Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Some Fundas

This one is from mail Archives....

Some software lessons learnt by me.

Every Day is a new day.
There will be really bad days in office. The days when Murphy’s law will hold good for you. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong during these days. Below are examples
Team member handling most critical task has emergency. His / her backup also has emergency. And task has to be delivered on same day.
Natural calamities happen on your delivery date
Your supervisor has received some firing from his supervisor and you forget to send him status report which would have saved him from saving his back.
And so on…

What we do in these situations?
· Try best to complete the day without making further damage. Don’t fight with your supervisor on this day. Listen to him. Give it back to him in double when you have your chance.
· Next day you are likely to find few things going your way which would give your strength to work on remaining challenges.

Also if you are worried that people around are going to remember your embarrassing day throughout their life then forget it. They have many other things to worry about and they have short term memory.


Switch Off technique.
Once you swipe out from office building, you should be able turn into mindset of a school kid. There is one life and you need to enjoy it whenever you get chance. You may get calls from office at odd hours. You need to develop ability to decide quickly whether that call coming from office at odd hour is really important to you. You can’t always be honest.

You are not the only one responsible.
You as a programmer/leader/manager will witness your delivery causing major havocs in production environment. Apart from backing out your code, you will be required to fix data corruption, resume operations in stipulated time. Then there will be root cause analysis meetings which you need to attend. In these all situations remember that behind every delivery there is process of the organization which is involved. You may be responsible partially being part of that process but not entirely.

Ability to live normally outside office.
What you do in your office / profession should not affect your relations with your family / friends. We have already reached half way through our professional lives, but long way to go in our actual life. Family / friends are going to be ones who are going to be most important part of your remaining lives.

Can’t insist on perfection all the time.
This was very difficult lesson for me to learn. You need to be as perfect as is required by situation. That is as tricky as it can get. Those who master this art become quickly up the ladder. Others keep on struggling on achieving perfection in areas which may not be relevant in broad perspective.

10000 feet view
This is the term used to investigate anything from neutral / broader perspective. In case your delivery has failed, you are feeling really bad then you need to think on following lines. This is just one delivery from this project. This is just one project from this client. This is just one client from this company. This is just company from many companies which you are going to join. This will help in long way reducing the impact.

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