Idiots Den

2008-01-29T14:13:00.000-08:00

Bin-Laden Vs Mother Theresa

Day before yesterday, i got into an argument with one of my friends regarding “Selfishness” and “unselfishness”. The whole thing started off as a joke, as my friend being a woman said that men are selfish. Once the debate got serious i ended up asking my favourite question in this topic “Is mother Theresa selfish or unselfish”. As i expected she said Theresa is unselfish. I do not believe in it. My argument is that every one is selfish. We all do/want to do things that makes us happy. While we are doing that we might make others happy or sad, help people etc.., that does not matter. May be Theresa's parents did not want her to become nun (I am just guessing don't hold my throat), she did what made her happy. I will quote one instance (of course borrowed from history), Pope wanted Theresa to ride in a car, may be he really wanted her to ride in that car. She could have taken one ride in it, couldn't she? No, selfishly she declared that she would do with the car what she wanted to do with the car which was to sell it. Anyways as every argument ends we agreed to disagree and parted our ways.

Next day i started thinking about it and some how felt will this whole thing make Bin-Laden (The most hated Man) unselfish. According to him he is working for Islam and people who follow that religion. With the kind of Oil money Bin Laden has, he could have chosen to sit happily in a palace in SA with tons of woman around him(polygamy being legal in ISLAM) but instead he chose to be what he is. I am sure lot of you will say he is taking life's while Theresa was saving (per say). All said and done, below are some of the commonalities between them.

“RELIGION”, I seriously believe, with all Theresa did for people in trouble and stuff, motto was to sell Christianity. Theresa invested time, bin laden invests time and his own money. Obviously both of them spent most of their life doing what they believed in doing.(I am sure bin laden is not looking for any other job) Rest is for you guys to think and yell at me.

Comments are welcome... I am the almighty, i moderate comments on my blog(hahahaha). Feel free to wish me hell, before you do at least understand the Intent. I am neither undermining what Theresa did nor glorifying what bin laden does. I hate bin laden too, other than the obvious reasons, because of him Bush spent all my TAX money on WAR.

K

2007-09-23T23:59:00.000-07:00

Visit to God in Melbourne

Finally after lot of convincing from my wife that i have committed enough sins, which requires a visit to temple, we ended up going to ISKCON which is very close to our house. Below are some of the observations from that visit:

As we entered i saw that there was some pooja going on in the courtyard so i wanted to checkout what's happening. A couple (Indian Guy married to OZ chick) where performing "Naamkaran" (Naming ceremony). Priest was an australian, and i heard him kill gayathri mantra left and right. How in the world can this guy chant sanskrit mantra? I know that these days even indian priests cant pronounce it properly but still it was very funny to hear the chantings being killed by a OZ priest.

When i was watching my daughter (she was sleeping), my wife visited the god and asked for forgiveness for all our sins. By the time my turn came to do the same they closed the doors. I asked them when would it open, a white lady replied "god is resting". I just bursted laughing and said "i thought he is suppose to listen to our grievances 24/7 365 days and thats what he gets paid for. That lady was in a hurry to eat, she said look come back at 4PM. I started thinking, if i was her i would have said, "god has just now left the building as he consults at lot of places".
I was hungry too so i proceeded to the kitchen, line was pretty big and circular. I figured out where i am supposed to stand and got into the line. In front of me was the mother of the OZ girl who was performing naamkaran. The indian daamad/son-inlaw(SIL) walked up to her and asked her to come get the food. Lady replied, yes thats why i am standing in line. SIL said, we dont have to stand in line as we are guests who have performed pooja here so we can cut through the line. She said that would be shameful and she wouldnt do that. I told her, i admire your discipline. If i was in your place i would have probably accepted that offer and got my food faster. She started laughing and said, very fact that you are appreciating what i did shows that you would not have done that. I told her come on, i am an indian i would cut through the line.... (no offence guys).

Finally it was my turn to get the food, I asked the guy how much should i pay. He said you can donate downstairs... while returning i put 5$ in the hundi and thanked lord krishna for the lunch and told him sorry to disturb him while he was resting.

2007-09-04T16:13:00.001-07:00

Life in OZ Land.....

