Long live software companies!

I work as a test architect for one of the leaders in CAD industry - on contract from a Bangalore services company. Today morning, I received a mail from one of our colleagues in the US mentioning a hotfix release for our software product. I clicked on the link in the mail to get to the hotfix. This is what the webpage said....(I've replaced the company name with XXX, for sake for privacy)

XXX DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY DOWNLOAD OR IMPLEMENT ANY SERVICE PACK OR WORKAROUND, OR ANY OF THE TIPS, TRICKS, EXAMPLES OR SUGGESTIONS OUTLINED IN ANY XXX PRODUCT SUPPORT TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS. TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS, SERVICE PACKS AND WORKAROUNDS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU. XXX PROVIDES TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS, SERVICE PACKS AND WORKAROUNDS "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT SHALL XXX OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, LOSS OF DATA, OR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS OR SPECIAL DAMAGES, THAT MAY OCCUR AS A RESULT OF IMPLEMENTING ANY SERVICE PACK OR WORKAROUND, OR ANY SUGGESTION OUTLINED IN ANY XXX PRODUCT SUPPORT TECHNICAL DOCUMENT, EVEN IF XXX OR ITS SUPPLIERS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

The text in this paragraph, if you read it entirely and understood correctly, effectively states that the company will not be responsible for their own product in any way. All of you, users of our product, are basically fools, and we can't be liable for your foolishness. If you spent hundreds of dollars to buy our product, thinking that you will be able to get some benefit out of it, what else are you, but a fool? This is way we live, and feed ourselves and our families. (Internal talk: If you wish to call it cheating, so be it; we don't mind and we don't care!)

When I read this paragraph, my reaction was mixed - anger, sadness, despair and all sorts of negative feelings rushed into my mind. It is during such times, I feel awkward to tell people that that I am working for an industry who can't even guarantee that people can download their work product from the link provided at the website, let alone able to work reasonably flawlessly with it. This is not a distinctive case. This is the state of all software product companies all around the world, 'serving' customers who pay hundreds (sometimes thousands or even millions) of dollars to use their 'superior' products.

Software services companies are no better, because after all these are the people who serve such product companies. Imagine, it is a double stake - the supplier in one situation turns customer in a different one. Don't complicate it more, I will tell it in simple terms - software product companies basically fool around with their users and software service companies fool around with the product companies who they contract with. So, as in the famous quote from Lincoln, software industry is of the fools, for the fools and by the fools (because we use software produced by somebody else)....

I can only imagine…

Amazing bond between a father and a son, told so touchingly, so lovingly and so beautifully! In fact, none of the words I used here are enough to convey it all. While I was watching these two 5-minute videos, I couldn’t help comparing my fatherhood with this father…Am I anywhere close to him? I don’t think so. But, this story is truly inspiring to be that!!!

Vocabulary improvement in kids!

A few days back, my wife took my kid out for an evening walk. They were passing near to the railway crossing, nearby my home. The gate was closed, and hence both of them waited nearby to have a look at the train and wave at the passengers inside. Two minutes later, the train arrived, whistling in full blast and all the engine and all its twenty two compartments went out of sight in just a few moments. My kid was extremely happy to see the train moving so nearby him and waved his tiny hand enthusiastically. He exclaimed, “Bads train, bads train”! Bads train? What is that? My wife didn’t quite get it, but didn’t want to kill his enthusiasm in the midst of his enjoyment. Some passengers were kind enough to wave back, which increased his happiness and sense of achievement. Soon afterwards, they started their way back home.

On the way back, my wife asked him what does ‘bads train’ mean? He immediately replied, ‘This train has people in it’. “So what?”, she asked. “Yesterday when we saw a train here, you said it doesn’t carry people and is called good train. So this one is a bads train!”, he was innocent in his face when he said that. When my wife told us about this, everybody broke out laughing, except of course my kid. He couldn’t make it out, what is so funny in this. After all, he has applied the right technique (as it seems obvious to him) to identify the train correctly. Look at how kids develop their own vocabulary by connecting things up. Amazing! Of course, this time he didn’t get the relationship quite right, but most of the times his most simplistic reasoning is all that it takes to improve the vocabulary...There are numerous examples when he succeeded, but we won’t discuss them here. In fact, I believe that they fail only because the English language is so funny and doesn’t have much logic or reasoning associated with it. We will talk about this aspect of the language during a future post in this blog, but for the time being let’s stick to this subject.

