I Observe...

Can't really say I have wasted 3 years of my life in the software industry. ...2 employers, 3 offices in 3 cities of 2 metros, 7 bosses, 4 projects, loads of colleagues.... I have observed and learned many things...

1. 86.3% of all the software problems can be solved by restarting the machine.
2. In case the above observation did not help you solve your problem, then nothing will.
3. When your boss asks for a demo, your machine (which has not crashed even once after you joined the organization), crashes all of a sudden.
4. After the crash in the previous observation, you realize to your horrors that all the work you did in the last couple of weeks was not backed up.
5. Once the previous realization is washed away in half a dozen of vodka shots, you suddenly remember that the previous backups were stored in the C:/ drive of the crashed machine, which means you need to start coding from the scratch.
6. The new cute girl who joined the unit will invariably be put in the project, which is seated farthest from your cubicle.
7. When your boss gives a demo to your big boss, he will always click on the single incomplete link (randomly choosing it over the 137 other working links), which you had planned to develop as soon as the demo was over.
8. When one bug is patched, on an average, the patch introduces 2.7 new and unrelated bugs.
9. If instead of patching the buggy code, you put extra efforts in reworking the entire module, then the next change request will be to scrap that module all together.
10. In lines with the previous observation, if you spend your weekend in redesigning and beautifying the user interface of a module, the first mail from your boss on the next Monday will be to move that module to the back end.
11. When the HR manager tries to call your extension to get somebody to mentor the new cute girl, your extension will be perpetually engaged with calls from free credit card agents or pre-paid to post-pad converters.
12. Your development environment will be closed and at least 3 chat windows will be open on your machine when your big boss walks over to your cubicle to appreciate you for something. When you do a frantic ALT-TAB, the browser page, which comes up will be cricinfo.com.
13. In case you manage to close the IM windows and the innumerable unmentionable websites mentioned in the previous observation, your big boss may ask you to open your Mail client to check some details from a mail, which he sent sometime back. Your personal folders ‘Mad Bulls’ or ‘Training Batch Babes’ will be bold with the figure 17 in brackets. After 7 minutes, when he asks you to go back to your mail client, the number will be 93.
14. At the project party, when the only cute girl of the project finally agrees to dance with you, the team lead decides its time for dinner.
15. Your boss calls you on your cell to check if you have completed the work he asked you to do. Even though you are enjoying your coffee at CoffeeDay, you tell him you are doing the final changes and is about to hit F5 for the final build. You hang up, take a final sip and turn to put the coffee cup in the bin and see your boss staring at you from the next table slapping shut his cell.
16. You save all the junk on your desktop. You do the same with the latest report graph image you generated. And you ask your colleague to open it and check the data while you are busy on the phone. The image she clicks opens up showing your friend smooching his GF.
17. Again at the project party, when you manage a hard driven spike in volleyball or a summersault in the swimming pool, the only cute girl of the project, who was around till then, misses that as she is busy on her cell or probably enjoying the beauty of the night sky.
18. If something the client told or wrote can be interpreted in two or more ways, then always, yes every single time, the one you chose turns out to be wrong.
19. If to negate the after effects of the above observation, you choose one initially and change over to the other at the last moment, the result will be the same. You will still have egg on your face.
20. You fight till death, threaten to resign, sacrifice an onsite chance and use all your influence to get into the team with 34 girls and just 2 guys, only to see the team getting dissolved the very next day and the 3 guys (including you) being put in production support (for the next 1 and a half years) of the same project.
21. When you deploy your application on a new machine, first run will always give you an exception screen no matter how much precautious you are.
22. Appraisal process is an annual (or biannual, depending upon the whims and fancies of the HR team of your firm) drama. You are the jester. Salary revision is just a revision or redistribution of your salary and does not necessarily (or practically) mean salary hike.
23. The newly joined cute girl posts a technical query in the discussion forum. You google, call up your friends using your personal cell connection, visit the library, waste half a day and finally find out the answer and post it in the discussion forum. Once you are through with this long process, you notice that some geek had posted the reply in flat 7 minutes after the question and the girl had already put her Thank You mail and her second doubt.
24. Estimation of software projects is highly accurate and précise. The only two fields, which are slightly more accurate than this art form, are astrological predictions and meteorological predictions. Usually a 3-month project, under no circumstances, will be slipped out of schedule by say more than 11 years.
25. And the last one is, we should stop blaming the British for whatever they did to us before 1947. With our software skills (code named as outsourcing), we've looted back a lot more money than they had in 400 years...