In times like these who do you turn to but friends who’d understand and empathize with you.
Sitaram and Karthik
Sitaram and Karthik were right there for me, and I for them. Regrettably, I was the first to make an exit out of Segorsoft (name changed, not the real name) after having just put in a year of service there.
Unfortunately, I had no other option, I had to move on. Perhaps, I could’ve stayed back and clocked a couple more years, at least for the sake of my beloved colleagues-turned-friends Sitaram and Karthik, and yet they, I knew, would never have approved of such a thing. Maybe, one must do what one thinks is best, but it was damn hard to arrive at a decision of sorts that will take me away from my well-beloved friends.
On the contrary, they’d entreat me to move on if there’s a better opportunity available for me elsewhere. Decisions taken based on emotional attachment(s) could go wrong; they’d simply say that to put some energized confidence in me. Besides, just another look at that good-for-nothing scumbag of a project leader called TP Cheddi would have anybody scampering off the job place for good!
The day when I resigned Sitaram was visibly hurt and upset even. Surely we would miss writing software codes day in and day out on the same computer we worked on huddled together. Now those days are all going to be over.
Delphi and Visual Basic software tools became a part of our daily staple on which we lived and persevered throughout our tenure at Segorsoft. What's more, it was actually Delphi that we enjoyed using more than VB and was more compatible with InterBase – a back-end database handler. VB was good enough, but Delphi took our breath away. There was something special about it that we never could do away with entirely. Both Sitaram and I eventually had to learn Visual Basic on the job and the fact that it was most similar to our favourite tool Delphi in its usage we automatically became experts in just over a month. Therefore in that sense, it was hardly a big deal.
Our Mutual Friends
Sitaram looked as if he was deeply wounded and displeased at the same time when I first told him about the new job prospect that was coming up and that I was seriously thinking about it.
I knew he and Karthik would vehemently disapprove of my looking out for a new job. Because it was tantamount to no less than a ‘betrayal’ when someone from your friends' group is actually trying to get out for some good job offers, I did not have the useless courage to get cheesy and tell the very people who mattered to me the most during my one year spell at the company upfront of the new job prospect that I was considering.
The point of the matter is that a year at Segorsoft had been enough, especially for three of us guys to make pledges of friendship to last a lifetime, and beyond so to speak. So why should there be at all any question of breaking away from the deep bond we shared at the workplace? Bonding with them was the most profound part of my life at Segorsoft (other than that it was work though, for obvious reasons). Work anyway had to be done but at Segarsoft its share of space and time always had to come first before our precious friendship could matter a bit more at the workplace. Work was in a way worship for us threesome friends. Having said that, it really doesn’t mean that work had to go through some kind of delay or it suffered due to the profound solidarity of our friendship that almost always had us in a great spell of camaraderie.
After I came away and joined the now-defunct Satyam Computers and completed about a year there, I got a phone call from the charming Sitaram saying that Karthik too gave up his job at Segarsoft to join a software company dealing in online learning and software development concerning e-commerce and stuff. Just then I knew that in all probability he too was harbouring dreams of his own to make it to the US. I was mighty pleased for Karthik knowing that he had finally left Segorsoft for good even as a couple of other colleagues of his too had begun giving prior notices one after the other. This is not to undermine Segorsoft as a software development company, what with all its extant learning opportunities and project work it could provide us, but let the truth be told: what it did not, however, offer us young guns was a learning ambiance and cheerful project leaders who had a great sense of humour and would readily pilot the team without being bossy and channelize the team's latent energies into becoming competent professionals. The one project leader we knew at Segorsoft was the project leader we despised.
It was not at all hard to expect good companionship from individuals (such as the one described above) in charge there. True professionalism was something unheard of. Apart from that fact all else was going well for this upstart software development company.
Yet, my heart ached for Sitaram: one of the rising stars on the IT firmament, who, once upon a time, had decidedly taken his own sweet time before he thought it fit to call it quits from Segorsoft.
