Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Vaazhkaiye alai pole... Naamellam Java/Cobol melae!

Having been in the IT industry for more than a year now, hundreds of funny forwards have come through about the industry at large. However I was in for a live demo of one such forward last week in a meeting. It was friday evening and nothing would irritate anyone more than a meeting. I've read forwards about the long discussions where people end up deciding nothing after digging up crap and finally, a round of mud slinging. The actual issue would have been forgotten in the melee! For me it happened such a way that a simple decision that the team members took in the morning was blown up into a lengthy discussion. Of course we ended up at the very same simple decision. No mud slinging was reported by anyone. Hail IT!

So funny that once when the lead laughed for a joke (of course crap only) everybody would burst into laughter spotting a great chance to release the ha ha ha-s that had been concealed until then. Life in IT will indeed be boring without these comedy times. But there are things going on that are downright bad. This is what that makes one repent for the decision he/she has made to join this industry.

For example: Its the arrival of a new project. The difficulties faced by the team in using a technology/language unheard of till then will be conveyed higher up the ladder with so much Additive White Gaussian Noise (Figure of Merit is a big ZERO) that the manager will end up reporting the company's pioneering experience in the same technology/language to the clients!! Something like this will happen...

Team lead to members: hey, we've got this new project to be built upon using "____" technology using "____" language etc.,

Members to team lead: what? we have not even heard of that. we know even you do not know about this. then? (enna sinna pulla thanama irukku?)

Lead to APM: we cant do this (stating the reasons)

APM to PM: we have only limited resources with very little exposure to do this.

PM to Senior Manager: We have resources with sufficient exposure. If we could train them well, no wonder why we can't successfully execute this project!!

Senior Manager to Director (or whoever his boss is): We've got excelleng trainers in this technology that if we could dedicate them for this project for a month or two, we can win more such projects in the future by way of successfully executing this.

Boss to Clients: We've been pioneering this technology with great success. We assure you we can develop this applicatin for you very easily... bla... bla... bla...

After all, its all money that matters.
Something like this is definitely happening somewhere or the other. Well, someone's gotta do something about this somewhere a.l.a NHRC in Kaakha Kaakha.

Eventually, its the programmers headache. Slugging it out during the day time with special trainers hired for this crap and working late hours to finish ahead of the delivery date alongside the funny team meetings, fights with onsite etc., It has become the order of life in IT. Indeed, "Vaazhkaiye alai pole... naamellam Java/Cobol melae"

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Shankar,

I completely agree with what you have written regarding this issue..Though it is a forward, you have penned it up neatly to portray a clear picture of what's happening in the IT world!!!

Enna panrathu?? Life is like that! :-)

Shankar said...

Thx Kay! :-)

Anand K said...

thankfully.. I haven't seen anything like this first hand.. probably coz of the type of proj I am in.. but I have heard of stuff like this happening all the time.. almost exactly like u describe!!

but this will cease to be a prob for us if we enter the higher levels in the chain :)

Shankar said...

true... however when we move up the ladder, we will be doing all these things.. rather forced to do these crap!! :-)

thankfully, i too havent experieced any such stuff and hopefully i wont...!!

Vijay Krishna Narayanan said...

I'm living out the forward. I know how it is. Here are a couple of things I wrote regarding this:

-- http://vkpedia.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-jarring-note.html
-- http://vkpedia.blogspot.com/2005/06/of-palm-trees-and-project-life-cycles.html