Money is what money does.

Living in the suburbs with an economic major for a dad, I was subjected to long drives filled with words like Price, Cost, Wealth and Money. Slightly different, shadow images of the same thing - Value. Transactions, hoards and transformations there-of. But this system of Value, has no absolutes - it's a general theory of economic relativity. The essential backbone of which is the equation of effort to value and in some essence has been as revolutionary to me as Einstein's has been to 19th century physics.

$$$: Money is worth what it buys you. The only reason it exists is because other people accept it and provide you services/goods. That'd be why it is infact called currency, because that is the most important property for money. But the exchange of money look like a zero-sum game - you gain only as much as I give. But transactions of value have to be a non-zero sum game. For a stable economic system, the buyer & seller should both go home with more than what they started with.

!Zero: The nonzero sum aspect of trade, is what set that juggernaut rolling in the first place. But to acquire more value than the other gives up, requires for an inequity of value in exchange of money. What I give up in return for money is more valuable to the person paying for it than what she pays for it. And thus the ship sails into the next port.

The Pin: The pin maker is a skilled man. All day long, he makes pins. It would take you an entire day's work to make a pin. He makes ten pins a day. If he demanded half-a-day's worth to make a pin for you, would you pay? I assume you would, after cribbing a lot about the rising cost of living, how they don't make them like they used to and how your children no longer behave. But you'd pay, take the pin & spend the rest of the day doing something fun.

And here's where the inequity of effort and value kick in. It is an equation, for sure, but one of the multipliers in it is skill at a task. The price you pay is fair for something if it takes more effort to do it yourself - DIY solutions excepted. The foundation is laid for the segregation of society into guilds, based on skill & strata based on the multiplier of effort to value. Productivity is no longer a measure of effort, but a combination of various other things.

The world we see around us is the effect of such a run-away economic chain reaction - where all's fair in the price war. There's nothing you'd buy at a loss, whether you profit in fluid currency is another matter altogether. You're built to be a winner at the game of value, but transmuting it into gold is another skill altogether. But you still got what you paid for.

On the other hand, there's probably one born every minute, who hasn't.

PS: this entry initially was penned in my notebook, when people protested about Apple dropping the iPhone price

posted at: 09:12 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, life, money

Everyone has one story to tell.

But blessed are those who have the ability to articulate it in words. For the struggle of a mind to tell all and reveal; It's to its detriment perhaps, to give up a bit of itself. But perhaps it is the escape of a mind from the confines of a body, of thoughts from a mind. And of course, ideas from the thought behind them. This is perhaps the greatest leap ideas have ever taken - from mind to mind, over time and distance.

Free to move between the minds of others, the thoughts have transcended the original boundaries of man, to enter the realm of the plural. Man became men, me became we, you becomes us. No longer does it have a single pale shade of white, but the tinges of grey that everyone's dirty fingers have added to the paperback. Context & perspective, shift and shear the words' import and the meaning escapes the control of the author.

My story becomes yours to repeat, if not to experience. Or perhaps not. The true magic of the written word was never in its production, but in the re-production of emotions that such pithy squiggles can carry within them. The imaginative machinings involved in reading, as mundane as it may seem, is no less a daily miracle.

And the rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

posted at: 18:06 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, literature, observations

I thought I'd invented this term. I'd thought it was my small bit of original jargon to contribute. I even had about seven pages of scribbled over notepaper dedicated to the topic - several hours worth of cogitation on the topic from airport lounges, cramped airplane seats and other places of extreme boredom. Pages and pages of attempts to distill out the idea from an amorphous concept, which the two words which by themselves cannot contain.

But everything that's worth saying has already been said. Despite being original, I discovered, to my surprise, that I'm not the first one to use "honorary guy". Well, rather than waste effort explaining how I feel, let me point you to this this cartoon (oh, the irony). But before I rain on my own parade, let me try to unload my mental baggage.

Being the new kid on the block isn't easy. Especially when you are entering an insular psuedo-meritocracy. And by psuedo-meritocracy, I mean that the pecking order is regulated by assumptions of your merit before you get to prove yourself. Somehow anybody testing such waters is likely to find it cold and assume a rather defensive toe-in first approach to exploring the community. And that makes for uncomfortable beginnings everywhere - and beginnings are such delicate times.

People who are thrown into such situations broadcast very strong vibes, which are there for any intelligent human to pick up easily. Perhaps this is my personal bias, but the strongest of those vibes is that of a girl entering a primarily male dominated community, feeling defensive and wary. The message sent is probably a very tentative "Hi, here I am", but due to an outgroup homogeneity bias, the message comes across as a self-entitled demand to adapt to the presence of the newcomer.

Being the nice guy that I am, I usually comply. The effects aren't pretty. Instead of being myself, I revert to some fallback stereotype male persona. This ranges from the shy guy, the shuffler or the patronizing alpha male. The first two finds me as a stoic blinker (oh, yeah ... smile at me) and those girls who are relieved to find me the latter are generally marginalized to footnotes in my eyes. And those who actually hate me for patronizing them actually fills me with sadness & hope at the same time.

And then there's the minority who do not broadcast these messages, the ones who are comfortable being themselves and in turn just "let me be", without ignoring me altogether. These are people I generally treasure as friends - men and women, both. These are people whose opinion I take for face value, for that's not driven by any facade I present to them. And due to a lack of vocabulary, I picked "honorary guy" to refer to women of this group.

