One thing I knew even before joining a b-school was that making decisions forms the key to almost everything. Especially when it comes to making decisions which can have life long impacts. As someone who always let things “fall in place” than decide, it does not feel good when confronted with more and more decision making – deciding on major specialization, minor specialization, topic for empirical study, topic for Autumn internship, what not.
The underlying question, the answer to which could simplify a lot of decision-making, is what I want to do in life for a profession. Something which I would love doing, and give me a comfortable (not luxurious) pay. An industry where I don’t feel like a misfit, in spite of being above average. Something that would also give me enough time to spend with my family, similar to what my parents could give me.
Introspection only adds to the confusion. When I was in fifth standard, gazing at the night sky through the simple telescope I made with my father’s help, I dreamt of being an astronaut, dreaming of walking in space. In 6th standard, after reading about the Wright brothers and their aeroplane, I dreamt of making my own single seater and flying it.
An overdose of newspapers fascinated me, and bringing out a handwritten gossip tabloid in my class, I felt like a natural journalist in seventh standard. Eighth standard saw me conform to the standard Malayali ambition of becoming a doctor. In ninth standard, after having assembled a stereo cassette player I was sure that I wanted to be an electronics engineer.
In tenth standard, reading the adventure tales of James Bigglesworth by Capt W E Johns, I wanted to join the Indian Air Force as a pilot – a dream cut short by flat feet and myopia. For 11th standard, I didn’t even consider the non-science streams (the general perception in Kerala is that only those who don’t get science stream go to arts and commerce). When it came to choosing between Biology and Computer Science, arbitrarily I chose computer science because I didn’t want to learn biology (that despite being born to two avid botanists). The same repeated two years later, when I chose Computer Engineering.
Through my years in engineering, I could compile a list of jobs I would not want to do, Software Engineer topping the list. Upon finishing engineering, a computer engineer couldn’t be anything but a software engineer, hence I spent three years in the IT industry, often feeling like a misfit, in spite of being an above average programmer.
I needed a change, and here I am, in a b-school, trying to figure out where to go from here. One comforting feeling is that I am not the only confused soul around here. I do feel good that at least I know and accept that I am confused, whereas there are many who don’t. It remains to be seen whether things continue to fall in place, or whether a b-school will make me more proactive.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Back to School
This post has been in the offing for quite some time, but due to many reasons never got typed in.
After nearly 3 years in the IT industry, I am going back to school. School, and not college because I am joining a one year fast track MBA program, which packs so much into a single year that there are no breaks, holidays, or weekends.
No more monthly visits to God's own country or home sweet home. No more the luxury of eating food cooked by Amma once a month. No more 'decent' pay of the IT industry - back to student life, 'thozhil rahitha vidyarthi'(unemployed student) as we say in Malayalam. To use an exaggeration, joining a jail for rigourous imprisonment where there is no parole!
On the brighter side, this course would open up a lot more avenues and wider options in my professional life. What remains to be seen is whether this one year turns out to be fruitful in finding myself - something that never happened for in the IT industry.
After nearly 3 years in the IT industry, I am going back to school. School, and not college because I am joining a one year fast track MBA program, which packs so much into a single year that there are no breaks, holidays, or weekends.
No more monthly visits to God's own country or home sweet home. No more the luxury of eating food cooked by Amma once a month. No more 'decent' pay of the IT industry - back to student life, 'thozhil rahitha vidyarthi'(unemployed student) as we say in Malayalam. To use an exaggeration, joining a jail for rigourous imprisonment where there is no parole!
On the brighter side, this course would open up a lot more avenues and wider options in my professional life. What remains to be seen is whether this one year turns out to be fruitful in finding myself - something that never happened for in the IT industry.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Trichy Ramblings
I am right now in Trichy, with three more hours to kill before my train to Chennai. Dusty, hot and humid like most places in Tamil Nadu.
