Why Elephants can't dance.

(Are you a Geek & do you dream of working for a software MNC? Think again !)

Confessions of a friend of mine who chased his dream of working for the best software MNC and who finally achieved it.

My friend (Alpha) is a geek to the core, who eats, drinks and thinks codes (ideal candidate to Matrix spaceship operator). He had grand plans of doing something new, something really cool and at the same time work for a software monolith.

Alpha started off his new job with a really cool application prototype which, considering his skill set, he was easily able to complete within the stipulated time period. This made him even more enthusiastic to do something cool, something really great, but he never knew what exactly it was.

During his college days, he used to come up with new stuff at a very rapid pace.He was at any stage involved with n number of projects in which others used to take undue advantage of his dedication. He never complained, rather completed all ,as this gave him the fuel he needed the most. It was the feeling of achievement which always kept him active.

Then he encountered reality, the monolith (MNC which he joined) started showing its true colors. All his plans of doing something cool, something new & cost effective were replaced by the new dictated work which involved unnecessary drudgery and mundane codes. Repetitive list of changes irked him the most, since he had to re implement the whole stuff due to improper design documents. All these led to time shortage and finally he had to put in after office hours to get the work done. His life became hell. Finally the project was finished on time.

This followed up with months of maintenance and bug fixing work. Since he is a perfectionist, there were no bugs in his code. So all he had was free time, unfortunately which he couldn't utilize. Since he was supposed to fix bugs and write test cases. So any innovation work would mean that he was not giving enough time to these mundane works. Even worse was to finish work before given time line, as either it would mean that he had given wrong time estimation and draw flak or he would be given other people's tasks. So, finishing work ahead of time became a punishment instead of fetching any reward.

So he did a statistical survey about how his friends were faring in other monoliths and start ups. After some analysis of the data he gathered through various surveys, he plotted all and observed the pattern.

Here is a set of such graphs with explanations.

1) Zeal vs Years of Experience.
This shows a sharp decline in zeal level to do something new for the organization. This is common across the monoliths (read large software organizations). The main reason behind this pattern (as mentioned by participants) was lack of acknowledgement as well as lack of direction for these innovations.


This differs sharply with those who joined start ups.


The zeal level leaped upwards and then it dropped after some years when the start up itself became a monolith.

So, its the red taping & valuing process over people which really brings down the zeal level.


2) Group Strength vs Effective working strength
Another pattern, clearly visible is the group strength. Since effectiveness of group is inversely proportional to the no of people working on it, as the no of people in a team increases, group effectiveness decreases. Since all start ups work with smaller group strengths, they are more effective in getting any work done.

Here blue indicates the number of people actually working in a group and yellow indicates passive employees.

Finally, fed up of all the red taping and bureaucracy, he has quit the monolith he dreamed of all his college days. Now he is happy with a start up of his own, where ideas are converted into implementations. He told me a very nice quote ... "here we work on real world problems in real time, whereas in monolith all I could do was to work on some imaginary problems with infinite time line".