Hitchhiked Wisdom™

Positive Dental is Actually Negative

2011-08-21T09:24:00.009+05:30

Dear Reader

If you stumbled upon this page while looking for reviews for dentists in Hyderabad or Positive Dental clinic, you are at the right place. I have done nothing but shared my experience with positive dental which was far from positive. But you are wise and I don't want you to go by my words alone. Check the facts by yourself and pay them a visit. But before you start your treatment with them, think again and assess the risk you might be taking, afterall it's your teeth.

If you are looking for a quick summary of this large write up here it is:

i) Unprofessional staff, dentists are perhaps interns from some colleges performing surgeries on unsuspecting people risking their well being.

ii) Every time you visit, you will see new faces, you will not be treated by the same doctor who started your treatment. This is the most risky part of dental treatment.

iii) You will be given recommendation to go for unnecessary treatments. If you are an IT professional, chances are you will end up paying a huge premium on actuall cost of treatment. That's a norm in Madhapur area - we pay a premium of being IT professionals.

iv) Unprofessional way of keeping dental history. Still following old way of writing patient's names in register. Not worth the money you will be charged. Similar quality of service you can get in a govertment hospital for free.

If you need more details of what made me list down such observations - read on:

Now, I have problems with my teeth dating back to 2005. I accidentaly keep chipping my teeth and then have to get a filling done. I had ignored one such broken tooth which led to a painful root canal treatment. In 2005 I used to live in Begumpet area because Hi Tech city was just a small village during that time and my IT company was located in Somajiguda. I got that tooth (upper chewing) fixed at Vivekanand Dental Hospital near Pulla Reddy Sweet shop in Somajiguda. Doctor was some Mr Reddy, and he was nice and polite and really did his job well. I got a root canal treatment and a filling of a nearby tooth which was also chipped. Then in late 2005, I moved to Madhapur area. Within 3-4 months the crown that was put on my RCT tooth came out. It was horrible and painful. I went back to Vivekanand Hospital and they got me a new crown immediately for no cost. They took the responsibility of replacing the crown. They had neatly kept the records of treatments and visits I made and they handled it professaionally.

Fast forward to 2010, I got my another tooth chipped. This time lower chewing tooth. It was very painful whenever anything cold or hot touches the sensitive part of the tooth. I decided to go to Vivekanand Hospital again. But upon recommendation of one of my friends who had been to newly opened positive dental clinic for some treatment, I decided to give it a try. I acted lazy thinking Somajiguda is too far and it's better to have a dentist near the house.

Positive Dental Clinic in Madhapur, Hi Tech city (opposite the police station signal) had opened sometime in Early 2010. I know, because I had shifted to Kavuri Hills recently from Kondapur area just a walk away from Positive Dental clinic. There were ads and a pursuasive promotional campaign when it opened.

So I went to Positive dental and a nice lady did the initial check up. Since it had opened new, there was no consultation fee at that time. She recommended some of the treatments (cleaning the stains, and a couple of fillings). I decided to go for fillings. When I went to surgery chair, it was some other gentleman who performed the fillings. He did a good job.

I made the payment. Since I had left my phone number with them, they kept calling me to get the cleaning done, while I kept postponing. They persistently kept calling for a month, so I finally decided that let me get the cleaning also done.

When I went to the clinic again to get the cleaning done. The receptionist was different, and doctors were also different. There was a different annoying lady this time who did the cleaning. She looked more like a student than an actual dentist. She did cleaning with an annoying face, and kept pestering me to keep my mouth open. Now, you can understand how long a person keep the mouth open - jaws start aching. So I told her - 'Mam, I don't get this done everyday. My jaws are aching, so let me just relax and then you can start again'. Her way of doing cleaning was clearly showing she was just a student, may be doing her intership or something. Overall very unprofessional and I am happy I didn't get any complicated thing done on my teeth by her.

I also kept visiting the Clinic with my friend who also has weak teeth and keeps getting them chipped every now and then. I was always surprised to see a new receptionist every time and except for one doctor everybody else used to be new. We almost visited every three months for regular check ups and sometimes for some fillings.

A month ago, I had gone to for a trek and during that time I got another tooth chipped. Next day I got an appointment with the Positive dental to get it fixed. When I arrived I saw a new receptionist as usual and a new doctor again. This young dude looked like a student again. I told him I got my tooth chipped. But he did his regular check up and recommended two fillings and some laser therapy for gingivitus and cleaning overall amounting to 5-6k. I just told him to do the fillings.

He was also a big brainless idiot. He kept asking me to keep my mouth open and open more during 15 minutes treatment. I told him again the same thing I told the previous woman. But this *(*(#($*, after filling the tooth grind my natural tooth on the other side of filling. I didn't realise it until I came out of clinic and ate something and it felt sensitive on the tooth. I felt scared because exposed tooth is the first step towards another root canal. I kept brushing with Sensodyne to make sure that sensitivity goes away but I need to get it checked soon to make sure no big damage has occurred.

After a few days, I went again with my friend whose filling came out suddenly after just 3 months. This time again there were new people around and new doctors except one. Every time you go there they insist on getting registered again. They don't have any computer to maintain the records and still using old method of writing records in registers. If one has to get their dental hisotry, I think they will have to give an RTI application and wait for months because their records are just so messed up.

