Melancholy ....

Some days are just off, you just wonder how to pass the time and indulge yourself in random activities.  The activities themselves don't have to bear any meaning for you, you just do something as if your mind is stuck in a cycle of indecision and laziness.  And, before you know - BAM ! Its 2 AM in the morning and you are still staring at your computer monitor ! Where the time flew ? 'Ah life sucks !', you declare and continue staring, randomly browsing, munching away that unhealthy snack that kills you a little every single day, and again make another resolution (in vain). to change yourself and upgrade your life first thing the next morning.

The cycle of melancholy that seeps into your life every once in a while, is a cruel master.  It makes you its slave. It eats away any form of energy you would have.  It engulfs your mind, clouds your judgement, pulls you back into boring and lifeless routine activities. It prevents you from accomplishing anything, and makes you surrender yourself involuntarily to it.  But from time to time, it does ensure that you remind yourself how of miserable you are as a person and while you do it laughs and jeers at you.

Yet, it happens to all of us, happens to the best of us, happens to the worst of us, and almost anybody who fits the description of a mortal human being.  Melancholy is perhaps one of the constants of life, like change.  It cannot be avoided, it cannot be planned for.  Its always lurking in the corner, sneering, waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on you at a time when you least expect it.  And when it does arrive, it saps at your motivation and slowly gnaws its teeth at your character.  

The only escape from its dark, cold and foreboding touch, that I know of , is to wait.  Simply wait until it settles away, don't try too hard to push it.  It begs you to do it, it derives pleasure as you try to shake it off from you.  It laughs at your efforts on curing yourself.  It loves a fight as it knows its gonna win at the end.  So, instead, make it your friend.  You don't need to necessarily like it.  Treat it as one of those friends / relatives who you have to shake hands with once a year at the family gathering.  You hate it, but you have to deal with it and move on.  Just wait for the unpleasantness to get over, and then slowly, collect back what's left of yourself and surge past it.  Melancholy hurts, just minimize the damage you allow it to do on you.

(link for the image : http://www.phocabulary.com/melancholy)

Self Leadership and Imagination

I recently attended a two week workshop on general soft skills / cross culture and related subjects' training.  Two topics really made me look up and take notice.  The others were good too, but the below topics really caught my attention.

1. Self leadership

2. Fostering creativity

I will not describe or discuss here as to what was taught to us in the workshop.  But I will just put down my own independent thoughts on the above topics from my perspective.

1. Self Leadership: 
I think this is perhaps one of the most interesting topics that has caught my attention recently.  We often complain of how much change we would like to bring in a "system" given the chance.  We often complain about the lack of leadership skills shown by others who hold such positions.  But when you do some introspection you realize that, leadership is in fact, not so easy.  And you realize it the hard way , when you try to "lead" yourself into "change".  The "change" could be anything , it could be as simple as "waking up early in the morning".  You can make a plan and start the process of "self leadership" into accepting yourself into this simple change, and you'll realize how hard it is ! It takes great amount of force to pull yourself out of routine and adjust yourself to a new reality. Most of us give up somewhere along the way, and say "it just isn't possible" or simple, procrastinate it so you wont feel guilty of totally giving up.  Whatever the case maybe, you need to ask yourself this - "If its so hard leading yourself, how do you think you'll be able to lead others ?"  Note that, I'm talking about "leading" and not "managing", they are totally different from each other.  Managing people is rather easy, but leading them, is hard.  And to those, who think they're already better leaders, or they think they can be better leaders, I would say your litmus test is when you start "self leadership" !  Try leading yourself into accepting a simple change from yourself towards improvement and you can gauge how good your leadership skills are !

2. Fostering creativity: 
Now this is another interesting misconception that I see most people have.  I see how often people believe that they are not "creative", and it takes some genius to be really creative.  After attending the workshop, I feel that this notion of "lone genius" is really misguided.  Creativity exists in all of us, its just that we let it go into hibernation, simply because we find it easier to adjust to routine and stay in our comfort zone.  For ex: We were asked to paint a dragon with water colors.  Now, even though I was fairly good at drawing long long time ago, I did not know I still had it in me.  But when I took those brushes and started painting, I felt I did a fairly decent job.  Now what sparked this ? In my opinion, its just that I was not afraid of the results / or in other words "failure", there was no one to judge me, and I had no critic to tell me whether it was good or bad.  I was like a child, exploring what I could  do with those brushes.  That's creativity.  Creativity exists in all of us  , but it only sparks when we set our minds free, get out of the "routine" box , stop thinking of risks and feasibility and worry about acceptance .  When we do that, we can see that we explore so many avenues which we initially thought did not exist.

Intellectual property use / abuse ?

