That horse rider and current IT industry

It is a story I reed during my childhood. The story goes like this..

1st half:
There was a king who has passion for horse and horse riders. He used to buy the best horses and hire the best horse riders and pay them competitively. Once he heard about a horse rider named X who is able to ride horse for 2 days without taking any rest and wanted to hire X. The king called the minister and asked to hire X before any other king hires X. The minister was trying to tell something. The king ordered to hire X then talk to the king.

2nd half:
The minister went to the king and said he is able to hire X. King thanked him and asked how is he able to do it. Who is able to do it. The minister said they have another horse rider Y who can ride horse for continuous 3 days without rest and Y is able to catch X. The king wanted to congratulate Y. Minister said Y is no more available as the neighbor king has already hired him. King asked why he did not inform him about Y earlier. Te minister said he wanted to. But king was not ready to listen. And ordered to talk to him only after hiring X successfully. Minister did everything to hire X reluctantly.

Resemblance with current It Industry:

Many It industries are looking for the talents available outside and compete to pay them to hire them. They get paid whatever they have asked for. Mostly the outsiders are paid higher than equivalent and better people inside. The result is the better people inside are forced to quit. Is it a unknown problem to the management? I don't think so. Is it like management does not want to fix it? I have no clue. Your suggestions are welcome.

Shewag better than Viv? You must be kidding.

I am a cricket fan. I am a fan of Shewag. He is definitely one of the best player to watch to. He is nightmare to the opposition bowler. Cricket pundits predict the match if Shewag plays or does not play well. He deserves all the respects. But is he better than Viv Richards?

A bit too much to ask for. Viv will storm into any all time best test or one day cricket team. Shewag will not be one of them. Viv is both an attacking player with sound technique where as Shewag bats well with eye hand coordination. Viv has played at a time when scoring rates are lower (compare batsman of those era) where as Shewag played when scoring rates are higher. Though the scoring rate of Shewag is better than that of Richards, if we look at relative scoring rate Richards is way ahead of Shewag. Shewag is not able to change his gear and play longer and slower innings when required.

So Viv is a far better player and belongs to the all time great cricketer, where as Shewag belongs to great cricketer of this generation.

Value of team work

A product is facing performance problem often at production. It is facing memory out of error too often. It has a java component which uses a java-com bridge and a com component which returns some result. The java-com bridge is no more supported and can work only for 32 bits. So RAM size cannot be increased. So it is decided to go away with the com component and java-com bridge and migrate the app to pure java and provide a 64 bit machine. The application is a legacy application and there were no Business Analyst. So the development lead was asked to depict what the com component and java-com bridge does and provide it to a technology evangelist who will do the same thing in pure java. And provide the data using web service. The technology evangelist was asked to consume the data and provide a UI as done by JAVA-COM bridge. It was a challenge for both of them. But both of them rose to occasion. Product developments lead providing the document on time, though documentation is not her core skills. And she defined the interface and both of them started working as per the interface. The development was over in 2 days. Now the application needs to move to QA. And as they are setting up in QA, the application did not work. The reason was product development lead was using JDK 1.4 for her legacy application and the Mr Quick-Fix evangelist is using latest JDK. It worked fine in development environment. But QA environment has older version of java so the newer version of the code provided by Mr Evangelists did not work. Then it comes to a discussion, should we use Java 6 or Java 4? And the discussion moved round and round from prod support to QA to Mr Evangelist. Everybody have their own version of the story, and the testing delayed for no reason. Finally the evangelist got his idea approved by senior management. And the QA did ask for JAVA 6 installations on their machine. After a sweet one week QA is able to test the application. What a waste of an effort. 2 days to develop an app by providing the best resource and 7 days to set up the QA.

By the time the product development lead has to go on a vacation so she asked her team members to fix any problems on her behalf. QA has started testing the application. Earlier any issues raised by QA were sending to the product development team. Now QA does not know whom to send the defect. She thought the component was developed by the evangelist, so send any defect to him. She sent couple of defects to him which should have been fixed by the development team. He was not well for 2 days, so checked mail after 2 days and mailed saying it is not his fault. And development team member said it is not his fault either. So they went to check the document which depicts the behavior of the application. Evangelist was right as per the document, but developer was right in terms of what the old application behaved. So it was actually a mistake in depicting the old behavior. Development lead has done it on and above her regular work. Evangelist has done his part of the work brilliantly, and developer is trying to say what is right, and the product is not delivered on time.
Evangelist agreed to fix the problem and move on and it was moved from QA to UAT almost after 2 weeks. The show is full of couple of individual brilliancy followed by a poor show by the team.

PS: This incident is based on a true incident. Names has been deleted to protect privacy. Some of the events have been to tweaked to make it more interesting