The height was the way doctor treated this time. When my friend mentioned that filling came out just after a couple of months, doctor said they don't take guarantee of the fillings. She also said we will have to do an X-ray to see if root canal is required. My friend asked, if you did the filling, and before filling you scrape off all the infectious tooth and then fill the gap with filling so that nothing can enter the tooth, not even water or air. Then how come you are saying that root canal might be required. This comment made the doctor start condescending us. She started saying - that's not our problem and we don't care how you maintain your teeth. Your eating habits might be the cause. My friend said - I brush teeth twice a day and I don't eat stones, what eating habits are you talking about. She simply said - get the X-ray done or just leave. When we said we want to see the doctor who did this filling, she said I am in this hospital for more than a year and I never saw you. It was shocking. When my friend asked for the dental history, they said give a written application and come after a few weeks.

This pissed me off. My friend was talking so politely with the doctor and she being the doctor started speaking loudly and anything that came in her mouth. Her staff also joined and they all started targetting my friend. It was an aweful experience. I felt cheated since I had been to the hospital three times and got so many treatments done. Now, I was worried that out of 5-6 fillings I had done here how many will come out and when.

It was a serious breach of trust, but I will not allow such frauds to keep looting the society. So my next action would be to lodge a complaing may be FIR against these idiots. Whatever damage has been done to me is irrevocable, but I hope that others also don't fall in this trap.

Please evaluate their services on your own. If you are visiting them, check the quality of their record keeping, see that every month or so if you go there you will see new faces. What treatments are you been recommended by them - if you are an IT guy, your bill will be always more than a reasonable cost with unnecessary treatments. Most shocking part of it was a review I was going through, where it was mentioned that doctors in such clinics are given yearly targets to achieve a revenue which forces them to give such recommendation. Moreover they serious lack professionalism and appear more like bunch of impolite people who don't have any experience at all.

My final words for you - be careful. Dentist, barber and a spiritual guru - we should choose only once and with great caution. Stay Healthy, Stay fit!

07-01-2010...

2010-01-07T19:44:00.002+05:30

Listening to 'nothing else matters' with a 'while x < n' loop where x is currently 5 and n is unknown. Was trying to write something in the project paper also called case study, but nothing comes in mind. What challenges were faced and how we met those challenges - I don't remember anymore.

Google talk, ibnlive, ibmmainframes, cricinfo, blogger, gmail - 5 tabs open in my IE 8.0. My team mate asks if the meeting is there, I ask my onsite coordinator:

Me: Hey buddy, do we have call today?
OC: do we need?
Me: Ofcourse..
OC: ?
Me: Not..
OC: hehehe.. ok we will have it tomorrow.. ;)
Me: ok then.. c u tom.. ;) bye
OC: bye

A colleague comes and asks a question on SYNCSORT. Am I busy? Ofcourse. But I can spare time to help people. Helped, resolved - yeah, I can work with SORT.

Another year gone by - and now I am the cube of 3, cube root of 19683 and square root of 729. Mom was crying - 'beta bahut duur rehta hai', so not feeling very good about that. Felt like going back home and driving taxi, as I usually think.

Well, life's moving on. What else!

PS: Oh! Did I mention my desktop sucks!

deadlines...

2009-07-23T19:33:00.002+05:30

I've got outlook on my machine. I've got sticky notes on my desk (also at home, which were stolen from office after office hours). I've got a things-to-do diary. What else is required to remember that I need to deliver what I committed? Only thing left is to write tattoos all over the body like tiny memos to remind myself that I've got to do the same shit on different days.

IT's NOT rocket science..

2009-05-28T21:48:00.003+05:30

Well, all you there in the IT world. Just understand that it's not rocket science. I am not trying to discourage but that's the truth, and sooner it is accepted the better it is. Here simple layman ideas find a better place because the people you are serving don't like rockets and scientists. All they are interested in is 2 + 2 = 4 and NOT how it is calculated. And when time budget and resources are burrying the projects and your tired IT arse further down in the ground you don't think about rockets, you think how to escape.

It sounds sh** but I am talking from my experience. So we are going through a data migration exercise and we have to migrate addresses from one system into another. And in the source system the addresses are present in free text format which can hold 4 lines and 160 characters in all. But the target system accepts the data in a particular format - Street in one field, Building in one field, Town, Region, Post Code etc etc - and can hold only upto 120 characters. And no existing functionality had to be changed in the target system. So these sources addresses had to be formatted and accommodated in the target format.

And since the source addresses were free form text and users being ethnically, psychologically and emotionally different, each of those 20,000 addresses had their own way of being written there.

So yours truly thought why can't we clean such addresses and migrate them across to target system by automating the cleaning process instead of asking the users to clean the whole data. I thought like a rocket scientist. While entering an address how a person usually thinks? He writes city the last, before that street, before that building and before that first line of address like c/o So and So. Oh no. There can be just two lines of address also, not necessarily all the lines will be present. Wait, some lines may be more than 30 characters, some more than 20. Some lines will have explicit house (Flaunders House, Westminster House..) or street (Fleet Street, Dame Street, Park Road..) phew!

And so I started building this cleaner routine in REXX and the code kept on becoming fatter and fatter. At last out of those 20,000 addresses this routine cleaned up around 90% of the addresses. Phew! I thought this will be my magnum opus of this year. Two days before production rollout, business users tell me - we are not able to map the address of source system properly to the target system. I said what the f*** (in my mind) - that may not happen always because addresses are not structured properly and need lot of readjustments before they are migrated across. They say - no, we want one to one mapping because our dim brains cannot understand what you are talking about. Somehow, we escaped saying "You didn't recognize this during UAT and previous testing sprints, now suddenly you are waking up from your slumber when we are two days away from going live. We cannot change code at this stage and this has to go the way it is now." We had to hold them on ransom and get them to accept it the way it was.