Another such instance happened just today morning. Mornings, as usual, are busy for all of us at home with my kid getting readied for school, myself preparing to go to the office and my wife to her school. Presently, he just finished his breakfast and was playing in the drawing room. I was having my breakfast. At a moment that was least suspicious, my kid suddenly told me, “Why do always cool up, why don’t you cool down?”. Initially, I didn’t notice it, since I was busy reading the newspaper . But, then I stepped out aside a bit and asked him what he meant by that question? What he said was really amazing, while also giving all of us again a good laughter. He said, “I asked you, why are always angry with me, why don’t you cool down”? It wasn’t really unimportant when was the last time I got angry with him (If you’re a parent, you’ll immediately acknowledge that there is never a dearth of opportunity to get angry with one’s kid, so I surmise, I would’ve got angry with him sometime in the recent past), but the fact that he applied his mind and coined up a new phrase from his knowledge about the opposites - ‘up’ being the opposite of ‘down’ - and from two unrelated words was literally thrilling for me. This time also, like during the train incident, everybody laughed, except my kid. This time, he got it closer than during the train incident. I am sure, he will succeed next time with his innovative vocabulary!

Belief drives us...

There are lots of tiny events that happen in all our lives, but we often don’t give them any attention because many of them are too easy to neglect. They are either associated with things that are too tiny to be seen, or can’t be seen at all, or just flashes by in front of your eyes only a few nano-seconds, and costs almost nothing. However, many of the events that belong to this category are of great significance in all our lives. Without them, your lives would be no less than hell or mayn’t even exist. But apart from the reasons I mentioned above, there is one more reason for such negligence. Typically, all the candidates that invite such negligence are either too commonly available, or widely practiced.

It doesn't only happen with events, but with material things as well. Let us look at some such examples. The best example of one such material thing is the air, we breathe. Except for physicists/scientists or those with academic interest, I bet nobody has ever thought about the importance of this gas called oxygen in all of our lives. I read in one scientific journal recently that if the content of oxygen in the atmosphere differed from the present figure even by 0.01%, none of the lives you see around would ever exist. It is still a long way for the scientific community to prove how this precise oxygen content in the atmosphere could be achieved, and how long did it take for this process. Though there are lots of theories for it, all of these are only imaginative works and none are proven.

One other lesser example of such a material is water. We rarely take any notice of a glass of water, while we are eating food at the dining table, be at a restaurant or at home. I don’t know who and at what time during our evolution observed that water is a drinkable liquid and that it helped quench the thirst. But, isn’t amazing to observe a baby who is born out of its mother’s womb knows about this phenomenon without anybody telling it. Science could still not prove why it exactly is the way it is, either.

While all of us are equally bad at realizing the significance of these, we all would catch it easily, when these resources are absent or even little less than normal. While, nobody in this world would’ve experienced low oxygen, unless at great heights like at the top of very high mountains or at one’s death-bed (which nobody would be able to attest afterwards!), experiencing unavailability of water and hence its associated problems is too common nowadays, which makes all those affected realize the significance of this liquid in our lives. We don't need the science to help us here, it is experience that matters here.

Such an argument can very logically be extended to events also. Now, take this. I theorize that all events happen with some purpose. All those events do good to you. Had any slight difference been there in the nature or the timing of the event, your life would be nothing short of hell. Of course, none of what I said has been proven scientifically, but if scientists can be imaginative to tell us about how oxygen level dipped to support life in the earth and the possible window of time it happened during the life of the universe and come up with theories at the drop of a hat to explain a lot more unintuitive and stranger questions than these, why can't us too be imaginative? What is wrong in believing in something, especially when it can sustain human life? I see nothing wrong...do you?

PS: During one of my future posts, let us talk about such beliefs and also about how beliefs sustain human lives...

I bought a new cell phone!

Two days back, I bought a new cell phone - Sony Ericson 800i through one of my friends in Singapore (for this model is yet to be released in India). It is a cool phone with several cool features. Previously, I had an much older model of Nokia - 3310, that I bought some 3.5 years back. I have never used any other phone till now, so everything about this phone seemed quite new and awesome to me. But, notably interesting to me were its camera and organizer. The camera is absolutely fantastic, no doubt, with its 3.2 Mega-pixels, zoom in/out, its inbuilt Xenon flash etc. The model is named cyber-shot, to announce its linkage with the cybershot digital camera from Sony (I'm not quite sure if the technologies are the same). Its organizer supports most things that the MS outlook too supports - appointments, tasks, notes, contacts etc. I am told that most models of existing mobile phones too supported this feature. I am a fan of organizing things digitally, using calendars and so on, and in fact was one of the reasons I even set out to buy a new mobile. In my opinion, the ability to synchronize your MS outlook appointments in your PC with your phone, and getting reminded of them even while on the move, is one of the coolest things that mobile designers ever invented.