Vowing to the rigorous pressure from fan(s) (reddy thanks for encouraging me) of my writing i finally decided to blog today. We moved to OZ land (from now on for Australia) in the month of june. I was living a retired life for around 6 weeks. It was awsome fun as i didnt have to worry about earning bread (My wife was doing it for us). My daughter and myself use to just play all day.. i used to make lunch for her and hit the bed after lunch. When she gets up we used to go swimming. By the time we are done hitas mom would be back and i used help myself with some alcohol. I know i am making lot of you guys jealous. This lasted for 6 weeks thats it.
I had 2 offers in melbourne, one from a logistics company and the other a startup, to which i was referred by one of my thomson colleagues. I decided to join the startup even though salary was 30K AUD less. Its been fun working here. We are a company of 5, CEO is the only guy who does not code. Out of the 4, 2 are phds in robotics... (These guys are unlike the phds i have met in the past. SCA folks will understand) I am the most under qualified in the company... All of them are extremely arrogant, so i am feeling @ home here (hahahaha). Public transport is great and no hassle of driving. Remember commuting to office in blore....
I met one of my previous employers who have office in melbourne, i was told that they dont like me as i blogged something about them. So that makes the count 2 (not getting job cuz of blog). I think i am a controversial writer... hahahahaha

Now enough of personal ranting and making you guys jealous.....

OZ land is shit expensive.... For starters, Banana is 8$ a Kg.... Poor mans fruit in India. I was flabberghasted when i saw the price. After living in US this place is very expensive, even if you dont convert things into INR. Most importantly, Oz beers suck as much as US beers... and to make people buy Oz beer these bastards sell imported beer @ a very high cost... Corona costs 20$ for 6 pack.(reddy get some KF when u r coming here). They attribute high cost of vegetables and fruits to famine. One thing i have figured is, this country has less people and they want to make the most out of them. Come on guys get some people from a religion which preaches not using condoms (u guys know who i am talking about). Next 20 years OZ will be fighting to control population like India (hahahaha). My daughter has started going to school and guess whats the fee for one day (90AUD).

People are crazy about footy... Slowly starting to get hang of it. TV is pretty much crap as you get 4 channels without cable or anything.

Oh bfore i forget... i have changed my religion... not using Windows anymore.... on MAC... it rocks
I promise, next blog will surely offend IIM Students (Kartha, watch out hahahahah...)

2006-12-04T02:23:00.000-08:00

Agile Enablement

I was talking to one of my friend who is big time into agile enablement. In fact I did the same for an organization as a consultant. I told my friend an analogy about how Christians sell their religion. I remember when I use to live in DC one of the Christian organization rep walked into my house and below is the conversation we had.

Rep: Can I come in
Me: You can but pls don’t take too much time (I am a huge fan of NFL and redskins game was about to start)
Rep: (after intro) “I think you are living in dark”
Me: I don’t like too much light, is the room too dark for you, I will switch on the light
Rep: No I meant about your religion
Me: (That’s all, that made the most cynical bastard in me come out.) Why do you think so, you guys light candles in front of Jesus which tells me that your god himself is living in dark and needs light. Your god shows you way with the light you have provided him (just humor guys, nothing to get offended)
Rep: That’s not the significance of lighting candles
Me: I am not interested in knowing, because the game is about to start. Take a beer, if you want we will debate after the game.
Rep: Shall I come back later
Me: Next time you come, bring a lot of cash.
Rep: Why
Me: So that you can pay me for my time.

Rep left and I watched the game. Coming back to enablement, I told my friend that agile enablement is similar to selling religion. He started laughing when I gave him a punch line, “Go Agile – Enlighten your Organization”.

At the end of agile enablement exercise, I asked the guy who paid me “do you think you are agile now” he said I am not sure. I said you need to hire me for one more month and started laughing. From that instance on I am trying to come up with a strategy to measure the quality of enablement? Working on it, hopefully will get to something soon.

My friends and I have had lot of discussions/debates about whether you need to sell a religion or not. Some of them believe that’s the problem with Hinduism. How can we, there is no process for conversion defined in Hinduism. Agile is more or less like Hinduism, “do whatever that works for you”… that said do we need to sell Agile?

2006-10-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

My dime on pair programming

After reading Steve’s/Ravi Mohans blog about Agile Methodology, I can’t hold onto my horses.

Recently I did the interiors of my new house which costed me a lot. I was thinking, what if my carpenters were to do pairing? Would I hire a carpenter who does pairing? Answer is absolutely no. If we go by the definition, quality of my interiors should be better if they were to do pairing. I don’t know about the quality but no way in hell I would agree to pay 2 people for doing the same thing. I never believed that pairing would produce better quality code. Reason for me to say that is, if you even put 4 idiots like me, quality of the code would not be any better; in fact it would be worse hahhahaha… All these advocates of pairing should think through this analogy. What if they are getting operated and the surgeon says, to increase the quality of the surgery I would like to pair and you would have to bear the cost (I can’t stop laughing). How much confidence will they have going to the OT?