But it triggered in me a thought that we shouldn't really think so much when it comes to data migrations. There should be one to one mapping. Forget about intelligent address deciphering routines which might have taken inputs from psychology, ergonomics, ethicity or even evolution. Ultimately what matters is your audience should understand what's really happening.

It's true. Because now when I look at my magnum opus, I myself cannot understand what it does!

Keeping the logic simple and understandable is very important, so that in future if someone looks at the code things become clear in just an instant. That's the reason, I think, someone once said - it is very easy to write in difficult words, but very difficult to write in simple words.

what next..

2009-05-05T18:59:00.003+05:30

When a project is nearing its end and your role is fading away in the overall work, you are faced with a strange sense of insecurity and a frequent question - "what should I do now?" - buzzing inside your head. This is the right time to give your thoughts a correct directions - which is what I once called "Vector Instrospection" (Instrospection with a direction). Following are some dos and don'ts fitting this period of dilemma which I found here.

Do:

* Find out what jobs are currently out there by using job portals like naukri.com.
* Register for jobs by email, and get the latest vacancies sent direct to your PC.
* Register your CV with job portals, that recruiters can take a look online at what you can offer them.
* Think about where you want to be in the long-term, and consider what jobs will help you to get there.
* Consider a new sector to avoid being stuck in a rut. How can you use your transferable skills? Which employers are recruiting at the moment?
* Consider the skills and experience you need to reach your career milestones. What skills are in demand?
* Research the major employers in your sector who might help you to achieve your career goals. It is increasingly unlikely that you will remain with the same employer for the next 20 years. Find out more with our company directory.
* In the short-term, assess what you want from your next job. Consider:
o salary;
o increased responsibility;
o opportunities for training and development;
o more time with your family, friends, hobbies;
o to continue living in the same area;
o to move to another part of the country.
* Money may not be your motive for changing jobs, but work out what you need to earn to cover any extra costs such as travel, childcare, loss of benefits such as pension, or a company car.
* Also, think about your work:life balance. Do you really want to be the boss's boss if it means giving up leisure time, long holidays or seeing your kids during the week? It is becoming more common to want to balance your home and work responsibilities. See our flexible working advice.

Don't:

* Wait until you resign or lose a job before you work out your future career plan. Start now so you're ready when the time comes.
* Apply for jobs without a career plan or goal in mind. You are wasting your own time and that of potential employers.

let there be bugs...

2009-03-19T17:12:00.000+05:30

Programmers! Always in a battle against infinite possibilities and limited lines of code, limited time, limited budget and limited patience! And on top of them all limited brain.

We start development. We think we can do it all. We think we can code a perfect program. Huh! What's the big deal.

We start testing. We think those bugs are fixable. Ah! How silly. We will fix them rightaway. Tiny bugs - here we come.

We start integration testing. We think, other programmer's code sucks. We think - she must change her code - dim wit! But then compassion takes over and we believe in hope. We change our own code and move on. Don't look back - no regrets.

We start system testing. We think, we need a break. But then we change the code, add new lines to it, but we know we are slowly losing it to anonymity.

Users start testing. We wish we could go on a long vacation which would never end. Can do no more. We have already run the scripts 107 times. Someone take it away from us. We don't do anything anymore. Someone pushes us - do it! do it! do it!

Code goes live - and we say - Never again. It's ok to be imperfect. Let's just evolve. Don't be perfect. Let there be bugs.

team meat...

2009-03-16T22:30:00.006+05:30

Believe me, this is from a real life incident. There exists a cabal of very high profile managers, drawing millions of vanilla rupees with chocolate toppings of perks every year, who when want to send a meeting request to their team to discuss a burning project show stopper send a note something like this:

Ironical as it may seem - the gathering actually turns out to be nowhere near to a team meeting. It actually justifies the words which appeared in its coming - TEAM MEAT. There is no agenda, there are no meet me details or a room - a perfect aspirant of the book "101 ways of how not to set up meetings".

Here is how such meeting's life cylce goes - first attendee will ask second attendee about the meeting details, surprised that they both don't know - they will go to third attendee to see if she knew. Until all attendees are covered (except the geeky ones, who like to think that it is their prerogative not to attend any team meeting) this process continues and become a meeting unto itself to discuss why the meeting details were not sent. When nothing comes out of this discussion - everyone decides to go for a short break to get a cup of coffee to ward this interim meeting's after effects.

Five minutes before the actual meat (meeting) - everyone's looking at each other's face to find where the meeting is. And then suddenly - like the 'Big Brother' reality show, an akaashvaani (annoucement) happens 'Big Brother ne aap sabhi ko so-and-so room mein ikattha hone ko kaha hai' (Big Brother wants all of you to gather in so-and-so room). There is tension of a vote-out in everybody's face - 'aaj kiska watt lagega' (who gets the beating today). Everyone's making their excuses in their minds, everyone's thinking of what to say in the meeting without any agenda, where anything can be expected.

After gathering his flock in the room and making them wait for a few minutes - the saddist, the voyeurist Big Brother appears in his ~~incorrigible~~ unmistakable appearance. In a two hour call - first 20 minutes go in deciding what the agenda should be. Next 20 minutes go in deciding who will speak what and how much and about what. And also, who will not be allowed to speak at all. Then next 20 minutes go in finding out and targetting a bakra (scapegoat) who can silently take up all the insult and aspersions which are coming his or her way.

