Boy Zone

I am referring to my team when I said “Boy Zone”. It has been just three months and I have started feeling that may be we should have some girls in our team. A9 group has managed to get a couple or three gals but our team stays firmly as Boy zone …

I can’t think why high standard hiring means fewer girls. Are girls not smart enough to enter such firms? Or may be they are not that career oriented as guys who take significant amount of preparation before interviewing for geeky firms. May be, girls don’t want to work in such hectic schedules … Or they are not that much technology oriented …

Whatever may be the reason … the reality is that we don’t have even a single girl in our team. I miss the heroic feeling that guys in firms such as Infy or TCS get when they bail out gals from bugs …

( Infy Gal : Hey ! My machine is not starting … Can you look at the problem?

Infy Guy: Sure! Oh, you have to switch on the power for starting any machine…

Gal: You are so brilliant … I never knew that …)

In our team, there are no girls and so no blunders … (Gal: I accidentally deleted the accounts info DB in Prod. Hope it shouldn’t be a big problem). So in short …it’s very boring. Even if someone makes any blunder, he is smart enough to bail himself out … So sad …

I really miss those expressions on the Gal’s face when they come to us after committing blunders … Its worth much more than getting bash from clients … So I don’t mind facing client’s fury for seeing those sweet expressions ….

Female programmers are a great thing in Indian software industry. Oh God, we miss it …

PS: I wrote this blog in a weird mood after seeing a couple of Infosys buses carrying pretty programming angels … So I plead female readers not to bash me with furious mails blaming me as a male chauvinist …

Be Frank, Brutally

I am tired of the hectic schedules and tense meetings. I think this is the price I should pay for being a Manager. But in retrospection, I believe I could have done some tasks differently that could have eased my tension.

The mistakes I did were trying to please the clients and not being frank. These two could get as deadly as we could ever imagine. I saw the face of this costly mistake as close as I will ever be. Both these mistakes are correlated. I was not frank so that I could please the clients.

I hid some bugs found at a very later stage. In the process of fixing it, we stepped on to plethora of other bugs and I was answerless when clients started asking me when they can start integrating. My blood pressure was jumping like tsunami waves as it will when I encounter pretty girls at Forum. I know this tension could have been avoided just by being Frank.

Being Frank is relatively easy when compared to being brutally frank. You should have guts to say to the clients on the production day that you have some serious bugs. You should be as gutsy as Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction if you have to say ‘we just have 75 bugs to be resolved and I am pretty confident that our boys won’t be able to do it by the D-day’. You could be ultra cool by patting your client’s shoulder – “Be cool Dude! This is how production works!!”

I have seen some projects that have been managed pretty well. Their status reports are brutally frank and they follow the principle that any bad news could only become worse by not informing.

So, don’t try to please the clients … Don’t ever do that by hiding your mistakes …

Proud to be in Prod

Finally, we pushed our project to production. The last two weeks have been very hectic and there were days when we worked 24 hours continuously. Developers are really energy drained and worn-out. Now everyone can take break and refresh themselves before starting the next release. I am also feeling relieved and happy.

I was reading a Tamil book “Ponniyin Selvan”. When I was going thru the difficult phases in the project, the hero of the novel was also going thru turmoil and difficulties. So Today I felt a need to finish the novel and see that all the chaos is settled and the hero is happy. I finished it in the cab. When I came to office, it looked like a bright day with my mind singing the happy tunes. Finally, I feel like that hero who brought the chaos into order.

MD called me and said that I should be proud for achieving this. He should have said that for a formality.

The reality might be different … I might not be a critical piece in the project … But the project has taken me thru a lot of difficulties teaching me valuable lessons … At least, I would be a critical piece, an able leader in my next venture …

Happy Anniversary, Amazon.com

Amazon.com is currently in celebration spree for its tenth anniversary. It’s special for India team as we are entering into our first anniversary. It’s again special for me as I am releasing my first project. So a lot of celebration to go …

You can check out Amazon.com celebration plans at

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/14104251/102-1949963-4145765

The interesting one is Special delivery with celebrities taking the deliveries. From actor Rob Schneider delivering the 50 First Dates DVD, to Anna Kournikova delivering a pair of Adidas tennis shoes, it’s a fun to watch those clips.

In India, we were planning to have a big concert in the lines of our parent, but it looks like most of the Amazonians are in favor of going out for trek / resort instead of the concert. So, I might be soon in Goa or Kerala or atleast in some resort in Karnataka enjoying the party, naturally!!

Take lessons … Your hassle lessens …

Still I am struggling with the sales people. These guys are born to lie. My car has arrived on Friday. Still the loan amount has not gone to the dealer and that is preventing me from taking the delivery. I applied exactly a week before and was promised that the money will go to the dealer last Friday itself. Still the money has not gone and I am getting a ton of reasons portraying their creative talent.

Friday: Money has to come from Bombay and we are waiting … (As if money is arriving by flight)

Saturday: Money has not come back from the previous Maruti dealer (Couldn’t they check it before itself?)

Sunday: It’s Sunday (What a great Trivia!!)

Monday: It will reach in another 10 minutes (It was the status throughout the day)

Today: No-one is picking up their mobile (Who, the hell, invented the Caller ID?)

Even after learning this valuable lesson of how frustrating the customer experience is with improper replies, I repeated the same mistake when I was on the other side. Friday was our Alpha release and our clients were waiting for our release.

We were still getting some bugs in the regression testing and there was a conference call every hour to sync-up on the status. I was doing the same mistake – “We are running the regression test suite and it should be ready in an hour”. Now I understand how frustrating it would have been for the clients to hear the same status in every call. Luckily we were able to fix the bugs and push the code to alpha but the mismanagement remains as a scar in my mind. I think I was a bit tense and nervous that I was not ready to declare that we have bugs.

Who knows, the sales person could be in the same shoes with some obstacles in the loan processing, or , he could have his TV remote in one hand and his mobile in another replying that “ I am still waiting in the bank, Sir”

Thus I booked a car …

It’s simple news that I have – I booked a car. But this exercise has revealed a lot about sales people and the sales pitch that even my ISB MBA failed to teach.

I booked Maruti Swift exactly one month back. As usual, I went through a lot of test drives and was impressed with Swift. Then started the search for car loans. I met a lot of honest people with loads of lies (aka sales people). HDFC got my papers and gave a quote around 2040 EMI per Lakh. I thought they were joking. ICICI came to 2030 and said that nothing below is possible. HDFC came down to 1999 and suddenly ICICI gave quote for 1992. I didn’t know how impossible things became possible.

Finally, I went for HDFC and at the time of giving cheques, he asked for Insurance amount. He didn’t inform me prior that I have to take insurance with them but the trained guys convinced me to take insurance with them (Just that brain doesn’t work some times)

I waited patiently for one month (that was the waiting time given by the dealer) and I was informed that it will take two more months due to spike in demand and production problems. I was frustrated and just cancelled the booking.

Then the same cycle started again when I decided to look for C segment cars. After meeting the icons of Ikon, going thru the indigo of Indigo, hearing the accents of Accent and taking the course of Corsa, I finally settled for Accent. I am again going thru the loan process, negotiating with the Maruti dealer to give the loan cancellation charges, pursuing the Hyundai dealer to keep the promise of delivering by weekend … Boy, things are not that easy …

Its not just Car … I have paid the full amount for Tata Indicom broadband connection last month and am still waiting for the connection …

Post-script: It sucks to see that I didn’t blog for a week but my company that is gracious enough to employ me is intelligent enough to keep me struck in a hectic schedule. Hope I should have ample time after our release on July 15^th. I can blog regularly then.