What are the various options of timepass for an heavily unemployed guy… He started thinking about it… How about gazing at sky for stars, counting them for a positive statistic, rather getting depressed with the dwindling bank account balance. He actually started doing it. The problem with miracles is that it just never happens. We need to create miracles out of our own imagination. And it happened. While ruminating on his worrying financial future, he somehow identified a bespectacled figure in the sky.
Unfortunately, he had to rely on aerial aspects rather on his own technical prowess of late. Now, he is not a very confident person as he was earlier. Gone are his shiny days as technocrat where he could churn out components and innovative frameworks, even if not put to use at-least helped him derive Job satisfaction. Unfortunately, jobs at his motherland was still elusive compared to back to back Job assignments he used to get abroad. Now, he only had his rustic inner self to hold on as walking stick to climb the seemingly steep career mountain to survive his family. He many not be the confident person but whenever he thought of his career / finance, he crazily looked upon the sky to derive any worthy belief supporting his weak inner self. So, the bespectacled cloudy stuff while worrying on his finances reminded him of his own Father and his past survival as lower middle class guy. Maybe he will be there for him watching from the skies?
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.“
Buddha
The Lord’s Piggy Bank
As if his Father is not enough to carry on his burdens, He appointed God as Partner on his earnings. Maybe it’s loosely based on a comedy where the thief steals after making God as Partner as safety insurance. The revenue sharing was based on a novel idea. He will throw all the stolen money on the floor of the temple. Whatever falls into the Hundi, the piggy bank hole meant for devotees to donate, belongs to God. God’s Piggy bank had a small hole and maybe God is not so greedy or he is just making sure nobody gets their hands into it. On the similar veins, He appointed God as his Partner sharing his profits proportional to the Hole in his Piggy Bank hoping to outsmart the Lord.
“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me..”
Emo Philips
He then climbed the Mountain, after huffing and puffing to reach the Lord’s abode to issue his Appointment Letter as Partner. But the Lord turned out to be what he is… just great by having a large mouthed piggy bank opening / Hundi hung high enough that no one can take from it but can only drop offerings into it. But much to the disappointment, the Hundi, comes along with a Board indicating all that goes in Hundi does not belong to God but as a Corpus fund. Don’t know if Gods are genial while sleeping, but certainly his so called trustees who could perform a daylight robbery on him erecting a simple Board. It’s just like Modi’s masterstroke. If the opposition called themselves as India, let’s rename India to Bharat. Ideally he should have renamed it to Brahm-Hindustan to uphold his fascist Brahmanical supremacy. If China is creating border problems, let’s park the Akand Hindu Rashtra near Russia far away from China.
“I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up – they have no holidays.”
Henny Youngman
Somehow such crazy inspirations and his belief on his Father and Lord Partner pushed him towards performing his corporate comedy or at-least try… well… why not… Once again.
You are sadly (dis)Appointed…
Fortunately, ( or Unfortunately? ), he cracked an appointment after going through Marathon interviews of his supposedly Superior followed by his own Superior followed by his own Superior followed by Office Boy and Admin. Everyone had different shades of questions. One said the different JDs he got as part of Job opening does not mean anything, maybe only the salary matters. One said he will mould him to whatever Apology Savarkar or Skewered Shawarma whichever pleases him, when he himself sounded like a stylish immature kidor as PB Mehta describes – a thuggish crybaby reminding of his own Sarkar Head. One stated the Organisation is a frugal retail shop, not a fancy IT Firm and atrociously declared he alone has the rights to preach inside the Org, however illogical and unequal it is, just because he holds the Purse. Wonder who gave the purse tphim. All he needed to loosen his purse strings was few donut shaped charts on absurd resource utilization with subservience to bourne supremacy. The Chief Powder officer aiming to keep his fire pow(d)er high and dry, boasted it as an elite company (of assassins? Or whatsoever). Hopefully he will not kill himself out of habit. So, it was a warm half hearted welcome to the elite-Ops club.
Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
He entered the Office like a well dressed Bakra in formals, as he could not take his Kids’ welfare casual. The Office proved to be a great one, simple and frugal but very functional. It had desk and Chair and most importantly dining table and small pantry with a smart Admin serving good Coffee. The HR induction threatened him not to get political ideas as they are quite ethical but was proud to compare Europe’s GDPR with India’s PDP when actually both acted like antonyms in reality with PDP hiding the wolf in it with the sheep hide in the guise of National security empowering the Government to spy on what it wants unrestrictedly, So much for their Government and Corporate ethics. The tech induction was impressive and he was rest assured the company’s vision is in right track and a safe career if he does not ruffle any feather or get into rough weather.
Enter the Chameleon.
His reporting Manager’s first task assignment was to go through an Architecture “Bible” document, which he could not understand the head or tails of it. It sounded like a Muniyandi Vilas Restaurant Menu Card, Don’t know how much of bloodletting it took to frame that document. The lavish Menu was like it had everything without caring for how much the Diner’s purse carries. Of course it had its own history and revisions like the layers of Mona Lisa with its own Da Vinci type code. Unless you understand the history you cannot understand the Document. When you understand the History of the Document, and figure out whether Mona Lisa actually cries or smiles, you will be obviously become the Corporate Neo-Convert baptised to the new Religion – “How to burn company cash in 30 seconds without burning yourself”.
“No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.”
George Bernard Shah err… Shaw
The Tech Bible which changes colour like Corporate Manager Jesus.
The Reporting Manager was very cautious to call the Architecture Document as Bible. Nothing should change or deviate from Bible or one will be punished to walk in the water till they drown. It was quite funny how he was able to correlate a Document which provided us a way of life and faith and did not change for 2000+ years and still holds good for future, compared it to a Document which should ideally change and innovate, with the technology going through a paradigm shift every 5 years or so. It was lot more fun when it got changed for every roll-out to accommodate for the insufficiencies of the Partner Developer. Maybe its a writ from the “God of Cost-cutting” – You can only withdraw money using Demand Drafts and not NEFT/UPI. “Yes… My Lord, as long as I get my Salary!”
“I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me . . they’re cramming for their final exam.”
George Carlin
Knowledge transfer – Just a cake walk on Water!
The sky gazer was supposed to help a team on uploading files to cloud without any access or knowledge of it. His peer who was already in a sour mood for scheduling early morning 10 AM meetings and pokes to join, decided to stay silent. His loyal subordinates from Partner Firm followed his path of silence for the mails, making him wander Pillar to Post just to understand the issue. Weekend was followed by Peer’s sick Leaves and measured silence from everyone else that progress could not be made. The Reporting Manager exhibited Polymorphism rather genuine steps to expedite, making him cry “OOPS!”.
There was another discussion on using file or API calls without throwing light on the quantum of data for a week, pushing the star gazer to spell out what they wanted. Assuming its a guge data, looks like they have already decided to take a rudimentary file approach and chunk the data manually instead of simply paginating the API call. Wonder how they will convince every intelligent system delivering APIs to give them files. The underlying problem seemed to be that, one wrong decision getting snowballed into a bigger wrong decision, as they try to cram everything into a prototype they believe doing fine if not future ready. A proper resolution could be rewrites, which they are lazy and procrastinating.
The sky gazer completely lost hope of doing anything useful with the setup. It sounded like a very novel way of unwelcoming Team member as he might have crossed the sacred rule of scheduling early morning meetings and raising questions on their Noah’s ark built with a large hole at the bottom to facilitate their drainage.
“Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.”
Mark Twain
He has worked across various implementations, seen the best and worst, amazed at the implementations being done like a reinventing networking company’s amazing Architectural turnaround or apparel company for the skinny types’ robust implementation and also disappointed at few places. In most of the situations, he must have felt like a blind man trying to figure an elephant by touching upon various parts, but this is the first case, irrespective of his shortcomings, the implementation seemed as if built by three blind men / team hoping that they will be never be discovered on their shortcomings with the so called madly authoritative IT Governors. The ray of light came in that, though he could be rustic, at least he is still good enough to build good enough implementations.
