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What does a boom in an industry bring in? It brings in a shortage of talent.

What does shortage of talent bring in? It brings in a great demand for the talent.

What does great demand mean in a shortage of talent? It increases the supply in an inorganic manner and inverse vandalism occurs.

In a country called Noviland, carpentry was an expensive business dictated by undersupply of wood as the wood cutters only had access to axes. This kept carpentry and arts related to wood accessible only to the elite and the academics who studied carpentry. This brought in many skilled and intelligent people to the field who were well respected and well paid, people were committed to workmanship. Even though the forest cover was huge in Noviland, technology of axes led to a limited supply.

A wood cutter’s daughter invents a circular saw that can be driven through the bicycle gears which helps to cut trees at 10 times the pace they were used to. Suddenly the supply of wood increased ten fold and there were not enough carpenters. The demand for carpenters grew way too much that it drove their paychecks very high, prompting people to switch careers. Those who learnt other trades, tools and works now did a simple study of hammer, nails & saw and jumped into the profession.

Maintaining old work was easy as everything was in place and simple maintenance tasks were all required to keep up. New work is were all the hell broke loose. People were now getting furniture that does not last long, wooden bridges collapsed on a few days of exposure to heat and rain. People who wanted to replace their furniture dreaded at the cost of replacement and replacement failures. There were way too many carpenters and finding passionate people was next to impossible. Carpentry became a high paying job where no passion or study was required, all it matters was to know about hammer, nails and saw. Some of them who did exceptionally well were immediately made a manager and given interns to manage thereby killing passionate carpenters in the interest of scale.

Software engineering in a few countries is at this state, merely having a crash course in Java and understanding of few libraries are enough to be called as a programmer. Programming is not just writing code, it is solving a communication problem which involves many aspects. Lots of productivity is lost because of the failure to understand and implement good engineering practices. Some people pick agile as a tool to enhance productivity but do nothing to improve the capability of the developers. There are so many practices which can help us develop and release software in days & weeks but many of us are still stuck at the timescale of months & years because of the ignorance of practices as well as reduced progression on the skill level.

Below is a table which helps us to find where we stand in terms of skills, I can say with confidence that even with 10 years of experience many of us will not rate ourselves proficient. We should let skill and passion dominate engineering fields.

 Table source: http://science.raphael.poss.name/programming-levels.html

 

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The first time I created an email account, I subscribed for newsletters, turned notifications on all the accounts I created in the net and was happy to spend time reading the emails I received, still the number of emails were manageable. Fast forward to now, emails have grown to be a necessary evil. Lots of people whom I meet are finding it difficult to handle the volume of emails they receive. Since it is easy to create digital copies and apparently costs nothing to include another person in the email for Just FYI, people are given an information overload through emails. It is not uncommon to hear people saying they have 10,ooo+ unread emails in their mailbox.

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Here are some simple rules I created so that my Inbox shows ‘Inbox (0)’ at regular intervals. It also helps me to quickly act on only the important emails when I check through my phone.

Newsletter subscriptions – Most of the sites where we use our email id, will by default have the newsletter option checked, we should make sure to uncheck it before creating new accounts. In case we accidentally subscribe to one it will still carry an unsubscribe link. Some email systems do not unsubscribe well, ruthlessly mark them as spam. It is our inbox and we have every right to deny entry to it.

Forums – These have to be filtered into a bulk folder like ‘forum/abc’, ‘forum/xyz’ depending on the no of forums and frequently read ones.

Notifications – Twitter, facebook, linkedin and many other accounts have email notifications, if we have the habit of using those accounts directly and frequently then we do not need the email notifications to be turned on.

Projects and distribution list – We will be part of the distribution lists of projects and business units, filter those into appropriate ones like the ones created for forums.

Finance – Create a filter for all financial transactions like payslips, transaction advices, statements. It should be a one stop folder to view the mails for all the transactions.

CC – The mails which we are CCed are an FYI which do not need any action, people also have a tendency to just add another person to CC; which we can read the subject line later and choose to read or drop.

Bookmarking – Time to time we get interesting links and forwards, instead of leaving them in the inbox to read later use a site that is helpful for bookmarking so that you can read them later.

With the above filter we can drastically reduce the number of emails that arrive at the inbox and we will be able to manage the lesser number of emails. The filters should be such that only the mails which are addressed to us in the ‘To’ field should be delivered in the inbox. Spend time at a manageable frequency to glance through the filters to triage them. Maintenance of the inbox is not an one time act, it is an ongoing activity

“Image courtesy of Patchareeya99 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net”.

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I have always shunned the idea of hiring people only from the top institutions at my workplace. The reason for that was my observation; that there were people from many relatively not so top institutions ending up top performers at the organization compared to their peers from top ones. This was not an one off observation, I had been observing this year on year that recruits from top institutions and not so top institutions were many at times on par with each other and there were few exceptions on either sides.

My school was a very competitive place to study, scoring in the 90s out 100 just meant that you are in the 50th percentile. It was getting increasingly tough as grades went higher and people were merely looking to outscore each other without gaining deep understanding of the subjects studied. Parent’s pressure on the ranking meant students had no choice but to play in the rat race getting stressed out and not learning much except scoring marks. There was a shuffle of groups happened after grade 8 and that was a breather in my school life, the competition eased out and it was so easy to be at the 75th percentile. This sudden ease of pressure made me learn subjects like science and maths with greater depth in understanding without worrying about optimizing learning only from the exam point of view. I could see that depth of understanding eventually helping me at my college and work place and I feel the positive effects of that even now. Had I been in the ultra competitive environment, I would have given up on learning.

I stumbled on the talk by Malcolm Gladwell which had rekindled my memories while I kept nodding at many his points in the talk.

Top institutions always gets the brightest of the minds, there is no doubt in that. But increasingly these institutions are getting competitive that people in the lower percentile in these places may face too daunting a task to accomplish something even though they were the best among their their peers in the country. It will favour the ‘smart gets more smarter’ culture. So as mentioned in the talk it will be better if we recruit the toppers from multiple other institutions rather than focussing on getting talent from top institutions. This may apply to organizations which forms A-teams as well.