After one hour - some sincere guy loses his or her patience and says something which nobody likes and next 20 minutes go in settling the dirt down. Last 40 minutes are the most crucial ones. Because this is the time when the Big Brother asks the most difficult question - 'Who is preparing the MoM'? At this time - some people wish the earth tore in two parts beneath their feet and swallowed them, and some wish a meteor fall on Big Brother's dim head. Then some poor fresher has to open her notepad and start pretending that she will do it (but in her mind she is thinking what the heck did we discuss here.)

Now the last 20 minutes - everyone looks at the sincere guy and try to make some sense out of his subject matter expertise displayed very vaguely by his poor communication skills. Big Brother with his big mouth says 'great analysis Sincere Guy' and then blurts out actions on each of the team members as if giving a sermon on the mount and the poor girl jotting down as if writing another new testament.

Even after so much of ~~blame~~brainstorming - 10 minutes are left out of alloted 2 hours for the meeting. Then Big Brother takes a soft stand and asks the question which everyone was waiting to hear - is there any other issue? - because this question marks the coming of end and people who were holding their bladders for last two hours can go out and spill their frustration on to the toilet, thinking of how they would want to beat the sh** out of You-Know-Who.

Alas! Life is unfair. Skills are so unfairly scattered. When will I get to become the Big Brother!

quick and dirty...

2009-03-02T21:56:00.003+05:30

I am currently a small drop of tasteless technical skill in the large ocean of strategic migrations. Among big waves of business process analysts, programme managers, solution architects, implementation managers and project managers, I exist as a tiny insignificant and expendable ripple that’s called a developer. By a random divine decree, which some people call fate and others coincidence, this tiny wave got a chance to whirl along with big waves and behold the glory with which they exist in this corporate valley.

Data cleansing is an important part of any migration exercise. It’s like letting go of the old and useless, and adapting to the new and useful. Migrating from an old technology to a new technology, from an old business model to a new business model always requires data cleansing to be performed on the source data.

Some of the data currently under the scope of migration needs to be migrated ASAP because it has intricate dependencies with timelines and budget. To clean and data-migrate this piece, a poor developer (not me) had come up with a ‘quick and dirty’ approach. As soon as projector projected the slide on the wall with ‘QUICK & DIRTY’ written on it, there was a burst of laughter among the members of the elite solution club. Visibly, everyone could comprehend the hidden vulgarity. For those of you who are naïve and unaware of the latent dilettante (which I hope will be very few) when someone says ‘quick & dirty’ in an American accent, it feels more like coming directly from the Sunny Leone’s or Sativa Rose’s mouth from an X rated movie. (WARNING: Please be careful if you get curious and start google-ing these names in your office systems.)

Dirty minds, if you ask me. Or may be naive big-shots who don't have knowledge of programming terms. Because according to Wikipedia, “Quick-and-dirty is a term used in reference to anything that is an easy way to implement a kludge. Its usage is popular among programmers, who use it to describe a crude solution or programming implementation that is imperfect, inelegant, or otherwise inadequate, but which solves or masks the problem at hand, and is generally faster and easier to put in place than a proper solution.”

Well, the poor person who made the slide had other intentions, in line with the wikipedia definitions. Intentions were to “quickly” set up the data even if that meant data was “not so clean” or “dirty”. Well, obviously he was misunderstood by the elite cabal. Idea was simple – given the data has no use for future processing, is static and drives no revenues or reports and needs to be set up one-off just for the reference in the database, there is no point spending time and money on cleaning the data to give it a correct & meaningful shape. After intermittent bursts of laughters and grins among all big waves, the plan is (still under review) to keep it quick and dirty, until ofcourse the management cabal comes up with some "calm and clean" ideas!

case study...

2009-02-20T00:34:00.004+05:30

This is a real life incident which happened this morning.

Context: Last night Developer 1 (D1) sent across a mail saying task XYZ cannot be done because current code (which is reused from an existing code base with minor tweaks) doesn’t have those pieces of instructions which can handle the inputs we are receiving and so we are ignoring the inputs as of now and we will need a discussion on the same.

Manager 1 comes in.

M1: Hi D1! What is it I am hearing? Why can’t we do that?

D1: Hi M1. Current code is taken from the existing code base which doesn’t handle what we expect. Also, we had conveyed the same earlier that this would not be possible to customize the accounts with current code and that all accounts will inherit their parent’s characteristics.

M1: But why aren’t we handling that? That means the design was flawed? B1 (M1’s boss) had clearly told that the code has to be reusable. Then the code should be able to do that. Why is it not doing that then?

D1: Well, because it is built that way. If we want that code to do extra tasks then it will require extra development work.

M1: slightly pissed off look… B1 will push it blah blah blah… (D1 doesn’t understand the lingo…) Costs are blah blah blah… Timelines are blah blah blah…

D1: startled look… silent...

M1: startled look… silent for a while... Ok! Can you just do some analysis and let us know why it was not done and what would it take to do it?

D1: hiding frustration behind a poor smile… Sure M1. I will let you know.

M1 goes and D1 puts his ear phones back and starts listening to Linkin Park.

Manager 2 comes in.

M2: Hi D1, how are you! I hope you are aware of the new requirement with respect to the accounts. Before we discuss anything, let me just say I am totally with you in and I totally agree that current code cannot do what it is expected to do.

D1: Hi M2.

M2: Can you just tell me, what’s the problem we are facing?

D1: Yes M2. The new inputs expect the new accounts to be customizable at child level. Till now, the code has been built in such a way that all the accounts inherit the characteristics of the parent account. In order to do that, we will have to do some extra development.

M2: Can you tell me, what are the extra attributes that are required to be customized at child level?