Sitaram, a Kumar Sanu look-alike, was ostensibly looking for the bigger picture! He wanted out surely, but the US of A was also his ‘ultimate ransom’ he had an eagle eye out for to be able to seize his chance. Good for him. In the late 1990s, that was every budding software engineer’s dream destination. I too had dreamed of going to the US and so did the adorable Karthik, an Adrian Brody look-alike. It was a big-time necessity for us, young software engineers, to be able to fetch the ‘hindering’ H1-B visa stamped on our passports and then, as they used to say, “Push off to the US” for good.
Some youngsters went to the US on account of parental pressure or some kind of societal show-off exercise, or even the kind you get to see most often – making hay while the sun shines! Of course, like always, there were exceptions; at least Sitaram and Karthik come from the group of associates who think of ‘professional sustenance’ rather than bide time to push off to the US while it still is possible for them to do so. I can vouch for the fact they were not the types who would bask in the reflected glory of others or believe in easy pickings. Like the people who believed in themselves, they too worked hard just like a conscientious person who prefers taking no ‘shortcuts’ but learns it the hard way to attain his goals.
Such “Pushing off to the US” kind of people who wrote software codes is no surprise really if you ask me because in those days it was perfectly normal to dream to go there, it is okay even now. But it came so out of the blue from Sitaram B. that I and Karthik Krishna had to take a bow and gladly give an echoing round of applause for him. Sitaram was not known for harbouring such what he called ‘colourful ambitions’ but he did after all and we realized that, eventually, to our much relief. At the end of the day, he did exactly what he thought was capable of. He had earned his jackpot after he got married and left for the US and never returned. And that’s another story for another day.
Thankfully all those years of life’s centrifugal forces and the push and pull of one’s own personal ambition towards achieving career fulfillment – as today Arindam is enabling himself to see, loud and clear – have been summarized into one big synopsis, unedited yet manageable for posterity’s sake. A gravitational pull so hard and binding to the land of his origin that flying off to the US for work like his friends Sitaram and Karthik had done never came to him as an opportunity. This statement probably sounds self-importantly sky-scraping in its feel, if you’d know what I mean, but still, what Arindam got in the milieu of his own life’s bargain is not what he always sought to have even as he had later found out to his utter amazement the reason for his not making it to where every software engineer worth his salt went.
The ‘software engineer’ tag that had fastened a proverbial noose around his neck during his heydays and that which, as a matter of fact, was supposed to be a big ticket to IT glory, was never easy for him to have plucked out or gotten rid of just like that. Never mind the sticker of ‘consolation prize’ he thought he would never really come to such a pass to deserve, and the prize stuck, overpoweringly or naturally, to his long professional work history like a parasitical leech that never let go.
At least Sitaram is doing fine and constantly winning his life’s battles in the US of A, but alas! Karthik, our sweet little adorable Karthik is no more. Karthik departed this life; he came back to India not like someone so full of life and verve but as someone who spoke not a word or two… He said he would come back and then we all would celebrate his coming. A good year and a half passed by and there was no sign of him, even an occasional email or two from him had stopped completely, and it kept me wondering why the emails I sent out were never replied to. What’s taking Karthik so long to reply?
Just like last time when he made news by quitting Segorsoft, it was Sitaram who happen to visit my Satyam office to share news about his ‘American’ whereabouts. He was an ever-alert buddy. This time too it was Sitaram again who broke news about Karthik’s sudden death in a car crash in the US in the year 1999/2000.
END OF PART 1 of '1997, AN ERA HAS PASSED.'
By Arindam Moulick
- Written between Sept. 2013 - Apr. 2014.
- This essay is warmly dedicated to my long-lost friends Sitaram and Late Karthik.
