Had Programming been the Medical way!

Dear Facebook,
Its since the day fell for your charms, the day since I get addicted not because of your look and feel, but some pretty faces out there, I could find the same question being asked by you, each time, I visit my home page; “What’s on your mind?”
Well! Its true that you have changed the significance of ‘f’. But honestly, its always been hard to share with you, the persons, thoughts and ideas, ideally on my mind. And, I bet, if I try anything like this, there could be a lot of bombs exploding, in between friends, in the office or may be from some strangers!
#1. Had Programming been the Medical way!
“One could not count the vigorous effort that you put in you logic, Or the numerous errors, that reside behind your code.”
The air becomes saturated, its hard to breathe, your body is raging with fumes, you feel trapped. You could feel the surrounding has deafening sound of silence. You haven’t eaten for hours, and still, you feel your stomach flooded. You don’t find anyone who can comfort you. You don’t find any music melodious, or a friend peculiar.
Please do not be misguided these feeling with what those intellectuals call it , the crazy stupid: Love. The mouse next to you starts randomly cutting out for a second or two before working again for a while, like it’s just dying.You feel, the monitor, in front of you, behaving like a black and white TV, playing an inaudible Sastriya Sangit.
Yes! you are definitely in between agony, trying hard to get your logic work as it should be. Meanwhile, someone reviews your logic and comments : Holy Crap! leaving you bamboozled.
I wish, the programming had been the medical way where I could proudly say:-

“See! If you want this logic to be implemented I would charge, a hundred grand for that, otherwise I won’t give a shit to it! All the if-else statements, the for/while loops, would be charged separately, based on the logic it consists. Twenty grand for each the test case I would write and thirty, for testing those cases. Because, I am knackered, the way, you come to me at the end of the day,when I’d about to leave, and ask ‘Let’s start working on this enhancement.’ I am shattered  with your requirements, that changes often, than the weather, the design, that is manipulated at your wish.”

Thanks,
Yours Availer.

Are We Satisfied...

A cage , three ‘firangi’ parrots, one of them green, another yellow and the last one white, hardly 3 inches long from head to tail.The cage is tied up from the roof of a Dhaba. The weird thing is the name, ’Tourist’, given to the Dhaba. Earlier, I knew only one common name given to all Dhabas, ‘Baba the Dhaba’.  People come and go , watch those prisoners, praise their beauty, enjoy, their chirping, their movements inside a tiny home. One of them, the yellow one, is silent, as of, has given up all the hopes. It keeps on resting/sleeping inside it’s artificial nest made up of soil ,inside the cage,itself. The green one keeps on chirping, as of thinking,’To Fly or not to Fly’ . The third, the white one keeps  moving from one wall of the steel cage to another,screeching, hitting the steel wires with its beak, trying to bypass part of its body, more than the beak, outside the tiny home, so called a cage. Holding the steel wire tightly with its talons ,always seems to get off the prison. Two small boxes, one filled with grains , another with water resides at the bottom of the cage. The green one often takes some grains in its beak and jumps back to it’s place. The roadside dirt has most affected the white one, its feathers has been turning into dull pale. They eat ,sleep,awake and again feed themselves, again sleep. 

I visit that Dhaba seldom for lunch. Watch them closely performing the same activities in order. I could feel them, looking at me, intently with a mixture of amusement, confusion and suspicion. Feel like being asked a question by them : “Are you the one who is going set us free ? If not , why are you staring me like this, stop giving us , a murderous look. Are you satisfied taking our freedom ?  Despite all your intelligence, you, human could never be satisfied.”

Sometimes, I feel like, going to the Dhaba owner and ask them about the price for those birds. Also take any local native person, who will help me to bargain their price, in their conventional language. But what if they could not adopt the outside environment, die with hunger and thirst.Neither way, I feel satisfied with their whereabouts.

