Office
Intel-speak during out-of-office hours
Aug 8th
There is no denying that the corporate work culture has a big impact on our off-office life. For example, if you are a SW development manager by profession, you automatically tend to map many of the things learnt in the office on to normal house activities – ‘Lets put a detailed requirements list for the the new entertainment unit we are going to buy this weekend”, “Hmm…this seems too risky. We need to think of the mitigation plans now before going on with this!”. If your partner is not from IT background, God help you! 
How many times have we checked ourselves after looking at the blank / quizzical stares from others?! It has happened more than once in my case! Today, during lunch time, I decided to watch out for Intel lingo that people use. Kinda funny to notice so many of the corporate terms becoming a part of our day-to-day vocabulary.
Who is the real worker & some personal tales!
May 28th
Its been a while since I posted. What have I been doing? Apart from the occasional tennis sessions in Wii, I am kinda stuck in the work (if you thought it sounded like "stuck in the rut", you have a warped mind! 
). Its already 12 in the night here, me feeling very sleepy. But wanted to finish up this toon below. I guess it is a reflection of my current mind state.
I read Matthew Reilly’s "Seven Ancient Wonders" last weekend. Book is on my favorite topic – Egypt!! Unfortunately this one reads like a kid’s book. The ease with which the main character of the book solves/crosses all those complex pyramidal snares/traps is ridiculous, to say the least. Anyway, I learnt something about the early water traps and Reilly’s description of Hanging gardens of Babylon was highly imaginative; I’d rate this book 2/5 – you can read it probably once, over flight or when waiting for your wife to finish her shopping I have started on his "Ice Station" next, lets see how it reads.
Last weekend, I also spent lots of time watching the entire 16 season of Survivors : Fans vs Favorites. I have never seen Survivors before, though I knew what the concept was. But, at no point of time I expected it to be so well made and so captivating! I thoroughly enjoyed the isolated environment, the idea of tribes/tribal council and the human dynamics that played out for survival. Wow…an amazing reality show. I personally liked Ozzie a lot in the show, very unfortunate Parvati fooled him in to quitting. I cannot wait for the next season to start!!
In the Wii front, today I got my Carnival games collection. My first impression: I don’t like many of the games included, hopefully multi-player will prove otherwise. Enough of my whining now…time for bed!
Mid-life crisis of a software professional
Apr 30th
I just added one more year to my age yesterday. Thanks to my wife, the day was special. But, It is scary actually, thinking about how my graduation 8 years back feels as if it happened only yesterday! Time *is* flying. Looking back, I have had my share of moments – moments I feel proud of, moments I’d cherish & moments I’d rather forget (but can’t!). My professional front has been one hell of a roller coaster ride too. My love for computers is the only thing that has survived these years. Passion for them has gone down drastically, though.
Can I code day and night for 4 days, like how I used to do during college time or even in the first 2 years of my career? A big no.
Can I still read a technical book non-stop from cover to cover? NO!
Do I still have that passion to learn everything? Probably yes. But I don’t care about that anymore.
Other commitments apart, even if I had everything else setup for doing the above things, I’d not, because of the laid-back attitude I picked up over time in this industry. After some years, I guess you become numb and dumb. Numb, because you stop enjoying/appreciating all the beautiful things in the world around you, become too insensitive to non-professional things. Dumb, because the mechanical work style you are forced in to makes your brain cells commit suicide and there is no sure-fire way to bring them back.
To visualize what I am saying, look at the graph below. I plotted my competence/commitment over time (from 2000 to 2008). Click to open the original image in a new window.
Good programmer = Sense of humor + Programming skills
Jul 27th
I was trying to setup a debug machine today. My setup required a specific version of BIOS; I booted in to DOS and tried flashing the new version. The flash went on well and during the verification phase, the tool found couple of invalid regions. It automatically tried erasing/flashing again. I was impressed; “Good. The programmer is smart enough to implement this auto-retry option, else It’d have taken ages to find out this data region corruption”, I thought and was silently thanking that programmer. It was premature, immediately the tool stopped and showed me the following screen.
[Snapshot: Tool output]
[Close up of the message]
The tool very helpfully said “Your platform is dead & have a nice day!”. “Have a nice day”??? Though, now I need to take the flash, go to the lab and program it using a flash programmer, I couldn’t help laughing at this cheeky message!
Conan O’Brien visits Intel head quarters in Santa Clara
May 14th
This is a funny video of Conan O’Brien visiting Intel HQ at Santa Clara. I have never been to SC, but I can relate to what he says very well. In fact, the saying inside Intel is “If you have seen one, you have seen them all!”, this is very true for the buildings Intel builds. In Bangalore, Intel has a building at Outer ring road, which looks more or less similar to the SC building shown in the video, though I’d say not as lifeless and dull! The one at Airport road (where I am currently sitting) is not that bad, actually.
Management Gibberish
Mar 30th
An effective way to stop managers talking!
If you don’t see the image above, click here. Some more of my images are availale here.
My first cartoon – Performance appraisal
Mar 29th
I stumbled upon this interesting site today. It allows you to unleash (?!) your creativity by creating simple drag/drop operations. Above is my first cartoon, which is inspired by the happenings in my company Do let me know what you think!
Performance appraisals – Should they be so complex?
Mar 21st
We went through the performance appraisal phase in my company last quarter. As we had come to expect, it was one of the stressful periods, so much that we literally threw a party when 360degree feedbacks were prepared and sent (ok, am just kidding. But, you get the point!). We call this process FOCAL; when I joined 3 years back, I asked one of the managers why the perfomance appraisal was called FOCAL. My luck, that manager was forced to quit in our last round of “leaning”/”increasing efficiency” process, before he got a chance to reply me
FOCAL is more of a ritual for us; focal FAQs and training mails get sent to everyone by November of every year. The newbies are forced to take an half-a-day instructor-led course. Then one fine day, we start getting lots of requests for feedbacks on our peers and stakeholders, we spend 60-70% on filling up all these. Except a few, I have seen most of my colleagues just copy/pasting the content from one feedback to another person’s feedback. Bad, I know, but if you look from their perspective, who would want to be original in their 24th feedback form? After this the managers come in to the focus, they need to collate all the feedbacks on a person, along with that person’s own (check this out for some good points on writing one’s own strenghts/weaknesses) in to one report.The “ritual book” states that the managers need to present this to other peers, convincing everyone that the person under scrutiny deserves something better or gets screwed. Fair enough, right? Wrong! As far as I’veseen, people tend to take shortcuts everywhere, and as Kelvin claimed “there is always thins thing called POLITICS“. The main problem, at least the employess are stating is that nothing is transparent! Most of the times they don’t understand why they got what they got.
The period after focal report delivery is again a “fun” filled phase. Disgruntled employees leave, promoted / well-compensated ones put in more time/effort, new people are brought in and the cycle starts afresh! Does this process need to be replaced? I don’t think so. Does this need to be made fool proof? Oh yeah! Should intel get away with this complex process for something simple, like Microsoft? May be a good idea!!
I know there are couple of other pages like this and this, but at least I don’t believe things are so bad in India.