- A slightly different version of this article under the same title has been published on EzineArticles.com. Click here to read the article: http://ezinearticles.com/?1997,-An-Era-Has-Passed,-Part-1&id=8964347
Hi, thanks for stopping by. Arindam here, and I'm from the sunny South. In my time away from work, I like reading, writing, traveling, taking long walks in the countryside, or picking up seashells and pebbles from the beach. I seek out the great company of friends and yearn for enough free time to trek in the mountains or stroll on the beach. Good food, books, engaging conversations, strong tea, and great music enthrall me.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Monday, February 1, 2016
Confessions of a Young Software Engineer, Part 2
Since Segorsoft (name changed) was an upstart IT company, there was an inarguable necessity for us to have at the helm of project affairs someone with fine leadership and great interpersonal skills - the one that showed general proficiency in the pursuit of developing great software while also leading a team of young software programmers. But that was not to be and a timid-looking scamp like TP Cheddi was most certainly not up to such a challenge.
Let me explain further and please I don't expect myself to be cute with this story...
TP Cheddi in his ‘leadership role’ as a so-called project manager at Segorsoft came as a cropper right from the start! He was an unmitigated disaster, to say the very least of the abject situation we found ourselves in. Cheddi was a typical case of one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch (from the heap of rarely good ones though at Segarsoft). He was unfit to be anything of the sort that he was made out to be at the workplace. He was an accomplished failure and his level of skills was a damp squib. But it seems that nobody realized that for a reason except us.
We folks at Segorsoft liked to believe that we were not just another software firm as most firms would naturally do; in fact, in many ways than one, and apart from the fact that we were harnessing talent on a scale that was on par with other reputably known firms in the city, we were expanding our horizons and carried out projects for both private and government companies and brought them to successful fruition.
As an upstart IT organization, our skilled workforce had just the right perspective to achieve what we wanted to achieve, and we were one of the early torch-bearers of raw software talent in the promising new field of the Indian IT Industry in the South. That was a great advantage for Segarsoft as an IT company and luckily they did not squander the opportunity away. The "gentlemanly flamboyant" MD of the company saw to it that we were always on the right track and things were happening fast and bright.
But what he didn't even know was that we had someone like TP Cheddi at the hustings to make matters worse. He was a portable disaster on the verge of turning into something of a terrible doppelganger on the various projects we were working on. Even as an individual, he failed miserably in our young and observant eyes; he could never live up to our raw expectations and knowledge-seeking power we had. TP Cheddi just couldn’t handle it. He continued to remain wet behind the ears, never looking to improve his condescending mindset which - in spite of him being highly unworthy to be a leader - smacked an unmistakable holier-than-thou attitude. He looked like an inexperienced hoodwink, grim-faced and tired from waging his own nuisance battles against software engineers who abhorred him on his face. Still, a dog’s tail remains twisted no matter how many times you try it’s never going to be straight! One wonders how such a 'project manager' ultimately survives in an organization that believes in extracting positive work from its employees. It was really a mystery.
Our numerous ‘inquiries,’ ‘errors,’ ‘doubts,’ and 'code corrections’ were never answered to our satisfaction. Quite frustratingly, we either had to look through big fat reference books or perform the ‘trial and error’ or ‘R&D method’ that even some project managers with some real-time experience worth their salt had openly espoused.
A project manager is supposed to help you when you get stuck with something or not being able to work out the problem; that it’s almost a given considering young people do end up asking a lot of questions, after all, don’t they? But to this dick-head scalawag, it never occurred to him to think it properly through and come up trumps to succeed in the tasks at hand. Apparently, that was not his problem!
Throughout our tenure at Segorsoft, TP Cheddi came across as an abnormal and frustrating chap that knew no social skills even, let alone talk about his software skills. After a point, we couldn't bother ourselves communicating with this stinking toilette Goo because it was simply such a waste of time in the fetid commode of his association! So we opted out.
Getting our goose cooked!
That day just within a few hours on the first day of the new project, this writer Yours Truly, and his partners/friends Sitaram and Karthik had become enormously disappointed when it was announced that the hell-hole TP Cheddi was going to be, like it or not, our project manager! Of all people!
Sitaram held his head in the palm of his hands, found a chair, and bent over. He became totally distressed while Yours Truly frowned to the point of banging his head on the nearest wall or whatever was available to bang his head on. Karthik appeared to be positively stoned as he couldn’t believe what his ears have just heard!