The Knowledge transfer sessions were more like an interview where he was supposed to figure out solutions with their own Biblical err.. technical components. The approach was as if how dare someone can question or criticise them. Also came a veiled threat from the Polymorphic reporting Manager Chameleon that Early Morning Rising Peer is the go-to guy who knows everything, and not documentation like any mature company will do. He got further warned on any other infringement of bypassing early riser will even lead to firing of everyone in the meeting. The sky gazer was the only guy in that meeting who could get fired by that chameleon as others are from well to do Partner Firm, who seemed to have upper hand on everything including the poor chap who acted like cheaper version of Donald Trump – “You are Fired!”. Maybe their partners are experts who have seen through the entire charade as Divine comedy and navigate well. The below quote aptly fits them though.
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”
Neils Bohr
Writing the Access imposition X times…
The access to the Servers and Code went through a large SDLC cycle where even the Corp ID’s Department / Reporting Manager attributes become faulty. It was made even worse as the Service Ticket will be closed as per the temperament of the Service Engineer and another ticket need to be opened up even to continue the conversation to update the attributes. He again lost hope of navigating the access maze and just stayed stuck. Now, he started enjoying the warm unwelcomeness in every aspect of it. Killjoy!
“I think Smithers picked me because of my motivational skills. Everyone says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.”
Homer Simpson
Meet the Maverick – Mad child playing with expensive lego bricks.
The useless Sky gazer got assigned to useless Project that was about to be rewritten due to various data and scalability issues. After multiple interrogations he understood nobody followed the so called Architecture for the reference component, the chameleon wanted him to treat like sacred Bible. The rollout was just a development of convenience by the Partner Firm milking a clever acceptance from the early morning Peer, who always had someone who has resigned to blame and the blessings of Architecture team.
“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”
George Carlin
The useless Project was led by an useless Maverick Man-Child having shades of eccentricity throwing tantrums in heavy proportions. The project become a three pronged headache, fix the data errors, fix the scalability / performance issues and do everything with a disjointed architecture as the Company seemed to be rich enough to buy three products doing the same thing and the design was as if writing a property will allocating work asset to those three components to please everyone around, rather making it work.
Fortunately, at-least one among three technology product, a good and simple tech sibling was mysteriously found to be bad for some reason or other nobody cared to know and got abandoned out of the will. So, it was a tussle to squeeze work / property share between two components a cutting edge and a legacy one. It got further complicated by the Partner firm as they had more legacy developers rather cutting edge tech cloud developers. When he raised the resource plan mismatch with the proposed design, the Chameleon hushed it up claiming it as Team Secret. He still wondered why do they do vendor-lock-in by developing on a proprietary language rather choosing easily portable language across cloud or on-premise like Java… who knows it could be just another team secret. All-in-all it sounded like he was brought in as a low shelf life contractor to cover their sins with the new entrant’s justifications and thought process.
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
Bill Gates
So, the implementation was factually a design driven by the Developers’ availability instead of any design or architecture. But, their designs were made to look cutting edge. How? Just put a small box for legacy layer having a lot of “hidden” functionality and make the cutting edge tech look big enough with the biggest box for anyone trying to understand. It was like a creating three cots for a person to sleep, but with its own size shortcomings and the architectural decision was to cut the leg of the Person as required to fit him in the cot. If he still whines on why three cots instead of one, just cut him to three parts to make use of the cots, as cost justification matters more than anything else.
The Big Bang Idea
As if the issues were not enough, the eccentric Maverick manager came forward with an idea, to kick out a legacy product and adopt the tech sibling who was thrown out for mysterious reasons. It actually sounded like good design, but to convince the team where everyone had an agenda of their own, is like climbing Mount Everest without Oxygen supply and blood flow. In any Organisation, there are two types of people / role-play responding to the Management, one who strictly adhere as Master-Pleasers without trusting their instincts or skills, like the chameleon Manager and the other who make noise and fall in the bad books but still tolerated for their skills and performance like the eccentric. The Sky gazer is someone who neither had the courage to break rules nor the “talent” and will to be Master’s lapdog licking around and lingering there, as hapless fresh entrant without any foothold of accomplishment. He was just trying to get access to understand the mysterious pandora box. He decided not to take any stance but organise a discussion together and allow them to fight and arrive at a conclusion.
“Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?”
Edward Bergen
Putting everyone to Bed.
