the company was surprised to see Ant working without supervision. Lion thought if the Ant can produce so much without supervision, will it not produce even more with proper supervision.

So Lion recruited a Cockroach with extensive experience as supervisor and was famous for producing excellent reports. The Cockroach’s first decision was to set up a clocking in attendance system. As expected Cockroach was not going to do work by itself, so recruited Spider as secretary to attend phone calls, help write reports and manage archives. The Lion was delighted with the Cockroach's reports and asked for graphs to describe production rates and to analyse trends for presentations at Board‘s meetings.

So the Cockroach had to buy a new computer and a laser printer. Again Cockroach was not going to do all this building of graphs and reports by itself, so recruited a Fly as its assistant to manage computer, build reports, print the presentations, organize them for board etc. The Ant, who had once been so productive and relaxed, hated this new plethora of paperwork and meetings which used up most of her time.

The Lion came to the conclusion that it was high time to nominate a person in charge of the department where the ant worked. The position was given to the Worm, whose first decision was to buy a carpet and an ergonomic chair for his office. The Worm also needed a computer and a personal assistant; so worm got someone from its previous department as assistant to help prepare a Work and Budget Control Strategic Optimisation Plan.

The Department where the ant works is now a sad place, where nobody laughs anymore, nobody enjoys their work, lack of motivation and productivity was to the lowest. It was at this time that the Worm convinced the boss, the Lion, of the absolute necessity to start a climatic study of the environment. Having reviewed the charges for running the Ant’s department, the Lion found out that the production was much less than before.

In order to fin d the cause of reduction of production, Lion recruited the Owl, a prestigious and renowned consultant to carry out an audit and suggest solutions. The Owl spent three months in the department and came up with an enormous report, in several volumes that concluded:

"The department is overstaffed, need immediate reduction of staff"

You don’t need to be genius to know who the Lion fires first. The Ant, of course, because Ant showed lack of motivation, increased frustration and had a negative attitude towards whole work environment.


Source: Mail forward

IT: World of logic, hard to find

My liking for software (IT) goes long back to my childhood. Probably then I did not know what’s waiting for me in future (Sitting in a cubicle like a moron working day in day out for peanuts). During my early school days I wasn’t great at math. Then one day Great Bhattacharya (My Dad) had enough of me and took me under his chatra chaya, where I was beaten to hell. I still remember those days. Everybody saw classic turnaround in me and now math was my favorite subject and it better be; who wants to get subjected to thrashing otherwise. When today I look back and think of those days, I am thankful to Great Bhattacharya, as with math I also got analytical thinking and logical analysis capabilities.

In India education has it own meaning. You get to learn the things that you might never use in life. I did my major in Electrical and here I am writing programs, fixing issues, fighting for optimization. Only thing Electrical left in my life is the electrical signals flowing in mother boards when my program is turned in assembly language codes and those are used to fire semiconductors and transistors. I am sure, like me there are many more software professions who have their major in some other faculty but landed up in IT.

In IT I am not sure how many people understand the meaning of logic. What this term really means?
Definition: The science or art of exact reasoning, or of pure and formal thought, or of the laws according to which the processes of pure thinking should be conducted.

As said by Einstein "Logic will take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere". Also meaning of logic is relative to everyone, because what can seem logical to one person is illogical to another person. I never understood this, how can logical way of getting from A to B be different from person to person.

Only after coming to software and now being here for a while I have realized in this field where logic seems logical, it’s so difficult to find people thinking logically. In this world you miss logic at every level starting from junior developer (probably due to innocence) to upper management (due to save my ass attitude).

This is the person who works almost 18 hours, takes all the blame, even after maximum efforts gets minimum credit and gets laid off before anyone else, illogical isn’t it? Meet the Chindi Coder (Developer)

This is the person who is supposed to be the most knowledgeable, functionally and technically and is often found begging to Chindi Coder for solutions and resolution, illogical isn’t it? Meet the Mistry (Project Lead)

This is the person who is face of the project for client and client hates to see this face, illogical isn’t it? Meet the Mukadam (Project Manager)

This is the person who keeps asking for everybody to deliver irrespective of the work load and number of people working on the project, only comes into picture when the things are screwed up and after all this who takes successful delivery as his success, illogical isn’t it? Meet the Daakia (Delivery Manager).

This is the person who is always covering his ass and illogical things happening are no more illogical to this person, illogical isn’t it? Meet the Sutradhaar (Director).

Exceptions are always there, so you might want to analyze yourself, if you fall in anyone of above mentioned position. If not it is always nice to meet a person on my side of world.