We were fairly motivated young professionals no doubt and had plenty of dreams to fulfill, but frankly speaking, having a project manager whose I.Q. can only be equivalent to a bus conductor or a Kirana-shop bandicoot, a humungous drag passing for a project manager came as a real shock! TP Cheddi as our team’s project manager was a big let-down; certainly a stumbling block for our aspirations to take flight.
We worked on a hospital management project for a super-specialty hospital client, which took over 6 months of hard slog to complete the entire project successfully. After we finished, the bus conductor… err…project manager sensed that Yours Truly could be ‘pushed’ to do the job of “deployment” on the client’s computer system. Yours Truly was up and ready to perform the task in spite of the bad feeling that was left in his mouth about being ‘pushed’ and all. Software engineers like us whenever required are supposed to consign ourselves to such menial tasks as well; many a time without prior intimation to the concerned engineer which ultimately makes it uselessly demanding for him to agree and execute the assignment on hand.
Uploading the finished software product into the client’s computer system was no problem at all, but the task itself sounds menial and unimportant when there’s no definitive timetable or precise planning as to when and where it should get done and how to go about it. Simply demanding to “do it today” was downright insulting and disrespectful to the employee concerned. And when a mentally-inept project manager is at the helm of affairs, the task of software deployment howsoever good it may sound to you, offered nothing of inspiration or interest when that person was around to wipe out the enthusiasm.
Software professionals would like all technical tasks to be taken into account and potentially linked to their annual performance index. That never happened. Nobody seemed to have got the idea that all tasks, whether small or menial, can and should be taken into proper account and serially documented. But they only cared about major job responsibilities and nothing else mattered to them (even if the task was supposedly menial as working on developing the functionality for just 30 mins only), at least to TP Cheddi that is. We believed that in an IT organization, especially an upstart like ours, every piece of work should get accounted for and your reporting manager should know first-hand about it all.
Bakhras for slaughtering!
How does it sound to you if you are asked to pillion ride on your project manager’s bike and travel all the way to the client’s place to upload the software application and while coming on the way back to the office entering into a cloth showroom and buying cloth material and cut-pieces for his new shirts and pants?! All this occurs as per your project manager’s express wish – without even a single word of appreciation or prep talk coming in your favour when the job was done. Who bothers! Did he ever bother him? Never did.
Some of the other Bakhras like us were always available for such slaughtering business! Catching one was never a problem! Put their jobs on the line and you have them tamed and their goose cooked!
I confess: customized software applications development got my goose thoroughly cooked! In the months after they promoted me for what I accomplished for them and before I finally made my mind up to get out of my somewhat brooding mode and TP Cheddi’s crooked, disgraceful attitude, I took charge of supervising software applications myself. I took over handling client sessions, business analysis, overall project management & intelligence solutions, and other consulting tasks. Otherwise, you see, I was certainly destined to suffer from an adrenal burn-out.
Afterward, Cheddi was blotted out of my mind and was ancient history - a history that won't appear in any archaeological surveys conducted by man or Superman.
Bamboozling IT Market!
Life was seemingly good until I decided to get into the raw deal of software engineering. Little did I know that coding is the most intrinsic part of being a software professional, not to forget the unceasing hubbub of new updates and in-vogue technological tools that a software guy is expected to bearably keep up with, in the race to seek out the ‘latest software’ editions in the already bamboozling IT market. Screams, howls, and shrieks as in “Oh!-My-God!” or “I-won’t-be-able-to-do-that” or “This completely sucks!” don’t figure in a software engineer’s dictionary. It’s totally blasphemous or suggestive of being a kaam-chor (escapist) if they do!
Learning new tools and experimenting with new usages was a nuisance for lesser mortals like us to scrape around and make a respectful living. I wanted out from what seemed like a defiant invasion of my privacy and lifestyle breakdown concerns. Needless to say, within a short period of time of my foray into so-called software development, several things at once began to cripple me, asphyxiate me and I wanted out at all cost. Personally speaking, it didn’t matter anymore for Cheddi if I paused and thought it all through one last time before I made a permanent exit from the not-so-hunky-dory world of IT at Segorsoft. To be frank, I wouldn’t even bother to think of him as some like-minded concerned type. He clearly wasn’t that kind of an individual. Caring or advising was not one of his strengths, not even by mistake could he bring himself to care. Never was he known to be a proper IT professional. A pathetic rat-assed mongrel he was; always have been distrustful, sarcastic, cheap, and uselessly tacky!