The best part of conflict arrived when the proposed discussion was assumed to be for adding an additional sibling to the property will even without any discussion / clarification by the chameleon and Co. The apprehension had its reasons. There was a lot at stake as the resource allocations and everything about the most important component of the Project – Money… will change, where ultimately, they will questioned on their decisions.. So, the property will panchayat got assigned to the “Lord of the Purse” on whether to adopt the thrown out sibling or just go with the legacy darling. Funnily, the thrown out sibling was already bought and kept aside sparingly used and was also logically the rightful heir to the design, if designed carefully. The Lord of Purse was given enough dog whistle by the chameleon and Company, that a new component was getting added which was falsely assumed to cast a deep hole on his purse. Lord of the Purse angrily replied that he wanted to put everything to Bed at rest as if he is running no-questions-heard-or-asked-Corporate-Zombie-Hospital.
“Sometimes I spend the whole meeting wondering how they got the big meeting table through the door.”
It’s Not me / May be it’s Me
I “swear” to Mother friendly God!
Now, the eccentric Maverick Manager got into his synthetic anger mode for no reason. He questioned the reason for opening the discussion on third sibling’s adoption as the entire discussion should have been discussed without naming the third tech sibling. He derived a genial reasoning that all the anger of the Lord of Purse was because the third sibling was named. Maybe we should have called him Pariah so as to adopt him unknowingly, out of empathy or sympathy, accommodating it with a minute box in the Powerpoint. The logic illustrated was out of the world. Only corporate IT could do such miracles, like Elon musk renaming twitter to X made it look anew and profitable, if still not working make it Why… err… “Y ” or “?”. Jai Hindustan!
Don’t know if Lord or Purse’s “Putting it to Bed” retort triggered / aroused the eccentric, he started calling out consummation in a very in-dignified way and lamented how come everyone acted like a King but they were essentially babies need to be fed with… documents, which nobody asked except for him. He then assigned the sky gazer to create more documents with more boxes, where the Lord of the Purse could put his money into, to avenge his sorrow. The choicest abuses were reserved for the so called Property Will – Architecture, in reality just the customary one which nobody else really bothered and efficiently circumvented.
“If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z. Where X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut.”
Albert Einstein
Blame it on the Cloud.
The sky gazer felt like laughing out loud on the loud and empty logics on display. But the after taste of eccentricity and swear words started weighing heavily on him. He just “resigned” to fate as counting stars seemed as better useless Job than solving this property share where everyone is preying around like vulture for the corporate fortune. The real Losers on this episode was the Corporate fund and then the Sky gazer who got deprived of month’s salary citing non-existent policy as return of vengeance from his Chameleonic reporting Manager and Co, who could not make him toe the line.
He could just blame everything on the cloud, as in retrospective it was just a laughable Circus he got pulled into. Except for the resignation act none was his doing. But what good is holding a Job without any sense of self-respect or dignity? Afterall all brown skins are not born thick enough to withstand abuses. If he entertains such swearing nut cases, it’s only going to get aggravated. The clueless management seem more inclined towards such authoritative and egoistic “governance” without even knowing what is happening under the hood. As such, there was no logic burning millions on IT investment, but cautiously saving on his peanut salary. Maybe this is just Corporate version of better being Sorry than staying safe. When such decisions explodes its going to be sure big bang like Meteors on Dinosaurs. Maybe Karma has its sweet way of financial balancing.
For any Tamil-Filmy-Japanese Guy… You know what is Karma…? Well I know better about you trying to suck upon controversies for publicity and end up burning as much bigger controversy. And that is called Karma.
“A man is accepted into a Corporate for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”
Modified Mark Twain Quote
The age of Cloud-Mine
Choosing freelance consulting is both of blessing and curse. It’s a curse where you need to work on limited resources compensating for the instability of the career, it also richly rewards with a lot of exposure to different companies, their best practices, turn around moments and also their pitfalls. There was a leader of conviction who did not sway to any open source or cloud ecosystems, but chose to perform a proper checklisting of the features required and tallying it with RoI. There was a Principal Architect who got pissed off with the so called configurable products and sluggish performance and was taken aback with the simplicity of POJOs – The plain old Java objects performing better and chose to rewrite everything in On-Premise JEE framework, “boldly”. There were few meticulous companies which tracked resources and allocation better than JIRA with a clear vision of what they want without flashy namesake projects. The best thing to learn on short term consulting is that you get to rub shoulders with the greatest who are yet to be discovered while getting your own sweet independence and time to change diapers of babies while putting up with your spouse on housing chores.
