I am from India living in a country where meat is eaten three times a day by almost everyone. Not even fish. Red meat.
I was brought up vegetarian. If fact in many parts of India, vegetarian is still a way of life. I started eating meating when I went to college.
When I first moved here , I actually bought into the whole protein and cavemen thing. Avoided red meat but still ate of a lot of poultry. And it is probably true that you need meat for muscle building. Can be done using vegetarian food but its hard.
However, a few things happened. I got sick. Not any disease really but I started getting severe panic attacks for which I could not get any help from the doctors. I did not want to take hard addictive pills.
This forced my to take a hard look at my lifestyle. I started making changes to find out what works. Cut caffeine. Stopped smoking. Almost stopped drinking. Ate 3 times on time. All this worked but not much.
Finally I decided to stop eating meat. I stopped red meat, poultry, fish, eggs etc.
These are the things I noticed.
1) I stopped getting any cravings for smoke
2) Panic attacks and dizziness gradually stopped. Took some time but it did
3). No chest pain due to gas anymore.
4) I slept better. I mean I had not had deep sleep in a long time before that
5) I felt better generally. Felt happier I guess.
6) I like looking at all the vegetables and fruits. At this point, I don't even go near the meat aisle.
For general day to day stuff we all write, yes I agree. Hate reading emails and articles with a lot of unnecessary jargon.
However, Writing- as in writing fiction,poetry,drama etc is an art. Just like a great painting, it is complex and it gives people an idea of the great mind of the author and what he thought of the book from his perspective.
Imagine war and peace written in spoken language.:(
I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.
For older people, who have experience building stuff,e.g-software developers who have done some development in their life- they are worth their weight in gold. BUT most older people I work or have worked with, they are not all developers. People like sysadmins,IT people, sharepoint admins, automation managers,DBAs,Managers some system architects etc- I have seen some common traits-
1) They have no enthusiasm for work. Work is not even secondary for them. Its the last thing
2) They either think they are doing hard work or act like they work hard. Exaggerate all issues or whatever work they did even if its just an installation
3) No passion for technology
4) Do not want to learn anything new
5) Don't care about above, because its time for their retirement and so they don't care what others think
Given this, if I were building a team, I would lean towards the younger crowd. Unless the older person has experience building stuff.
>I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.
Yes, you are going to get a lot of flak. I'll start. Yes, it's your personal experience. Personal experience is where prejudice usually comes from. If you get beat up by 3 people in green tee shirts, you're going to cross the street to avoid people in green tee shirts. That's the way our brains are wired. It's natural. It's instinct.
It's also natural to pee on the sidewalk when we feel the urge. But we suppress that instinct because society functions better when we do. Similarly, society functions better when we suppress our natural prejudices while interviewing. We use our intellect to remind ourselves that there are people who don't fit the mold of our personal experience, and force ourselves to interview one person the same as anybody else.
And you keep doing it even after interviewing several people who do fit the pattern you've seen previously.
You should get flak for this. If you were building a team, you would be judging a person based on a group they belong to, not the person. You would also be doing something illegal (assuming you are in the US and the person is over 40).
You are right about the salary.
but what is your opinion on job security and employability. the way I see it, in a tech role, as long as your are flexible and open to learning whatever technology is thrown at you, you will always be employable.
But in management,especially in junior management and especially in very large organisation, managers are in most cases dead weight. they don't do much.Don't they feel the insecurity?
Perceiving a manager—no matter how junior—as simply "dead weight" signals a failure in the organization, the individual manager, and/or your own perception. In addition to ensuring accountability, a good manager also helps to shield subordinates from the bureaucracy that is inevitable in large organizations. This work may not always be visible.
But chaos is also inefficient. The best possible management minimizes both the chaos and the bureaucratic inefficiency, to get optimum output from their organization. This does not happen without management - the "natural state" of an organization is not as efficient as the optimal state.
Definitely not as many available jobs. Every company in the Valley seems to be looking for engineers by the truckload, but there are not so many openings for [people|project|product] managers. Apparently, engineers now self-organize and products simply leap from their fingertips onto store shelves.
As for job security, I guess I'll find out eventually. My gut feeling is that in software companies, it's easier to get laid off/fired as a manager, and it's the opposite in companies where software/IT plays a peripheral or supporting role.
If you think you can replace managers with Trello, you clearly have had some very awful bosses in your career.
I don't need anyone to tell me to keep working on my TODO list. On the other hand, someone who grasp the big picture is useful to have around to tell me in what order to tackle the task in the TODO list. Its even better when said someone has the clout to go poke a 3rd party that is blocking me so I can keep working on the TODO list.
But the very best managers I have had are the ones that are willing to bite the bullet and say "No, X cannot go into the TODO list as it is now. Let's work together to define what realistic actionable items need to happen for X to be accomplished and then we can put those in the TODO list."