D1: Attributes, like billing frequency, billing currency, billing addresses and contact persons.

M2: Do you have any idea how many such clients are there?

D1: Nope. I will confirm with D2 and let you know.

M2: I think, just suggest what you feel… will it be a good idea to load all the accounts as current code does. And then write a small add-on script which will then take those additional attributes and write into the database.

D1: M2! D2 has confirmed that there are 14 such accounts.

M2: Will it be possible to set them up manually, instead of writing a script especially for them? D1! Can you please analyse both the options – setting them up manually, or writing an add on script to load only account specific data after main script runs, and let us know which option will be quicker, cheaper and better?

D1: Sure M2. I will get back to you in next 2 hours.

M2: Thanks D1.

D1: No probs M2.

M2 goes and D1 closes his windows media player and starts analysing the problem.

the win-win manager...

2008-12-18T22:50:00.001+05:30

passing by...

2008-11-26T14:17:00.000+05:30

walk the walk, don't just talk the talk...

2008-10-02T21:53:00.005+05:30

I have realized that work is mostly about ego satisfaction and fact of life is everyone thinks that their ego is more important than others. So earlier this afternoon, while I was explaining my design of a new migration program to my boss, I almost forgot the fundamental principle and the whole explaining ended up in a big mess, since he had his own idea of doing the same thing. And I had my own. Which unfortunately he came to know from a third person, and thought it was third person's idea I was working on. Damn this communication! It was heart breaking.

Now even after a week's thought and some thousands lines of working code, my almost complete module faces unnoticed extinction. The problem is, boss thinks from his application's point of view and during last week he was on holiday. During that time I started working on the design from my application's point of view and almost pulled the desired result out of it.

Now today, the One came back from the holiday in France & Italy and started designing his own French-Italian way. And his logical process was nowhere near mine.

Since I am the reticent subordinate who never likes pressing his point (even to peers), I have to step back and again write the whole code his way. But, it really doesn't matter, until they keep paying me. Ultimately the truth is, there is no right or wrong design - there is just a working and non-working design. If you keep talking about the design and do nothing about it - it's worth crap. I am just hoping this fellow not only has weird design ideas, but also some experience to give those ideas shape (that wasn't clear from the way he was explaining his 'universal migration design' in that ear piercing managerial lingo). I just hope that he not only talks the talk, but also walks the walk.

finanacial freedom...

2008-07-29T15:29:00.003+05:30

In a realistic world, total freedom is not possible without financial freedom. Below are the links to some stimulating insight into the subject which troubles most of us blue and white collared employees.

Part 1 : Is Your Job Running Your Life?

Part 2 : Four Rookie Mistakes People Make That Keep Them Poor.

Part 3 : Five Steps I Took That Helped Me Become Financially Independent.

the text book strategy...

2008-07-17T22:10:00.004+05:30

It's been long. I could not understand what to write. When mind is so obsessed with thoughts NOT related to work, then nothing can inspire to write about work. Today, somehow I have shrugged away all laziness and insecurity to try to discuss the basic "don't" of the IT industry which everyone knows at finger tips but still does not follow when it comes to it.

Here is a real life example of a project during its definition phase when the manager from client side asks the manager from vendor's side: "...I would like to know how you will mitigate against the risk of getting to mid August for the start of development and delay to development completion." And the manager (vendor) had this idea in mind - "We will put more resources (people) in case we see project getting delayed."

True story and a typical text book situation.

First of all, if the definition of the project has been done with earnest thought and sensible facts, then such questions MUST not arise. Goal of definition is to understand the need, scope in the possibilities, scope out the undoable tasks and estimate the design. Definition gives a foundation for the start of development.

That does not mean that post-definition the risks are not present. There are known risks for which already there should be a plan in place. Also, there are (sometimes) unkown risks, which arise during the later stages, for which mitigation plans have to be improvised using experience.

But here, the question is - in case the project is getting delayed can adding more resources (people) to it accelarate the progress of the project? Text books always say 'negative'. But I think, it cannot be generalized for every situation. In some cases, it might work depending upon what is delaying the project and which area of the project will be supported by the newly added enforcement. The strategists and leaders have huge responsibility for the success of it in any case.

old is bold...

2008-06-24T15:31:00.006+05:30

Young Indian IT professionals prefer to get into Mainframes because there are more chances of getting relocated to the client locations and harvest pay-checks in USD’s or GBP’s. But at the same time they are paranoid that their skills will become obsolete soon because one day distributed computing will take over Mainframes. Also, they have this notion that there is no real development work in Mainframes; most of the tasks are maintenance and support. Real development work now goes into distributed or open systems platforms. Is it true that Mainframes is dead or it is dying a slow death?

No. Mainframe is not dead, nor is it dying. To the surprise of all, it is coming back with a new look. It is resurrecting. This article and there are many such essays evangelizing the come-back of Mainframes. Only problem with mainframes (when viewed from programmer’s perspective) is that they are not very docile for the application development. But when viewed from a CIO’s eyes, Mainframes are around 80% cheaper than distributed systems (Total Cost of Ownership) and at the same time very efficient to handle heavy workloads.

