7 years at work

Does not seem like such a long time after all :).

Wishful thinking

One of the favorite methods of solving tough situations in our industry is "wishful thinking" :). It is surprising how often even otherwise sane people will say stuff like "Oh, we should ship faster and be more agile, maybe we should follow scrum" !!

How will you know something will solve your problem if you are not even sure what your problem is:

1. Is it lack of specs and vision? Maybe you really never specified what you wanted to do, so all sorts of random things are getting done?
2. Scope - did you scope the project so that it has a chance of getting done on time with the resources you have?
3. Talent - do you have a bunch of asp.net programmers trying to write kernel code or vice versa :)
4. Managing change - did new things happen to which you have to react?
5. Learning from mistakes - did you ever have a honest post mortem? Did you learn something from it?

How the heck will any of the above problems get solved by following a different process or by asking for status mails more frequently?

Error handling

Imagine you are building an application/sdk. Let us say every time an error happens in your app/sdk you give the following helpful error: "An error has occurred at sometime due to unknown reason" and give guidelines that if an end user should see this kind of an error they should enable tracing in their application config and restart their application and repro the problem again so that they get more useful errors in "traces".

What should be the reaction of your customer?
Right! they should come and kick your ass :)

As tragic as this seems, this seems to be the default error handling strategy of one of the "change the world" platforms!

Technical interviewing

Here are a couple of mental exercises which I usually dislike doing. I hope you dislike these too :)

Part 1:

1. Come up with all the work related tasks that you have to do in a usual week at work.
2. What contributes to your bottlenecks?
3. What skills would be useful to have for someone to do your job?

Part 2:

1. Come up with the list of questions that are usually asked for a person interviewing for your job.
2. Think of the number of times the "skills" tested for in above are useful on the job in the last 6 months.
   

How related are part 1 and part 2?

Grokking homeopathy

It is very common in India (probably elsewhere too) for any random person to read up some books and start prescribing for family and friends. This causes quite a few a misconceptions:

1. It does not work or works very slowly.
2. It has to cause an aggravation before you get cured (belief held by most doctors with homeopathic medical degrees too - great commentary on state of education, just like in most other fields).
   
3. Taking random medicines is harmless to the cure.

Recently Dr Luc has started blogging about homeopathy for the public. It is worth reading through the blog to get an understanding of this cool healing modality and to know if you are really talking to a competent homeopath (see choosing a homeopath).

blog url: http://drluc.blogspot.com/
website: http://www.drluc.com/