But rather than stereotype these people into a new bracket, what the term "honorary guy" really does is to suspend judgement based on stereotypes I've accumulated over the years. Sort of short-circuit out the homogeneity biases and treat them like the individuals they are. I guess I need a better word.

And as for the rest of them, I'm just being as little of myself as I can. Shut up, shuffle or condescend - pick one. After all, you asked for it.

PS: Umm... Dorothea had mentioned it on her blog, last year. Same arguments, different conclusion ... .

posted at: 07:46 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, philosophy, observations

In one of my previous posts, I'd commented off-hand that the Indian F/OSS community doesn't have enough rockstars. But that by itself blossomed out into a rather heated debate on #linux-india, mainly because we never got to hear lawgon's wisdom on what actually is lacking in India. The debate was more tilted towards the effects of the so called "rockstars" than their origins, causes and well ... mating habits (Freud made me do it !).

But before you actually read this blog entry, I'd advise you to watch Kathy Sierra's talk from LCA '07. You can download it from here [101 Mb]. I'll be borrowing some of her terms and ideas because they talk about how people get involved and become passionate users.

Burn Through the Zone: Success is often a matter of persistance. Most people hit the "Why Bother" phase in the first few weeks of trying something new. But what keeps the persistant folks going is the knowledge of an attainable goal, a sort of beautiful picture of "what could be". The so-called "rockstar" of the community is on such a pedestal of achievement. Bereft of such an example, there will be hundreds who hit their first snag and quit - people who are capable, but don't see it worth their effort. Or maybe they just ran into the "I suck" zone, in Kathy Sierra's words (or well, pictures).

The rewards for being good at something have to be obvious and evident for people to try their best - therefore they work hard and succeed - which is a circular argument from the outside. After all only an idiot would set himself on a mission with no goal and idiots aren't our target audience here.

Emulation Mode: The biggest problem people have with this concept is that a rockstar lends hiself to emulation, producing fad-followers rather than future leaders. But the whole basis of human culture and learning has been mankind's ability to recognize a good thing when it sees it and of course, to imitate by whatever means available. You learn more by doing than seeing and the obvious way to gap that bridge is to attempt what the other idiot/genius is doing.

The right people will split out of pure emulation mode very quickly, as they realize their innate urge to do their own thing. And in any case, people who can follow in a clear (albeit beaten) path are still valuable to any community. I personally prefer them over the self-propelled idiots :)

"Coolness" factor: During the formative years of your life, for a large number of reasons, you do what's cool. The urge to stand out or blend in, as the need be, is something which primeval and probably the conflict of which is the essential misery of man. The effect of the rockstar (who by definiton is cool), is to add an aura of coolness to the act of contributing to something. But for some strange reason, coolness is unacheivable in a group of peers.

The rockstar himself is part of the coolness ying-yang as well. In the real world, without a suitable audience to shower admiration, the hacker has nothing to aspire to but some obscure achievement in a world of peers who would rather play down your work compared to theirs. I think jace had called it the Great Wall of 'So What ?' - where anything you did can be dismissed by these two magic words.

The hard part of being a rockstar is not to put up such walls when someone new comes into the community. Trivializing someone's work is hardly a great way to welcome someone into a group and can be perceived as an outright dismissal of someone's hard work. And indeed it does happen to every other developer, at some point or the other.

Honestly, half the "Because I can" people are into it because it's cool ;)

Beacons: In a community with an insanely large number of potential contributors, it is nearly idiotic to try to seperate the chaff from the grain by brute-force. A rockstar by this definition is an evangelist by action and a touch-point by reaction. A prominent figure outside his or her area of action attracts a lot of potential talent who can then be nudged towards potential mentors who have the time & talent, but not the visibility.

Such rockstars, who inspire/guide/find contributors are required for any community. They are the glue that holds together the gears that drive the community (oh, I kid ... I kid). They are like tiger in the jungle, their visibility & influence indirectly showcases the community - to those outside the community.

Communities grow anchored to such people - their visibility and the ease with which they can handle that is a valuable asset to the community. But it is possible to overdo it as well - you know the examples ...

posted at: 06:40 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, observations, foss, society

Some people are born managers, some others acquire that talent over the years and then there are those who have it thrust upon them. But everybody's still gotta manage, play the game with the hand they've been dealt with and not all of them will make good poker players. From my shuffled set of manager cards, let me therefore deal out a card which has been played so often that, it is pointless to attempt a bluff. But first, some setting and scenario - from the receiving end of the card.

Case of the Mondays: Imagine working in a team of ten odd people. For some strange reason your manager seems to insist on the entire team showing up at 9 'O clock sharp, just like factory workers everywhere - except without the benefit of a siren to warn them. Except there are two free-thinking hippies who still show up at work at 11, with bleary eyes as if they've been working all night long - and maybe they have. The first clue that the management (no, it is no longer in singular) is displeased comes from an email, similar to the following with appropriate padding.

From: manager@company
To: team-world-wide@ 
Subject: Punctuality and Official Timings

We as a company ... blah ... blah ... customer ... blah
time is money ... waste no time ... read this long mail 
... with care and precision ... key aspects ... morale
and motivation ... blah blah

Of late, it has been noticed that people ... you know who
you are ... yada yada ... engineers show up late ... as 
late as lunch ... must encourage team work ... on mondays

99 bugs on the product ... Take one for the team ... 
pass it all around ... make sacrifices for the team ... 
ask not what the team can do for you but, ...

