Choose Strong
For Tim.
The company, maybe not alone, feels like a sales-driven firm.
Engineers make the products but they are mostly invisible. At
least they do not announce wins in email broadcasts. This way
of thinking is not limited to the sales department, however. My
manager, Sandeep, tells me with utmost sincerity that there are
non-engineering solutions to a technical problem. He might be
right but it would feel disturbing if engineers start to think that way.
Recently, another manager sent out an email: "Variable names
longer than 16 characters don't look professional and the
code won't pass my review." The guy had been obsessed with
this point for a while as I saw his similar comments on
previous internal documents.
The bigger problem, of course, was the lack of style
consistency in the collective coding practice. Some
programmers seemed to be aware of it and shared their
experiences but no other manangers chimed in in the email
discussion. This smelled trouble and if technical leaders
did not care about programming styles, they were not
qualified.
Computer program code is like articles and books. Writing
code is easier than making it understood by others. The
number one benefit of a consistent coding style is that it
makes the lives of the readers (fellow programmers) and thus
software maintenance easier, which translates to not just
profits but the very survival of the company.
Earlier this year and in front of the CEO, with his black
and white eyeballs lurking behind gold-framed glasses and in
a desperate voice, the CTO urged: "put your heart and
soul in the game!" At that time, I even pitied the guy: who
was he fooling? How many hearts and souls would he win
over for the company through his little speech? Did he know this and was only acting?
In the light of the above email thread, I could see the guy
was also technically incompetent for his lack of response.
His redeeming merit was his ability to make sales pitches,
not to the engineers but to his boss.
> With Indians dominating ...
You want to know what it looks like when the Chinese dominating?
OK. I'll tell a story about my being fired by a Chinese boss ;-)
There are fewer good managers than bad ones. With Indians dominating the management positions in IT, many problems persist not to be solved but escalated instead. Btw, I am not biased against Indians:)