Unclutter…

 

 "Work desk" - We try to keep it ergonomic, comfortable to work at. But over the period, it gets cluttered.

On weekends, most would do a cleanup exercise. Removing the unwanted things, adding the required. Keeping frequently needed things at arms distance and moving no so useful things to the corners.

Now look at your life in the same way. Just replace the things with “thoughts” and “people”. Over the period, we need to remove useless thoughts and negative people from our life. Need to keep meaningful relationship close by, also adding more positive thoughts to our daily life.

People reach to a particular level, say - good job, house, nice car, vacations… Does that mean the work is done? No. Uncluttering is still required.

Life is like a work desk, constant repeated efforts are required to keep it uncluttered, smooth, happy.

Stop focusing just on the life goals, also focus on yourself, on your “work desk”. 

 

Loading team with too much work

 

What happens when you load your team with too much work and unrealistic goals:

 Honest People

• Will be able to cope for sometime and then burnout would start
• ‘Innovation’, ‘work quality’ will take a back seat
• Eventually they would either leave or become ‘clever’ - read below

Clever people

• Will utilize the situation to have good repo in organization
• They will pick a lot of things, even if they are not able to manage them all.
• Result - Lot of things would be half done or done with bad quality. But these problems are ignored and even rewarded, as theoretically the person is doing a lot and not complaining.

Slackers

• They know how to slack even with more work.
• Most of them would go on long leave or take frequent leaves.
• In some companies they are often moved to other ‘easy’ projects (bringing further burden on Honest people). In few, they are asked to leave, which is often a long road anyways.

Even though above eventualities are well known, overloading team members is very common technique, as it gets short term benefits of lot of work getting done. 

Few managers/leaders don't care about long term damages as by that time they move to different position, but hurting the organization in the process. Some don't have the long term vision, or simply deny any kind of damage due to the practice

 

Interview to 'Hire'​...

 

"That person takes very tough interview",

"It’s very difficult to pass his/her interview"

How many times have you heard these comments at the water-cooler? Most times such behavior is applauded and indirectly encouraged. It indeed is not right !

Most interviewers love to ask tough questions, even the ones, which are not related to the day-to-day job profile. Worse, they don’t look for the ‘approach towards the solution’, but the exact answer, that too in that 5-10 minutes time frame.

The time/efforts spent in screening and other interview processes goes waste with such behavior, with the position still standing open to fill up. 

Hiring a bad candidate is a loss, but trust me, rejecting a good one is a greater loss.

This problem is further aggravated with fear what if the hired candidate turns out bad later. Interviewers don't want to be pointed out for selecting the wrong candidate, thus pushing rejection rates higher.

I am not asking to take easier interviews, or hire people without due diligence. But please ask yourself “is the question I am asking even related to the work a person would be doing”. (remember those popular multi-threading questions). Or am I interviewing to ‘hire’ the person.

Plus, as an interviewer, have courage to take a stand on your choice. If the candidate turns out bad later, that's Ok. That can happen with anyone. (Company’s continuous appraisal process would take care of that)

An organization, once popular for their very long tough interview process, found that it hardly made any difference. People who scored high in interviews turned out to be mediocre performers and vice-a-versa.

So, evaluate rationally. And if things go wrong, take responsibility, learn and move on.

Keep hiring, keep growing...

Success (in career) is so overrated

One question asked to each child, across geographies, is what you want to be in your life. Anyone reading this would be no different. Assuming you reached that goal (hence reading this article on LinkedIn J), one important question that comes to mind is “what next?”

Rather the question came to me immediately after my first job – “Now what?”

After almost 2 decades, I strongly feel – “success”, especially in one’s career, is too overrated. No I don’t mean to demotivate you, if you are in a profession where you are not contended and still have the fire to go on, then that’s great.

But more and more people I talk to, are not really clear what to do next. If earning good money and having good career is the final frontier then what to do once you are done with that? I think lot of folks are facing this issue and are quite lost. Searching happiness in food, outings, vacations and other ‘instantly gratifying’ stuff.

Another problem with ‘success in career’ is, target is achieved quite early in one’s life span, may be 30 - 35 years

Shouldn’t there be a more important goal. By ‘more’ I don’t mean just ‘more powerful’, but ‘more’ in ‘number’. Something that takes you further from there. So here we come to the point, (actually there are 2 points but discussing second one here will make the post too long).

Apart from ‘career success’ one needs to have other goals. Especially in the midlife, instead of focusing on building more wealth; focus on achieving something else (wealth making might be part of it, but not essential). Sounds strange? Then, looks like, you missed the whole open source revolution in the last decade.

It’s the feeling of accomplishment which keeps you going, keeps you busy

Goals can be simple – Hobby, Fitness target, learning something new, doing something totally outside your career choice (teaching, gardening, Solar module consultant, any other weird sounding stuff). 'Weird' not because of anything wrong with these activities, but because you never thought about them, anything that's out of your comfort zone. (not outside your 'liking' zone)

So, stop reading and start doing something. Or may be read more, found something related and interesting - https://medium.com/skilluped/8-timeless-skills-to-learn-now-in-under-8-hours-to-change-your-life-forever-75e7b339373a

When less is more (efficient) ...

Shared my thoughts, a decade back, on how adding more and more code instead of fixing the underlying platform was becoming a norm. Mumbai Vs Software architecture

Now, in last decade, as the prices of Memory, Storage and Processing have further gone down, the overall efforts to write efficient simple code is becoming more rare. Now more of a personal effort rather being part of the SDLC/review processes.

Result - Heavy, inefficient code. This, not just the overloads the build systems, CI/CD pipelines but finally will run on your customers' environments. Forcing them to put more money on the platform/hardware/power which could have been used on better things.

Few months back I did a code check-in:  

• Overall functionality: Increased/Improved
• Overall test coverage: Improved.
• Total Lines added were Less than Total Lines deleted
• Total Processing: Reduced. 
• Overall memory consumption: Reduced. 

Overall ‘time to furnish the call’ : Reduced by 30%

Brought a smile on 'my face' and also the hardware it's running on :) :)