So, please ensure sync ... and conf-calls with onsite ... 
by coming in time every day.

Thanking you,
Your Neighbourhood PHB

No Names: A politely worded mail, which in the manager's opinion conveys the essence of his complaint in clarity. But such mails accomplish two things. First it fails to totally point out who's wrong and who's not. This indicates to those in the wrong that the manager is non-confrontational and is more likely to snipe from afar than come out in a melee. And by not naming any names, the manager assumes that the people responsible will know and take action. But by denying personal criticism, they are blocking off the employee's response in advance. There is no way for the employees who have incurred the displeasure to broach this topic and explain in person - without appearing petty. They might have a very good reason for coming in late every day - a conf call at 10 PM every night for instance.

Authority Erosion: Secondly and more importantly, such a public announcement erodes into your authority and trust from the other employees. When they see your orders disobeyed with impunity (yes, when ... not if), you are literally letting your targets eat into your authority, while building their own pseudo-authority as a rebel - especially if they are still good at their job. To give an appropriate analogy, it is indeed hard to keep faith in this world, when certain people aren't instantaneously hit by lightning, even out of stormy skies. In short, it pisses off more people who keep to the lines, when you send such a mail which gets an unconscious "Yeah, but what can you do ?" response.

I call this manoeuvre the Group Therapist, where someone having run out of his power and authority, tries to turn the peer pressure screws and essentially try to shame people into obeying. And sometimes it works, mainly because people are sheep. Nothing bad happens if it works, but as mentioned above, problems get worse if it doesn't work - especially over a prolonged period.

Grapevine: But private direct criticism can still work as a deterrant for others. The office grapevine is strong and long enough to actually leak what was said in that sound proof conference room - and the weird thing about people is that they believe hearsay more than an official memo. Gossip in general giving no advantage to the producer other than the thrill of being "in the know", while official communiques aren't viewed with such pink-tinted glasses - Making the water cooler conversations more effective at communication than any office memo ever sent. Strange, but logical.

If you've read Migration Patterns of Codemonkeys or Performance Inversion, you'd already know that my my bitter well of cynicism holds no answers. But they present some facts, pose a couple of questions and the rest has been left as an exercise to the reader :)

posted at: 06:46 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, observations, philosophy

You've got to hand it to Steve Jobs. Moves he in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. I've ranked him as a master of mystery and hype for years, but never realizing what other depths of talent he might posses. I'm still digesting the lessons I learned off Machiavelli's classics (Art of War, lies at my desk, bookmark a few pages in), but it doesn't take a genius to marvel at the Machiavellian motions of this spin doctor.

Let's get our facts straight first. Steve Jobs is the CEO of one Apple "fruit company" Inc. His company makes and sells the iPod, which nearly monopolizes the digital audio player market. Now, in a very loose-laced attempt to follow the Gillette Razor Blade approach to customers, they have a nice little store which sells songs to any customer who might wish buy them.

Now, to curb piracy and pacify the rabid record industry watch-dogs (popularly known as the MAFIAA), Apple introduced a DRM solution named FairPlay. The system works and is lenient enough to keep people from breaking it accidentally, which lets the average joe ignore the fact that it exists. The iTunes Music Store however, has protections clauses in its contracts with the recording industry, which render the contract null & void if the DRM is broken and Apple can't fix it within a specified period (a fortnight).

So, as of date, iTMS cannot sell songs which would play on one of my MP3 players. Nor, can they relicense their FairPlay codecs to other vendors - because they are liable for all disclosures - accidental or not. So let us sprinkle some iMagic sparkles and see what happens.

The Pledge: Steve Jobs goes out there and proclaims - I wish for a world without DRM - really, that's what most reports about his open letter convey. Now, why would a man who has benifited the most from the status quo advocate such a step which might break his own monopoly ? The cynic in me, suggests - because he could profit more and in the short term, too. But selling un-DRM'd songs to users of other mp3 players doesn't look like something worth risking your credibility, like this - especially not when the iPod is the king.

The Turn: The Music Industry will NOT say yes. Warner music has already said that Mr Jobs' proposal is "without logic and merit". It would be idiotic of His Steveness to assume the industry would suddenly develop a conscience overnight. But they too want iTunes to sell more songs, even to people who don't have iPods - as it turns out this thought was spelled out in the open letter - because that's what Steve really wants too. Mysteriously, suddenly all the executives smell money in the air and they want it !

The Prestige: The open letter details another alternative - licensing FairPlay to current and future competitors, which isn't technically impossible but rendered practically impossible due to the protection clauses in the contracts with the music publishers. Having led their greed to this obvious alternative, when they suggest it (as their choice) I suspect Apple is about to ask them to rewrite that bit of the contract.

If Steve Jobs had asked the MAFIAA to reconsider their contracts in January, they'd have definitely smiled (like the smile that follows seals and has a fin attached) and asked for a cut off every iPod sold. But February is much warmer for Apple - where they are in a win-win situation. If the industry doesn't let Apple go drm-less (a near impossibility, that) - Apple come crying back to us, "They never let us have any fun !". If they rewrite the contract, letting Apple hawk their DRM, more money for Steve - oh, much much much more money than the extra DRM-free iTMS purchases would fetch. And just in case, they manage to go DRM-free, they'll have a new crowd knocking at their door - not to mention all the kudos for fighting those evil corporations for our rights.