The train was supposed to reach at 5 am, and it was not a terminating train - so kept on waking every hour, to discover at 5 am that the train was late by at least an hour and a half. First sight of trichy was the Kaveri river(it is not a river any more - you can see most of the dry river bed, and the little spring like water remaining is only ankle deep - reminded me about Nila/Bharatapuzha in Kerala). Next came the shanties and slums, and the familiar sight of women queueing for their share of water at the hand pump.
I could find easy and affordable accomodation near the central bus stand, and food at Vasanta Bhavan was also tasty (and again cheap compared to Chennai).
Visited the Rock Fort Temple yesterday. Amazing experience - the 7th century temple, its architecture, the paintings, the carvings, and last but not least, the view of Trichy from the top. Initially I also had plans to visit the Srirangam temple, but somehow felt extremely lazy (nothing new).
My planned one hour at the internet cafe is almost over now. I shall upload the pictures taken from Rock Fort soon.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Snaps from Mamallapuram (Mahabalipuram)
Some snaps of the Shore temple at Mamallapuram, around 50 km from Chennai on the East Coast Road
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Saturday, January 13, 2007
The Guru
No, this post is not a film review of Mani Ratnam's latest offering. It is about an evening well spent, with one of the few people whom I consider as my Guru, one of the few teachers who has inspired me.
I met him yesterday in connection with getting a recommendation letter for admission to one of the universities. Once we were done with it, we had small chit chat, general enquiries about my batchmates, work, life, everything. I'd always loved listening to him, mostly because he has a different outlook towards everything - one of the few people who still resists using a cellphone - and, that, on many counts, I found his views to be strikingly similar to mine.
He said he played badminton with some of his students in the evening, invited me over to a game in the makeshift badminton court he had made in front of his department building. I happily joined him, teamed up with him for a couple of doubles matches against his other students, and promptly lost!
After the game, we both went back to his office to cool down for a while, before taking a walk to next bus stop outside the university. We had tea and snacks from a small shop there, continuing with our general discussions, and about my higher studies plans. When we were done with our snacks, we together took a bus to the city.
It was an evening very differently spent than my routine days in the infotech industry, but I enjoyed every moment of it. There he was, a senior professor and director of a research centre, with me, doing all those simple things, like playing a game or chit chat over tea and parippu vada in a small kerala tea shop. But then, to me, it is these simple things in life that give me joy, spending quality time with people I admire.
I met him yesterday in connection with getting a recommendation letter for admission to one of the universities. Once we were done with it, we had small chit chat, general enquiries about my batchmates, work, life, everything. I'd always loved listening to him, mostly because he has a different outlook towards everything - one of the few people who still resists using a cellphone - and, that, on many counts, I found his views to be strikingly similar to mine.
He said he played badminton with some of his students in the evening, invited me over to a game in the makeshift badminton court he had made in front of his department building. I happily joined him, teamed up with him for a couple of doubles matches against his other students, and promptly lost!
After the game, we both went back to his office to cool down for a while, before taking a walk to next bus stop outside the university. We had tea and snacks from a small shop there, continuing with our general discussions, and about my higher studies plans. When we were done with our snacks, we together took a bus to the city.
It was an evening very differently spent than my routine days in the infotech industry, but I enjoyed every moment of it. There he was, a senior professor and director of a research centre, with me, doing all those simple things, like playing a game or chit chat over tea and parippu vada in a small kerala tea shop. But then, to me, it is these simple things in life that give me joy, spending quality time with people I admire.
Friday, December 15, 2006
First Look: Windows Vista
Microsoft's much awaited and long overdue OS, Windows Vista is finally out - the corporate version was launched on November 30, and the home editions are expected in January 2007.
I happened to attend a seminar on Windows Vista as part of Microsoft ISV, where they were making it sound as the best thing that could happen to the software industry. The talk included a walk through of what's new with Vista, and a few tips and tricks for software development in Vista.
