Let’s face it. We Indians don’t like the design phase in a software project, or in any project for that matter. Given a chance we would like to completely eliminate the time taken for the activity of design and planning, all we want to do is to jump into coding straight without bothering to gather the requirements from the client or worrying whether the hastily delivered application serves the purpose or not.
Imagine a project of building a skyscraper having 100 floors (highly unlikely as we don’t have so much patience to build 100 floors), we want to save all that money that goes for the compensation of dumb design engineers, architects and interior designers. So that we can use that money to hire more laborers who know to build walls. The laborers themselves will figure out with their experience how to build the building. After all those cheap laborers might have built so many buildings till now.
We like improvisation, we don’t plan our cities, we don’t plan disaster management, we don’t plan for critical risks. We (referring to Indian project managers) like using the word “proactive” a lot of times in a desperate attempt to motivate the employees and sometimes as an excuse to giving a bad appraisal to a hard working employee, also to suppress the voice of employees. But we are not proactive, we hate pro-activity.
Instead, we follow the nature’s law of reaction, Newton’s third law. We react to things as and when they come. “Chalega… Dekhlenge….” (translates roughly to “it runs…we shall see later”) is the perfect representation of our typical attitude. Where CAT exam fails online, where Bhopal tragedy happens unforeseen, where Maoists kill hundreds of policemen without any intelligence information, negligence , laziness and arrogance is not something new.
If someone insists us to plan a task or himself spends time in design, we call him a dreamer and a loser. Winner according to us is the one who works day in and day out, slogs at offices for 14 hours a day, sweats at work without having any idea of what he/she is doing, without any care for the quality of the product being built, completely ignoring the risks and repercussions.
May it be software, or politics, or municipal corporation, or public security, or public convenience or even a patient struggling for life! There is no interest shown by the authorities in planning.
Hey wait, having said all that, there is dreaming for sure. A lot of dreaming. Politicians loftily speak about making India one of the developed nations in the next 10 years (speak about realistic goal setting!), Realtors boast of their hastily built commercial projects as “state of art” building, not to forget the wonderful Sanskrit names they choose, IIT-ans claim that their startup will soon downsize Google, engineers claim that their plagiarized projects to become the next big thing in the world, sports coaches claim that India will get the most number of Gold medals in coming Olympics.
We want to go to Swarga(heaven in Sanskrit), but we don’t want to die!!!!
We want results, but we wont focus on high level management and execution!
Comments?
About the Author: Sridhar Jammalamadaka is the Editor of Interview Mantra. He's a typically non-typical Software Engineer from Pune, India. He likes entrepreneurship, web technologies and Micro Controller programming. He enjoys playing cricket and piano (but rarely does these activities). Through this website, he wishes to gather a large community of aspiring engineers, entrepreneurs and professionals from all parts of the globe. You can connect with him on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sridhar.j 
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