The Butterfly Diaries 13 - Quality Quandries
When I was young, dad would start teaching me only on the night before the exam given his tight schedule. But instead of focusing on stuff that would help with the exam the next day, he would always start with the fundamentals. No matter how little time we had, that was the only way he could do things.
That was how it was with this gentleman Mr. Systematic as well. But luckily, time was something we had on our side, despite him having to start all over again with me due to Mr. Ambitious resigning.
By the time he was done, I was fully confident about handling the role of configuration controller. Not that it was rocket science. It was just the role of an archivist – maintaining project artifacts.
As he said, “The real devil lies in the detail. From the folder structure to the document naming convention, everything should follow a well thought out strategy.”
But this served as a doorway to other opportunities.
The first was related to increasing the project’s capability maturity – the CMM level. Apparently at level 1, project success depended on heroes – individual brilliance. At level 5, the process became the hero and ensured the project succeeded irrespective of the people staffed on it.
Irrespective of the people, eh? I remembered a spoof article I had seen somewhere about some company experimenting with teaching monkeys to code in Visual Basic. I wondered if these highest-level processes could enable projects to be run with these simian Visual Basic programmers. If that were possible, companies could get away literally paying their programmers peanuts.
But anyways my company was going bananas about getting all their projects to level 5. And I had to get our project on top of that CMM tree. It was not too difficult. It was all monkey read, monkey learn, monkey do stuff. And before I knew it, we were there.
But, for some reason, ever since we reached level 5, I found I had become a ‘hero’ with the boss lady. She talked to me more often and started directly assigning work to me.
The second opportunity came from Mr. Systematic. He had grown comfortable with me and wanted to transfer his other responsibility of managing the premium module to me as well, before he went onsite.
Unlike configuration management, this did turn out to be rocket science of sorts. But the teacher was Mr. Systematic. He started thus.
“Think of every insured object as a point in a ten-dimensional matrix. And the premium as a function of the ten variable.”
The idea of a multi-dimensional matrix and all had a science-fiction feel to it and thrilled me to the bone.
He wouldn’t let me even look at the code till I had convinced him that I knew the calculation model.
With him gone, I found myself in the KBC hot seat fielding premium questions from our Amitabh Bachchans onsite. But without any options or lifelines. I fumbled a bit with the first few. But over time I began to look forward to these puzzles wherein I had to retrace the steps to find out how the software had arrived at a particular premium value.
Having seen me do well in these two areas, one day the boss lady called me to her cubicle. “Didn’t you tell me you were keen on working in Java?”
Like hell I was.
“So, I thought why don’t you start picking up our client-side architecture. Someone with understanding of both sides can diagnose causes of defects much faster.”
The client-side developer was not as great a teacher as Mr. Systematic. But he would answer question after question patiently. Over the next month, I was able to resolve a few client-side bugs as well. With these new skills, I finally had something Mr. Dependable had to depend on me for.
And for some strange reason my mood swings also seemed to be reducing. I remembered Sherlock Holmes’ maxim, ‘work is the best antidote to sorrow’. I had to add ‘It depends on the quality of the work, though.’
Everything seemed to be going well. Till the day my mother decided to confront me. “What are you doing with your life?”
She sounded as if I had become a wastrel or something. I was having a job. I was doing well. I had even got a good appraisal and a decent hike. What did she mean?
When I told her that, she was like, “Things have gone exactly as your father and I feared when you decided to pick up this job. Your ambitions have got re-calibrated by the people around you. We thought this was a temporary arrangement while you figured what you wanted to do next. But you seem to have settled down here.”
But…but…I first had to stabilize in this job before I started thinking about what next.
“And not like you are doing amazingly well here. It’s been two years. You haven’t got a promotion or a foreign assignment. So, I don’t know by what measure you think you are doing well. Unless you consider an easy life at a mediocre job as the definition of success.”
I remembered dad’s words when I took up the IT job offer: “I should have had your mother stay with you during your college days, to keep an eye on you.”
That was how it was with this gentleman Mr. Systematic as well. But luckily, time was something we had on our side, despite him having to start all over again with me due to Mr. Ambitious resigning.
By the time he was done, I was fully confident about handling the role of configuration controller. Not that it was rocket science. It was just the role of an archivist – maintaining project artifacts.
As he said, “The real devil lies in the detail. From the folder structure to the document naming convention, everything should follow a well thought out strategy.”
But this served as a doorway to other opportunities.
The first was related to increasing the project’s capability maturity – the CMM level. Apparently at level 1, project success depended on heroes – individual brilliance. At level 5, the process became the hero and ensured the project succeeded irrespective of the people staffed on it.
Irrespective of the people, eh? I remembered a spoof article I had seen somewhere about some company experimenting with teaching monkeys to code in Visual Basic. I wondered if these highest-level processes could enable projects to be run with these simian Visual Basic programmers. If that were possible, companies could get away literally paying their programmers peanuts.
But anyways my company was going bananas about getting all their projects to level 5. And I had to get our project on top of that CMM tree. It was not too difficult. It was all monkey read, monkey learn, monkey do stuff. And before I knew it, we were there.
But, for some reason, ever since we reached level 5, I found I had become a ‘hero’ with the boss lady. She talked to me more often and started directly assigning work to me.
The second opportunity came from Mr. Systematic. He had grown comfortable with me and wanted to transfer his other responsibility of managing the premium module to me as well, before he went onsite.
Unlike configuration management, this did turn out to be rocket science of sorts. But the teacher was Mr. Systematic. He started thus.
“Think of every insured object as a point in a ten-dimensional matrix. And the premium as a function of the ten variable.”
The idea of a multi-dimensional matrix and all had a science-fiction feel to it and thrilled me to the bone.
He wouldn’t let me even look at the code till I had convinced him that I knew the calculation model.
With him gone, I found myself in the KBC hot seat fielding premium questions from our Amitabh Bachchans onsite. But without any options or lifelines. I fumbled a bit with the first few. But over time I began to look forward to these puzzles wherein I had to retrace the steps to find out how the software had arrived at a particular premium value.
Having seen me do well in these two areas, one day the boss lady called me to her cubicle. “Didn’t you tell me you were keen on working in Java?”
Like hell I was.
“So, I thought why don’t you start picking up our client-side architecture. Someone with understanding of both sides can diagnose causes of defects much faster.”
The client-side developer was not as great a teacher as Mr. Systematic. But he would answer question after question patiently. Over the next month, I was able to resolve a few client-side bugs as well. With these new skills, I finally had something Mr. Dependable had to depend on me for.
And for some strange reason my mood swings also seemed to be reducing. I remembered Sherlock Holmes’ maxim, ‘work is the best antidote to sorrow’. I had to add ‘It depends on the quality of the work, though.’
Everything seemed to be going well. Till the day my mother decided to confront me. “What are you doing with your life?”
She sounded as if I had become a wastrel or something. I was having a job. I was doing well. I had even got a good appraisal and a decent hike. What did she mean?
When I told her that, she was like, “Things have gone exactly as your father and I feared when you decided to pick up this job. Your ambitions have got re-calibrated by the people around you. We thought this was a temporary arrangement while you figured what you wanted to do next. But you seem to have settled down here.”
But…but…I first had to stabilize in this job before I started thinking about what next.
“And not like you are doing amazingly well here. It’s been two years. You haven’t got a promotion or a foreign assignment. So, I don’t know by what measure you think you are doing well. Unless you consider an easy life at a mediocre job as the definition of success.”
I remembered dad’s words when I took up the IT job offer: “I should have had your mother stay with you during your college days, to keep an eye on you.”
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