Confessions of a "Coder's" Mind !

Perhaps we all want to be discovered, Gunish, rather like the folks we see paraded on these incessant reality shows. In my small pond, the number of years worked has little to do with promotion. In fact, since I have been here it has been quite difficult for some to take being "passed over" for a promotion by someone fairly recently hired. So, age wasn't the factor. The decision had more to do with the "complete package". A programmer is expected to program, but a systems analyst (here, anyway) has to manage projects, anticipate and circumvent problems, interact with people, etc.

At the same time, in my career I've seen situations in which a very good person (talented, etc.) was passed over and I felt in my heart that it had more to do with the lack of alignment between that person and the one in charge...perhaps out of no fault of the individual. Sometimes, I believe the reality is that judgements are made about people (the halo/horns effect) and the person is better off to find another pond where they are appreciated.

Having said that, I can imagine that most of us who have a number of years invested in the field will tell you that they "did their time" and went through periods where they were underappreciated and underpaid before their careers took an upswing. Unfortunately when you are young you suffer from feeling that you're not respected or taken seriously, and when you're older, you worry about age discrimination and suffer from feeling like you're not respected or taken seriously. Ah! Those golden, short, middle years! I guess I'm in them now, but worry about the ones to come.

hey bro, welcome back, i was hoping that u write soon enough before i start poking you in the eye. Nicely writen... shows how frustrated a coder can get with life and what he ultimately needs. I somehow felt that i was a part of it. I Beleive that its a generic case, every coder feels this way!
kewl bro,
anyways who was that girl anyways .... i never got to know of your love interests.
about Geeks....

I am a PROUD GEEK!
:-)

Hey Dude,
You seem more frustated than being contended. You belong to the type who are not satisfied for what they are but what they cannot become. Its seems you achieved what others could not of your age but..... this long but is always a pain in your butt as long as you do not have magnanimity thoughts. All I can say is feel good for what you are..

Best Wishes

okay so u are not content.
what makes you content gunish, u are really one of a breed who have the gift of creation. i have seen your work, i know that its in you... and beleive me of all the people like me in the world who have seen your work, we have been inspired by it.
We have atleast i have never seen a person capable of doing what you do. is this not enough, is that feeling of inspiring people not enough to make you content!
i dont know about anybody else but if i were in your place, i would have been the most content person on this planet!
- Have a nice one!
Ragini

hey baby, i read your writings for the first time ... preety intense stuff eh..
i gotta admin ... i took the right man for me!

Love ya,
POOJA!

...when she lost interest, after discovering your age.

I call this phenomenon, "normalization", and while it may not happen at leading and cutting edge firms in boom times, it happens all the time the further you get from metropolitan firms at the cutting edge, whether the "metropolis" is what it used to be (Santa Clara and Mountain View) or today, Bangalore.

"Normalization" is based on the theory that one, as an MIS manager or head hunter, is located near the center of a bell curve of probability and as such is unlikely to encounter true superstars, whether "the next Bill Gates" or "the next Ramanujan".

The tricky thing, of course, is that Ramanujan, had he sent his results to a mathematician who normalized, unlike G. H. Hardy (who did not think himself as normal) then Ramanujan would have been cruelly dismissed as just another colonial Indian babu with "delusions of grandeur".

In the USA and in England, teachers often "normalize" their students. For example, if a student hands in a lengthy essay with big words that are unfamiliar to the teacher (where in the USA teachers can be surprisingly aliterate) the teacher will often "save time" and maintain all-important "classroom control" by belittling the student, saying, often, "you're not Shakespeare".

There's a deep link between normalization and colonialism. Clive Ponting, a British author, describes how India and China, which were the workshops of the world in the early 18th century (producing much finer textiles than British homespun, finely graded teas, and pottery of museum quality), were effectively deindustrialized by a different Lord Clive and Lord Elgin, in India's case in the late 18th century and in China's, the 1840s.

A short generation later, students in India and in China who wanted to get ahead socially were required to learn English, in prestige "British" style academies, but in these it was made clear to the students that their cultural or technological production would be, at best, a sort of second-hand knock-off of the production of London and the industrialized north of England.

No Great Power really wants "globalization". Spain, France, England and the USA instead wanted and want to enjoy spheres of influence of various sizes where the metropolitan power can produce inferior merchandise and get people to buy it.

