Life of a software engineer…

Well, this was an article I wrote to a magazine or news paper supplementary called “Corporate Buzz”. Unfortunately, they did not like the article too much and hence I thought I should post it here. Its quite a few months old.I am not sure I have seen such an magazine or news paper supplementary named “Corporate Buzz” around… But here it is for you to enjoy

All your suggestions, feedback and criticisms are most welcome..I am all ears to you…

A software engineer is a most envied person in the whole world. Not just because of his educational background, not just because of his expertise in software development, not just because of the humpty number of his positive traits – its mostly because of the life style. Here are some of the outstanding features of a software engineer’s life, right from the alpha version to the production version.

Most of us almost have our tags around our neck or in our belts all the time, even when we are out of work. When we walk, when we eat, when we drink or when we are waiting for a cab. Only few of us are born with silver spoon and rest of us are born with our tags. Sounds funny, but a real fact.

You know whats our favorite web site, its google and other search engines. If one day, these search engines goes down – almost every software company around the world is going to face a heavy productivity loss. We are the guys and girls, who are exposed to a lot of changes in our technology areas. The changes are so used to us, if one day my house vanishes from Chennai and goes to mars I wouldn’t be surprised. It would be a days game for me.

Bugs are own dear most buddies. They are the by products of the software we develop. We are so used to them and they are our every day issues for eternity. The test engineer has the habit of filing bugs and we have the habit of saying its a feature or its working as expected. Of-course, we don’t say it all the time, we just say it when we can’t solve it. Our worst enemy and night mare are the test engineers. I wouldn’t mind even killing my best friend who eventually happens to be a test engineer in the same project, just for one sole reason, that he filed a bug in my module.

Workaround is one common word you can hear from us. In simple terms, if we are unable to derive programatically that sum of one and one is two, we just write programs that sums up five and ten, then subtract thirteen from it. Don’t ask us why we do it, its a workaround.

Our favorite food is anything junk. Wait don’t raise your eye brows. I meant, we like burgers, pizzas, sandwiches and cup o noodles than proper cooked and healthy foods. Our clients not only influence us by the work they give us, they also do influence us in our food habits and culture.

We studied computer science to make things simple. We make it really simple such that, we don’t like walking few yards or climbing couple of floors to have a chat with our friends, we just use our local office chat software or public chat software to talk to our friends.

We provide job opportunities to thousands of people around the world. As us how, we are unable to perform our day to day errands due to our work nature. Hence, eventually, there are a lot of third party companies coming up who help us pay our bills, book our tickets and helps us do our basic works. Aren’t we great??

“Monday morning blues” – a terminology every software engineer feels. A sense of dizziness or laziness on every Monday morning which prevents us being productive at an higher extent. And if it happens, such that we had to work on the week ends the terminilogy is slightly changed to “Monday morning darkness”. Sounds like a horror movie name, but its a horror only a software engineer feels.

Apart from alcholics, smokers and other forms of people, we also have special kind of people in our industry who are called workaholics. They are special breed of people whom you can find in office any time of the day including weekends. If we drill down to the cause of this issue, we also get to know this is because of the difference between “hard workers” and “people who hardly work”.

Our english is some times too really peculiar, like -
- Whatcha ya wanna do on a odd day like dis with a damn bug like tat??
- I am fighting hard with this OutOfMemoryException(worst than a software engineer’s spouse).
- Could I buy some of your time?(Its too costly and not for sale)
- I need a F1 from you(F1 is help).
- You better shut down(instead of shut up).
- I have a personal work, I need to ctrl+f9 or f9 home(run home).
and, we always expect that whom ever we are speaking to knows these jargon’s. Be happy that we don’t expect you to know a programming language for communication – Other wise if you ask us “Can I borrow some money from you??” we would say “Unidentified literal in line 1 word 4 character 19. Please fix this compile error and run again”, or we will give you a blue screen with a error code 0×00005e so you can google what that means.