All those options are good for Apple - but for anybody who buys from iTMS, only the last option is any good - Apple: 3, you: 1. But you've got to appreciate style, precision and direction of this so called "attack on DRM". After all, a best defence is a good offence.

Some lesson in negotiation that, woohoo. *But* - if it was that transparent to me - could it still work with RIAA ?

posted at: 06:46 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, apple, observations

Very little is known about the Life and Mating Habits of the common Code Monkey. But that should come as no surprise to anyone who has observed a specimen in the cubicles of Asia. But observations from cubesville have often been indicative of a certain flux in the population - a trend to migrate over longer distances. Unlike the famed lemming of the north artic tundra, which takes a downhill (to say the least) approach, this migration is more often in search for higher ground. Is there some herd mentality to it or is it merely an individual moving on ? Join me, as we dig deeper into the mysterious world of the code monkey.

Of late, I've been feeling the urge to leave Yahoo! and go do something else. I couldn't explain exactly why, because I probably have the best job imaginable - work on what I want, from wherever I want, a couple of meetings a month and play pool all afternoon. But the urge was still as strong as ever. It needed a rational explanation and I started to itemize and categorize the possible reasons as objectively as I could. A couple of recent discussions on slashdot and india-gii have added fuel to that fire and then I read this.

Career Phases: In general, the company you work for is really really important for your first couple of jobs. It should come as no surprise that junior engineers want to work with a strong brand. This sets them up to move onto be senior engineers in places which pay better. Experienced engineers are not too desperate to seek out things which look good on their resumes - they're interested in other aspects of the job than how good it will look on their resume in a couple of years.

There's a flip side to the career phases argument too. If you've read the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, you might remember a class of wizards known as the Sourcerors. Now that nearly all magical spells have been formed out of the raw magic, the discworld needs no more sourcerors.

Now, software companies are like miniature discworlds. There is a phase in the company's life cycle (it is a cycle, it repeats) when the ground is fertile for new ideas. And this age of miracles, attracts the brilliant miracle worker who can shape reality around such ideas. But such proto-geniuses have little to do in the adolescence of the company. As the work force muscle builds up, the concept of a superstar engineer dies and slowly but surely, the emphasis shifts to overall throughput of a team than individual brilliance. When a manager (and his team) can outperform any individual engineer at the same task, the company needs the best managers they can get, rather than a couple more brilliant code monkeys.

People outgrow companies and vice versa.

Wages: Money is like air. A little bit more doesn't do much when you have enough, but you'll know it when you are running short. But there does exist a certain stress level beyond which people do not think it is worth their pay to work - but a large percentage of salaried workers never approach that limit. That is where an interesting economic hypothesis pops up - Efficiency wage hypothesis. Even when you get paid enough, merely the fact that you are paid does not induce any sort of gratitude or loyalty towards your employer - it is money in return for services rendered. But as the shirking model in the theory indicates, often you do get what you pay for.

Pay hikes are often nominal and are significant only when you are promoted. Meanwhile people being freshly hired are being hired at pay scales more in terms with the market demands. Over a period of two or three years, the difference between your hiked pay and your peers being freshly hired climbs to a significant value to prompt you to get back to level. Most companies to refuse to raise the pay of a long standing employee to the levels of a freshly hired of similar level, giving various excuses - the most general of which go - who told you that ? That's not true. And in this world of salary confidentiality, rather than counter that argument, you'd probably try to get a better pay package elsewhere - and you probably will.

Raises don't match lateral entry pay packages.

Vertical Space: Most indian companies don't have a good technical ladder. In an industry where company half lives are measured in years, waiting around for those above to retire is hardly any option. Generally the way to climb the ladder is to move somewhere where you're closer to the top and work towards building the rest of the ladder downwards. In other words, the easiest way to get promoted is to be somewhere small and grow along with it - after all companies don't need to be promoted (*sic*) to grow. But some are unfortunate enough to end up pushed down as the management brings in fresh talent to supplement the growth. This is somewhat in line with the career phases argument where fast growth, high risk approaches are suitable after the initial few years of establishing a brand pedigree.

Last one out is a...: Community is a usually disregarded factor when considering job hopping. But the web of friends can outweigh some of the advantages a job hop might bring. More important would be your relationship with your direct boss. Having to work under a new person and develop the same rapport takes quite some effort and the average asocial code monkey dreads the thought of having to go through that *again*. On the other hand, this explains how much more precious a manager can be, because when he leaves he disturbs the general inertia of his direct reportees.

The moment the community at work starts breaking up, be it due to overwork or attrition, the downsides of leaving start to diminish. Eventually, you'll be able to point out a single departure which snowballed into a mass attrition throughout the company - even if everyone went in their own directions. At some point, a $n people can't be wrong correlation turns into a causation going into a spiral of departures.

Attrition turns into super-attrition when a strong community breaks up.

I've sort of started to understand why people need to switch jobs, about every couple of years - not out of greed or disloyalty - but as suggested by pure common sense. But a closer inspection of the scenario does indeed suggest that status quo is an assumption - a valid assumption for vast majority. That could change, I suppose (or rather, hope).

