And Vijay Says…

Over the last few days – I had multiple conversations about different aspects of anxiety in the work place . I also chimed in on a couple of threads in social media about it . So when I woke up today – I felt like I should share some thoughts about how I deal with it myself .

When I was a young consultant – I was anxious all the time . Every Sunday I would get anxious about getting on a plane on Monday morning . Every time a Partner visited my project, I would get anxious . Every time I had to make a presentation or report status – I would get anxious . It didn’t take much to for me to feel anxious .

It would manifest in many ways – ranging from sweaty palms on the mild side to acute acid reflex on the harsh side . I was misery personified . What made matters worse was that I also tried really hard to hide my anxiety from my colleagues . And strangely I never asked anyone for help – and just chose to suffer through it myself . Not a lot of my friends even know today that I had to deal with those problems back when we worked together .

It had an impact on my career progression too – At 29, I was still a senior consultant when most others who started with me were managers and one or two were already senior managers .

While struggling through anxiety for several years – I also got better at analyzing problems and experimenting with solutions . I started analyzing what was causing my anxiety and what could I do about it . And at some point – I think I cracked the code !

Life turned for the better – and rather dramatically . I started feeling better physically , and started enjoying Sundays . I no longer threw up before big meetings . And my career took off – in another 5 or 6 years I got into the executive ranks .

So what did I find out ?

The primary cause of my anxiety was fear – or more precisely the fear of getting fired !

I had very good skills for my line of work . And my line of work – SAP development – was in hot demand . And if I messed up at work – the first thing a Partner or my client would do was certainly not to fire me . In hindsight all of this is plain obvious . Just that it took me half a decade to realize that the odds of getting fired were really low !

I also realized I had two big weaknesses to overcome .

1. I could have come to this conclusion quickly if only I had asked for help sooner .

2 And there was a possibility that even though I had great skills – I just didn’t know enough good people to find a job if and when I needed one.

So I started actively seeking help .

Thanks to my wife insisting on it – I went and saw a doctor and he prescribed something that helped with my acid reflux . He almost immediately diagnosed that it was stress related – and he was right . As soon as my approach to work changed – acid reflux went away and I didn’t need the medicine any more .

Looking back – a part of the problem was that I was (and still am) an introvert whom many people who know me mistakenly take for an extrovert . By now I know I am not alone with this situation, and I can joke about it 🙂

I started asking for help early and often and that made a big difference . I no longer felt the need to be the smartest person in the room who knew all the answers . This also made me realize that everyone has some difficulty asking for help . The moment I started asking for help – others in my team did so as well . Collectively – we figured out solutions much faster and with less stress . Another learning was that it is a very limited exercise if you only helped people who could help you back . You have to help what you can and then over a long period of time , you tend to always get more help than you ever expected .

I also made it a point to keep my skills sharp all the time . Every quarter I set a goal to master a new skill and I would use the weekly plane rides to get it done . It’s a habit that has become second nature . It has helped me change my line of work several times over the years – from ABAP to SAP functional consulting to BI to CRM to AI and so on . Off late – my interests have also widened to ethics , psychology and history . Eventually it became no longer about job risk mitigation – but it doesn’t hurt that it serves as an insurance in case I ever need it .

Then came the need to network . It didn’t take long to realize that just by connecting to a lot of people on LinkedIn and Twitter didn’t do me any favors in having a useful network . It’s a painstaking process of building meaningful relationships one at a time – starting with strengthening existing friendships and business relationships and then working from there to extend to others . It takes a long period of time and there is no end to it – it’s something you do all the time , and again without making it a “I will only help people who help me ” transaction .

There are other factors involved like living under your means and saving for a rainy day , taking good care of your health , prioritizing your family over work and so on . You can’t take those for granted – just by optimizing on work alone will not get you to a good space .

The confidence – and especially the peace of mind – that comes from removing fear from your mind is something that you need to experience for yourself . Words are not adequate to explain it . It’s a huge feeling of liberation from a jail that you created for yourself .

It’s not that I no longer feel anxious – I absolutely still do . It’s just that I have learned how to use it to my advantage instead of letting it stress me out . The “trick” for me essentially is to have a routine about things I feel anxious about .

