As i see IT - 1

Few years back, I had pondered in a post, on how my batch had never seen anyone retiring from IT and would probably be the first to witness it. The reason being, even a decade back, there was so much of chopping and churning happening, with companies big time into consolidation mode and new software were blooming in every single day. To put it in context, the software that was hot cake in the market, which was the product of my very first project, became obsolete within an year, to such an extent that, those developers almost became redundant, with their skillset amounting to nothing. Technically, It didn’t entirely go waste as the coding skills got remapped to another product but they did have to put in effort to learn the semantics and syntax. Those who were senior managers at that time, had worked on Pascal and Cobol and punch card related systems that were long obsolete. I often used to wonder, would the managers be continuously learning new products, for a) their skill set were long redundant and b) how can they manage someone when they have no clue as to what the resource was doing?

To (mis)quote Gandhi, my life is my answer to my own queries raised above. I saw my COE head retire and as I moved onto a different role to what I was doing before and encountered the very same situation described above. Now that I can visualize in person, on how these situations are handled, unless there is a better way that I am not aware of, I am not too thrilled on neither the process nor the result. All throughout my career I had always gone after those products, that were niche yet more aligned to business. In short, it would be a rare skill set (and would be rarely needed as well !!) but would be closely aligned with business needs. Every 30 months I was switching between tech, by choice and by design. Each time, I could actually see how my work was helping the business. I am a big time fan of support projects, for they are the very foundation of service industry. When you  solve a ticket and receive a thank you  note, it gives a sense of immense satisfaction that you have actually helped someone.

My “developer” friends used to contradict by asking, how many lines of codes that I developed for that day. For them, developing something from the scratch, based on a few lines of requirement, gave them their thrills. Production support was looked down upon as a menial activity, which ate up your personal space and time over weekends. Batch job monitoring was seen more as a punishment. Despite all this, there was a sense of wonderment and fulfillment at the end of the day, when you receive a thank you note and that of bewilderment and anger if there were any escalation mails, questioning our commitment. Mental stress, was a word that got included in everyone’s vocabulary and “workaholic” was a tag that was worn around with pride.

Why is that sense of belonging to the industry suddenly missing? What are the reasons for the disillusionment? Is it all imaginary or real and how much is ageing related to these thought processes? It is going to be a real long thread of posts!!!