A Coffee With …

“You know, the Manager wants to see me… I don’t know why the heck he is interesting in meeting me . He just said , wants to talk about some project related thing.”
“Oh , That’s a positive sign, maybe he wants to involve you in some good work. Might be some change of project.”
“Let’s see, what happens !”
A tall, dark man with well maintained physique, passed my cubical saying that he wanted to meet me in next five minutes , in the meeting room situated at the corner side of the working area.
Within five minutes we were inside the room sitting face to face. The only difference had been a cup of coffee, that was missing in my hands. While he was enjoying a cold coffee (surely taken from CCD), I was sitting idle along with a spiritless look.
“So, We have something really important to discuss. As we have a lot of people finding opportunities to move to the location of the client ,so called ‘on-site’ , we are left with  a lot of places to filled after they leave. Such an opportunity awaits you. You have been in this project for marginal time, and I think you are quite familiar with both the front end and back end technologies and terminologies…” 
“Actually front end,in back end, I just, worked on only few enhancements.”, I interrupted him in the middle, with a half grinning, half grimacing, look of distaste.
“Okay, I think you must have a proper understanding of current project. There are some people, in the support section of this project, who are moving apart, and I am here to suggest you to avail this opportunity.” 
“But… I am not interested in the kind of work done in support field.”
“What do you mean you are not interested ?”
“I mean…Err… I don’t feel the kind of work, good enough, they do in support.”
“You never have been in support , how can you say like that ?”
“Yes, I have been in buffer for some days in support team prior to coming into this one. I have seen them working. And  I also, don’t like the timing in which they work,generally, there was two shifts there. One was morning from 7 am to 5 pm and another from 12pm to 9pm. I am not comfortable with either of the shifts.”
“That’s not a valid point, how can you say about there work not  good enough. They also do the same work as we do in development.The only difference is, You get tickets there, and you have to solve them within a time period.”
“Yes , when you get tickets you solve them and  the rest of the time, I have seen people wandering around the food courts for tea or gossip. I don’t find it as a challenging work. And also you have to work during weekend, providing support services sitting at home.”
“That’s a misconception that support work in not as much challenging as development. I want to tell you about one of my colleagues, who is, at Manager post, in Apple. Can you believe he was in support work, for a long period of four years. You can be there just for a short duration of 18 to 24 months.”
“That’s not a short duration. I don’t see any work pressure there,  you get tickets, you solve them , other times , you sit idle. And you can’t learn things without feeling any pressure. We have less opportunities of learning new things…...”
Meanwhile the conversation was interrupted by a phone call at his mobile. Finishing his call for 2-3 minutes, he came to the point again.
“Yeah! ,Sorry for the interruption, Where were we! , OK ..Think about it more like this, you get idle time, you can utilize them in learning new technologies. You can learn whatever you want, whether its Java, .NET or web based html. I don’t see any valid reason , why don’t you want to work in support ?”
“Err…. the reason is still same, I am not interested at all, I don’t see that work neither inspiring nor motivating.”
Thinking for few seconds he said, “Well, I just want you to wait here for sometimes, till the TL of the support team visits you. Let me check whether she is available or not. Talk to her, and if she is able to convince you then we are all set, otherwise don’t say directly ‘No’ to her.”
All I wanted was, to yell at his back , Is it like so. First you killed our technology interests and now you want us to do work as per your likings. Forget about the Customer Delight, you boast about, are you keeping the delight of your own employees.
In a duration of five minutes a lady walks in, with glasses perched on the tip of her nose, and the same drama was repeated for one more time.

Good Programmers Copy

“Ek Bagal mein Chand hoga , Ek Bagal mein Rotiyan….” the melody was buzzing deep inside my ears through the ear buds. It was half past one, the afternoon timing, when you try hard to keep yourself awake.And, once you put ear buds on , you can the feel the world off ! Some people still manage to find the whole day refreshing, and I am certainly not one of them.

In the mean time I could sense somebody was calling my name. Putting the dream of, both ‘Chand’ and ‘Rotiyan’ aside, I managed to  I snuck around the neighboring co-worker. I could see him working on some hot issues , he faced during our daily job: ‘coding’- what we call it as.

“I got a problem for you. Here is piece of code that I had, exactly  copied from the code snippet, you had written earlier. But I am getting some kind of issues with this piece of code. Can you check and tell me , what the issue is ?” 

I managed to give him  a ghost of nod. Sniffing around of his piece of code, I could found nothing of my interest.

“Okay, leave it I will find it by myself, he mumbled.

“Yes sure . Also let me know what is the problem”.

Meanwhile, the phone rang, displaying an unknown number at screen.

“Hallo!”

All I could hear was a distant person’s voice chattering across the other side of the phone.

“Please, speak in English on Hindi.”

“I am already speaking in English, Sir.”

I figured out,the accent of English, was totally different to what we Indians speak. And for we, all English accent, other than Indian are hard to grasp.

“Hi ! I am calling from Kindle customer services UK . You had raised a request for replacement of your Kindle device, as you had mentioned that some of the keys on your device are malfunctioning.”

“Yes that’s true.”

“Okay. So for security reasons I request you to add the payment details on your account in amazon.com. You should have a valid credit/debit card for filling up those details.”

”Can you please call me tomorrow or may be day after tomorrow as I don’t have the credit card details right now.”

Getting a positive response from the other side of the phone , I hung it up.

“Hey ! I think you have forgotten all the coding logic , you had implemented some days ago.” the neighboring person said sarcastically.

“Who remembers the logic implemented codes, that was written two months ago.” I replied, giving a wounded look to him.

“You ,even can’t explain the solution of the problem which I had mentioned you, sometime earlier. You must have copied and pasted all the code snippets from somewhere else.”  he argued.

“Definitely I had copied and pasted a lot of code snippets, but that was a successful copy and paste. And you did the same thing, but yours is unsuccessful.” I  defended.

“ Its not all about copying and pasting, there are some concepts behind coding.” he said, more irritably this time.

“That concept part may called Programming , but The ‘Coding’ seems to be nothing more than a successful copy and paste or a lucky hit and trial.”

It let me reminded the the famous statement of the cofounder of Apple,  Steve jobs:

“Good Programmers copy, but great programmers steal ideas. Every novice can be a coder but it takes years to become a programmer, and some people can not make it, till the end.”

Later on, he asked me , whether should he include the update of  work done by me, for the day, as ‘copied and pasted codes’.

“Of course! You can, but append the word “Successfully”  as a prefix.”