Two years up/down?

On the 7th of this month, half a dozen IC tweak engineers, including myself, completed 2 yrs at TI. Dont take a bow please. No big deal this one. No fanfare either. At the lunch table that day, we collectively reminisced our 1st anniversay euphoria, photo session and stuff. Thats the closest we came to celebrating this year. Talks a lot about the enthusiasm left in the old and brittle bones, doesnt it?

But! Are we to blame ourselves? Nay. This is a mean and ugly corporate world. We are helplessly stuck in this vicious cycle where long hours of quality effort is needed to ensure better performance and laudable results, and this only means appreciation from the customer in the form of more work. Celebrations hardly find a place here.

A few retrospective lines...

Very enthusiastic about work. Thats how it all started. Enthusiastic I was a year ago. Not so enthusiastic I am. Now. No reason for this. Crave for change even when the sailing is smooth and everything in life is just fine. Thats plain human nature.

Work-life balance is nothing but an oxymoron. When work takes the driver's seat, life is not even allowed to take the back seat. It gets mercilessly defenestrated (I am obsessed with this word these days). What with a fast car and a reckless driver called work, it isnt even possible to get out and bring back that life. All you can do is momentarily turn around and look at your discarded life through the rear windshield.

Dabbled in everything, mastered nothing. Thats one sentence which describes the seriousness of my intention to excel in anything outside work. For good or bad, I have lost the conviction that I am not just another also-ran kinda guy. Music, karate, cricket, all these activities that I had pursued with some seriousness in the not so distant past, are now in abeyance. Playing these out from the balk seems next to impossible. Sad, but true.

On a completely uncorrelated line (only reflects the thought process in my mind. Absolute incoherence!), if at all there are any gross misfits in the semiconductor industry, they are schedule makers. In two years I have realised that in such a dynamic/volatile industry, where technology changes faster than a design, sitting in a board-room and setting dealdlines is nothing short of a farcical act. And these days, I see more managers than designers, moving around with hep laptops, with open MS Project sheets, asking if we poor designers are on track. Its high time they realised that most of the time we are derailed!

Its hardly a nice thing to note that retrospection educes only life's cribs. There indeed are a few bright spots here and there and they deserve to be mentioned. Not now though.