Some of the features in Vista can be back ported to WinXp using Vista SDK, but the rich visual experience can not be ported. The look and feel of Vista is much better than that of WinXP - this could go a long way in redefining user experiences. The other major 'new things' in Vista, apart from the visual effects, are: Improved Search functionality, User Access Control (UAC), Sidebar/Gadgets, IE 7, Speech Synthesis, Guided Help, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), XAML, etc. My first impression of these features, based on what I saw at the seminar is given below:
Improved Visual Experience
The shift is similar to what typical users would have found when they shifted to WinXP from Win2000. They have taken the visuals to a further level of 3D - with page previews on each open window when hovering on the taskbar, page previews during Alt-Tab, and a cart load of rich visual effects. The start menu has been overhauled, and all windows have a 'glassy' appearance/
Improved Search
The search functionality has been improved a lot, and has been integrated with each functionality of windows, including Control Panel. What's more, the search facility can be integrated with any applications we develop for Vista. There's good news for XP users here - this functionality can be installed with XP too.
User Access Control (UAC)
The UAC provides improved security by making even admin users work at practically standard-user mode. Vista is able to achieve this by elevating a user to admin privileges only when absolutely necessary. Whenever an action which needs admin privileges is to be executed, it asks for admin username & password (if the user is a standard user), or asks for a confirmation from the user using a screen to which it is not programatically possible to send keystrokes. While Microsoft is marketing this as a pioneering feature that would go a long way in computer security, I remember using similar features in various flavours of Linux as early as in 2000.
Sidebar & Gadgets
Vista comes in with sidebar on to which user can attach "gadgets". Again, this is compeletely similar to the sidebar of Google Desktop, including the usage of the term Gadgets. Deployment of gadgets is also ditto!
IE 7
Vista comes bundled with Internet Explorer 7 - which supports tabbed browsing and has an integrated RSS feed reader. Again, tabbed browsing is something that Opera used to have for many years
Speech Synthesizer
This looks like a cool tool, as it does more than merely reading out texts in a particular accent. You can use Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to do a lot of things - like emphasizing on some word in a sentence, or modulating how the sentences are spoken. This can be integrated into the application that you develop on Vista - which could make a lot of difference to the user experience of your software.
Guided Help
While this feature is still under beta, I believe this would be an interesting feature to have. In addition to having descriptive help files, Guided Help teaches you visually how to do the tasks. It also allows you to record steps, from which you can build your own guided help for your application.
Overall: So what is my take on Vista? Vista vindicates my theory that 'Software always grows to make your hardware feel obsolete'. Vista is fast when used with 2 GB of RAM. Note that this is a product from the company of a person, who, back in the 1980s said - 640 KB of RAM ought to be enough for everyone. While the new Search, Speech Synthesizer and Guided Help are really good features to have, you can achieve the rest of the features except the visual effects by installing 3rd party softwares - and they wouldn't need 2 GB of RAM. I would prefer to add patches for whichever features that can be ported to WinXP, while I wait for 2GB RAM to become cheaper, before I switch over to Vista.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Attrition, Hikes and Happiness
“If in another 6 months, I don’t get a transfer to x-branch of the company, I would quit.”
“There is no challenge in this job profile. I want them to put me in x-project, where work would be interesting. Else I would put in my papers.”
“They are paying only x.x lakhs per annum to freshers…Company Y pays double that. If in my next appraisal I don’t get at least z.z lakhs per annum, I will join Y. In fact, Y has already made me an offer to pay my bond money also. Besides, I have three other offers also to consider.”
These are the kind of words one gets to hear from the younger software engineers. Not that I am old, but that’s the feeling I get when I talk to these people. I remember back in 2004 when I passed out, when the industry was beginning to look good, recovering from the 2000 dot com bust, my batch mates considered themselves lucky to get a job. It is not that we all were angels and never cared about the money, but I feel we at least give our jobs more respect than ‘I-sell-myself-to-the-highest-bidder’.
