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.

Most of these are not necessarily Intel-specific, but they are heavily used inside Intel. Also, Intel is famous for lots of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms – an acronym for representing acronyms – how about that!!], I have listed only a few of them!

Do share such lingo that you guys use in your companies. Lemme see if I can popularize some of them inside Intel

Word / Expression	Inside Intel meaning	Context I heard this in  off-office talk
POR	Plan of Record. Some feature that is approved and will be in place for the current version / product revision.	“Going to Coorg this weekend was not a POR at all. But, we pulled that in somehow”
ZBB	Zero-based-budgeting. If some feature is ZBBd, it means it wont be implemented or no money/effort will be spent on it. Only POR features / products go ahead.	“I told her to ZBB the Coorg trip. It is too hard to accommodate at this late an hour”
Ping	Contacting someone via IM / Phone or Email.	“Ok, I am leaving now…ping me tomorrow. We will plan for the movie”
iMBO	Intel Management By Objective. Set of agreed upon goals / results, usually tracked on a quarterly basis.	“One of the IMBOs for my carpenter is to re-do the hall stuff”. [He used it in a light sense, but it was clear he couldn't think of any other proper way of explaining it. ]
AR	Action Required. A small task that has to be done, usually in a week or so. You get these in meetings a lot	“Don’t worry…I will take an AR to arrange for the movie tickets tomorrow”
Take this offline	Discuss / Pursue something later, probably because it is of lesser importance or not aligning with the agenda. Normally used in meetings, when trivial things come up.	On phone, to someone: “Hmm…I don’t think we need to find a closure for this now. Lets take this offline”
Rat hole	Discussing / Debating a topic too much, than normally needed, with out any solid conclusion in sight.	“Let’s decide on the movie tomorrow evening, based on the availability. Else, we will be unnecessarily rat holing now.”
Hard stop	Stop immediately. Cannot be delayed beyond some time. Normally used to convey the importance of the next event. Used like “Guys, I have a hard stop at 0400pm. I have another meeting that I need to prepare.”	On phone, to some college friend: “6′o clock? Oh no….I have a hard stop at 0630. How about meeting after 0900 today?”
Raise the bar	Increase the expectation. Normally, the bar gets raised every time you meet the current expectations set by your superior.	On phone, talking about a carpenter: “We need to raise the bar for him, else he won’t even do what he did last time around”
EOD	End of Day.	“Ping me by EOD tomorrow. Ok?”
Keep me in synch / keep me in loop	Providing updates regularly on each step.	“Ok, let’s meet tomorrow evening. Keep me in loop on any last min changes”
Bandwidth	Difficult to explain. Think of it this way – if you have more bandwidth, you can do more work / something else	On phone, to his house association president: “I understand your point, but you need to understand that I don’t have the bandwidth now to go talk to the builder. I am stuck in some official work.” [it's a different story that he was sitting with me in the cafetaria for more than 2 hrs with out doing anything ]
Setup the Agenda	List of points to discuss / close on. Typically you setup an agenda for the meeting you setup.	“His agenda was not clear at all…I couldn’t understand it till the end” [Used loosely as a substitute for "hidden motive"]
Workweek / Quarter	In the corporate world, your year is split in to 52 workweeks or 4 quarters. After sometime, you forget that there is something called “months”.	On phone, to an ICICI person: “Could you send me this month’s statement by next week? It should be….hmmmm [ a small pause when he checks his calender that is attached to the tag]….WW33″

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!

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.

For anyone who has been in this industry, the graph should not come as a surprise. Like all the college grads, I was brimming with enthusiasm and positive energy (I’d even call it “too much optimism”!) when I came in to this industry back in 2000. Soon, I realized things didn’t work the way you thought they would, or the way they were projected to work. My motivation took a big hit. It went up again when I switched companies around Q2 2003 and Q1 2004. Do you see that dip in commitment/competency around the period Q4 2005 – Q3 2006?? I got married then I’d rate both my commitment and competence are at a record low now.

Trend line shows that over these 8 years my competency had stayed more or less equal, while my motivation/commitment quotient has decreased steadily! This is scary, because I don’t know whether I am doing the right things now to keep my motivation at the same level at least, if not make it go up. If you ask me, I guess retiring from computer industry when I am 35 or 40 yrs old is the most interesting option I have. I doubt its feasibility though

Have you faced such a “mid-life”(?!) crisis in your professional life? How did you cope up with it?

[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!

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.

If you don’t see the image above, click here. Some more of my images are availale here.

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!

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.