I started reading “The Dilbert Principle”. The first essay proposes the obvious fact: “People are idiots. Life is just too complicated to be smart at all times”. Everyone in this world learns lessons, at the expense of his or other’s experiences. But the most important thing is being “learned” all the time. As Scott says: “Idiocy is a condition we slip into many times a day”. As I was reading the book, I find 100% real world examples of the idiocy at work place. One particular part I thoroughly enjoyed was “Ten great lies of management”. Personally I experienced these lies:

“I have an open-door policy”, a.ka. you can walk into my cabin anytime, and talk to me. I fell for this lie, and walked into the MD’s room. And the response I got: “What do you think of yourself? How the hell you can think you can directly walk into the Managing Director’s room”. I thought he had a Open-Door policy.

“You could earn money under the new plan”, a.k.a we’ll give you X.S.O.Ps for your performance. You can replace the X with A-Z and even greek letters. Personally I think real-good-programmers care a heck about their financial position. They want to make good software, and make the world a better place to live. They dont look for “X-SOP”s.

“We don’t shoot the messenger”, a.k.a Be open and talk to me about your issues.I fell for this too, and I questioned about the dangerously alarming level of technical competency pervasive at all levels. I got a Question in response to my Question :“What do you mean by technical competency?”. Positively hilarious. I still think about my heart beat rate when I talked about it, becuase at the corner of my heart I was having fear that am I competent enough to question like this? But I got the answer: I was damn “right”.

I promised to myself, that I will keep my “learned” state of my lessons, and make sure that the very moment the idiocy gets into my mind to that level, I’ll voluntarily take retirement from programming.

In other observations, from the Quark website the name of the executive suddenly disappeared from the executive bios page.
Here are the links for the old Page and the brand brand new page.

Old	New

High morale boost for me and ofcourse another lesson to learn as well. Thanks.