This dream is "mercantilism" where the Great Power enjoys economic hegemony and no worries about competition. The problem for a Great Power like the USA, with its laissez-faire, is that its merchants, looking out for themselves, will cut their own deals with people in other lands for cheap labor, whereas Britain, with a less developed capitalist economy, could trust its factory owners and merchants to assume, for several decades, that their workmen in Manchester could make better products.

Now, I concern myself with these issues as an American because my experience is that the fundamental injustice doesn't have a gross structure, affecting only people in lands distant from the colonial metropolis (whether London or New York).

Instead, the colonialism has what I think of as a "fractal" structure and as such is used as a mechanism of control in the interstices of the colonial metropolis itself.

For example: in a Roman Catholic high school in the American midwest, I learned from a French order of priests akin to the Jesuits that "good" writing was as complex as it needs to be, and that the "good" writer is unafraid to use compound sentence structure if that is what it takes to convey an accurate meaning. I thought to transfer this lesson to data processing documentation based on the experience of my first job, which was rescuing my university from the consequences of undocumented data systems.

But then I worked at a firm staffed by University of Chicago types heavily invested in an American-academic paradigm, popular then and now at the University of Chicago, which REJECTED "fancy" speech and urged "simplicity"and "Anglo-Saxon" speech as praised by Strunk and White's overrated The Elements of Style.

Later, I found something of the same spirit at Princeton University, where policing of "over-elaborate" speech seemed to me to be part of a caste system in which graduate students and employees were a critical part of Princeton's cultural production, but kept in the shadows.

Gayatri Spivak, an Indian critic (who translated Derrida into English) opened my eyes to a rereading of colonialism, because, as she said in a talk at Princeton, she was well aware of the complexity of her position, its fractal, almost self-repeating quality.

She realized, contrary to oversimplified journalistic accounts of "political correctness" that her India background as "a middle-class polytheist" had given her leverage which was taken away, to some degree, by her position as a Hindu woman, both from her standing in the American academy and even among more conservative Hindu males, who might be uncomfortable (perhaps, less so than conservative Moslem guys) with the idea of a smart woman...just as we Americans are, at times, nervous about Hilary Clinton.

I conclude that you overachieved like my son overdid it when he, without doing any preparation, got the grade of 1560/1600 on his combined SATs, after disrespecting the educational establishment at his school...after failing to kiss a lot of ass.

I would get the SAME putdowns when I was in my twenties. I wasn't "supposed" to understand compilers, for example. Now, at the other end of my career, perhaps the putdowns will resurface, this time as age discrimination.

However, I'm forestalling this by seeking work as a teacher in addition to development work in Asia, where teachers get a lot of respect. I am awaiting visa approval in Hong Kong, and in another example of the "fractal" nature of post-modern experience, I am no longer a rich expatriate.

Instead, I am living from paycheck to paycheck and eating in the local styles to save money. I've lost my American spare tire (the rim of some fat around the midriff) because, in part, you can't buy Great Big Bags of M and Ms in Hong Kong, I don't have the money, and they aren't good for you.

In the USA, I would sometimes "deal" with stress by munching out, and except for slight love handles, my exercise prevented me from looking the fat American. Here, I am slowly acquiring the skinny Asian bod which is all good.

Fractal colonialism is any refusal to take the person as he or she actually is, and we all practice it from time to time. It's easier, for example, for me to treat Indian fellows "normally" and on their merits owing to their mastery of English...and, to the fact that I knew so many in Chicago.

[When last in Chicago, I showed my Dad pictures of Nathan Road in Hong Kong, where many Indians live, and where there is a great Mosque. He said, looks like Devon Avenue.]

We never get in life what we want and we get what was never expected. I choose to work agressively than looking out for rewards. Life has lot of crazy $hit to throw a us but I guess such things known as "Moment of Truth" only make us work more and draw us closer to our destiny. People dont see or dont care to worry about what you have been but all they expect is good work. Big shot companies like Satyam ect whatever you have mentioned only give a platform to work but that doesnt mean you put raise you ego but give a damn about how people treat you. Its just a platform everyone gets in life to prove yourself and your work and be it anything
"Never give up". People are right in their own thoughts when it comes to a point that someone ask you what did you do for 13 years? Its true because all the while they havent seen you go through things and your agressive nature to learn. Ultimately, learn to have "Patience" and "Have Faith"..

Angel