Ten thoughts after ten years

Guest Post: Ten thoughts on the software industry on completing ten years

Ten years ago in a big wide room I stood with my buddies in front of an HR executive to start the paperwork that would induct me in the IT industry. I wore a tie for the first time in my life, the Mumbai heat stifled me and what the HR executive told me wrenched my heart: don’t join us today, she said. The batch is full. Come next month. Or later still. From such a bad start, surviving ten years in the industry looks like an achievement. Here are ten thoughts after completing ten years in the industry.

1. Software touches peoples’ lives – so I imagine: I feel humbled by the positive changes software has brought to the global economy and to the lives of millions of individuals. And yet, in my ten years I have never seen a person whose life was changed positively due to my code. This paradox troubles me a lot.

2. People are the real treat: In my ten years, I have made friends with people from diverse backgrounds: sons of farmers from AP, a topologist from Boehm, daughter of a sari vendor in Mumbai. A majority of the people I met have been positive influences on me. One of them I married. Meeting fascinating people has been my greatest take-away from my time in the industry.

3. The industry too unites the country: To sit in a cafeteria at office – any mid-size IT company’s office – is a reminder of the vastness of our country: we see Kayasths from Kanauj, Bohris from Baroch, Catholics from Calangute, Deshasths from Nagpur, Jats from Jalandar, Adidravids from Adyar, Jains from Indore, Buddhists from Gaya, Sikhs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus. We come together to write code, prepare status slides, progress our careers, but ultimately to build great software. We make fun of unpronounceable names, we sneer at accents, we laugh at regional quirks. But then when we speak the language of loops, case constructs and NullPointer exceptions, of KPIs and bonuses, we realize there’s much more common to us than we imagine. We share, we build. And India comes together.

4. The program is a literary form: just like a novel, or a poem, or a play. The programmer is the reader, author, narrator and critic, all at once. To write a program and to instruct a set of registers how to behave is a literary endeavor. Artists try to understand the human condition, we create abstractions that help us understand the world we inhabit.

5. A program is a means of self-discovery: you write code. You think it is infallible. QA colleague reports error. You curse her. She reproduces the crash. You debug. For five minutes. Then an hour. Half-a-day. Log files pile. Then you discover the missing semicolon. You curse yourselves, what a simple mistake. Then you reflect and discover something about yourselves. You become humbler. Until the next bug.

6. We are a great hype-machine: Can anyone beat our industry when it comes to inventing a new technology, believing in them as if they would solve World Hunger, hype them endlessly for six months only to realize that it was a mistake, just like, well, the previous one?

7. Mediocrity abounds: While interviewing candidates for job positions, I am often stuck by pity: the poor guy struggling to sort a String has no clue how programming works and will never have. The guy should have been doing something else. But he fell and entered our industry, for our hype and the money, or to peer or parental pressure. Someone will hire him of course, because our industry needs millions of people, even those who can spell ‘Stack’ can do.

8. The healing power of money: More than anything else, I am in the industry for money. I love the comfort it provides, the pleasures it brings. Our industry pays very well, sometimes astonishingly well. IT has single-handedly transformed, for good, the lives of millions of Indians.

9. Expansion of my identity – foreign visits: When I was a teenager, the farthest I thought I would travel, I imagined, was up to Mumbai. Years later my work has taken me to places: a Coliseum in Rome, the Louvre, pubs in Heidelberg, and yes, Mumbai. I like to believe that visiting each of these places – and staying in Bangalore – has made me a slightly better person than the small-town kid with small dreams.

10. Life’s challenging questions: In the end, I wonder: is this worth? The nature of our work demands a lot of introspection, and sometimes we point it to ourselves. Existential questions abound: what am I doing? Why? What’s the meaning of this all? What’s the purpose of my actions? What’s my Dharma? The brave souls escape. The optimists wait for an opening to quit. And other return to being drones until the next wave hits.

Endnote: I later made friends with the HR executive mentioned above. By a delicious turn of events she took my exit interview when I quit Tata Infotech, my first company. The manager with whom I worked last in Tata Infotech married her later, but this has nothing to do with my quitting, of course. I lost contact with both of them, until suddenly, in the summer of 2006 I found myself dining with them both, eating pasta and sipping wine, discussing Brazil’s prospects for the Football World Cup. I then haven’t met them or spoken to them ever since. What an industry, what a World we Softwarewallahs inhabit.

Posted by Bhushan Y. Nigale