When Life gives you Lemons - A coder's take

Another mind-bender - Oh Boy!! So I don't know why I am being asked these million dollar questions that I have no clue how to unlock. If I ever did wont I be a millionaire in the first place. That elusive bulb never flashes in the inner recesses and I am always left struggling trying to connect the dots. I wonder who at Storylane comes up with these kind of questions. Thanks Michael Landau for throwing this at me anyway.


Life in general mimics a chaotic system driven by the dynamics of skewed events on a routine basis. The events can be painful, unprecedented and sometimes bizarre that can drive you bonkers but they keep sling-shooting those lemons at ya really hard and every time one lands in your lap you are left wondering whether to chuck it back or squeeze the citric juices out of it. Either ways you gotta handle it. As I write this my mind is already voyaging back a decade when I was working on a paper on synchronizing chaotic systems such as Rossler attractors using Fuzzy Logic Controllers and I was just so enamored with the AI stack that it did not dawn on me to draw those corollaries with Life. May be it was not needed at that time. 14 years later I see them linearly overlapping well almost.

Synchronizing life's chaos is certainly not easy although its not difficult either. Those logic controllers are always at play to defuzzify the chaos in your life that gets stirred up your way by the masterful fate. Logic controllers in layman terms are brick-mortared with rules, rules and more rules. So when you start as a kid, your slate is clean, there are no rules but as you come through the ranks you are always establishing a rule-base  on which your future dealings with life will be determined - those rules could be a learning curve, a sad experience that has made you stronger, a knowledge driven exercise that is now in your arsenal to bank on. And on top of if you are spiritualist like me who constantly hones on his mental fortitude by virtue of meditation - the effects are unreal. The mind being a great wanderer is now more in control and can be redirected to focus on pressing issues than  loiter aimlessly forever. The toughest thing in this world is not the most complex algorithm to crack, it is to be able to reign in on your mind to focus, reflect and evaluate the problems that stumble out of your life's closet.

When a coder is assigned an application defect to troubleshoot, he attempts to address it in a very impersonal rationalized way, blanking out all assumptions that might deter his chances. Nothing is taken for granted. Similarly that same coder when solving life's problems will approach it no differently - analyze and debug the issue by sifting through the event logs, look for a pattern of events that he may have experienced in the past, isolate the problem and then either provide a temporary hack to stop the bleeding or work on a long term solution. And yet there will be occasions when the defect intentional or not may impact other stakeholders in the ecosystem created around you - could be a tiff with your colleague at work, a quarrel with your wife on not obliging her with a solitaire or a busted day at work. The chaos that emanates from such aberrations in life needs to be handled the way the coder does with a sense of clarity and calmness. If that defect was your own doing, accept it, fix the issue and move on. Don't let your false hubris come in the way of accepting your fault.

When the problems in life are fatalist in nature like a hurricane ravaged home or a severe accident that is life threatening or a health in tatters - akin to those server crashes from hung threads, transaction rollbacks or deadlocks on the database. But unlike the transaction recovery mechanism on servers, life does not offer any such instant recovery solution  while inflicting those wounds. The rehab journey in such situations could be sapping, debilitating and arduously long. The weak would crash into the abyss never to rise again.  The strong desires to rise again some through nerves of steel others through bundles of jubilant energy and yet a few through rigors of spiritual affiliations and faith-driven investments into that superior Unknown.

The intent here was not to bombard you with technical terms but to present an insight in a different perspective through the lenses of a coder and how he interprets, debugs and squeezes those lemons and gulps up his lemonade cocktail  - and I mean literally :-)

A Techie survives - Hard work or Talent

A programmer who has survived a dot-com bust of 2001 and a severe recession that threatened to relapse into the The Great Depression of the 1920s during the past decade will tell you they have done reasonably well. But it was not easy at all - you had to keep pushing yourself to the limits and beyond with tenacity, iron-clad will and sheer hard work to keep pace with your naturally talented colleagues, hiring and spending freeze, mass layoffs and also in general with the technology in a state of constant flux. There were endless days with minimal sleep trying to scrape through those ever-elusive deadlines that even had greater impact on health and social engagements. And then there were days when it was a do or die situation when the client production system would be down impacting their business and all eyes from the CIO to your Direct Report fixated right on you and you under tremendous pressure to deliver.