Self development according to us means technical certifications or something that adds values to our company and client. You know we are people who live selflessly, we always consider our company a part of us and that’s why we do this self development. That is the reason why our only self development is always towards an technical area.

Status reviews, client conference calls etc are the so called “official meetings” where we get some time to relax. Some one talks to another one and another one talks to some one, and I am in my own dream world. Finally my turn comes up, I say “No updates from my side, Thank you !!” happily ever after since the last 4 years. And did you notice, I said a courteous thank you for not bothering them with my updates. How good of me??

For us, any word with a “e-” as a suffix is quite interesting. We like emails, we work in e-commerce, we book tickets by e-booking. I honestly guess, there should some “e-food” or “e-family” research going on some part of the globe so one day we have everything in “e-”.

We won’t die if we don’t have air or food or water or shelter. But, we are sure to die if you don’t let us be connected to the internet.

We love and hate(depends on the situation) one god given gift to us. We talk or think about more of this particular person than our family members or girl friends/boy friends. This person is none other than our project managers. They have multiple personality disorders, some times they are poor souls and some time they are the red eyed chinese dragons spitting fire on us.

We like our official email IDs so much. Some times we are often identified by email IDs in most of our power point presentations and achievements list. I am so obsessed about it such that, I don’t store contacts name my mobile instead use their email IDs.

Inspite and despite of so many hard work and tough times, we are just called as “resources” not even engineers or developers most of the times.

We are so obsessed to binaries, that’s zeroes and ones that most of us remain as a ZERO or a ONE in our life in this career. We never tend to be striking a balance between a zero and one. I think, our life would be much better if we just use these binaries for programming alone.

 

 

Chest up…Chin up…

Lots of people may wonder what this blog is about…However, those who are/were in armed forces or NCC or who have friends or relatives in defence may find the terminology quite normal…

Chest up…chin up is usually a command to make the soldiers chest up and chin up physically. Its a sign that the soldier is bold and courageous enough to face any hurdle that is in front of him. My dad being a NCC officer(in the past) used to tell this to me whenever we walk togather..

Trust me, standing that way or walking that way makes us feel so confident. It gives a new energy and people around us are also bombarded by the same energy. You also get an attitude in you which gives you all the energy to face anything.

Attitude is something people often consider as bad…I have heard comments saying “He/She has too much of attitude…” Look at it..its “too much” which is the catch here. Otherwise attitude is good. Attitude is what protects you from people. People, who often try to tamper our confidence levels by words, deeds or both. Attitude is what protects us from all of those kind of people and also sometimes does not show up our vulnerability so easily.

Personally, I feel attitude is a reflection of our confidence. They both go hand in hand. You have self-confidence and you have an attitude too. No one can deny that, but most of us don’t really know its attitude.

Now, that does not mean that you should not respect others or tamper them or hurt them because of your attitude. That also does not mean you should not be so easily approachable.Use it as shield and not as a sword

Chest up…Chin up..With a lot of confidence and positive attitude…Enjoy life!

 

Miles to go before I sleep…

Whenever this word comes to my mind…I feel, I have a lot more to do. Well, we all feel that too…The days seem to be running faster. I am understanding what speed of light or wink of eyes means these days…24 hours does not seem enough. 

Some other times I also feel, I am not planning my time properly. This seems continous and never ending. I feel Robert Frost’s words are true, we got to keep running to keep up with time

Whose woods these are I think I know. 
His house is in the village, though; 
He will not see me stopping here 
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer 

To stop without a farmhouse near 
Between the woods and frozen lake 
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake 
To ask if there’s some mistake. 
The only other sound’s the sweep 
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, 
But I have promises to keep, 
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

So lets keep running…!!

 

Smileys…or Lifeys…

Common term everyone would have heard, or yahoo terminology would be emoticons…

These small icons or graphic images map our real emotions to a computer based emotions…Some emoticons are real cute, they express more than what humans do in reality.