There's a corollary to all these observations, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

posted at: 14:21 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, observations, philosophy

Jargon is the refuge of the elitist, but I will stoop to it - to hide behind a word, my ideas. Performance Inversion is that dark fate that awaits a "Can Do" person in the hands of an unscrupulous [1] taskmaster. Something dark and deadly which destroys your work ethic and pushes you ever closer to a burn out, while still under-utilizing your real talents. In relatively mild quantities, the problem solves itself, thanks to that great human ability to forget. But for some more unfortunate souls, it throws them into a bottomless pit of effort, in a spiral of work and more work.

Performance: You are stepping into an existing team, filling someone else's boots. Invariably, your first few weeks will be typical bootcamp. You are pushed to deliver and most of us, do deliver in that initial phase putting in extra effort in return for the manager's confidence. But having gained the confidence and trust, the work cycle settles down into a more sustainable load, by mutual consent from both parties.

Distribution: Not everybody in the team works at the same levels of productivity. There are a few who have bursts of extreme results, while some of the more settled folks deliver a constant, steady stream of work. Most managers would like a decent mixture, so they have enough afterburner fuel in the former while the latter keeps chugging. Work comes in and the work load sort of averages out for everyone, a few extra bits given & taken, in general everyone ending up with their fair share - no more, no less.

"Can Do" XPloited: The former category of "in reserve" people are those who are more commonly known as "Can Do" people. Nobody sane (or at least has heard of "Mythical Man Month") will dare to plan for these people to work at full throttle. But a few still break this cardinal principle to keep the wolf off the door, for a few months more. After all, what good are developer resources, if not for working.

'Tis an act of betrayal, worthy of Macbeth and more. But unlike the lady of the play, the blood seems to wash right off the hands - maybe she should've tried the sweat and tears of engineers, instead of perfumes from arabia. Anyway, if someone had yelled out "abort mission!" at that point, I'd shake them by the hand and buy them lunch. For otherwise they have to be eternal optimists who never learn (incompetent) or of the feudal weasel family, whose concern for the serfs is legendary - either way, let them expense lunch.

Blame Spread Thick: Having been told to do the impossible, the developer has a faint idea that he/she is going to be pushed to the very limits of his/her ability. In some sense, the "Can Do" people enjoy that experience. But then something goes wrong, some dependency fails to deliver, the whole plan's a pile of toilet paper as far as the project's concerned. And a landslide of backlogs land on the developer's shoulder and the difficult task becomes mission impossible (where work should've been a walk in the park instead). To compound insult to injury, he/she is called in by senior management to explain the delays. Watching the man responsible for the mess (in your opinion) sit on the other side of the table with a reproachful look, doubting your commitment, is too much for anyone with a straight backbone to bear.

Character Shows: But you still eat crow, swallow the remnants of your self-respect and buckle down. You work insane hours, on weekends, skip meals, eat junk food and work work work. By an amazing coincidence, you manage to drag the entire module back on schedule, mainly by doing the dependencies yourself and doing QA's job when you're done coding. Having got your workload to a manageable level, you wait for the release, the associated kudos and a general pat in the back.

Inversion: And when you think it can't get any worse, it does. So the boss shows up at your cube, and says "Ummm,yeah ... $_nameless_ is quite behind schedule. You're the only one ahead of your tasks, so I'm moving a bit of work off to you". Not only are you not getting credit for finishing your work, but you are getting more work just because you keep doing it. All this while, $_nameless_ has been shirking work, lazing about in the food court and generally enjoying life. So, faced with the basic injustice of the situation and remembering the last lecture about "communication", you walk back up to your boss's office and enunciate - "No, I'm not doing that". Boss takes offense to your "Not my job" reply and lectures for half-hour on team work and "one for all, all for one" philosophy.

Final Straw: For an external observer (such as middle management), in a matter of months, you've gone from being a "Can Do" whiz kid to becoming a whiner who says "No" to work. They just can't comprehend why or how of the scenario and decide to take strong steps to discourage this behavior. In response to your glowing achievements on your self appraisal, they write out a "negative attitude to work" and give you an average hike. Your complaints to HR fall on deaf ears, used to listening to employees bitching about pay, quote salary parity to ignore you. Of course, the boss probably got a good hike for managing with (*sic*) employees like you. The inversion discontent spiral is now complete.

In a few short steps, one person has gone from being an excellent employee to someone who's polishing up their resumes. But the really sad part is that as long as the real offender is not punished, this developer is only one among a long line of people whose work ethic will be destroyed totally by mismanagement. There are a few other branches and variants to the above scenario, some worse, some better, but they all end up in the same gutter anyway.

All this only goes on to prove why I think of management as a dark art of sorts. It requires a lot of finesse and panache to pull it off, rather than mere authority behind you. You can't convert any average joe from a tech lead into a manager, at least not into a good one. There is a certain Je ne sais quoi which sets apart the good ones from the average ones. So if you have a good manager, you don't know what you're missing

And for the record - I only observe, I don't interfere.

[1] - Hanlon's Razor:
                Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

posted at: 17:42 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, life, work

One of the rarest of the rare species that inhabit cubicles is that creature of myth and legend - the Team Player. Often naturalists hiding behind indoor plants near the watering holes of employees claim to have encountered the creature in the wild. But they are probably mistaken or lying, because it is widely accepted that no fossil evidence has been found past the piled carcasses of the Y2K mass extinction event. Ever since the job atmosphere has lost its ozone layer of job security, most of these magnificient creatures have succumbed to cancerous career growths or perished in hibernation between jobs.