Thinking that software programming is for so-called ‘nerds’ and not the 'territory' for alternative career-seekers like me, Yours Truly could not ever give up on his hard-earned laurels. It was damn hard not to get attracted to the glamorous world of software engineering or look the other way when you know that people around you are getting better and better at it. Therefore, would it be sacrilegious of Yours Truly to contemplate such an impractical idea of his that only means to desert everything related to IT and walk away? Possibly. Possibly not. Who knows? Do you know?
Being a software programmer means – Yours Truly had gradually realized to his great heart throbbing misery (yeah, nothing less than that) – having to consciously have a crack at learning new software technological gobbledygook year after year. Or otherwise, if learning new technologies isn't your cup of noodles (not Tea) then soon it will be tantamount to professional stagnation - and not to speak of personal mortification that comes off you like old cracked chips as an itinerant side effect! You are caught between a rock and a hard place! Neither here nor there! Dangling in the balance sheet of life! Dhobi ka kutta na ghar ka na ghaat ka! And so on and so forth.
Giving up the ghost of learning new software programming tools sure comes as a big relief to some but for some others, it becomes a necessary evil thing to keep one's job in the IT sector intact. But folks, let that exclusive story spool out later when the time's right and the lucky stars in their heavenly stardom above are set in their rightful astrological positions (excuse my little predilections here please!); only then will I be able to tell you, my dear friend, what it takes to be a young much-harangued software engineer in a world that is increasingly becoming weird and funny at the same time. A world that bamboozles you to no end.
That story, as I said, will come up for consideration not now but later. As of now though, I say chaps, one is not in the mood to hang up one's boots!
End of part 2 of ‘Confessions of a Young Software Engineer.’
(To be concluded)
By Arindam Moulick
- Written September 2013
- Click here to go to part 1 of ‘Confessions of a Young Software Engineer’.
- This article is warmly dedicated to my long-lost friends Sitaram and Late Karthik.
Let me explain further and please I don't expect myself to be cute with this story...
TP Cheddi in his ‘leadership role’ as a so-called project manager at Segorsoft came as a cropper right from the start! He was an unmitigated disaster, to say the very least of the abject situation we found ourselves in. Cheddi was a typical case of one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch (from the heap of rarely good ones though at Segarsoft). He was unfit to be anything of the sort that he was made out to be at the workplace. He was an accomplished failure and his level of skills was a damp squib. But it seems that nobody realized that for a reason except us.
We folks at Segorsoft liked to believe that we were not just another software firm as most firms would naturally do; in fact, in many ways than one, and apart from the fact that we were harnessing talent on a scale that was on par with other reputably known firms in the city, we were expanding our horizons and carried out projects for both private and government companies and brought them to successful fruition.
As an upstart IT organization, our skilled workforce had just the right perspective to achieve what we wanted to achieve, and we were one of the early torch-bearers of raw software talent in the promising new field of the Indian IT Industry in the South. That was a great advantage for Segarsoft as an IT company and luckily they did not squander the opportunity away. The "gentlemanly flamboyant" MD of the company saw to it that we were always on the right track and things were happening fast and bright.
But what he didn't even know was that we had someone like TP Cheddi at the hustings to make matters worse. He was a portable disaster on the verge of turning into something of a terrible doppelganger on the various projects we were working on. Even as an individual, he failed miserably in our young and observant eyes; he could never live up to our raw expectations and knowledge-seeking power we had. TP Cheddi just couldn’t handle it. He continued to remain wet behind the ears, never looking to improve his condescending mindset which - in spite of him being highly unworthy to be a leader - smacked an unmistakable holier-than-thou attitude. He looked like an inexperienced hoodwink, grim-faced and tired from waging his own nuisance battles against software engineers who abhorred him on his face. Still, a dog’s tail remains twisted no matter how many times you try it’s never going to be straight! One wonders how such a 'project manager' ultimately survives in an organization that believes in extracting positive work from its employees. It was really a mystery.