It is one thing to be solving a complex problem on your own and totally opposite when that complex problem is under the constant hammer of surveillance. The neural synapses in a state of panic go into a huddle mustering all they can to troubleshoot the issue and save your client from losing millions. Barring an odd failure here and there, when you manage to bail them out on numerous occasions, you start to command their respect and become their go to guy. While this comes with the territory and there are so many techies out there who have have gone through the same rigors and probably did better, it surely has been a satisfying experience for me on a personal level. Recently I got an achievement letter for being the most billable consultant in my company last year by a stretch along with a $200 gift certificate. While this may not sound a big deal, these small tokens of appreciation keep you going.

A high-profile entrepreneur Jonathan Gheller (CEO Mixtent) asked me on Storylane - What is my greatest talent? How do you use it? - I would say I am not so sure (may be knack for problem solving) but I do know that I have bundles of sheer perseverance and grit, that never give-up attitude that has bailed me out on countless occasions. And on those occasions when I have sent emails out at 3 or 4 in the morning notifying your VPs and CIOs that you did it and their praising rejoinders on a Job well done - that sense of accomplishment has been unparalleled to date.

Even the most exciting talents in the world are invariably wasted sans hard work.

 

Dilemma of an IT Architect

At a time when my IT career appears to be stuck in the second gear, a few questions have been springing up lately in my mental corridors. The dreaded of them all is – Have I hit the colossal wall of career stagnation? Being an IT architect have I run up the steps of the corporate IT ladder? Do I have to settle for this for the rest of my career lifespan?

In a typical IT hemisphere, graduating to a Solution Architect or an Enterprise Architect comes with some healthy perks and a degree of job satisfaction depending on what kind of work you are involved in. If you are an Architect in Google or Amazon, clearly you have your hands full and you may be working on the next big thing like a Google Glass or bolstering Amazon’s Cloud offering. Technology dances on your fingertips while you conceptualize and model the products. Breaking new ground and constantly moving towards that finish line adds to the daily thrills along with the pure job satisfaction. The innovation quotient keeps you on your toes all the time. However there are times when Solution Architect role in another Fortune 500 company may lack that excitement buzz. While you may be engaged in some cool stuff like modeling and automating a mortgage business process on an IBM middleware, your innovativeness is hampered by the scope of the project and the choice of the enabler. Even a slightly aging technology starts to hamper your own growth as you see your Google peers hurtle by you.

Before I start digressing too much, the point I am trying to put across is when you are already positioned as an Architect, there is hardly any room to move up the ladder, and when you are stuck working on the same platform/technology for couple of years, your skill-sets start to depreciate and eventually become dated. This sense of discomfiture leaves you wondering – Jeez!! What do I need to do to get my career throttle into the third or fourth gear?

Should one move out into a parallel role in an innovation-centric work culture where the best brains huddle up to write the next Dropbox or an Open Table. Or should one fork out into a managerial position by pursuing an MBA. Even if you land a manager position in some company will you keep up with the agile driven projects, tight deadlines and managing the allotted budget. Bottom line you are sort of severed from the technology landscape specially designing and coding apps. Or should one branch out into an entrepreneurial role by engendering a business idea that you have the conviction to launch as your startup knowing fully well, finding that ever-elusive angel investor might feel like climbing the Everest.

Some of the counter-questions boomerang back - Can you handle the rigors of sustaining a startup, work the long hours, be ready to sacrifice your social outings and ride the storm out during the ebbs with your coworkers/co-founders. Or can you pay for your MBA program and land a decent job Will it bring a sense of closure? Will you not miss writing some beautiful code on your favorite IDE.

The answers to these myriad of options and the dilemma surrounding them will eventually come from within knowing fully well who you are and what you are capable of.