Thursday, March 15, 2007

Marching towards a century

It was the ides of March when I started writing this particular post.I now see that the blog is approaching the century mark . 5 posts to go and I should be hitting a century here not to mention other places where I have hit centuries before . Certainly my high school maths teacher would be hopeful !

I had a brief and wacked out trip to the silicon valley for a bunch of meetings and conferences. Returning to India meant that I was jet-lagged on return rather than during the trip. The return journey got me back through a very fogged out Hong Kong and I spent the time curled in the large airport doing nothing much but hogging and reading.

Post that I managed to force myself to drive the 590 odd km between Pune and Hyderabad to meet an old friend A . Now A is an HR professional and for the first time in life I ended up in a room where a person from a non-HR background was in a minority. Must say that it was a unique experience and not hearing too much HResque was worth the time. I thought that it had become a part of their common speak , but then P , A's wife is another non-HR entity and that saved the day for me. Anyways I am raving and writing crap, so let me stop here for today.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

The valley and eclipsecon.

In the valley - ostensibly the mecca for all software developers for some meetings I managed to find time to attend eclipsecon and listen to Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert . The stories he put together regarding why some of his cartoons never made it past editors also made for Dilbertish episodes. IMO there's Dilbertism in any and every organization that exists on Planet Earth and more so increasingly in India given our requirement that everyone becomes a manager . We all seem to contribute to a chain of actions that don't seem to result in anything useful but a set of meetings. As one of my former customers used to say about some of his other customers A & B. If A and B needed to do a project to tie shoe laces , they would need 467 meetings across a year with every tom dick and harry who thought himself or herself (now we have to be equal oppurtunity ! ) to be useful to the cause to talk about a plan, a contingency plan, risks , accuracy of estimates from engineering before 1 day of engineering could be done to tie their shoelaces !