For me – that includes listening to music – usually Carnatic , getting plenty of sleep (I need 7 to 8 hours) and focusing hard on just the first couple of things I need to do to get into a rhythm . If I have a presentation to make that I am starting to worry about – I focus on making sure I know what I have to talk to for the first 2 or 3 minutes . Once I get through that – my experience kicks in and I can get through the rest quite easily . If I have to review my business with my bosses – I think about what they would want to know and figure out that aspect of my answer very well . I spend less time worrying about peripheral things . If I still feel the stress – I know it’s because I need more help . I call one of my mentors and spend a few minutes talking with them and pretty quickly I am back in a good mental space .

Dealing with your own anxiety is one thing . That in itself takes a lot of effort – but it still might not be enough . There is a high chance that people in your team are anxious – and you may actually be the reason for that . As I grew into leadership roles – this started becoming more and more a topic of interest for me .

My approach to this is as follows –

1. I cannot be insecure at all if I have to help some one in my team with their anxiety . This means I need to think carefully about how I hire , how I communicate and so on . Insecure managers compound the insecurity of their team .

2. Everyone is different . What worked for you to minimize your anxiety might not work for them at all . I remember a young colleague who got anxious about flying – fearing that the plane will crash if there is turbulence . That led to a couple of glasses of wine every trip and some times even before getting into the plane . I tried to help but this was beyond me – and I was happy that this person went to a professional and got the help he needed .

3. You need to proactively and consistently take fear away from the work place – and then make sure that other people in your team are reinforcing that behavior .

4. Your primary expectation as a leader should not be to be liked – it should be to be respected and trusted . If they like you – that’s a nice side effect . The truth is that you will have to take hard decisions that affect people in your team . As long as they know you have been consistent and fair with your decision – they will understand and respect your decision even if they don’t like you for what you did . I try to be as transparent as I can be with my team – and give them headlights into what will happen next for each course of action we take .

5. All that said – there is one area where I haven’t been able to minimize my anxiety . That is about firing people . Almost invariably the moment I take that decision – I feel sick and the acid reflux comes back full swing . It’s predictable and that makes me realize it’s my body preparing me and I get through it with some pain . It is one area I definitely need to improve .

The smart people that I listen to have been saying for some time that I should think about the issue of “work life balance” more as work – life integration and it will be easier to make sense that way .

Their infinite wisdom was that I will find a lot of useful things that I can take from work to life and vice versa . Also – it’s easier to perfect one behavior and then use it seamlessly all the time instead of the constant context switching between my two phases of existence . What’s not to like ?

I have been giving this whole seamless integration thing a shot since I was a trainee at TCS . I was born and raised in Trivandrum and my training was in Mumbai – which was two days away by train , or a month’s salary by plane . Phone calls were so darn expensive too for my trainee salary . So before I left home – my mom told me to write letters instead of phone calls .

In a couple of weeks time, TCS drilled into me that communication should be crisp and concise . I tried it on Amma

My letters looked like this

Dear Amma and Achan

Pls note the following

1. I have been eating and sleeping well

2. Hope my dog is coping with my absence . Tell him I love him

3. Training is going great . I am learning a lot

Love

Your son

It took about three such letters before my loving mother strictly forbade me from writing anymore letters . Apparently “crisp concise bullets” and “restricting the note to three main things” are not what the communication with mom is supposed to follow as a template . Who knew ?

It’s a good thing that phone calls became cheaper over time . Otherwise my parents might have disowned me a few decades ago . I write very few letters, much to everyone’s relief – but my letters (and post cards and Xmas greetings and …) all still have bullet points . I have made peace with it since my use of written communication is mostly for work purposes 🙂

As I progressed through my career – I gained an invaluable survival skill . I can go back and forth with anyone with whom I have a disagreement without becoming emotional about it . I don’t raise my voice . I just stick to logic and data and I don’t tire easily . If the other party makes a good point – I quickly stand corrected with no drama . Occasionally I have had to break some glass – metaphorically speaking . At some point I also learned that humor helps make some points easier as well .

This skill had been honed over a couple of decades and in the spirit of work life integration – I of course try it liberally outside work too . If you haven’t tried it yet – take my advice . DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME !

With friends and family, it turns out that raising your voice and being an emotional wreck is absolutely the expected way to express your disagreement . Apparently humor is the least effective tactics of all . If you want to be a real pro – you need to curse and swear , and at least minimally be capable of breaking glass physically . Metaphors are like humor – don’t bother . And last but not least – outside work , you are an absolute weirdo and/or psycho if you concede your point without a major fight .

Again – it’s a good thing that most of my arguments are on the work front . So once again – I just stick to one behavior and gracefully accept my weirdo status outside of it .