Jokes aside, I'm here to debunk the myth of the team player. To study and expose the nature, being, migration patterns and if time permits, the mating habits of the common team player which is endemic to air conditioned cubicles of software companies.

For a borrowed concept from professional sports, the team player label has undergone a sea change before it has been used to describe a software engineer. Rather than deride the noble concept, which embiggens the smallest man, the target is the namesake euphemism which has replaced it in corporate vocabulary.

Managing a software project is no walk in the park and if Mythical Man Month is any indication, is often contrary to conventional wisdom. Essentially, most of the problems stem from one single assumption - that software is an industrial product. Building software is unlike any other industrial process and is more of a research & development activity than an assembly line of coders assembling components. Allowances have to be made for dead end attempts, work done to maintain status quo (aka Backward Compat), regressions and other anomalies.

Programmers, by definition, are only human. And humans have good days, off days and then those days when it doesn't pay to get out of bed. The productivity of a programmer is bursty and unpredictable. But predicting that is exactly what all the money in management is all about - creating schedules, timelines, plans and bullet points. And they'd rather have their task made easier.

So it is obvious that a steady, yet low, throughput would be considered more suitable to the management principles adopted from the industrial revolution, rather than the odd week of lucidity separated by a fortnight of stupor. The brilliant programmer who works in bursts falls out of favour, while the predictable programmer is pushed forward. The moral of the Tortoise and the Hare is vindicated in this modern race, where the hare is caught napping, though the jury is still out on whether 'twas the management's inaction which let the hare sleep.

The team player has come to be a euphemism for such a slow and steady worker - predictable and absolutely devoid of hidden reserves & surprises. Someone who would rather move with the team rather than run ahead and look back at others. To make no exceptions and just keep on working, despite lack of motivation or support from above is the clinching quality of the newly defined team player.

To put it more bluntly, being a team player (in context) is not for the benefit of the team of peers, but functions primarily as yet another variable removed from the game of uncertainity that is management. The ease of control is why this group is encouraged to form and survive, even re-evolve in new circumstances. By whom ? Take a guess. And where the species is missing, others are dressed up in the robes of team play-dom, under the flag with the device SCRUM.

The moment the system favours such team-players over strong contributors, the team will quickly lose its edge and motivation. The balance has to be maintained to ensure that the average output of the whole group exceeds the sum of the parts.

Finally, all the above discussions treat team players from the cynical point of view. But just because you are not a team player in the eyes of your management does not make you not-a-team-player in the eyes of your peers. As long as you can have fun, while working with them, help those who struggle and in general, not let your ego rule your decisions, you'll be one of the team - truly.

Otherwise, you're just a team player.

posted at: 01:46 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, life, work

It has always been Us vs Them, only the definitions of either group have varied for mankind. The fact that we are "We" isn't due to "Me", it has always been because of "Them". The phenomena is not restricted to the world outside, but into the air conditioned world of the software industry. Rather than just poke the sordid underbelly of my chosen profession, I wanted to understand how exactly this came to be.

The polarization evolves from a geographical split. An indian wing of a US MNC or an offshore ODC of one could serve as a sufficient model. The cultural and timezone differences aside, the system functions smoothly when the wing is small, yet doing really important things. But somewhere during the latter phase of its growth, things start to go wrong. Work that could have been done by "Us" (yes, it begins...) is kept for "Them", even though they are understaffed or overworked. Suddenly a log jam starts to appear in the smooth flow and you can literally feel the disparity in treatment.

The problem has its roots in communication. While the communication channels remain person to person, as is common with a small outpost of a company elsewhere, the problems, if any, remain purely personal and has none of the communal hatred of the Us vs Them. Then arrives the manager who, for lack of other tasks, takes up the job of communication. Well intentioned maybe, but the moment an engineer has to send a mail to a manager who has to communicate it elsewhere, the seeds of disparity are sown. Information shouldn't need to go up levels to traverse teams. Hierarchies get in the way of information and the barriers start to rise as growth pushes the pyramid upwards.

But there are some managers who seem to have avoided this problem by being so transparent that they seem to be hardly there. My career so far has been short and uneventful (mostly), but it has been my pleasure to work with two individuals who, in my opinion, have discovered the zen of management. To be completely frank with their reportees and extremely diplomatic with their superiors is how they function. Compared to the fold like umbrellas attitudes others have shown towards authority, I have found the other strategy to be better at motivating me. Transparency means that you know why you have to work harder and what's on the line here. Consequences of a boss's displeasure isn't enough to make me work hard, but a real failure of the project is.

But back to the original problem, beyond communication and onto competition. The moment a manager starts collating his bug reports and TPS sheets, it becomes a game of numbers. Now, if you haven't read How to lie with statistics, you should. So some team will have done a bit more or a bit less and the obvious comparisons between the two teams will be made. Unwanted parallels drawn to the disadvantage of the team lagging behind. Once this has been dragged out into the open by somebody, it becomes an open contest for next year.

Competition works. Margaret Thatcher was a great fan of the concept. But a software firm is more of a non-zero sum game than the free market, especially since the customer (who wins) isn't playing the game at all. Like the old game of prisoner's dilemma, the teams draw up their perceived benefits of co-operation or defection (more accurately, delaying or denying help). But as the game suggests, it should easily fall into a cycle of co-operation, if communication was open and clear.

That is where the next tragedy of the software industry comes in. Attrition rates and job hopping essentially means that the shadow of the future is rather short. For the average employee, he'll not be here to play the next round. So as in the one-off version of the game, his obvious choice is to always defect.

