Two years back, this time around… I’d just resigned from my previous employer at pune.  I was packing up stuff to leave for Bangalore and join my new workplace.  4th September, 2006 would still be remembered as one of the most dreaded days in my life.

When I had time to take a coffee break, I had this sudden flash of thougths that ran across my mind and hence this post…

Till May 16th of this year, till I landed in Turin, Italy, I had nothing on my track record to prove that I was a useful, as the corporation calls it, “resource“.  Since then, Life has come around so fast and so full that as I gave more thougt into the whole sequence of events, it did seem not only gratifying… It also felt extremely complete… the whole scenario connected!

I actually got a pay raise! and transitioned as a Senior Engineer in the organization! Special credits to my Manager for making this happen!!!



I got into a high-priority team at work! Apart that being a huge incident in itself, I also realised that I’ve not lost a lot of symbian in the last 2 years of not coding on symbian! I’m not the sharpest… but I’m still sharp… Probably the late night coding sessions with @daaku paid off finally! :D

That apart, the team I work with has so much of electricity (OK, I am not accepting any lame jokes on this pun) in it that work becomes a breeze… I’ve started falling in love with code once again… Irrespective of how painful it is to take a crashlog, figure out one bug among about a million or so lines of code that my team uses, fix it, ensure that it doesnt get repeated on other components that might use the code, et. al. et. al.

As I was writing the previous paragraph, I was reminded of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at a Call Center.  In the book, when God speaks to the people stranded in the Qualis at the bottom of the pit, he mentions to the main narrative Syham that a Bad Manager is the root cause of all evil :) .  And God also tells Shyam and Vroom about getting a bonus in the process of setting things right!

That just happend with me! The very same damn thing happened with me :D !!!!!!  I’m sure more than half the industry is ruined by people like Subash Bakshi!  My first year and a half at work was totally ruined by horrible managers!!!

Well, turning back, it was overall a bumpy ride… some really big potholes hidden under water, getting caught unawares many times, and at the end of the day, coming out of it all…

Life has come a full circle for me and I must thank you all for putting up with me for whatever I’m worth!

P. S.: I love twitter!!!!

Catchup with life post…  Lotsa things… quick entries on all those!!!

Lots of things in the last 2 months… the most nerve wrecking thing being the loss of my mom… :( Something that none of us have been able to come out of…  It so happens that when someone shares a relationship with you thats deeper than being a friend, and suddenly, that person gets sucked out… the void is too hard to handle… neways life moves on… and so do have us…

The next topic of the post: the ever lovely and awesome BCB a.k.a. BarCampBangalore is back!!!  BCB-6 summer edition is happening on april 19th and 20th… The venue is IIM-Bangalore… Be there!!! I’ll be running around fixing up wifi for you peeps… Tats for sure…



The next most important topic of the post: Moto-dead… I’ve spoken about this for a very long time… And mentioned in my blog a couple of times too… This was bound to happen… Motorola Handsets Division being royally kicked out of the Motorola stable… atleast that’s how I choose to see it…

You cant be a blood-sucking leech in this age… you have to contribute or else you cease to exist.  I’d go by Motorola’s top brass’ move to do this… but it could have completely been averted.  They didn’t have to screw up. And screw up with so much perfection that nothing can correct it ever again…

Motorola is perhaps the only company thats been practising the jack of all trades in the mobile segment for quite a while. And guess what! It BACKFIRED!!! What else would you expect??? I may not be Trump but I can see through the lining to say that in today’s age where competing takes balls of steel, you had better not be playing around on the highway!!! You’d definitely get run over!!! Many a time..

And I’d say this with a lot of sadness that a Mobile giant simply went ahead and committed suicide!!! RIP Moto!!! The Razr was an awesome show… nothing else after that… Not one single mobile after that was even worth picking up and holding in my hands…

Coming to the next important topic, my conversation has actually changed places… Keeping in touch with poeple on twitter has become the in thing and the easiest thing in life now… A conversation, although asynchronous, is definitely conversation worth it when the whole discussion is available anywhere and althemore better when the participatory limits dont exist!

Twitter just takes chit-chat to the next level… The erstwhile Yahoo chat rooms concept with a bling from technology… converse from anywhere… anyhow…  Follow me on twitter to know more…

And there ends my hiatus…  Chao…

Disclaimer: This is a rock-solid rant!!! Read on…

The Situation:

We had to give our client an interim delivery on the project we were working on. A phase that involved testing third party code to ensure it was “without defects” so that we would be able to integrate it into our mainstream systems in the coming phases. And guess what… I was completely wrong about the “without defects” part of the previous statement.

Not only was the application badly written, but the third-party team changed the requirements doc without informing us. And to top it all, their build that was delivered to us did’nt contain a properly filled up “Known Issues” document! And my client intends to make it to the market before spring!!!

The Rant:

This is a case of really bad coordination and mismanagement. When there are three entirely different teams working out of 3 geographically different locations, it is IMPERATIVE that everyone is on the same page! Why on earth do we have E-Mail??? Why on earth do we have VOIP??? Why on earth do we have Phones???

If it is still badly coordinated, it boils down to only one thing: “The organization that wants to sell that code doesnt care about the customer!“  When you have something that you intend to sell, the first and foremost expectation should not be to make money!  It is to give something valuable in order to get the money you intend to earn!

And in this project that I’ve been working on, there have been some things that I’ve definitely been shocked to observe.  And I’d take them as stepping stones in handling things in my life here on…

  1. You cannot work for just money!  You have to work because you love it.  Working just for money kills the output.  And you will get your money, but someone else will suffer.  And it will boomerang back to you!  Sometime later… But, definitely!
  2. Realise that someday, you may have to eat your own cake!  That you made for money!
  3. Please take pride in your work!  Life IS full of shit! Nevertheless…
  4. When you make something for your customer, make it with a sense of respect.  It’s called duty.  Not JOB!
  5. People want to pay!  Believe me! People want to pay.  But they also want something of more worth than the money that leaves their pockets.
  6. The best guys in the market thrive because they give the customers an experience! Not a commodity! And there lies everything about money.
  7. A customer would shell out a lifetime worth of savings to have an experience. Steve jobs gave people an experience with the iPhone! Nokia gave people experiences with the N-Series! Sony Ericsson gave people experiences with their Walkman phones!  People love experiences.  People cannot love a product.  It is an inanimate piece of sh**!!!

Now, coming back to the crux of my post, organizations become market leaders with the right perspective of a customer experience in mind.  And then, where does it go???  A lot of companies strive to push the envelope in providing a better and a more fruitful experience…  And a lot more dont!!!  They just start looking at the big bucks!  No more quality, no more happy customers.

And their organization is now thriving just on old relationships in business, and on scale that they have as a market leader.  But for how long? When people that are part of the organization fail to attach themselves to it, and they just do their “JOB“, we’re in for a landslide into the abyss…

Wake up big guys, wake up!!!!

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