I find that, in recent times, one of the most abused area in tech business, to make a quick buck is Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).  Not a day goes by without reading some tech company suing some other company over some insignificant piece of design, which I honestly doubt the creators would've even stolen consciously ! From protecting ownership, this IP has become more of a tool for cash-strapped companies to make a quick buck.  You know , kind of , legal extortion ! I feel as if this IPR, while on one hand protects the rights of ownership for the individual, is stifling creativity and innovation.
       Lets take the simple example of touch screen phones.  Now, Apple invaded the mobile phone market around 5 years back with its iphone 2G, and changed the landscape forever.  Not only did it bring up a barrage of copycats, it also, brought with it a slew of lawsuits, with every company suing every other company.   So, how do the other companies escape the charge , if they can't afford the royalty ? They just have to re-do everything from scratch.  You already have this touch screen technology here, but instead of building upon it and improving it, most other companies are spending so much of resources on just re-inventing the same thing, albeit with some minor difference ! Google has a search algorithm which gives excellent results, but can MS improve on that ? Or can anyone improve on that ? NO !  MS has an in-house group spending millions of dollars to do the same thing which google has already accomplished ! Why ? Because the algorthm is an IP of Google.  You either cough up millions of dollars in royalty, or make your own thing from scratch.
     Now, please dont mistake me here.  I'm not saying its right to steal the hardwork of others.  But, I wonder, if our progress will be the same, if we start restricting sharing of knowledge using tools like IP and copyright ? What if Newton had patented the 3 basic laws of physics or if Alexander fleming had patented penicillin ? Would the world have been the same ? Netwton wasn't wrong when he said, "If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants", I wonder, can anyone else in this day and age, dare make such a statement ? Well, they can't if they do, the giants will sue them to eternity.
     Although it seems more like a hope as of now, I wish these tech companies learn to live together and still go in for a healthy competition and not sue one other over crazy insignificant IPs.  It doesn't help the industry as a whole, and can only make it stagnant instead of taking it forward. Here's to hoping for a healthy competition .... signing off for now .... catch you in some time :)

Project Skyrim

My immediate goal in my free time is to complete and wrap up Skyrim.  I've clocked in upwards of 40 hours and nowhere near the end.  If info on the interwebz are to be believed , I still have around 60-80 hours of game to burn.  Now, I'm the sort of person, who can't take up another game until I finish one.  So, I've this huge back log of other games waiting to be played.  And then, there's the release of Mass Effect 3 looming in my face.

So, I'm starting "Project Skyrim", which is basically completion of the game as soon as possible (2 weeks).  I'm planning to ensure that I can dedicate as much of my free time at home as possible to complete this.  Which means, giving up on watching movies, facebook, idle browsing, and reading up on game tech.  However, Skyrim being a mammoth game, I can't complete each and every quest and get every piece of that finesse armor/equipment available in the game.  So, this is what I plan to complete in the coming weeks, before I start up another game.
1. Thieves guild quests
2. Dark Brotherhood quests
3. Imperial legion quests
4. Bard college quests
5. Main quest

I plan to re-visit the game when it has a DLC and go on with other random quests and get all those rare equipment and armors in the game.

Lets see how my project goes.  Wish me luck....off to play Skyrim now !

Oh Well....I got promoted !!

YAY !!

Got promoted to Senior Engineer.  Nice happy occasion.  It was quite some time since I had been promoted - maybe 3 years I guess.  Spoke to some of my family members, but I had to sugarcoat my new role - you know, Senior Engineer in India, is a post, you get after 2 years into the job.  Not after 8 years.  Funny how much difference the cultures make.

Anyway, this is good news for a many reasons.  First, I don't need to worry about the next promotion for atleast another couple of years.  So , it means, I can just focus on my job, and not worry about impressing anyone.   Second, I don't need to work my ass off pulling 16 hour work days.  Working for 10 hours as I do generally and pulling in a late night whenever the work demands should suffice.  Its really refreshing to get out of the rat race and finally be able to do what I want.  Which is write good programs, learn some interesting stuff on directx, learn some basic photography with my DSLR, and get to explore this country I'm living in currently - Korea.  Not to mention , spend more time with my wife and daughter along the way :)

Oh by the way, I plan to shift this blog wordpress from blogspot in sometime.  Still figuring things out on how to use Wordpress.  The main reason of the shift is the wordpress support on android and well, I see that its much more robust than blogger.  Only downer is that it doesn't allow me to post google ads.  Not that, I've too many readers here who would make me rich.  Are there ? lol !  Also, another idea is to keep this blog as it is, and have another blog in wordpress to talk mostly about my technical ramblings.  Let me see how it all works out.

Anyway, signing off for now....good night !