In this race to be the one first up with a product, to make the most money, to get the most kudos for their product, a silo of thinking develops. People start reinventing the wheels merely because the other team doing the same thing elsewhere is not co-operating (also because they stand to lose a chunk of the credit). Time and money wasted. Important products slip merely because a manager doesn't want to ask for help.

The lack of communication explodes into a cycle of non-productivity and credit grabbing which are short term benefits paid for by somebody else in the long term. But in reality, you merely end up paying for somebody else's mistakes of the past and merely passing on new burdens to your successors. Unburdened by any past sins, the first generation which indulges in these seem to come out winning.

What could have been a peaceful working environment is now wracked by underground politics which cuts through the basic helplines of the employees - other employees. The command structures demand no creativity, a task which is solidly obeyed in levels below ("the easiest thing to do is to never have good ideas"). Thus a hierarchy has divided and ruled for its own benefit and paved way for its ultimate downfall, merely by replacing the individual with a collective Us in constant conflict with Them ("We'd always been at war with Eurasia").

I've seen the disease and I haven't found a cure yet. Prevention yes, but a cure no.

posted at: 04:01 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, philosophy

I hate being the bad cop. For all that cliched formula attached to this particular idea of Good Cop, Bad Cop the sad fact is that it really works. The very idea that a person would often agree to a moderate in the presence of an extremist picking the seemingly lesser evil.

Sometimes to do what's good, you have to make others hate you.

posted at: 20:46 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, observations, philosophy

A long long time ago, one of my classmates happened to read one of my blog entries about taxation. He commented that my English has come a long way but I should under no circumstances write about economics or money. But recently I've started to watch the US stock market, more out of curiosity than actual expectations of profit.

Since I'm neither an investor nor a trader there, unlike most ticker watchers, I was interested in watching the ebb and flow of the stock prices rather than scramble to buy or sell. Considering the (rise and) fall of the petro dollars ever since the new millennium dawned, the dollar value is merely a transactional discrepancy for an outsider. Gold is rather more stable to compare against, especially considering the unique situation India is in terms of gold demand and consumption.

The frontrunner of the Web 2.0 stocks has been Google's IPO. The stock which was priced (possibly overvalued) at 300+ USD was and still is riding on the investor confidence thanks to the recent products (albeit Beta) which have come out of the Google stable. Then, suddenly Google insiders decide to get a little cash out of the market and into their pockets. The sell was more massive than all the other 199 companies put together and basically was a shot in the arm for California's treasury in tax dollars. It could be said that the sales wouldn't affect the economy as the money never really left the market but merely got converted into scrips. But the more important question to ask is whether this is a precursor to something more dramatic (always a good idea to watch CFOs selling stocks).

On the other hand, we see another trend marked up against Gold versus the stock market. Technically speaking, the stock market should be ahead of the curve on Gold in the growth sector mainly because of the risk involved (which should be compensated by increased returns and vice versa). But very recently, that has stopped being true for GOOG stock. This is probably more a reflection of the falling value of the dollar rather than the intrinsic value of the stock in particular but the trend in itself is disturbing.

I' m not the smartest dude in the world, but even I would be hedging my bets in tech stocks if I held a few million of these. So it is probable that these two events are related in some way, but to speculate whether one event was in anticipation of another would be completely irresponsible. In fact, if I were a Wall Street mogul I'd be convincing you to buy while I sold off all of mine slowly (just like the old times in '99).

In conclusion, something's cooking.

** disclaimer ** : these are very much my own opinions and I am a code monkey @ Yahoo!, so if you do something stupid based on these, Y'all can go to this excellent village ["Yee Haw !"] that's missing its idiot.

posted at: 00:31 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, stocks

This one's for all the times I saw an eskimo on a sled with the banner North Pole or Bust in Miami. Actually that was just a cartoon - but that's the point. Ever wonder why it's funny ? Actually I have a pageful below that will do nothing explain it. But I think you'll understand why I hold back no smiles. This is actually a page from my life, carefully bookmarked (disclaimer: some names changed for more hilarity).

The problem with opportunities is that when they do knock, they're likely to press alarm bells rather than door bells. As articulated so clearly by Wally - there are no problems, only issues, challenges and opportunities. So, what does that have to do with my life ? Well, I was the neighborhood Wally when I used to work in Initech.

I used to show up at work a bit after nine. Yes, 9 AM and that's late by Initech standards. I'd walk upto to my desk with a cup of coffee as if I just nipped downstairs for a coffee. I never carried a bag and hardly ever an umbrella. I'd imagine somebody would be hard pressed to figure out whether I just walked in to work or whether I'm relaxing after my early morning bit of work. My job involved taking a mobile phone, flashing the latest build and literally key mash my way into the bugzilla records. I was a QE and they were wasting a really quality engineer by making him poke a few buttons. The managers knew it, but were really powerless to pull in a kid out of college into writing embedded software (*oooh*).

So the problems started in the April of 2004, when 25-odd people from the 34 member development team gave in their resignations. What I was doing at the moment was having an argument with my technical manager about my leave, without knowing about all the hush hush resignations. I basically had put in more than a month's salary into my round-trip (non-refundable) plane tickets to Trivandrum and wouldn't stand to any level of bullying about the leave which I'd applied for two months ago. So I left office to spend an enjoyable week at home.