I see following problems with pairing;

1. Its basically highway robbery

2. Kills Individual thinking ability of a Programmer/Human Brain – Concerns me a lot as it might create parasites.

Pairing can be applied when you want to mentor people or you don’t want to create critical single point of failures/Share Knowledge.

When I think about it, for the kind of people Thoughtworks or Google hires, quality of the software will be same regardless of whether they use pairing or not. One of the funniest advantages of pairing I read was that, people can’t goof off while pairing. What if both of them are goof balls, will we switch to 3 some (hahaha, don’t take the other meaning you perverts...)

My Conclusion

One of the agile manifestos says “People over Processes” and there are books which talk about agile as a Process, what an irony. It’s really not about the process its all about people. If you have good people you will get good output regardless of the industry. If you have great people to mentor these good ones, you will endup having great results.

2006-09-10T23:30:00.000-07:00

My Journey of Job Hunt

For the first time in 10 years I have been asked by an organization to leave. Owner of the startup that I am working for does not want to spend money on product development. He has decided to close the Bangalore office and keep the Delhi office as it is much cheaper to operate in Delhi. So I am back in the market looking for a job. I have met so many idiots in past one month, wish I had enough financial backing; I would never work in this industry. Below are some of the conversations

I went to a company in Diamond District (they have some asset management product)

Interviewer (I): What would you do if you are stuck in a forest with flat tires and do not have spare, with your family

Me (M): my daughter has super natural power of fixing flat tires, she will fix it and I will move on

He got offended; I told him hypothetical answer for a hypothetical question. I really can’t understand what this idiot was trying to measure, if he was trying to measure how I would react to an unplanned event, i think I faired well.

Next Question

I: how many maruti zens are there in Bangalore

M: If you are trying to measure my presence of mind I can give you any number and you would not be able to do anything about it.

I: give a number

M: 100,281

I: how did you come out with that number?

M: fact that you can’t validate it/debate about it sitting in this room

He was again offended; I don’t see what was wrong in my answer. All these F**** can’t accept blunt answers for their stupid questions.

I met VP engineering of company called DumbObjects (Not the actual name, I don’t want to hurt core values of dumb people), below are some of the conversations

I: 15 days before the delivery of the project, architect (Key person) resigns, what will you do?

M: 15 days before the release if your project requires architects then you are in much deeper shit than him resigning (hahahaha).

I: I want to know how you would handle it

M: I will try to find out the reason for him to leave, if there is anything as an organization we can do then I will try else I will plan a smooth transition and let him go.

I: How many people have you fired?

M: I don’t have the count

M: I asked him what he would do in the same situation

I: it depends; I would probably convince him not to leave

M: That means you have an employee who has no clue what he wants or you are so charismatic that you can convince him. One of them has to be true; I don’t think the latter is true.

Obviously VP did not hire me, reason they gave was that they were not happy about some of the blogs that I had written. I told him; neither do I want to work for some hypocritical bastards. I asked him one question; let’s say I write an article about a social issue and you have a different stand about the same, you will not hire me? He did not have any answer.

It’s beyond my comprehension what all these morons are looking for in a person when they are interviewing. The very fuckin mentality that they are doing a favor by giving job to some one leads to such stupidity. After coming back to India, Thoughtworks probably has the best interview pattern. At least such stupid questions are less (not zero hahahhaa…).

2006-07-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

Breeding Innovation

I keep thinking about a workplace that is conducive for innovation. What kind of environment helps people innovate?
Thoughtworks is one place i felt has fairly achieved it. An environment where people can express their ideas and opinions with out any apprehensions, is what probably breeds innovation. If organizations have environment where people have to blindly follow processes/hierarchies, they stop thinking. The best analogy i can think of is; all the rituals and religious things we do without knowing the actual significance of it. Some of them really made sense at that point of time but not now. A community is all about reviewing and adapting to changes. An Organization is nothing but a community. Its easier said than done but thats what the challenge is all about.
Some of the key things about environments conducive to innovation are

Transparent/Open environment: As mentioned earlier, an environment which encourages people to express their opinion/ideas. Important thing is that people should not have any fear that it will be used against them.
Confidence in youngsters we have hired: If this is missing, we start taking inputs only from people who have experience or rather old. Stereo typical mentality is that people with out experience will not be able to contribute at higher levels. I feel the other way is true. Some times old people have thoughts of their generation which do not hold good during present times.
Open feedback: if people cannot accept feedback/criticism about their ideas and take it personally, its a major hurdle for innovation.
Meritocracy:a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement not based on their age.

