As title states.
I took one of my India guys to the movies on our team outing two weeks ago, and it was a different sort of experience, just riding in the car with him. His mind seemed alive with questions about America–how we get to work, our various religions, how my family is organized, politics, culture, etc.
Then, when I got him back to his place, he invited me to come in and sit awhile, relax and have something to drink. We then continued our discussion of education, and the various differences between American and Indian public education.
Anyway, two things struck me:
- This guy (Indians use the term “This guy” or “That guy” in place of ‘he’…sometimes) works more than I do, and yet, he seems to have work/life balance figured-out, where I do not.
- This guy has to be dead tired, and yet he invited me to his apartment in a mannerly way and conversed with me.
- This guy has broad interests outside work.
* * *
I was warned way back by my friend Bill Randall that the corporate world would suck the life right out of me and make me an uninteresting person. Check.
I mean, I’m writing this before coffee, but this reality-distortion field known as corporate America is crap. Work yourself down to a nub, looking over your shoulder at the guy from the developing world who can do it for 1/8th the cost, who never says ’no’. Work so much you have no other interests, can’t even CONVERSE in anything besides what you’re working on. Work so much that you ACTIVELY HATE people interrupting you, viewing them as a distraction.
Healthy, no?
Yeah, yeah, I’m at a low point. I’ve been killing myself to shore up an overcomplicated code module that isn’t threadsafe and leaks memory. Oh, and it can deadlock; just found THAT one yesterday at 5:30. If that gal were still working here, I’d tell her to put the keyboard down and back away slowly–don’t USE threads until you understand them!
Thankfully, I FINALLY found-out that it’s probably a firmware issue that’s hosing us, and so for the last day or so I’ve been decompressing.
:-) Time for coffee.