“No one will need more than 637Kb of memory for a personal computer.”
Bill Gates
Unfortunately, in star gazer’s Motherland, of late, except for few eminent personalities like Harsh Goenka, none provided a proper Final settlement citing some lame reasons like making you sign NDA on last day or swallow PF deductions. But Karma has always had a funny way of turning around this company culture. A company which withheld PF was running a 30-40% bench and bleeding on ransomware calls due to cost cutting. It’s NDA imposition competitor is still working on low level projects as glass ceiling can never be shattered by small minds.
“Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.”
Bill Gates
Recently, the city of Birmingham declared bankruptcy, trying to replace a SAP system with Oracle and burning their fingers. This proves a point cutting edge tech has nothing to do with data management and if at all cutting edge need to be employed, it has to happen where the data transfer happens around. Bankruptcy is reserved for people who acquire teacups for the want of better tea. One thing as a Consultant one frets over is that, he can never change things for good. If he does… he is just trying to flip a Dosa/ pan cake stuck on a hot tawa without a “spatula” of in-house accomplishment, just ending up burning his own fingers. But, he can always mail and leave the rest to Karma and take bed rest.
“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”
Bill Gates
The CIOs tend to get caught themselves on the trendyish cloud-webs they find fascinating in the consumer centric world. You got enough sexy and glitzy forums aptly scheduled at Las vegas to gamble around with company funds. First of all, there is no clear idea on how to use the cloud and the project cost with the increasing data management. Secondly, they forget that Cloud is just a startup laboratory for their IT experiments. Once they have a matured technology solution which will stand for a decade, it’s much more profitable to move to On-premise creating an in-house micro services setup. Thirdy, they don’t have a clear exit plan for Cloud by writing in native code like C# rather than Java or any other portable language, and then wasting resources by jumping around cheaper corners finding shoe racks to stuff their data in. They should have kept portability to On-premise, Quantum of data and exponential billing in mind for their implementations.
“Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.”
Bill Gates
Ironically, by investing on the Cloud Vendors who are supposed to to be the “cheapest” solution providers, CIOs also made them the world’s biggest revenue generating Firms. We need to ask ourselves who the ultimate Bakra is if we create our own IT apocalypse with irrational hiring and investments and vengeful firing methodologies.
“I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger.”
Bill Gates
Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Moving Survival Mountain
While the crazy sky gazer could not figure out the corporate rat race, at least he figured out the reason for bespectacled Father figure in the clouds. He started utilising his Mom’s pension amount inherited from his Father as the last lifeline to survive his family. Ultimately, his Father’s savings helped him like Naai Sekar’s Magic Box, when the sexy Corporate Trishas and Nayantharas flying high on the cloud left him high and dry, depriving him of his well earned salary, squeezing him to stress out. Maybe he is oh-so-tasteless.
“Now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework.”
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
He then turned desperate for any cloud signs or magic looking at the sky to calm himself with an imaginary rope to get out of the froggy well with despair pulling the legs of Hope finding a way out. On a Super Blue moon day, he at-least got a sign if not salary. He queried his daughter nearby, “What do you see in the Clouds?”
She replied, “Mountain!”
Moonu Moonu Moonu Unnoda Love Sceneu
My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
PS: This is just an imaginary post not subjected to any Non Disclosure agreements, just like never credited salaries of Idiots who still find hope in hopeless Corporate Culture, drafted by ego heads treating themselves as fascist Religion, and religiously followed by Corporate Minions without understanding one day they will be on the receiving end of the same atrocious toxic inhuman culture they helped to groom.
If this correlates / resembles anything in reality, it’s just coincidencidental incident or incidental coincidence like the numerous synthetic coincidences leeching on Blogger’s blood and life.
All images are for illustrative purposes only.
Timepass Politics 