Life keeps on teaching us, warning us, protecting us via experiences, insights, intuitions etc. from time to time. Sometimes we know about ourselves via others by experiencing what we like/dislike in us. Sometimes we meet people who give us some insight into higher forces via their experiences and help us understand our own experiences, observations that at times seem inexplicable.

I am sharing some of my observations and experiences as student, as teacher, as s/w professional, as person and so on, on this page in the hope that it may bring me in touch with people who know about life and why it is so.

Academic experiences

Student life provides some of the best periods of life and learnings. Teaching gives you the view from the other side and enriches your experiences further. I have been lucky enough to make certain observations from both the sides and experience the lacunae and meaninglessness in education system.

1. What is evaluated? : What is it that the various evaluation methodologies test for? Is it learning, or is it knowing, or is it mugging? A student not being able to crack an exam or not get good overall marks in the subject, does not mean that he has not gained sufficient insight into the subject. Moreover exam performance also depends on the temporal state of health, mind, personal life issues etc..
2. Relative grading : An evaluation system, where your classmates are equally, at times more, responsible for your good looking performance on the paper. Wrong perception of the system by majority of the students, often results in majority bothered about the average performance of the class and aiming and being around that. A lot of talented students also suffer, once they fall prey to getting good looking paper performance under this system.

Experiencing IT industry

Lot of following observations and experiences might hold for other industries as well, though the degree might differ, as all organisations involve human interactions in one or other form. But comparing various places where I have interacted with masses in work place so far, software industry has shown the state of human sleep far more easily and helped learn many things about the life. Whether I experienced things directly or indirectly via friends, it has always puzzled me, disturbed me and motivated me to work towards awakening.

1. Meetings : Activities that are often energy draining and time wasting. Things that can otherwise be completed in couple of hours or at times even less than an hour, often end up consuming far more time and resources whether meetings are face to face or electronic exchanges, partly because there are no listeners - listening is much more than just sitting there wide awake looking attentive, neither interrupting nor speaking, and partly because almost everyone out there wants to prove his/her point. At times it looks quite amazing when different people keep saying the same thing in different decorations over and over again and yet they don't reach any conclusions.
2. Apprehensions : Apprehensions cause people to make big deal of things at times so trivial that once you start with them, it does't take more than 2-3 days to finish it. If you are confident about what you know about work in question and do some research and analysis related to problem before jumping to conclusions, you can save yourself from falling prey to other organisation milking you financially in big ways. As people decorate the higher positions in the organisation, often their apprehensions also grow. Apprehensions often make people act in quite weird and illogical ways and result in not only losing on project completion and financial aspects but also qualified and useful people.
3. Plagiarism : If you give some idea or explain something to a person, case often with person holding higher rank in the organisation, it is often worthless or doesn't make sense till same thing is mentioned by someone who is further senior, or holds similar ranks, or by himself in future - in which case one can get to hear amazing justifications as well.
4. Buggy situations : A buggy situation mentioned by you does not carry any meaning, till reported-to parties themselves find it before or they get hurt by it. Wrong comparisons are one of the big reasons for it. For ex. you have been working on a code that caters to hardware interrupts and is thus affected by certain buggy situations in hardware. Does it make any sense to compare it's behaviour with another code that is not using these hardware features, and conclude that bug does not exist? Another category of barriers in acceptance of new bugs exists in the form of - "I have been working on this for such and such number of years, even before you knew about it".
5. Debugging : Quite often people fall prey to debugging and patching the manifestations of the problem rather than the actual problem, this often results in far more time spent in more patching and even fixing the problems caused by the earlier patches. What I found surprising is that all this happens in the name of saving time. People don't mind spending many man-months later but are allergic to spending some time in thoughtful examination, understanding and analysis of the problem and possible solutions in the initial stage. These debugging habits combined with delaying formalities called processes, quite often derail the schedule and one misses the optimial window of opportunity and market.
   
   My personal experiences have been that debugging is not a big problem if you are open, attentive, can visualise the local/global aspects of issues at hand and most importantly - connected with your work. A rightful combination of knowledge, intuition/hunches, logic and bit of luck does the job.
6. Hours at workplace : I often found it quite puzzling when people wanted office premises open 24 hours as they were not finding day hours sufficient to work. In most cases 7-8 hours of organised and thoughtful work daily is good enough to keep the things going at steady pace. If you just prioritise things in your schedule, cut down on time that you otherwise spend in non-work related chatting, mailing, meetings and net surfing, gossiping, playing games etc., you gain sufficient time during regular work hours. Which is better, effectively accomplishing worth couple of hours in 13-16 hours/day or worth 7-8 hours in regular work hours and getting sufficient time to take care of other chores in life and relax so that you are fresh and energetic next morning? There could be times when you might not be in good health or some other problem when your efficieny goes down, but having couple of 10+ hours workdays/week regularly reduces your effective productivity quite significantly.
   
   Flexible work hours is a good option, if exercised judicially and when needed. Often it spoils the habits of youngsters and they end up not realising how the prime time of their life slowly runs out not utilised for their development. Companies don't mind it because more often than not people work much more under the label of flexible hours than they would have in disciplined working, but it often spoils the company's standards to the extent that their focus changes from quality to quantity of time.
7. Contradictory standards : On one hand, many companies have anti-solicitation clauses in their agreements, and on the other they ask their employees to suggest their friends etc. from their previous organisations, telling them that the contacted person won't know about their involvement in this contact process.
   
   When you are working for some other organisation, they would contact you every now and then, and would want and at times even suggest you to ditch it and join them. However when you properly windup with previous organisation and then contact them, they don't even respond to your communication.
8. Older academic performances : There are many organisations still that lose out on many good persons because of their assumptions that if a person hasn't been getting first class marks since class 10th or 12th, he won't be good. What sense does it make to give such a crucial weightage to the aggregate performance of a person at those earlier levels, that is contributed to by subjects that are not pertaining to company's work requirements and poor performance in these could be responsible for below first-class performance of the person. Moreover a person could have struggled since then and improved a lot, and might have made up for things he didn't know well then. Isn't it something worth considering and giving chance to the person to appear for various written tests and interviews and demonstrate his capabilities? Don't these companies trust their own written tests and interviewers?
9. Ethics : Except for some handful companies, most don't care to inform you if for some reasons their answer is not affirmative. They don't even respond to your communication asking for status clarification. It has become the defacto notion that if a company stops responding to/contacting you, it means that they are not interested in your services. Even if person appears for an interview or written test at the organisation, forget the case of two-three months interactions and deal being 99% through, it doesn't take much on the part of organisation to drop an email clearing the status but it helps the person to schedule his other commitments and activities, apart from him respecting the organisation for it.
   
   Many companies also observe cheap tactics to reduce the candidates for second and third rounds of testing and interviews, where they invite and let everyone appear for the written test(s) and later tell the not-eligible people in the filtered lot that can't be considered for further rounds because they don't meet the eligibility criteria.