Our numerous ‘inquiries,’ ‘errors,’ ‘doubts,’ and 'code corrections’ were never answered to our satisfaction. Quite frustratingly, we either had to look through big fat reference books or perform the ‘trial and error’ or ‘R&D method’ that even some project managers with some real-time experience worth their salt had openly espoused.
A project manager is supposed to help you when you get stuck with something or not being able to work out the problem; that it’s almost a given considering young people do end up asking a lot of questions, after all, don’t they? But to this dick-head scalawag, it never occurred to him to think it properly through and come up trumps to succeed in the tasks at hand. Apparently, that was not his problem!
Throughout our tenure at Segorsoft, TP Cheddi came across as an abnormal and frustrating chap that knew no social skills even, let alone talk about his software skills. After a point, we couldn't bother ourselves communicating with this stinking toilette Goo because it was simply such a waste of time in the fetid commode of his association! So we opted out.
Getting our goose cooked!
That day just within a few hours on the first day of the new project, this writer Yours Truly, and his partners/friends Sitaram and Karthik had become enormously disappointed when it was announced that the hell-hole TP Cheddi was going to be, like it or not, our project manager! Of all people!
Sitaram held his head in the palm of his hands, found a chair, and bent over. He became totally distressed while Yours Truly frowned to the point of banging his head on the nearest wall or whatever was available to bang his head on. Karthik appeared to be positively stoned as he couldn’t believe what his ears have just heard!
We were fairly motivated young professionals no doubt and had plenty of dreams to fulfill, but frankly speaking, having a project manager whose I.Q. can only be equivalent to a bus conductor or a Kirana-shop bandicoot, a humungous drag passing for a project manager came as a real shock! TP Cheddi as our team’s project manager was a big let-down; certainly a stumbling block for our aspirations to take flight.
We worked on a hospital management project for a super-specialty hospital client, which took over 6 months of hard slog to complete the entire project successfully. After we finished, the bus conductor… err…project manager sensed that Yours Truly could be ‘pushed’ to do the job of “deployment” on the client’s computer system. Yours Truly was up and ready to perform the task in spite of the bad feeling that was left in his mouth about being ‘pushed’ and all. Software engineers like us whenever required are supposed to consign ourselves to such menial tasks as well; many a time without prior intimation to the concerned engineer which ultimately makes it uselessly demanding for him to agree and execute the assignment on hand.
Uploading the finished software product into the client’s computer system was no problem at all, but the task itself sounds menial and unimportant when there’s no definitive timetable or precise planning as to when and where it should get done and how to go about it. Simply demanding to “do it today” was downright insulting and disrespectful to the employee concerned. And when a mentally-inept project manager is at the helm of affairs, the task of software deployment howsoever good it may sound to you, offered nothing of inspiration or interest when that person was around to wipe out the enthusiasm.
Software professionals would like all technical tasks to be taken into account and potentially linked to their annual performance index. That never happened. Nobody seemed to have got the idea that all tasks, whether small or menial, can and should be taken into proper account and serially documented. But they only cared about major job responsibilities and nothing else mattered to them (even if the task was supposedly menial as working on developing the functionality for just 30 mins only), at least to TP Cheddi that is. We believed that in an IT organization, especially an upstart like ours, every piece of work should get accounted for and your reporting manager should know first-hand about it all.
Bakhras for slaughtering!
How does it sound to you if you are asked to pillion ride on your project manager’s bike and travel all the way to the client’s place to upload the software application and while coming on the way back to the office entering into a cloth showroom and buying cloth material and cut-pieces for his new shirts and pants?! All this occurs as per your project manager’s express wish – without even a single word of appreciation or prep talk coming in your favour when the job was done. Who bothers! Did he ever bother him? Never did.