One question I had always had when using them is, Are we heading towards a virtual world where we often have imaginary character of our-self.Like, Mr.Anderson and Neo in the “The Matrix”…The emerging social networking sites are incorporating features to even map our physical and mental self into an virtual image. Though it has some good, it has weighted bad too, psychologically we are tend to be under a self pressure…What all we are unable to do in reality will be capable in virtual world…so the human mind just tends to stay in the virtual world where there no failures, no sadness, no defeats and no negativity. This eventually leads to addiction which eventually eats our own mental self.Then we would turn mere living cells feeding our expressivity, our thoughts and our emotions to our virtual image and end up no where…

Well, that was not the real thing I wanted to convey, that’s one thing that’s greatly occurring these days.

Now back to the subject of discussion…

In our real life, we forget that we are humans born to live a happy life and enjoy life. We often just get behind some or the other thing, would have started with studies…then work…then skill set development…then onsite…then again a study or family…and it goes on and on…If we ever give a thought to us, “Man!! stop !! if you go on running behind something when would you live your life??”…The instant answer we would give is, “After achieving…so and so..so and so…” and the list keeps growing…By the time we reach the end of it, we would have already finished meaningful part of our life

So the answer eventually is – Live your life while you grow and while you are in your achievement or growth phase…Don’t forget the key purpose of life and don’t just concentrate in the surrounding factors…

I felt this occurring commonly in me, one common comment I receive from my colleagues is, I always have a tensed face or probably an serious face…I don’t really know how it got a fit inside me…A little observation to my facial reactions proved they were right. I analyzed and did find out that, I forget to smile or keep a smiling face…this is naturally because every-time my mind/brain seems to be preoccupied with something..even if its a lightweight brain thread or a heavyweight brain process it just keeps consuming answers to what next? what next? what next? what next? and goes working on it…

I think its time, I shut it down and do something else to get it back to normal…stop taking things seriously…make work as just work…concentrate a bit of self development…concentrate a bit on enjoying the beauty of life and nature…Overhauling time for my brain machine

Some-other things which I am going to try are,
- When I walk, when I eat, when I breath, when I sleep or whatever I do…I am going to auto suggest myself to stop thinking too much and just concentrate on whatever I am doing in the present.
- No parallel processing and no concurrent processing. Going to be in single threaded model for some time.
- Take good time to sleep, to eat healthy food(of-course fat free) and read as much as “out of subject” books.
- Try and smile whenever possible…whether its necessary or unnecessary.
- Stop frowning
- Finally, LIVE MY LIFE
So guys and girls…its your turn now…Do whatever get out of it !!! Its not really good out there

If you have tackled these kind of situation better, please do let us know.

 

Rose is a rose is a rose is rose rose….

The title does sound funny…its a starting line of a bollywood film song

It was around 7:00 AM in the morning, I was as usual cuddled in my bed. My mom, jolted me and I slowly opened my voice. In an excited voice she told me that few roses have blossomed in our garden in a rose plant she had planted few days back.

I am not a guy who is interested in gardening and it did not make any sense to me about the roses. So I just slept back again.

W hen I went to the terrace to get something is when my eyes fell on the newly blossomed rose. I was feeling it was something special. Though our garden was not so spacious and there were lot of plants, the rose did catch my eyes with all its beauty. It was as though, the only shining smiling flower around in a whole population of serious people around.

Its true !! In our daily life where people are so concerned and serious about their life n work…there are only few people who take time for others. Who make others smile…Who take time to enjoy life and who take time to be positive and spread positiveness around… They are just like these roses which catch everyone’s eyes

How would you feel if you had a garden full of roses??

