Scaled Agile has the status of a religion in many tech shops I know. Like with religions – its followers express unquestioned faith, intolerance for other ideas (Waterfall is the devil, EVERYONE should be trained in SAFe), and its praises will drown its criticisms (its not a problem of the framework –  you are just…

First the back story My mother in law flew from Kochi to Phoenix last week . Her original route was COK-AUH-LAX on Etihad and then LAX-PHX in American . It’s her favorite routing since the airports are familiar to her, and she can finish customs and immigration in AUH and her bags will hence come…

I woke up at 4AM PST today to watch the first innings of Eng vs Pak in the cricket World cup. And at 5AM , I saw an email pop up from someone I mentor – who wanted some help in thinking through whether he should stay in his current job, or move to a…

I am an eternal optimist. I published my wish list for the first Modi government when they took office 5 years ago . As you can see for yourself, none of those things happened in any significant manner. And yet, here I am with a new list – and I will append the original wish…

I woke up this morning and saw that the BJP led NDA has won another five year term . Before my attention turns to the upcoming World Cup Cricket, I thought I will share a few thoughts Picture from https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/india-election-live-results-2019-bjp-claims-victory-congress-accepts-defeat-1.1558527353661 What separated BJP and INC ? Granted it is difficult to dislodge incumbents since they…

Late on Wednesday night, I got an email that essentially said we moved from #5 to #1 on a certain important metric . This was a big goal for our team, and we were all working hard for it. So I shared the news with my leadership team right away . Thursday morning, one of…

Promotions are hard for the employee and the employer. Unless its the first couple of levels in the organizational ladder, there is always a lot of subjectivity that goes into the process from both sides. Even when a company says it is all data driven – it is often the case that subjective decisions (…

We – the collective humanity – have always loved the concept of efficiency. “Better, Faster and Cheaper” have always appealed to us. But over the long term, efficiency has not always been in our best interests, perhaps because we never knew when to stop.    It follows a fairly consistent pattern that goes like this…

Almost 7 decades have passed since Alan Turing asked “Can Machines Think?” . It’s hard to define what thinking means – and it continues to be hard today as it was in 1950. So Turing took a pragmatic approach and redefined the problem as “Can a computer behave like a human being?”. It was absolutely…