Some of the other Bakhras like us were always available for such slaughtering business! Catching one was never a problem! Put their jobs on the line and you have them tamed and their goose cooked!
I confess: customized software applications development got my goose thoroughly cooked! In the months after they promoted me for what I accomplished for them and before I finally made my mind up to get out of my somewhat brooding mode and TP Cheddi’s crooked, disgraceful attitude, I took charge of supervising software applications myself. I took over handling client sessions, business analysis, overall project management & intelligence solutions, and other consulting tasks. Otherwise, you see, I was certainly destined to suffer from an adrenal burn-out.
Afterward, Cheddi was blotted out of my mind and was ancient history - a history that won't appear in any archaeological surveys conducted by man or Superman.
Bamboozling IT Market!
Life was seemingly good until I decided to get into the raw deal of software engineering. Little did I know that coding is the most intrinsic part of being a software professional, not to forget the unceasing hubbub of new updates and in-vogue technological tools that a software guy is expected to bearably keep up with, in the race to seek out the ‘latest software’ editions in the already bamboozling IT market. Screams, howls, and shrieks as in “Oh!-My-God!” or “I-won’t-be-able-to-do-that” or “This completely sucks!” don’t figure in a software engineer’s dictionary. It’s totally blasphemous or suggestive of being a kaam-chor (escapist) if they do!
Learning new tools and experimenting with new usages was a nuisance for lesser mortals like us to scrape around and make a respectful living. I wanted out from what seemed like a defiant invasion of my privacy and lifestyle breakdown concerns. Needless to say, within a short period of time of my foray into so-called software development, several things at once began to cripple me, asphyxiate me and I wanted out at all cost. Personally speaking, it didn’t matter anymore for Cheddi if I paused and thought it all through one last time before I made a permanent exit from the not-so-hunky-dory world of IT at Segorsoft. To be frank, I wouldn’t even bother to think of him as some like-minded concerned type. He clearly wasn’t that kind of an individual. Caring or advising was not one of his strengths, not even by mistake could he bring himself to care. Never was he known to be a proper IT professional. A pathetic rat-assed mongrel he was; always have been distrustful, sarcastic, cheap, and uselessly tacky!
Thinking that software programming is for so-called ‘nerds’ and not the 'territory' for alternative career-seekers like me, Yours Truly could not ever give up on his hard-earned laurels. It was damn hard not to get attracted to the glamorous world of software engineering or look the other way when you know that people around you are getting better and better at it. Therefore, would it be sacrilegious of Yours Truly to contemplate such an impractical idea of his that only means to desert everything related to IT and walk away? Possibly. Possibly not. Who knows? Do you know?
Being a software programmer means – Yours Truly had gradually realized to his great heart throbbing misery (yeah, nothing less than that) – having to consciously have a crack at learning new software technological gobbledygook year after year. Or otherwise, if learning new technologies isn't your cup of noodles (not Tea) then soon it will be tantamount to professional stagnation - and not to speak of personal mortification that comes off you like old cracked chips as an itinerant side effect! You are caught between a rock and a hard place! Neither here nor there! Dangling in the balance sheet of life! Dhobi ka kutta na ghar ka na ghaat ka! And so on and so forth.
Giving up the ghost of learning new software programming tools sure comes as a big relief to some but for some others, it becomes a necessary evil thing to keep one's job in the IT sector intact. But folks, let that exclusive story spool out later when the time's right and the lucky stars in their heavenly stardom above are set in their rightful astrological positions (excuse my little predilections here please!); only then will I be able to tell you, my dear friend, what it takes to be a young much-harangued software engineer in a world that is increasingly becoming weird and funny at the same time. A world that bamboozles you to no end.
That story, as I said, will come up for consideration not now but later. As of now though, I say chaps, one is not in the mood to hang up one's boots!
End of part 2 of ‘Confessions of a Young Software Engineer.’
(To be concluded)
By Arindam Moulick
- Written September 2013
- Click here to go to part 1 of ‘Confessions of a Young Software Engineer’.
- This article is warmly dedicated to my long-lost friends Sitaram and Late Karthik.
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