Life as an Engineer in South Korea - Part 1

Its quite some time since I've updated this blog.  I can come with a multitude of reasons, but honestly deep down I know its due to sheer laziness.  Sorry for that (as if you are waiting with baited breath he he).  

Anyway,  its close to three months since I entered this beautiful place and I thought of writing a bit about it here.  Usually we get enough information about Indian Engineers in US/UK or any other English speaking countries.  But information about Indian Engineers in Korea is hard to come by on WWW.  So, hopefully, this will give some insight into aspiring Engineers who're looking to take up employment here.  I'll give the information in parts.  In this post, I'll address some concerns I had before coming here (these are very common, and most people would've them too).

For the uninitiated, I recently took up job as an Engineer at one of the most prominent companies of S.Korea (no cookies for guessing ;) ) in Suwon City , S.Korea.  I had lot of apprehensions initially about accepting the job offer and life in general, at a country where, finding someone who speaks English, is equivalent to finding someone who likes Tees Maar Khan in India.  Sorry for the bad punchline, I'm not so good with analogies !

Some of the most common concerns I had were in the below areas - 

1. Food
2. Working long hours 
3. Harsh climate 
4. Language Barrier
5. Cost of Living

Let me address them one by one.

1. Food - Food is not an issue so far, mainly because we had brought most of our Indian groceries with us here.  So I get to eat delicious Indian food daily.  And my wife seems to have found an otherwise previously undiscovered love for cooking delicious dishes deep inside her, which works greatly to my advantage.  Add to that, my office has a good, well stocked, Indian Cafeteria, which offers decent Indian vegetarian meals.  There are some pizza places, where one can order vegetarian pizzas as well.  You have a couple of Indian restaurants as well in Suwon where you can find vegetarian food.  But as a whole, being a veggie, one is at a disadvantage here.  Some of the vegetables like green beans are very very hard to find, Indian  stores are few and far , and even if you do come across the few Indian stores, Indian Rice cost like $22 for 5kgs !  So, if you are an Indian veggie, life maybe a bit tough, if you don't have enough groceries with you and your company doesn't provide Indian food.  You might find it tough to socialize with your Korean colleagues as well, as, being a veggie, you will always stick out like a sore thumb in office parties and lunch/dinner treats.  

2. Working Long Hours - This seems to be a common misconception outside of Korea.  Yes, hours are long only if you make them to be.   So far, nobody at my office has told me to stay back and work for extra hours.  In fact,it has been quite the opposite, I'm encouraged to work smart and not slog.  But this might vary across companies.  But, in general, from what I've noticed, Koreans are hardworking people.  They don't mind staying long hours in office, and they are pleased if you stay back too. 

3. Harsh climate - Coming from the air conditioned weather of Bangalore, the weather here in S.Korea does seem harsh at times.  The cold can go as bad as -16 , literally forcing you to stay indoors.  But nothing , a couple of hot pakoras with warm coffee and a thick sweater and blanket can't solve.  If you are having trouble with harsh winters, this might be an issue for you.  I've heard the summers can be nasty too, yet to experience it, so no comments yet !

4. Language Barrier - Well this is indeed a huge problem.  So much that, sometimes I fear it can potentially cause social isolation and induce loneliness.  There are some Indian families around in the city of Suwon, but the knowledge of local language is needed the most, especially when you go out to shop or roam around, where, a trivial task like asking for that grocery you want, or  checking out directions can be a huge hassle.  In office, not knowing the language can put you in a great disadvantage compared to your peers.  You develop a frustrating sense of dependency on your co-workers for even insignificant stuff like getting your computer repaired, paying your bills (At least the first few times) etc.   Meetings and most of the technical training happen in native Korean, and you miss out on them as well.  So, unless you are prepared to spend time and efforts to learn Korean, you might want to re-think about a long term career here.  I've started to train myself on Korean with some information available on web, planning to attend some classes shortly as well. 

5. Cost of Living - Yes, S.Korea is expensive compared to India or China and almost as costly as US in some aspects.  Renting an apartment is very expensive, so are vegetables and other groceries. Same goes for clothes and other household items.  But, I received a fully furnished apartment as part of my job offer from my Employer due to which I'm relatively at a safer side. Kid's education is another thing to look out for.  Monthly fees can cost you upwards of $500 in an English school for simple Kindergarten education (excluding initial deposit, travel/books/uniform and other such miscellaneous expenses).  I've not checked for primary schools, but my guess would be that it would be much more.  Medical Expenses, cost a lot too from what I heard, but there's a medical program from govt., which is kind of mandatory (I assume), which covers most of the regular ailments.  The premium for that is quite less, so unless you are illness-prone, you should be able to get along.  To sum it up,  without the benefits of housing, accepting a job in S.Korea, especially for people from India , can be daunting since the cost of living here is very high compared back home.