There are of course lots of other features also, like video calling (there is a separate VGA camera in the front panel of the phone to help this), video recorder, internet access, music player, radio, games etc, but all these were secondary to me. I am not a great reviewer of technologies and don't know quite a lot about cameras and absolutely nothing about the latest technology available in today's cell phones. May be because of that, I am impressed by what I got. The price of course was a bit high (near to Rs.19000/-). I read through most of the reviews available in the web about this phone, and its comparison with others available in the market, but this one and this one was perhaps the most exhaustive and the best. These reviews really helped me choose the right model...

Hope you find yourselves in the best of health soon...

Today morning, our team received a mail from our onsite (US) manager, of a different kind and set an entirely different mood amongst all of us. It said, she is off this afternoon since she had to undergo scanning at the hospital to find out if she is having a repeated attack from a cancerous growth in her body now, 2 years after the first attack. The mail, sounding a bit gloomy and moving, but very imaginable when it comes from most people, was least expected to come from her, who was otherwise perceived by most of us as the owner of a very strong determination and will power. But, thinking about it again, I realized that it was quite natural that anybody would feel depressed when they hear such news about themselves. I can't even imagine, how I would face it, if such a thing happened with me, ever... So, I decided to write a mail on behalf of the entire team to her, expressing all of our best wishes hoping for her speedy recovery and the best of health. Below here it is, reproduced exactly the same way I sent to her.

Hi,

It is easier to say than actually live it, nevertheless I will tell you what I always believed in and is my philosophy of life – “Everything happens for good”…It doesn’t look exactly relevant in this (even to me, now), but it will prove ultimately to be, in some way. I’ve experienced that in my life, several times.

Over the years, I’ve come to know a little about you. I believe you can and will get over this *trauma* thing soon. Hope for the best, but anticipate the worst and then anything that happens with you will look like a blessing…

I hope I’ve conveyed through this mail what I wanted to, and you took it in the right spirit. But know that all of us here love and respect you a lot and will stand by you always…

Regards…
Anand Iyer

Changing trends...

Yesterday, we had a new joinee to the development team at our company. His manager came by and introduced him to me. Generally, I make it a point to go and talk to the new guys, as soon as they join the team. When I talked with him, I realized that he is already familiar with most of the other members of the team and perhaps knew about them even more than me. This led me to think about how times have changed.

When I started to work, it was a very different feel during the first few days at any new company or a new team. My own experiences with one of the companies I worked with in the past are similar and even mildly daunting. I’d spent days together there, before I realized the guy who was sitting beside me belonged to the same team as mine and was supposedly reporting to me! When I walked in during the first day into that place, my eyes were looking for the guy who talked to me during my interview, because his was the only familiar face to me. All others were strangers. Fortunately I got a cubicle to sit in and a computer to tinker with, within the first few days at work. My manager was on tour abroad and wouldn’t come back for another month or so. Till such time as he came back, I’d to stay alone in my cubicle with virtually no connection with any of my neighborhood. Once he returned, I breathed a sigh of relief, but wouldn’t still know anybody other than himself. Both parties felt a strange sensation while trying to talk to each other and get introduced. Acquaintance with my neighbour happened only because he was the developer for the feature I was assigned to verify, and there was no other way than to get familiar with each other. I guess, in the most cases introductions didn’t happen, unless you were forced to co-operate at a professional level. This was the story 5 years back and I believe, happened with most everybody.

A few years earlier, all this changed. People became bolder and started mingling much more freely even starting from the first day, but with a slight push from somebody. It became customary that the manager (when he is around) takes you around the office during your first day at work, and introduces you to all other members of the team. Consider this to be an ice-breaking session. So, till the time the manager comes by to take you around, most of us will feel uncomfortable sitting in a crowd of strangers. The funny part is these ‘strangers’ know each other well, but you being a stranger to them, they may feel a bit odd to come and talk to you, because both don’t necessarily have any common subject to talk about. So, this ensues in the strangers talking about you in low whispers to each other, and eyeing you with suspicion, because after all you may’ve come in there only to attend an interview – when no other suitable place was available, the manager would’ve asked you to just wait there till a room was available for the interview.

Nowadays, such situations rarely occur, even without the team manager around. Today, most guys in the industry are youngsters, who like to go and push themselves with strangers. Today, when a new guy walks into my team, within no time, they will acquaint themselves each other. One of the managers sitting nearby me, keeps a cricket bat and a ball near him all the time, so that any new guy in his team (and even in others) will be welcomed with a game of cricket! People started discovering ways to hold personalized ice-breaking sessions. People frequent to places outside the company, to participate in team lunches, team building exercises, and even visit to nearby cinema halls. The trend is good and I hope will sustain in the future, for good…

Is it right to ‘Catch them young’?

