Humour

Chest thumping gets IT noticed

T A Balasubramanian wonders if a programmer’s work ever gets noticed.

With his usual mixture of sage advice and loony suggestions, Dr Don Jong continues counselling Bobo Jitter, the perplexed CIO of Bazooka Company. Dubbed the ‘Oddfather’ because of the unusual insights he comes up with, Dr Jong, as we will see, has a gift for decoding technology’s most baffling challenges.

“I wonder if anyone pauses to consider the work that my programmers and I do in the IT department as important, Doc. I sometimes feel like we don’t even exist.”

“And why is that, Bobo?”

“I have been a CIO with Bazooka for a decade. The only time that people seem to notice us in the IT department is when they find something like a routine weekly report missing from their mail. They don’t seem to observe that there is a huge investment in time, energy and creativity that goes into making the software that makes it possible for a simple summary report to be sent to them. And all that strain and intellectual effort we put into the
art of programming is utterly invisible.”

“You could say that art lies in concealing art, eh?”

“I wish it were not so. I would much rather have a lot of recognition given to my teams for the struggle that we software guys put into our work. It’s time the world acknowledged our importance and bowed to our talent. Software rules the world, Doc.”

“I am sure it does, my boy.”

“Not since dinosaurs walked upon the earth has something so dominated life on this planet. It’s everywhere. Software controls our economic transactions and the machinery of production. It supports every imaginable industry, service, and vocation. Software expedites design and delivery, payroll and procurement, travel and trade. Any communication more complex than a birthday greeting relies on software. It can be found in cars, cameras, kitchen appliances, satellites, stock markets, and, of course, computers. Software draws pictures and maps galaxies; it beats chess masters and unravels the mysteries of genes.”

“Yes, of course, Bobo. You have a right to be agitated if nobody notices all these important things.”

“Just think, Doc. Hardly a day goes by that your life is not somehow touched by unseen lines of code. Software is so ubiquitous that I would not be surprised to hear that primitive tribes in Africa have taken to carrying palmtop computers when hunting in the bush.”

“That too, is possible, yes. We live in an age of miracles. Who could have imagined: a slice of silicon no bigger than your finger nail, coated with some chemicals, crammed with invisible etchings you cannot see, that makes great things happen on a little screen. It is the kind of magic that might have got you burned at the stake in the Middle Ages.”

“That’s exactly what I mean, Doc. What we do with software is magic, but nobody seems to notice this. Take movies, for example. You can see the special effects that make Spiderman leap across buildings or the Titanic breaking up, or Neo battling hundreds of cloned villains in The Matrix, but do you stop to think of the work that goes into making all this happen as you munch popcorn?”

“Ah, Bobo, maybe you are too sensitive. People are always busy doing their own thing in life—they are often not too keen on observing and applauding the silent and the significant underlying bricks and pillars that hold up their lives.”

“That’s what bugs me, Doc. It has gone way beyond magic, too. Just look at how much reality can be altered by complex software. Manipulation of images is so sophisticated an art now that some courts will no longer accept photographic evidence—pictures are so easily forged and forgeries are almost impossible to distinguish. With the right software, you can stand next to presidents, or appear to kiss Angelina Jolie.”

“Ah, that is something to imagine, Bobo,” says Dr Jong with a dreamy smile, closing his eyes. “Software has, how do you say, reinvented the possibility that imagination would have stopped short of.”

“Well, to be fair, I do think software has gone too far sometimes. You may never be able to fully trust your eyes and ears again; but, my point is that whether it is altering your present reality or creating a virtual one, software is forever changing your experience of the world.”

“Indeed it is so, my boy. I, for one, am awed by its complexity and by what clever programmers such as you can entrust it to do.”

“Well, Doc, I can swallow my pride and accept that most people will never express shock and awe at what they genuinely should, but my programmers are different—they are young, impulsive and wild. How do I manage their sensitive egos?”

“Well, how are they different?”

“To expand upon your simian lessons, most people seem to think that managing programmers is like living with a band of monkeys. The belief is that they are such an egoistic and rebellious bunch that they resist conventional management control. Only partially true. The great similarity I see between coding specialists and monkeys is that both become attentive when food or drink is offered. A more complete appraisal might be that programmers—at least the ones I manage—are an intelligent and creative group and thus are not resigned to suffer user
indifference in silence. Besides, I see no reason to malign monkeys.”

“I agree, Bobo. Monkeys are very intelligent creatures, you know. Unruly sometimes, but nevertheless, very clever—even if they cannot write Java code. Which is why I use monkey behaviour so extensively when we talk.”

“As I see it, the difficulty in managing programmers lies in the unique compulsions of their vocation. The best of the lot are both linear and tangential thinkers. That is, they are capable of sustained logical reasoning, with occasional bursts of creativity and cleverness. They are both left-brain and right-brain thinkers, logical and intuitive, scientist and artist.”

“Ah, like yang and yin in balance, eh?”

“Exactly. Most managers would agree that overseeing a group of methodical scientists requires a different style than managing a bunch of unruly artists, but what do you do when both aspects are strongly present in the same people? And what if they all want at least some little recognition for their work, if not exactly shock and awe about software itself—from these indifferent, callous users?”

“To answer that, as usual, I have to fall back on my monkeys and the rules of the jungle, Bobo.”

“What is it this time, Doc?”

“Chest thumping. Gorillas, when seeking attention, stand up, bellow loudly and beat their chests with a thunderous sound. As the great boxing sensation, Muhammad Ali, known for his unstoppable verbal punching as much as his flying fists, once observed—humble people don’t get very far.”

“You mean we IT guys should start boasting about how much our software does for these users?”

“Voila! You comprehend. Recognition does not come by burying one’s head in the sand. Be boastful, and like Muhammad Ali, learn to float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee.”