It’s not as if I haven’t taken some lessons from outside work and tried it at work .

My parents are both super charitable people . My mom has often taken on debt to help people who were in distress . My dad has helped hundreds of people with no expectation of getting anything in return . My grand father was also wired this way and he was a big influence on me when I was growing up . Having seen them all operate this way throughout my formative years – I have this tendency deep inside me that when I see someone at work who is stressed out – I often jump in and try to help . Most of the time I make their problems into my problems , in the process of solving it .

My own mentors have warned me several times that I should be a lot more careful about this . And while I have largely ignored them on this piece of advice – they have been proven more right than wrong about this . In the work place – if you don’t do this “let me help you” thing very thoughtfully , all that you do is to create a belief in those people you help that they should lean on me again the next time they are in trouble .

I still believe that helping someone of the right thing to do , so despite the first hand experience of its side effects – I still do it . I have a feeling that I have started to do more of “here is some fish , but let me also give you a few tips on fishing” . I also have a feeling that my mentors still think I am at best a work in progress on this front 🙂 . I also firmly believe that a lot of people have helped me when they had no real reason to bother .

You would often hear from very successful business leaders that you learn more from failure than from success . Intuitively that feels right . Like every other sales leader – I have done my fair share of “loss reviews”.

But there is one thing I absolutely won’t do – if I lose a deal , I will never open that proposal deck again . I don’t delete it – but it will never see the light of day again .

This means that I often have to recreate content from scratch – even if it’s much easier to take the good slides from those decks that I had put in the “never open again” folders .

It’s certainly not an efficient way of working when you are under time pressure – and I won’t blame anyone for calling me superstitious . In my defense, I generally have won more pursuits than I have lost . So I haven’t had a lot of incentive to change so far 🙂

This habit was triggered by my parental grandfather when I was a teenager . He was a history professor . I did poorly in a social studies exam in high school and when I came home – he went through my answer sheet in great detail . There was one essay that I did an excellent job and the rest of my answers were pretty mediocre . My history teacher had told me to save that essay since there is a good chance that I will need it again for the final exams .

My grandfather had some very different advice . He asked me to throw the whole answer sheet in the dust bin and start learning from scratch – and don’t even bother saving the two pages with the essay . His theory was that the answer sheet will just rekindle negativity in my mind – and however great the essay was , it will always be associated with failure . I agreed with him then , and I still agree with him today !

So yeah – work life integration seems like a fine theory . But it sure would help if the experts had some concrete advice on better templates to write letters to mom !

This blog you are reading is written on a “low code” system – it is a wordpress blog where I have not used any custom coding at all. I could have – and I am an experienced developer. And yet I chose to not even touch html or CSS because it works for my limited purposes. Few hundred thousand people have checked out my blog in the past – and literally no one has asked me yet anything that needs me to write some code. At the most – I will need to switch color schemes or font or pictures – and none of that needs me to write a line of code.

What works for me will not work for a larger and professionally run web property like Diginomica for example . They need code – lots of code. And if you go to an even bigger media company like NYT or WP, I can only imagine the talent, tech and processes they need to run it.   There is no way that 90% of Diginomica, let alone NYT can run with low code tooling today. Some day in future it may be possible – but I can’t even do any speculation on how long that is going to take.

What triggered my rant here 

This article Unqork CEO – ‘Agile has failed on Diginomica got shared on my twitter feed. That served as the inspiration for this blog. It had a catchy title – and I have criticized the poor use of agile and scaled agile  a few times in the past  . I opened the article thinking the Diginomica gang has uncovered a new angle on this. Unfortunately not only did I not find a new angle, I got very frustrated by a weird conflation of agile and low code, and some poorly articulated assertions on the applicability of low code. Usually Diginomica takes a critical take on the topics they cover – and that is the primary reason for me being a loyal reader. This one unfortunately did not cover the “so what” aspect – and honestly that disappointed me.

The fundamental premise is illogical – and poorly articulated

First – Waterfall and Agile are ways to execute a project or build a product from a methodology perspective. That has nothing to do with the actual tech that is used. For example – MongoDB came into being after Agile became popular. So if NASA did a waterfall project – should they avoid using MongoDB because it is more modern and hence only fit for agile ? The line of thinking itself is ridiculous . Now substitute MongoDB with low code tool of your choice and the silliness of that argument will be even more evident.