Over the past two nights, I learnt that my 4 year old son has a philosophical edge. Typically, he doesn’t easily relent when he is asked to get onto his bed and sleep. He makes also sorts of excuses and keeps awake till my wife gets tired and sleeps herself. Most times, his excuses had been to either switch off the light in the bed-room, without which he won’t sleep or to tell him stories. But, during the past two nights, I noticed a difference. He was lying down on his bed and suddenly started asking us questions, which surprisingly turned out to be quite philosophical; I don’t know, if he realized them to be so; I also don’t know, from where he got these ideas? The previous night, he asked point blank, who ‘created’ us? If he asked me the same question slightly differently, I wouldn’t have took much notice and be so shocked. I can understand that kids usually are interested to know about how they came into this world? But, it is slightly unusual for a kid of that age to ask, *who* brought them here?

The night before that, he asked me another more intriguing question. Why does *yesterday* not come back and allow us to live again? I was really shocked and almost equally awed to hear him ask this question. It sounded unbelievable, for it was one of my own favorite questions too. I have delved on such thoughts a lot, because I like to. The answers for those lie in some extremely cryptic science – maybe physics, maybe evolution, maybe mathematics – I don’t quite know and I know also that none of us know. But, these are extremely interesting questions.

I didn’t attempt to answer this question to him. Partly because, it was not the right time to and because, I thought he wouldn’t understand if I explain him my philosophical thoughts behind it. But, I could be wrong. Maybe, he can much more easily inculcate what my mind is straining to reason, because adults are heavily adulterated by certain specific ways of thinking, while kid’s minds are completely open – they are highly receptive, willing to accept anything, without attempts to reason them too much.

Almost all adults are slaves to their thought process and fall flat on realities. Depending on which area you’ve worked most in your life, you are either logical (try to reason everything before you believe them) or you are creative (try to innovate and bring in your own thoughts into the existing ones). Though, there are few people who have both traits enough in their minds, there is probably nobody who has a good balance of both and with the most important element called acceptance, that links these. I believe that kids are much better than adults at both, since they haven’t seen much of either worlds and hence not as polluted as adults are.

So, is it right on our part to ‘catch them young’ as is stylishly put, inject them with our age-old convictions and thoughts and pollute their minds. The truth is, I don’t know…So, the next time my kid asks me any such questions, I will chose to keep quiet and let him think about it on his own and slowly fall asleep…

I just got reborn…

Have you heard anybody telling that they had had a complete makeover over the last few years. If you know them closely enough, you may consider what they said with some seriousness, else you will discard it as just a pompous display of words effecting self-praise. Of course, they only mean to say that some specific incident or their experiences in life, have caused them to change the ways in which they think and act. Even Stephen R. Covey talks about a complete re-scripting of our lives for our own good, in his book titled 7 habits of highly effective people. By the way, this is a wonderful book, with so many ideas that are all pure common-sense, but all too forgotten. We will discuss that later, for that is not the real subject here.

Ok, whatever the speakers of these statements have actually in mind, when they make them, it is actually 100% percent true in the literal sense. Biology has proved this fact beyond doubt, and that it is caused through a mechanism, which happens 24 * 7 * 365 in all our physical bodies called cell division. A few months back, I was reading a book about life after death (I don’t remember the title of the book, but it was one by Srila Prabhupada, the founder acharya of the ISKCON foundation). It talked basically about the cycles of rebirth (fundamental to the Hindu religion in India), the reason it happens, its implications and a lot more spiritual stuff. The author argues that we are reborn every few years, since according to certain biological discovery, all cells that constitute the human body are dying with time, and get replenished with newer ones. This happens at a very steady pace, and by the time we lived around 7 years, our body won’t have any cells that were part of it when the process started. Your physical body is literally entirely new, and your soul is part of an entirely new system. Though, this process is not instantaneous and hence may not really agree with what the author wanted to communicate, the argument is very logical otherwise.

The other day, while listening to the audio book of A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson, I heard this once again in the Chapter 24, titled ‘Cells’. Of course, Bill Bryson didn’t touch upon the spiritual aspect of it, but repeated the same thing. The figure that marks the ‘rebirth’ is also slightly different. He says that ‘you’ are completely new every 9 years. If the average age of a human is 75 years (let us say), he/she would have been reborn nearly 8 times in his lifetime!

Wow! What a wonderful concept! Mind you, it is not just like any other fancy concept, but scientifically proven to be correct…