"...inko paani me daalo, tairna seekh jaate hai..."

"...inko paani me daalo, tairna seekh jaate hai..."

...I overheard a TL tell someone, as I passed her desk in Infosys back in 2006. ["you leave them in the water & they learn to swim by themselves"].

She was talking about us, the new crop of software engineers in the team. We were given a complex piece of code to analyze daily, which seemingly was beyond our capabilities. These were issues reported by our onsite IT team based at the client sites in the US.

The first few weeks were nightmarish. I would sit all day on it, yet could not figure out what was wrong. We usually got 2-3 days to find the issue. If we failed to crack the issue, a senior would pick it up, crack it in an hour & send the analysis to the onsite team. 

It was on one such occasion I was analyzing a code & even on day 2, I was clueless. I went to get some coffee [free coffee from the CCD machines felt like royal luxury back then] & on my way I overheard her & told a friend about it. He smiled & said "The code we are given to analyse is usually something that a senior is working on in parallel. The outcome of our effort hardly matters. The seniors do the RCA [Root Cause Analysis] & share it with the onsite team. Whatever we do is just for our learning.''

A couple of days later, I was given another issue to analyse. So, while I was keen to find the root cause, I was no longer under the same pressure, as I knew the onsite would get the RCA from a senior. I was nowhere close to the solution by day end. The next day, I started off with a fresh mind & by 3 pm, I was finally able to find the bug in the code. It was a superb feeling. Now I knew the issue would already have been sorted by a senior, so I did not inform anyone about my finding. Instead, I kept analyzing the code over & over again out of curiosity. While at it, I found an opportunity to optimize a database query (sorry if all this sounds too technical) in the code that could save a few hours in the program execution. So I wrote a query to replace the existing one & sent the RCA as well as my recommendation to the onsite team, knowing it would probably go unread. 

The next day when I logged in, the 5th unread mail from the bottom was an "Appreciation Mail" from onsite. Apparently, the due date for the code I had analysed was a week later so my senior had not yet worked on it. The database query I had optimized had resulted in quicker resolution of claims, so the client was happy & the appreciation mail was for that.

- So often, one has to be put in a difficult, seemingly impossible situation/challenge to fend for themselves, with minimal intervention, in order for one to learn to overcome such situations. 

- One often performs their best when one feels that nothing significant is expected of them, surprising self & others in the process. 

The TL I quoted here was Asmita Lonkar, who was a great senior to have around. As she had rightly predicted, aakhir mein main tairna seekh hi gaya...[Finally I had learnt to swim].