I would say the type of manager you describe could be more aptly called a leader: visionary (motivating the team behind ideals), willing to do the hardest work (as opposed to handing it down apathetically), respectful (building trust and such) and more.
"Leader" is usually reserved for a different kind of work. A leader determines where the organization should go; a manager ensures that everyone under him is marching in that direction. They require very different skillsets - leading is an outward-facing, synthesizing, strategic role, while managing is an inwards-facing, empathizing, tactical role. To use Ben Horowitz's terminology [1], leaders are Ones and managers are Twos. The CEO's usually the most visible leader in the company, but you'll often find them at lower levels as well, like the tech lead trying out a new experimental Skunkworks project.
Both of them are distinct from "boss" as the grandparent describes it, which is usually what happens when you get a manager who lacks empathy, awareness, and flexibility. Both leader and manager are highly cognitively-complex, pro-active roles that require constant information-gathering. Boss is what happens when you get someone in that position who lacks the confidence or skillset to stay on top of all that information and then reacts through command & control techniques when things go wrong.
"a manager ensures that everyone under him is marching in that direction"
That sounds like a boss to me (and not just because you used an unnecessarily gender-specific word ;). One of the anecdotes in the article is about this person, as a manager, acting as a listening board and ultimately conduit for an engineer when discussing the importance of a specific project at Twitter, and raising questions that came from that engineer that ultimately resulted in the project being cancelled. I think that advocacy role is important management – where the manager advocates both up and down (and ultimately you can't "tell" people what to do, you can only fire them or convince them, so it's "advocacy" both directions).
Difference between a "manager" and "boss" is entirely in how they go about getting everyone on the same page. For any given strategic direction, there are a lot of different ways that could be achieved. A good manager takes in information from all her reports (including their preferences, fears, concerns, and goals) and then figures out a plan that keeps all of them happy while also achieving the strategic goals coming down from above. A bad manager takes the goal as the only input and then outputs commands to achieve it.
Totally agree. A good tech resource is hard to find. The guy who makes you go to a meeting once a week to tell you the floor plan is changing a little? Not so much!
Ah, but the managers are usually the ones that decide who gets fired. If they fire you, you can be back on the job somewhere else in a few weeks. If they fire themselves, what other manager would hire a former manager who even implied that a manager was the least productive employee in the unit? That's crossing the thin green line, man!
Half of a manager's job is justifying the importance of management to the employees, and the other half is justifying their own importance to their superiors.
Let's put it this way. I have never been kept around long enough to see my own manager get fired. And I have been through 3 mergers.
relative to inflation, hasn't increased much.
also, fine if you are single but once you have a family with kids, you feel the pinch even if you are with one of the big ones.
The biggest issue for me is the time. Do politics, become PM and then chill all you want. As a techie, you will not have much time for family.
Also, as a techie you still hit the ceiling very soon.
If you are happy with the job abroad, stay there. Its not as rosy in India as the media somehow shows you.
This I can certainly relate to.
In India wherever you go in the IT industry you are expected to forget about your life,family and just focus on minting money for your employer and for Shitty pay.
I have 10 years experience in the industry and I have worked for bodyshops,niche hip companies and for awesome startup(s). In all of them,shamelessly expecting you to work extra hours, sometime 15+ is a norm. And when it comes to paying you for it, you are handed a nice package of politics and bullshit.
I kind of admire people who somehow manage to use politics or whatever to actually chill and not work at all. At least they are less stressed.
Not good programmers in India. yeah right. Pay them well. care about their life and create a reputation for your company to do that and see how they come to you.
Its not just the employer's fault really. I am now in a different country and nobody expects anyone to work after 6. because nobody will do that. We Indians accept it ourselves. A lot of them actually take pride in having no life and spending all the time in office. I hate them from the bottom of my heart.
I was brought up vegetarian. If fact in many parts of India, vegetarian is still a way of life. I started eating meating when I went to college. When I first moved here , I actually bought into the whole protein and cavemen thing. Avoided red meat but still ate of a lot of poultry. And it is probably true that you need meat for muscle building. Can be done using vegetarian food but its hard.
However, a few things happened. I got sick. Not any disease really but I started getting severe panic attacks for which I could not get any help from the doctors. I did not want to take hard addictive pills.
This forced my to take a hard look at my lifestyle. I started making changes to find out what works. Cut caffeine. Stopped smoking. Almost stopped drinking. Ate 3 times on time. All this worked but not much. Finally I decided to stop eating meat. I stopped red meat, poultry, fish, eggs etc. These are the things I noticed. 1) I stopped getting any cravings for smoke
2) Panic attacks and dizziness gradually stopped. Took some time but it did
3). No chest pain due to gas anymore.
4) I slept better. I mean I had not had deep sleep in a long time before that
5) I felt better generally. Felt happier I guess.
6) I like looking at all the vegetables and fruits. At this point, I don't even go near the meat aisle.