I returned to a chaotic office. Almost every good developer in the team is on notice. At that point hardly anyone cares about the project to waste their time on it. Here's where the management decisions kick in with true force :- We need to hire more people. Since they've already sold the IP for the project, management is now being paid for time rather than code output - there's no motivation to hire excellent developers. Solution, throw the bunch of freshers who've been sitting around on to the code. The more time they take to do things, the more money the account pays. And I was one among them.

That, my friends, is how I became a developer in profession. The loss of a significant amount of technical talent in one place, means a significant opportunity to people sitting in the benches elsewhere. That might sound too simplified, but there are two unspoken assumptions. The new guys on the bench have to be really good and the management has to have enough confidence in them (or shouldn't care which way) to throw these kids at the hardcore work. On a normal day, that'd be a big risk - but during these few desperate hours, this could be the last gambit.

It might just be my big empty head, but I keep hearing echoes.

posted at: 08:46 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public, life, work

Humans didn't live in cities till a few generations ago. And it shows. We still behave in some very primitive subconscious ways which show our ancestry as hunter-gatherers in a jungle. I suggest you take a closer look at two different (for the record, wholly imaginary) people walking through a mall. One is a mid twenties guy in jeans and a t-shirt which says Look the other way. The other one is a early twenties girl with two friends. They walk down the shop floor extremely confidently but very differently.

Hunter & Gatherer: Who'd be hunting for clothes and who's be gathering ? Even a casual observer will not have any problem finding an answer for that question - which is left as an exercise to the reader. The traits are almost painfully obvious on second thought.

Rather than head off into a discussion of how/why this evolved and end up pissing off half the human race (by intention or accident), I'll just go ahead into the subject.

Threat, Opportunity and Other stuff: That is exactly how an ideal hunter would see the world. You'd want as few distractions as possible. Gather enough information to remove one more variable of the landscape from your conscious thought system. It is either a threat or an opportunity - anything else can be ignored. Of course, when there's a mammoth thundering towards you, you can hardly be bothered by how beautiful the sunrise is.

Since humans were never intended to be carnivores and lack any real professional equipment for the job, we can't completely remove the imagination and creativity from the hunter either. A complete lack of imagination would spell disaster for a creature which would be helpless without crafted tools and co-operation.

The Hunter was not just a way of life, it was a state of mind too. There's still a bit of Hunter in each one of us. It revels in the chase rather than the result, where as the gatherer prefers to accumulate rather than capture. We are both, but we are neither truly.

For, thus the book of Genes read - ' Call me not the hunter or the gatherer. Call me a survivor'.

posted at: 12:44 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public

We've always seen them around. We've also at some level or other accepted and acknowledged them. I'm not talking about the BMW in the garage (bought by daddy dearest) or the bachelor pad full of dim lights & candles. I am talking about some very muted down social signals I've run into over the course of my academic and professional life. These are signals which reflect the granularity of the social grade structure which we all unconsciously are trained to perceive and act accordingly.

Before I dig into my bag of stories, let us look at local social badges. Fair skin is one on the top of my list. In a historical context, it meant that the person was not forced to move around in sunlight and implied a protected life style commonly associated with the rich (always been rich). A prison pallor which is considered unhealthy in some other places would be a glowing social symbol somewhere else. In short, the badges I'm talking about have no significant value in the present context other than what it has been provided by the group.

Tag, you're IT: Anybody who visits an Indian software company (as in a true blue services company) should take a few moments and take a good long look at the identity cards carried around in office. Usually companies have different coloured badges for different graded employees, that is quite normal. Those are signals of a real organizational structure - but look closer. There will be a small group in the crowd who'd be carrying their company ID cards with a customer tag - one that distinguishes them as people who've been onsite and back. This is meant to convey - I'm an important man for my project and I've been abroad . This is a social badge which had nothing to do with the company organization and is purely a product of the office community. The perceived social status of someone who has been onsite completely vanishes when the group is no longer an exclusive elite.

And all I got was: That was probably a bad example, but here's a better one. Anyone who has visited a recurring conference has seen this one. People show up with souvenirs from the the previous events. I've seen people around FOSS.in this year wearing the first Linux Bangalore t-shirt and a larger number wearing the 2004 t-shirt. At Linux.Conf.au I saw a crowd in the old green t-shirts and the red ones too. After resetting my natural ignore switch, these seem to ask the unspoken question - I've been around for a while, what about you ?

Bower Bird Approach: The same scenario shows up when everyone's pushed into a nearly identical cubicle somewhere. Cubicle decorations are another one of the interesting social badges found in the software industry. For some, his/her workplace is a second home - you end up decorating it to be yours. There is a sort of permanence about a cube with half your house moved in that appeals to the ones who have just joined. The elements of decoration might also move towards advertisement - full of free or branded things from the company. I'm not talking about showing off your Employee of the Month rock or I mad a Difference (*heh*) coffee mug. I am talking about pinning up the conference badge from the last one you went, sticking on that chest sticker from the last marathon you ran and of course, the poster that you couldn't find room for in your bedroom. All these say to the guy who walked past that I've been there, done that and still have the poster.

These badges communicate in ways words can't. They are powerful because they can't be denied, they can only be outdone by others. And just because I understand what is happening does not exclude me from participation. So if you see me wearing a t-shirt with New Zealand on it and lugging a LCA laptop bag - just smile.

posted at: 09:44 | path: /observations | permalink | Tags: public