It’s true that organizations are trying to modernize their old business critical applications. And in doing so, many of the antique applications are getting re-written into distributed platforms. IBM is investing a lot of time and money in reforming the Mainframes and has already done a lot to bring z series. New AD tools are being developed to ease the application development on Mainframes. One thing to keep in mind here is that applications developed easily might not be the best applications developed.
Meanwhile, change is around the corner. Truth is 'old and weak perish and new and strong survive'. Mainframe is old, but it's strong and has a bright future. But there will be changes in its core working style, which hopefully, will be for the good. As a wild guess, there will be new cocktail architectures – Mainframes and Java, Mainframes and Linux, Mainframes and Eclipse etc. Now, it is up to Mainframe professionals to align their career path with the changing Mainframe environment if they plan to thrive along with the changing times.

whither the Indian IT...

2008-06-23T20:08:00.004+05:30

Let me open my mouth with a defensive cliche 'life doesn't like straight lines'. Young, restless and 'virgin' Indian IT professionals are making their way into the new world - which also cannot be in straight lines. This global osmosis of talent, skills and potential is happening slowly - and will remain invisible to the eyes until one day it explodes forth an abrupt result (something like information technology Tsunami) which touches every corner of the latent dice. Until then we can only be part of the change and hang on a little more.

James McGovern has written an inciting blog (thankfully on my request)which gives great insight into current IT scenario in India. It is a must read for every Indian IT professional, in or out of India; especially at the time when yearly appraisals are on along with rising inflation and slowing GDP growth in the country.

small is beautiful...

2008-06-16T21:11:00.003+05:30

Quotes from Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher:

"Education can help us only if it produces “whole men”. The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the “whole man” in fact, may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories, he may treasure the Encyclopedia Britannica because “she knows and he needn’t”, but he will be truly in touch with the centre."

"No system or machinery or economic doctrine or theory stands on its own feet: it is invariably built on a metaphysical foundation, that is to say, upon man's basic outlook on life, its meaning and its purpose. I have talked about the religion of economics, the idol worship of material possessions, of consumption and the so-called standard of living, and the fateful propensity that rejoices in the fact that 'what were luxuries to our fathers have become necessities for us.'

"The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion – political or otherwise – which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time."

"Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful."

"A modern economist is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. . . . The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity."

"It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilizations not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products."

"The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed."

why managers...

2008-06-16T14:38:00.002+05:30

CPU’s now run at millions of instructions per second. Size of primary memory has increased manifold. New tools, IDE’s have arrived to reduce the involved human effort. But still, IT projects go on as if eternity has their names written on it. IT projects are no longer as much about the technology as they are about people. When it comes to an IT project - people plan, execute, control and hang around without any purpose. People are the primary bottlenecks in a project which keeps overshooting the planned schedule.

Someone overslept in the morning, did not take bath, missed the bus to office, did not have proper breakfast, someone got late because she had to drop her kid (even worse kids) to the school, someone is struggling with the extra alcohol of previous night – and they are supposed to balance another important aspect of their lives – work. No doubt when there is a conflict between work and non-work life, non-work life takes precedence in most of the cases and consequently work suffers. In a way, people don’t suffer as much because of work as work suffers because of people.

People have now become the most conspicuous bottlenecks in the projects. Interdependency of a project upon different teams, different groups and different skills has gradually distorted the uniformity and smoothness of operations. Coordination between such islands of information/operations remains a challenge. Understanding the goals of every group is a challenge in itself and it represents most of the time actually spent during the project.

There comes the need of a charming handsome gentleman or a beautiful articulate lady to smooth the edges and bridge the gap between the otherwise isolated islands. There is a saying in Chinese that ‘if you don’t have a smiling face, don’t open a shop’ which can be rephrased for the present times as ‘if you don’t have a smiling face, don’t even think of becoming a manager’.

P for Process...

2008-06-11T16:27:00.002+05:30

Processes are, by definition, the set of rules or standards put forth for smooth operations of a business to achieve desired results. There are bulky documents in every organization containing religiously written texts dedicated to processes. But, the question every process document fails to answer is ‘Why the process should be followed?’ And if this question is coming in the mind of a person who is supposed to follow the process, then it is a sure sign of a budding scepticism that, if left unanswered, can be detrimental for the organization in future.

The standards set by the policymakers of an organization, at any level, are delicate rules of organizational ecology. Meaning, for followers, these standards are not as undeniable as the law of gravity or the laws of motion. Reason - these standards are set up by the rationale of human beings and are very prone to becoming obsolete with changing business practices and within a very short period of time. The law of gravity never changes – so there is no problem following the law, every creature is born with the instinctive acceptance. Just imagine if the gravity was 9.8 N one day and the other day it changed suddenly to 6 N, how much effort it will require for the whole creation to adapt to the new law. Thank God gravity is intact but that’s exactly what happens with business rules; they are prone to fast changes. And changes in business rules give rise to changes in processes.

Process is an essential part of everyday life – be it making chicken curry or launching missiles. For a novice cook, it doesn’t matter whether she puts onion in the hot oil first or the asafoetida. But for a seasoned chef that does make a difference in the resultant taste of the dish. That’s the effect of processes – they reflect the maturity of the profession. But sadly maturity cannot come just by labelling it to the job titles of the professionals. It has to take roots in the vision of the individual, only then can it become meaningful for the individual as well as for the organization.

In words of James McGovern:

I believe that process is intended to "raise the floor" - that is to elevate the minimum acceptable standard across all participants. The process itself is designed to create an output of a particular (acceptable) level or quality. Process is also good for consistency.

Competence is about "raising the ceiling." The upper threshold of what I can achieve is dictated by my competence. As per above, my incompetence can be offset by process (to a certain extent). People of high competence may want to resist process, because it brings their execution down to a lower level than what they are capable of delivering. This creates the tension of "do I have to follow THAT process?"

