[2021-08-01] Silver Jubilee

Today marks the completion of 25 years in the IT industry for me. Just as with the increasing number of silver hair on my scalp, I hope that this silver jubilee marks a certain maturity on my part rather than just the passage of time. While I do not have pearls of wisdom to offer on this anniversary, I would like to reflect a bit on the journey so far.

Beginning

On the 1st of August 1996 I joined what was then known as “Tata Information Systems Limited” (TISL) soon after graduating from college. I also moved to Bangalore as a part of joining TISL, where I continue to live to this day. TISL was a joint venture between the venerable Tata Group and the colossus in computing IBM. Within the approximately two years that I was employed by the company, TISL changed its name and corporate-structure to first become Tata-IBM and then IBM Global Services.

I have changed a few jobs since then.

Job Satisfaction

As a naïve college-graduate, I wanted to attain “job satisfaction” in my career. I had loved computer-programming in general since high school and graphics-programming & game-programming in particular since college, so my ideal employer would have been a game-developer creating their own 3D graphics-engine. However, I did not want to subject myself to the shenanigans and the constraints of the US immigration system, so I joined a regular company in the hopes of making the switch some time later if conditions were to become better. It now seems that most game-development companies are quite exploitative in nature, you are not left with much of a work-life balance, and game-development in general has gone in a direction that is not my cup of tea. So I do not terribly regret the path I have taken.

That said, I realized soon that the interests of a company are never fully aligned with your interests, despite all the noises they might make to the contrary, so it would be foolish to seek fulfillment via your job. For a while therefore, I did not exert myself too much in my day job, preferring to work on my side-projects in the evenings and over the weekends. That turned out to be not such a great idea since a day job takes up quite a bit of your mental energy, especially as you start to take on more responsibilities and doubly so if you work on soul-sucking enterprise software. This leaves you with little time or energy for your passion-projects and is therefore quite frustrating. So it was back to finding at least somewhat interesting work-opportunities in the latter half of my career. If you are spending so many of your waking hours and mental energy on something, it better be a bit fulfilling as well.

Experience

Someone once quipped that “experience is a comb that life gives you after you have lost all your hair”. I sometimes wish that I could get into a time-machine and tell my younger self all the things that I have learned over the years, but I know that this would be a futile exercise since there are many things that you have to experience yourself for you to truly appreciate them. I see this play out repeatedly as I try to advise younger folks who seem quite sincere in seeking out such advice. This frustration is compounded by the fact that there is so much bad advice floating around and spouted in confidence by inexperienced folks, while the really experienced folks mumble and waddle about in self-doubt. (AKA “empty vessels make the most noise” or the Dunning-Kruger effect.) Confidence is not equal to authority, but we perceive it to be so.

As an example of this, I now strive relentlessly to keep things simple in a system and to not over-design it for solving use-cases that might arise in the hypothetical future. To really appreciate this, you have to have maintained complex software-systems as they evolved to support changing requirements or as they prematurely got replaced by the next shiny thing. However, a simple-looking system will not win you brownie-points with management or with peers in unrelated teams who might be evaluating you. (“What is so great about this? Even a kid could have built something like this.”) In sharp contrast, as a kid barely four years out of college and a designated “architect”, I was an architecture astronaut creating elaborate castles stuffed to the hilt with design-patterns and ready to address all current and future use-cases. Those systems did not survive for long as they were not needed after a while and the new use-cases never came to pass.

Another example of this is the propensity of our industry to keep pushing new products, methodologies, languages, etc. as a silver bullet that will make your life a whole lot easier, but that end up adding to the complexity of systems and wasting your time and money. Younger folks enthusiastically take these up and evangelize replacing older products, methodologies, languages, etc. by the new shiny thing. If your foundations are strong and if you have weathered the industry for several years, you tend you see through the hype and become jaded, but no one would listen to your “not yet” (unless you happen to have the authority to put your foot down and have others follow along). At the same time, you have to watch out and not become too cynical and so skeptical of new solutions that you miss the significance of genuine improvements that crop up at times. Always be learning.

Career

When I had joined the industry, IT in India was relatively new and oriented towards services, not products. It had seemed that the only way to advance my career was to soon get into people-management, which was a depressing prospect for someone who loves programming and is an engineer at heart. Thankfully, more and more opportunities opened up in Bangalore and I have remained a so-called “individual contributor” throughout my career so far, with no intention of getting into people-management any time soon.

I have repeatedly seen that people are eager to quickly advance in their career and for others to equate that ascent with success. After all, the quicker you can get more power, more money, and more prestige, the better for you, right? However, this eventually leads to a stalled career, frustration or disillusionment, and even burnout. It ultimately results in the manifestation of the Peter Principle even in the most data-driven and supposedly-objective companies. You spend your most energetic years pursuing a path that might not ultimately be as fulfilling as you had hoped and that leaves you with no time for family, friends, and your hobbies. (You probably have much more money than your peers, which is not bad at all, even if it cannot buy you happiness.) I have consciously tried to avoid taking this approach for my career, though I sometimes do wonder whether I am just trying to rationalize my laid-back approach to life.

Communication

To paraphrase Titus Winters and Russ Cox, software engineering is a surface integral of programming over time and other people. While I loved programming, it took me while to become better at software engineering. A key thing I learned in system-design is the pursuit of simplicity, which reduces the overall maintenance-burden of a system for a team. Another important learning was the importance of clear and crisp communication. Explaining your design clearly so that your team can use it to effectively implement the system, keeping your code readable so that others can maintain or enhance it, documenting the semantics and the contract of your interfaces properly to reduce errors, etc. are all important to building a good system. Most engineers would eventually come to see the benefit of this and start following them with some guidance and perhaps a bit of goading.

There are other forms of communication however, that are more difficult for engineers to follow, but that are nevertheless critical to their career and well-being. For example, you have to develop the ability to say “no” by pushing back on unreasonable requirements that would add unnecessary complexity to a system or taking on additional responsibilities that would strain your well-being. As another example, many engineers seem to believe that all their good and hard work will speak for itself and are loath to engage in what they perceive to be shameless self-promotion – this is delusional and you would do well to let others know about your achievements, crisply highlighting the impact of your efforts, the difficulty you had to overcome, etc. As yet another example, when someone goes out of their way to help you, take some time to thank them publicly to show them that you are grateful and they did not simply waste their time.

Conclusion

There are many other topics on which I can pontificate based on my time in the industry, but I should probably set them aside for detailed exploration in future blog-posts. Suffice it to say that I consider myself fortunate to be still working on interesting problems with smart engineers who are eager to learn and where I get to continuously learn as well. I hope to remain productive for many years to come.

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