Have a look at the pictures of one of the roses,

 

My lost dreams…

Is lost dreams the right word? or is it unachievable dreams

That was the debate in my mind when I started this post, well I will call them lost dreams…Everyone has a dream…small or big or silly…Most of the times when we are idle our thought process ends up in a dream or a wish

When I sip the coffee from our office coffee vending machine, I always wish it could have been much better…When I see a small kid arguing with his mother for a toy, I wish I remained a kid for the life time…Some of these wishes or dreams are achievable and some of them are not…I too have a lot of dreams…some of them are not achievable till now while for some of them still there is a scope

The ones which are not achievable, I call them lost…one of them is, I wanted to be a fighter pilot in my childhood days…I landed up as a fighter coder, fighting with my own code and similarly a lot of them….

Yesterday night when I was in the terrace thinking about all these lost dreams, I decided not to have more of it…stop there people!!! I meant not more of lost dreams…Wanted to turn them to reality…Do something towards it !!! Do it!! Urged my mind…Some of the dreams which I want to accomplish this year (2007) are,

• Learn French if time permits learn some other foreign language also, probably Japanese or German.
• Be a reasonably sound person in software architecture, Linux and open source.
• Enhance and improve my soap carving, poetry and writing skills.
• Be a good photographer…with how much ever I can do with my digital still camera
• Have a web space of my own.
• Do as much as I can for people who are in need.
• Have a vacation with my family in a foreign country.

 Last but not the least….

• Spend sometime for myself everyday

 Well, these are the only dreams of mine which are within scope, in terms of time and energy :)

 Now what are you staring at the monitor for?? Realize your own dreams…start preparing for it…but before that…Don’t forget to wish me all the best

 

26-February-2007

The day was the same as usual, Monday morning blues… I woke up with a usual wish that it was still a Saturday or Sunday…

Today was my license test for MCWG (two wheeler) and LMV (four wheeler). I was very much confident about four wheeler since we were practicing for almost 20 days, I was bit scared about the two wheeler, just for the reason that some one told me its tough, some couple of years back

I was yet blindly confident on the other side that I will get the license because I am applying for via the driving school, the simplest way to get license for lazy people like me

That happened to be the true; it was just like cake walk… Around 2:30 PM I got my license, that’s a wonderful and indeed a great achievement to me. I proudly showed my license to my dad and mom, as if I had achieved some unachievable thing in my life even my dad was pulling my legs for the same… but for me it was in fact a glorious victory… I never miss an opportunity to celebrate small achievements because they pave way for bigger ones

I went to office around 3:30 PM, just when I entered the parking space I saw two girls from our project dressed up in saree (indeed pretty looking ). Then I realized, how can I forget this…Today is our Business Unit (BU) annual day, I rushed to my seat. Again, the first thing I did was, I was boasting to my colleagues that I was “officially licensed to kill” from now on

The annual day function was about to be started at 4:30 PM, we had our usual coffee break at 3:45 PM and I came back just to check my emails. At, 4:30 PM we were in the cafeteria, as usual we sat in the last row just because of the reason the host happens to be a close friend of ours, we badly wanted to pull his legs but before that I should admit the truth that I wrote the script for the days event presentations

So the events started as usual all presentations and boring speeches, I thought it’s yet another annual meeting. Then the award presentation time started, I heard the announcement, wow!! The award for excellence in his initiatives goes to Raj (one of my best friends at work)…as soon as he came back to his seat, I asked him for a treat (the usual thing I am interested than an award)

Next, some entertainment events started, I felt it was very boring…and half of the people in the last two rows were already in their dream world Then, next set of awards, this time I was shocked to hear that I won the award for excellence in team building… till I came back to my seat I could not believe it….Even now I don’t understand why I was given this award As soon as I came to my seat, Raj happily said “you got one award and I got one award, so treat cancelled….”

Karthik (another of my best friend at work) won the award of long timer , but we knew this news already since he updated us regarding this during coffee time. The guest of honor, that day was Pranav Karthik he is Jr Karthik. We enjoyed a lot with him, his expressions, smiles, activities really wonderful…

All these things all together made my day, I will never forget this happy and contented day in my life. First day, I have won an award in my career…I got my license, two of my friends won their awards….good times with Pranav…Lying on my bed that night, I was just smiling, thinking about the events….