Process is an organization-wide solution. Implement once and it touches all people (or is supposed to). Competence is an individual-wide solution. It is implemented one persona at a time. This makes it much harder to manage...

where's my oil...

2008-05-29T22:25:00.007+05:30

“We are the consumers. We are the by products of life style obsession. We have jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need…Things we own end up owing us…”

Tyler Durden of Fight Club (Directed by David Fincher) inspires a lot of scepticism in me especially, when I am having nightmares of the rising inflation.

I get dreams like I am riding my Pulsar and suddenly the fuel is over in front of a petrol pump but five kilometres away from home. How cruel! When my monthly fuel budget is already in deficit, I can no longer afford to buy petrol unless I realign my food budget which, too, is about to dry up because of rising food prices. I have to push that 140 KG of machine all the way to home, or better sell it off. When I am about to sell my beloved stead, suddenly I wake up and realize that I am currently in London, far away from the whirlpool of rising prices, but only for a short time.

Prices are rising. Not only in India – everywhere. Indians abroad are wondering why they are not able to save as much foreign currency as they used to a couple of months ago, while Indians in India cringe when they hear rest of the world (Ms Rice) say that hike in food and oil prices is because of the rising demand in India and China, which in theory is true though not the complete answer. One - USA’s bio-fuel programme is turning the grains into fuel and more here.

We (emerging market citizens and developed country citizens) are not doing that bad anyhow. Only our savings are not that much we can boast any longer. Worst hit are those countries where food is the indispensable commodity – the third world. Prime Minister of Haiti resigned when he couldn’t do anything about the rising food prices and about the rioters shouting slogans of ‘We Are Hungry’. Many got killed in Mexico riots. Army is guarding the paddy fields in Africa. Military is baking bread in Egypt. And to make things worse oil is touching $135 per barrel which is not at all a good price, not because it is high, but because it shows an alarming shortage of oil. Such sharp economic turns change the course of future, leaving layman in shock.

In theory - inflation is caused by either of the two shocks – Demand Shock or the Supply Shock. Demand Shock, as the term sounds like, is a sudden sharp increase in the demand of a commodity which drives the price higher, which is most conspicuous in the housing markets in booming times. Supply Shock is when there is a sudden drop in the supply of a commodity with an unchanged demand, like in case of oil prices.

People say ‘problems never come alone’. India was celebrating the Sensex touching 21k at the beginning of the year. Then suddenly the weather changed from sunny to cloudy to very cloudy and now it seems it is about to rain (if not pour). Elections are approaching, Gujjars are whirling their sticks around in Delhi, commodity prices and crude oil prices are rising. Now this is a really tough challenge for a government, which is interested in coming into power once again. Let’s keep fingers crossed for the ~~best~~ greater good and pray that our policymakers will see an opportunity in this problem instead of burying their heads in the sand like an ostrich to later blame each other and some invisible ghost. And everyone will be left wondering where the oil went.

poor programmer...

2008-05-28T20:50:00.006+05:30

Problem with the application programmer’s job is that no matter how hard I work and how smart I am, I can never become a mass celebrity or win a noble prize or a Bharat Ratn, Padma Shree or Padma Vibhusan. I am the meek supporter of a bold economy. I am the wistful spectator of a celebrity world.

I mean, a programmer cannot reach out to the people of this world. A journalist writes an article and hundreds of people read it and make opinions about the world. A programmer writes a program and nobody but the compiler understands it, and years later if someone actually dares to go through the source code (which is like the junkyard of a programmer's irrational thoughts), the poor programmer’s soul gets all sorts of critiques and curses, whereas a journalist receives the Pulitzer Prize for his years of service to the world, or even gets the Best Critics Award of the Year!
In a group of people of different professions, a programmer appears like a laid back citizen of an undeveloped world, an unevolved civilization. That’s the problem with the world of programmers. We don’t have role models. If one wants to become a great journalist or a sportsman or a politician s/he has role models like Thomas Friedman, Christiano Ronaldo and George Bush. But if one wants to become a programmer – there is nobody, everyone is on his/her own on the road to perdition.

But it is good for unambitious people who don't seek fame and celebrity status, those outcast self proclaimed geniuses who want to live unknown to the world of natural human beings and go as the tiny footnotes in the pages of history.

evolution of a programmer...

2008-05-27T16:06:00.005+05:30

To Quote Edsger W Dijkstra

If something goes wrong in the field of Physics or Geology or other natural sciences you can blame the nature. But if something goes wrong with your program you cannot blame anyone but your own brain.

An IT application generally evolves like a human civilization until the technology is able to support the changes in business environment. Once technology is no longer able to support the business, it becomes obsolete.

Consider this – the application I work on, was built some decades ago using CINCOM’s rapid application development tool called MANTIS. Those were the times of mighty mainframe machines, and elegance of modern day servers and MVC architecture was only in the visions of computer engineers. MANTIS is a straightforward, down to earth tool with hardly some twenty commands and an inbuilt compiler which sits on CICS. One of those tools, which experts say can be mastered in two hours. It has no inbuilt garbage collection or exception handling, and front end is very unfriendly compared to today’s sleek and funky JSP. You have to write some 100 LOC to implement the page logic, there is nothing to scroll. There are no date operations like Oracle. What the redundancy of code means becomes very conspicuous when one looks at the source code. On and all, MANTIS is now obsolete given the pace with which business is changing. It is full of known bugs, which can no longer be fixed. So the business is gradually making a shift towards Siebel CRM. Eventually, I have to start looking for a job elsewhere.