2006-03-27T20:08:00.000-08:00

Is "Change" that Hard

Last weekend i took my 1 year old daughter to swimming pool (was her first time at the pool). She was in the pool sitting in a floater. She started paddling her legs and flapping her arms with in no time. I was amazed seeing that. kids have such an inherent ability to adapt and learn, its just so opposite of us (adults). Above narration is a preamble to what i started thinking in the pool.
I work for a startup product company which is doing fairly well. We are at a stage where management wants to invest money in product development. Initially they were behind revenues, (this is the case with any startup, else they will go belly up) which has led the product to such chaos that its impossible to manage now. We had Product strategy meeting in Delhi last week to come up with a plan to make the product manageable. What i observed is listed below.

Resistance to change: When i was trying to explain some of the aspects of agile, lot of them were skeptical, especially people on whom organization is dependent on. I was trying to convince them that distributed development can be done with less pains using some of the aspects of agile. Resistance was from people who are considered as extremely important in the organization today. Since i termed them as bottle necks they were offended but sincerely when i think, they are bottlenecks.
Knowledge Transfer: Delhi office was started before bangalore office, naturally they have more domain knowledge than people in bangalore. Delhi public dont want to transfer knowledge, may be because they are scared of loosing their job. This is probably due to management not updating the people about organizational goal or people we have are so incompetent that they are scared of being laid off.

Both of the above mentioned observations are not good for a growing organization.
I was wondering looking at my daughter, why dont adults like us have what a 1 year old has?

2006-03-07T21:21:00.000-08:00

Is Resigning a CRIME?

After coming back to India and working with more than 3 organizations I have found that resigning is a CRIME. I have observed in couple of places that boss stops talking to you and do not even smile when he sees you. Its not that I am missing something, I can’t stop laughing at such immature thinking. In such a globalized world its very common that people find better opportunity and move on. As an organization we should respect others dreams and priorities. This is what is missing in most of our organizations. If the person has spent lot of time in an organization that he may feel that his life has become monotonous and wants to do something new. Organizations should only try to reduce the impact of loss of such a person.
This is a nice story that I would like to narrate (its real). One of my friend who has umpteen years of experience joined Cognizant. After a week he felt that he was in a wrong place and wanted to quit and informed the same to BU head. As usual these guys think that they have such an amazing charisma that they can influence some bodies thinking and try to give a pep talk. This did not work, so the guy asked him to serve notice period. Can you believe it, for one week of employment 60 days of notice? When I heard this I was rolling on my stomach. What does this convey? People who are heading organizations are so irrational; they have even lost the ability to think. They don’t even know what is good for the organization and what is not. Lets take this scenario and elaborate. What will an organization get by this guy serving notice period. It would be such a loss for the company since they have to pay him for those 60 days and get nothing out of it.
This is the reason why I feel that organizations need to have some young blood at the decision making level. Having only young blood could also prove detrimental; it should be a nice mixture of young and experienced people. Young blood will most of the time have the guts to accept the market reality and take decisions based on the same.

2006-02-28T19:00:00.000-08:00

R We Slaves Still ?

Off lately i have started working at a new place. Its one of the big Services company in India. Yesterday was my first interaction with the team and the customer which also happens to be an indian company. I was shocked to see the personality of the team members and the way they conversed with the client. First thing that struck me was team members calling me "Sir" and every other Tom Dick & Harry the same way. When i told them that they are not suppose to address me that way, they could not believe it. Secondly i was shocked to see that the receiver is happy being addressed that way, else he would have objected it the way i did. All i could think of is, all those years of slavery whether its mughals or britishers has left such a huge trace in our blood that it can be seen even today. I always believed in this cuz when i was in US, i used to see HCL consultants who did not know the meaning of word "NO". They would probably even offer BJ (read as blow job) just to make couple of dollars. I understand people have different priorities but is it worth being a slave? I have failed to understand priorities of such people hence its hard for me to answer this question. One thing that i felt yesterday was, to start with atleast i have a challenge at this new place, that is to change the mentality of these people. I know there would be lot of resistance from both the slave and the master but i feel i should try atleast.