Second – between Waterfall and Agile is squeezed “there were vendors that claimed they could build you everything you needed into one package/stack” . I don’t know what to make of this. Incidentally, those solutions – like say SAP or SFDC – also can be implemented in Waterfall or Agile. It is a terribly illogical way to segment it on par with Waterfall and Agile.

Third – Agile has not failed universally. Poor execution of agile leads to failures as I called out above in the links to my past blogs.  But there are plenty of Agile success stories all around us. Since we already used SAP as an example – they deliver their product using Agile and so does SFDC and Workday and so on. So the fundamental premise of the title itself is flawed.

Now back to the idea of low code itself.

The principle of low code is a VERY good thing

Code has a tendency to become a liability the moment you finish coding. I am all for being a minimalist when it comes to coding. This is why engineers encourage re-use, why we establish frameworks, why we standardize tooling to the extent we can, why we encourage automation , why we like “shift left” and so on. In theory, I would expect low code based apps to be lower in maintenance cost.

We all like to do things better, faster and cheaper. Any tooling that promises that value is worth checking out. Time is precious for business and technology people.

And finally – there are only a small number of good developers to go around. Low code tooling goes a long way to mitigate this problem.

And yet, with all my positivity about low code – I think what the Unqork CEO is saying here is very far from reality today, and for foreseeable future.

You could build anything you can imagine without me needing to write a single line of code or generate code, because we think that’s also legacy. So the idea is to stop writing code, stop legacy. 90% of what any company does today, we could confidently do on Unqork without a single change today, without a single line of code. The last 10% is where 100% of their engineers should be building. Right I would say that that last 10% is purely APIs, interfaces that engineers are building that are unique to them

Low code is not new – we have lived through several avatars of this over the years. I remember SAP coming up with Visual Composer  something like a decade ago. It did not go very far. SAP was not the first – and things did get better over time. I am a fan of lighting platform that Salesforce introduced and it has several nice low code features. But even in salesforce projects – it is rare that 90% of the work is on declarative side.

Of course – history of failures is not something to worry about too much in tech. Tech usually improves with time .

A strong start to the low code story  does not mean it usually ends well

Time to market is absolutely a critical business driver today. Low code is a big help in proving out something as an MVP – as a prototype or pilot. If business likes it – great, and if they don’t you can throw it away with very little to write off. That is the good part. But that is not how this story typically unfolds.

Business will love the first version, especially the speed at which it got delivered. They will add a few more things to be done by the app. Most of the time – low code tooling can get that done too in record time. Then along the way – a high value requirement will come along which cannot be solved by the low code tooling . So it gets handed off to an engineer to enhance. This is where it typically picks up downstream momentum . There is a good chance that there is no way to make that enhancement without a significant rewrite. There goes time to market for a toss !

Mobile might be the hardest problem

Mobile is a harder problem to tackle than web. To get the best experience – I don’t think there will be a lot of debate that it is hard to challenge native development with generic tooling. Device integration, performance , Mobile UX are all hard to perfect without going native from what I have seen. If your experience is different – pls leave a comment, as I am very curious on this aspect especially.

Technical compromises just defer the costs

Low code ( and similar templated tooling that goes by other names) all are built with “general” requirements in mind. That comes with some obvious constraints – like the tooling expecting pre-existing APIs (in an enterprise world that is largely built as monoliths – or poorly designed/implemented APIs ) , some limitations in logic that can be implemented by drag/drop/click, and often performance limitations. That is the price you pay for faster development cycles. That is the price you pay with interest when your successful app gets asked to do more ! And if the tool can be extended – you have to ask yourself if it is “low code” anymore 🙂 .

There are indirect costs 

Low code also has some organizational costs that only become evident when you scale. A lot of the products are sold to business users with the promise “It is inexpensive, and you don’t need to wait on IT to get what you need – you can do it yourself”. Soon you have a proliferation of apps ( or reports or dashboard or whatever ), a lot of unused licenses/subscriptions,  and there is tremendous friction with IT ( traditional developers ) , and between business users. The typical solution – establishing a COC to “guide and govern” the low code system. Before you know – the COC gets bloated. And they put way too many constraints on governance (with good intentions usually) that the original time-to-value advantage is not true any more.

To conclude

I think low code tools absolutely have a definite place in the tool kit. It needs to be used for what it is good for – and that expectation should be clearly set with the customers who buy it. Over time, like with all technology – I totally expect low code to solve more of enterprise problems. But for now – I think claiming only 10% of scope needs engineers is an extreme overstatement.