When a new person is inducted into the application, given the attrition rate of the ambitious people, the first question s/he asks is ‘Why don’t we write the whole code in J2EE again?’ That’s a valid question, and a smart, futuristic proposition. Who wants to listen to a gramophone record in the times of iPOD nanos? But consider this – you bought a gramophone record somewhere in 70’s and since then you have been collecting the records religiously like a music aficionado. Now you have a library of thousands of records, which has eventually developed an emotional bond with you. You can’t just throw away all of them and buy one 100 GB iPOD nano and download all the songs from Apple’s music store. Business, too, has this unrealistic attachment to the obsolete applications which, though highly inefficient compared to latest technology, give correct results. You cannot expect them to shift immediately; it is a gradual evolutionary process of business transformation which promises exorbitant jobs for enterprise architects.

Moreover, hardly there will be a business which runs on a single technology. Mine, runs on Mainframes, J2EE, VB, and all of these talk to each other through another middleware technology called WebSphere MQSeries. Ideally it looks like a stupid mess from neutral perspective, but for a support provider it is a blessing. Support providers are always in hunt for bugs which they can fix to bill their clients.

Conclusion: When looking/working at an application it is imperative to understand that application is not just the lines of code or the number of java classes. It holds in itself the history of how business rules have evolved, the frustration of restless programmers, the limited knowledge of overqualified application architects and ignorance of pandemic project managers.

money... my take...

2008-05-08T18:34:00.003+05:30

Often, I am bedazzled by the concept of money. From simple barter of things to complicated derivative instruments - we have covered a long way across the evolution.

Once upon a time, two cows were bartered for one ton of barley, one acre of land for three beautiful wives and three silver coins for a sumptuous supper at a place where naked damsels served the food.

Today, the barter has become so complicated that without having an MBA in finance, it is almost impossible to understand what is being bartered against what. Consider this - 'X' bank gives loan to its customer 'Y'. The bank received that money by selling equity stocks in the financial market. A mutual fund bought those equity stocks in hope of making profit, and also hedged the losses by signing some derivative contracts which were sold by some foreign investment bank. There is no wonder that customer 'Y' himself invested in the money in the same mutual fund which bought the equities from the bank which helped the customer to procure the loan. Now, you call that the messy barter.

Still, simple barter does exist. 12 INR for a glass of juice, 99 INR for a pair of allegedly 'imported' sunglasses, £1 for a bottle of orange juice, $1 for a diet coke. But then, £1 is traded equal to INR 80 and $1 equal to INR 40 in currency markets. George Soros, made $1.1 billion on September 16, 1992 by short-selling $10 billion worth of pounds. Now, you think that's simple?

No, it's no longer simple. Different people have different views about money based on their education, culture, upbringing and last but not the least 'how-much-of-it-they-already-have'.

There are worldly, practical, realistic people who think that money is everything, money is power etc. Also, there are poetic, idealist and dreamers who think that money is not everything, and they even go to the lengths to saying that money is the root of all evil, or even money is evil.

I say - both of them are wrong. First kind does not understand the aesthetic sense of money, and the second kind misunderstands its beauty. Money has power, no doubt. It has power to purchase things. But how that power gets exercised, depends on the most complicated organ of human body called brain.

While spending money, we make choices. Those choices depend on our personal values, which we develop throughout our lives. Consider this situation where there are two guys 'A' and 'B' who are given 50,000 INR each to spend. Now what will they do with that?

1. 'A' buys a multifeature mobile phone with 50,000 INR and person 'B' puts it into her savings account and forgets.

2. 'A' buys a multifeature mobile phone and person 'B' after seeing 'A' also buys a mobile phone.

3. 'A' and 'B' collaborate and invest their 100,000 INR in a new business.

4. 'A' goes to a pub and throws a party to his friends. 'B' buys some mutual fund.

Anything is possible.

We have unlimited wants, but limited resources. Based on this and our predilections we make choices of where to apply our available resources and which wants to satisfy. Economics is the study of this, at individual level (micro-economics) and at country/industry level (macro-economics).

prelude...

2008-05-08T15:51:00.003+05:30

One day, when I was bored to my bones, a thought clicked in my brain and said that education has ruined my life more than it has made it. I still remember that Alexander the Great invaded India somewhere around 326 BC and died somewhere around 323 BC, ‘x’ is the capital of ‘y’ country, ‘d’ is the head of ‘w’ state, ‘d1’ is the date when ‘t’ was born and ‘e’ died on date ‘d2’. Apparently my brain, overloaded with unnecessary information, is now struggling to find some space in its intricate anatomy where it can process the information it has and make sound judgements. I mean, what do I care if Aurangzeb levied taxes on Hindus on 17th of February 1655, or Mahatma Gandhi died on 30th January 1948? Sadly, the educational system I grew upon was mal-designed to judge a person’s memory and ability of retrieve the information from his/her brain instead of sharpening his/her intellect and strengthening the ability to infer from what s/he knows.

So, I thought I will re-educate myself all over again. I decided that it is imperative for me to know something of everything and everything of one thing. But it is difficult to unlearn certain things, and those things prevent me from learning the right way. Because most of the time I have suffered from not knowing what I really wanted, I dared to choose Economics and Computer Science to be the ‘one thing’ and ‘everything’ remains everything like political science, sociology, driving, swimming, psychology, combat, management, finance etc… Strangely, everything interests me now, when there are no exams which judge me against some stupid definitions and dates.

Till now, I have been putting all the noise of my brain here. That's moslty unstructured and random, as the life is happening to me. That randomness will continue along, and now I am attempting to structure my way through life as I learn and evolve.