The Commitment

An electronics graduate by chance and a technical manager also by chance (a true Piscean to the core, all that I would love to do dream, drive and drink (oops I am teetotaler!!!) and get paid, if possible ;) for all this), I end up explaining concepts to my juniors who for all their experience, tend to get hazy in remembering fundamental concepts in electronics/embedded systems. The juniors whom I interact with, are not mint quality developers fresh from college, but are moderately experienced men with traces of white hair around the side of their head or with a crescent moon hairline on either side of their head, making the corner sites shine more in broad daylight or with men who reveal an ever increasing full moon when they bend their head! Heck, I am talking about married men, those who are in the initial phases of their wedded bliss! Now, this breed of people is often caught in the perfectly imbalanced position of having to balance romance, life and work in that order!  Often caught up in catch 22 situations wherein they may have to leave early from office to keep their dinner date promise with their loving wives, or work late so that their weekend is not eaten up by the stupid working-now-not-working-later code! To add to the existing misery, they have to handle that over enthusiastic fresher nerd who for all his bookish intelligence, cannot rake up the ideal piece of code, that “just gets the job done for now” or that beautiful damsel who for all her googling skills cannot come up with the appropriate keyword to look up for that piece of code on Google amidst all the tabs amongst Facebook, Twitter, Gmail etc.., or that ever whining software developer who raises the white flag at the drop of a hat waiting for the senior developer to come to his rescue, sitting in front of the monitor with the look on his face saying “You say, I type!!” 

I feel sorry for this phase of life of these individuals, who are neither here nor there in the hierarchy of authority; small enough to be bullied by manager and not big enough to bully fresh mint developers! Not that these guys are not smart but their perfectly pruned brains gather dust and some fundamental concepts start appearing hazy, and just when they appear to lose ground either in front of their bosses or in front of their junior, the carpet is swept right off their feet, making their life miserable. Not having time to brush up with the books, feeling squeamish to ask the junior, and not dare to ask the seniors they whine and worry in that whirlpool of constant confusion! Being a manager it is my first and foremost duty to weed out the cobwebs and provide clarity to my immediate juniors. Once this clarity is obtained, it proliferates down the hierarchy and we would be speaking of win- win situations all round, and yes, a perfectly balanced work-life (whatever it means to whomsoever it is concerned)

A page long prelude and I am still miles away from the actual topic of this post! A typical managerial attribute that I have picked up over the years :D. Anyway each one has a style of explaining concepts to people, and my way would be to give an example that would hit that sweet spot in the cerebellum and get what I am trying to explain in a jiffy! And it so happened that my immediate junior could not get the concept behind the contents from a datasheet of a micro controller and hence had trouble in getting that piece of code implemented from his juniors. Fearing that he would lose guard in front of his juniors he kept delaying the implementation until it started showing the red flag in the schedule. (All managers are familiar with that tiny red flag in that Microsoft project planner!!) So understanding his predicament I started the example.

Mr.Potato, I know you are married and hence will give you real life example that will instill this concept so firmly in your mind, that even after your death you can explain this concept to Lord Yama to get it implemented in his embedded system products, if he uses any! 

The day after your wedding, when you are soaked in the beautiful smile of your wife, in the over enthusiasm to start a conversation, assume that you make an inadvertent promise that you would take her to out for lunch and a movie the weekend you come back from your honeymoon. That happy endearing smile on your wife’s face would ensure that nothing would be able to stop you from keeping that commitment! When you actually go to a movie and treat her to the grandest lunch you can ever afford, she is all smiles and expectantly looks at you in your eyes! You don’t have a choice but to commit to the next movie and a lunch in a weeks’ time! So every time you go out to a movie the next weekend you must and should commit for the next weeks agenda! Whatever the agenda it may be, but commit you must! Be it a movie or a lunch, or that vacation you promised once every 3 months, you would not dare to skip the committed date, would you??  

Slowly I continued, now assume that due to office pressure, bowel pressure (remember, you ate like a pig during the team dinner on Friday evening) or some other pressure you miss that committed date and time, what would happen? She would be unhappy is all that he said, not revealing the repercussions what that missed commitment would have! Bigger the commitment bigger the repercussions! Mr Potato’s eye brows started to relax and the gleam in his eyes started giving me the confidence that he was getting the concept! His gleam had given way to a big smile revealing all his teeth, an indication that now he had got the entire concept; but not the one to accept that the example was in perfect correlation with concept, he retorted with a question! Why to commit when there are chances of failure? Better not commit at all, he tried to walk away with the verdict! To hell with the example I thought to myself, the concept was for a fail-safe feature to be implemented in the product, and this was only an example to use it. Fear of failure should not keep you away from commitments, I said! I have another example for that, but that would not suit this concept! Have you got the concept now? Yes yes, nodded Mr Potato! Please get this implemented before you forget about the concept and start thinking about the commitment! Sure sir! 

Next day, the WATCH DOG TIMER feature was successfully implemented in our product!!!

NERD INFO (Not so nerdy if you are into electronics/embedded systems): The WATCH DOG TIMER is a fail-safe mechanism used in embedded systems, which prevent the system from total lock up. They need to be fed with a value constantly at defined time intervals, failing which they reset the system :).  

A[V]I