I don’t think the young engineers alone are to be blamed. In this boom of software industry when every company is in need of a large number of ‘resources’ (I hate the term resources – makes it sound as if people are just another computer – maybe ‘talent’ could fit better), they have been blatantly throwing ethics to the winds, openly encouraging prospective recruits to just vanish from their current positions without any notice. That’s just once side of the story. The other part is that while on a recruiting spree, every company fails to keep track of its current workforce, often paying lateral entrants much more than the employees who had stayed on for many years. Thus, loyal employees too are forced to look for greener pastures outside the company. Also, most companies refuse to give proper raises during appraisal meetings – whereas, in resignation meetings there is a better chance of being granted a hike. While most IT/ITES companies are constantly whining about high attrition rates, had they spent half of what they spend on luring others to the company on hikes to existing employees, the attrition rates could have been better managed.
Again, the dreams and aspirations of the youth is very constantly changing – if my previous generation was happy buying a car/house in the mid forties, this generation is still not content buying every ‘kool’ gadget under the sun using their credit cards. If the nth batch was happy with x lakhs per annum as salary, the (n + 1)th batch is not content with x.5 lakhs per annum. Somewhere along the road to economic prosperity, we’ve lost the key to happiness. As my generation becomes increasingly consumerist, I wonder whether with many times more salary than our previous generation, we would be at least half as happy as what our parents were.
“There is no challenge in this job profile. I want them to put me in x-project, where work would be interesting. Else I would put in my papers.”
“They are paying only x.x lakhs per annum to freshers…Company Y pays double that. If in my next appraisal I don’t get at least z.z lakhs per annum, I will join Y. In fact, Y has already made me an offer to pay my bond money also. Besides, I have three other offers also to consider.”
These are the kind of words one gets to hear from the younger software engineers. Not that I am old, but that’s the feeling I get when I talk to these people. I remember back in 2004 when I passed out, when the industry was beginning to look good, recovering from the 2000 dot com bust, my batch mates considered themselves lucky to get a job. It is not that we all were angels and never cared about the money, but I feel we at least give our jobs more respect than ‘I-sell-myself-to-the-highest-bidder’.
I don’t think the young engineers alone are to be blamed. In this boom of software industry when every company is in need of a large number of ‘resources’ (I hate the term resources – makes it sound as if people are just another computer – maybe ‘talent’ could fit better), they have been blatantly throwing ethics to the winds, openly encouraging prospective recruits to just vanish from their current positions without any notice. That’s just once side of the story. The other part is that while on a recruiting spree, every company fails to keep track of its current workforce, often paying lateral entrants much more than the employees who had stayed on for many years. Thus, loyal employees too are forced to look for greener pastures outside the company. Also, most companies refuse to give proper raises during appraisal meetings – whereas, in resignation meetings there is a better chance of being granted a hike. While most IT/ITES companies are constantly whining about high attrition rates, had they spent half of what they spend on luring others to the company on hikes to existing employees, the attrition rates could have been better managed.
Again, the dreams and aspirations of the youth is very constantly changing – if my previous generation was happy buying a car/house in the mid forties, this generation is still not content buying every ‘kool’ gadget under the sun using their credit cards. If the nth batch was happy with x lakhs per annum as salary, the (n + 1)th batch is not content with x.5 lakhs per annum. Somewhere along the road to economic prosperity, we’ve lost the key to happiness. As my generation becomes increasingly consumerist, I wonder whether with many times more salary than our previous generation, we would be at least half as happy as what our parents were.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
Blogging Via E-mail
Looks like blogspot.com has a very desirable feature - to make a
post, all one needs is to send an email.
post, all one needs is to send an email.
Checking out whether this would work.
The Migration
People migrate from one city to another, from one house to another, from one company to another....
In this age of IT, migration is also reflected in cyber space - we migrate email ids.....This is the first time I am migrating a blog page - from sabarinath.rediffiland.com . Whether I stay here for long, or go back to iLand - its too early to comment.
For a beginning, I may be carrying forward content from my iLand blog - those which I consider as my favourite.
In this age of IT, migration is also reflected in cyber space - we migrate email ids.....This is the first time I am migrating a blog page - from sabarinath.rediffiland.com . Whether I stay here for long, or go back to iLand - its too early to comment.
For a beginning, I may be carrying forward content from my iLand blog - those which I consider as my favourite.
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