So that's a brief summary based on my 3 months of living here.  I'll try to update the blog more regularly whenever I get free time.  Catch you later :)

Pathetic state of 'Project Management' in silicon valley of India

I had a heated exchange with my boss today leaving me very exhausted mentally and irritated to some extent.  The worst part is, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot help but bring this to home - which results in a nasty snowballing effect of adding more stress as everybody else is stressed out at home when they see me grumpy.

     I can make a blog and fill it up with 100 posts about how much office work contribute to stress for a working individual in India.  Especially in the software industry.  The main reason is the disagreement and the way its handled in our so called 'modern offices'.  Have an issue with your manager, well the way to sort it out is to sit for hour long lectures on anything from 'Empowerment' to 'Turning around', 'innovation' and more management terms, which you never use in your daily life.  Don't agree with your boss/co-worker, the official way is to schedule a skip level meeting, where invariably you are taught lessons on how to get along with your boss/colleagues by your skip level manager.  You can run from pillar to post, but the end message is the same - "Just stick to the plan and get on with your work.  Your opinions can be shoved up your behind for all we care !"

    Sad really ! One of my colleagues was telling me today that "people don't leave companies, they leave managers".  And its so true.  One of the main reasons I attribute this pathetic state of project/resource management in India is to the vastly unskilled/undeserving pool of managers.  These guys were the engineering graduates of the late 90s or the early 2000s, who entered the industry during the 'dot-com boom'.  At that time, attrition was so high, a guy with 4 years of experience was the tech lead, a guy with 2 years of experience as tech lead became a manager and so on.  Naturally when the tide is slowing down and getting into a state of normalization, we have all these vast pool of people who are stuck at mid-level/upper level management positions, who are so unskilled in technical areas, you've no option but to continue using them.  And now we are beyond the previous "maintenance" projects, getting more and more of end to end development and guess who manages these ? The previously unskilled pool !

    Most of these so called 'project or resource managers', still work by the age old method of bribe/blackmail/carrot & stick for employee retention / satisfaction.  Some of the popular methods of making an employee "contribute" more to the company:

1. On-site opportunity: By far the most popular one.  Find a grumpy employee not happy with his salary/work/environment or whatever, forget about spending time at counselling him to find the root cause, just throw in the assurance of sending him onsite and rest assured he'll fall in place.  Any place from Singapore to Buenos Aires will do, as long as him/his wife and his kid's tickets are paid for and he is allowed to stay back long enough to change his location in facebook profile and paste pics about his onsite spoils.  No matter how stupid his outing was or how bad his new fake accent is.

2. Contractual obligations:  Worried about losing your fresh talent jumping onto other companies ? Worried that all you taught to the fresh minds are being stolen away by other companies at your expense ?  Don't bother about improving your in house work culture or incentives to make them stay.  Throw in a complicated contract which could result in the employee paying a hefty sum of money in case he leaves you.  You can even throw in an advocate at the time of making the contract to really strike fear into their hearts.  For best results visit the innermost parts of India where students are actually ready to sign their life off for an opportunity to work in a s/w company.  Use their poor financial situation complete to your advantage! Now that's how geniuses in HR roll yo !

3. Ridiculous notice periods:  I heard that the notice period in US is usually two weeks.  Well, welcome to Bangalore ! Here it varies any time between 2 months to 6 months depending on which company you are in.  Impossible to retain an employee thanks to your sucky company policies ? Well let us make it such that its not possible for them to find employment anywhere either.  'You can't lose if you don't play!'

4. Unbelievable lateral hikes:  Finding trouble poaching talent with your sucky bureaucratic company policies ? Tired of being rejected by anyone who's able to write a program to print "hello world" without compiler warnings or errors ? Well, here's the instant solution - give them a ridiculously high package which is more than twice the amount another poor loyal guy with the exact same skill set and experience is making at your company.  Add a signing bonus as an icing on the cake to seal the deal.  Rest assured you'll land that guy for your next induction program.  Now, to stick to your process of suckiness, ensure that his future hikes are dramatically reduced to fractions lesser than one, and depend on point 1,2 or 3 for his retention.  Also, don't bother about normalizing the salary of that honest/loyal engineer stuck with your company.  What kind of a loser sticks to a company beyond 2 years eh ?

If you think I'm trying to vent out my frustration or being sarcastic, you are free to walk in and join any software company in Bangalore and see if for yourself.  Don't bother checking the logic or the reasoning behind any of these points, unless you are in mood for some real "coaching" on how "you should first ask yourself what you've done for the company before you ask what the company has done for you" !