Blog
A word of caution: This is my first attempt at satire, I enjoyed writing this like my code, hope others enjoy while reading this unlike my code. If this feels boring please feel free to close the window and don’t curse me!
This is happening in one of the verses of our multiverse and is not in anyway related to earth, solar system, milky way and our verse or our tech industry.
There exists a country named Hitechlandia in the planet Dearth of Watery Way galaxy of some other (uni)verse. The president of the country decides to modernise his ministries with technology and decides to appoint Chief Technology officers for each of its ministry.
Education ministry is given to Mr.Complex Ity who is a veteran from the famed SillyCON valley of the planet which is the hotbed of latest innovations, gurus, ninjas, assasins. Complex Ity has spent decades in SillyCON valley and knows innovation in and out, he can grab innovation by its neck and whip its back with ease.
On his first day of office Complex Ity picks up the list of problems plaguing the education ministry so that he could disrupt one-by-one. One problem catches his eye the most i.e. “children are not drinking enough water in the country’s schools”
Being the innovator at heart and soul he decides to call for solutions to this problem from serial disruptors and general public to implement the most innovative solution.
After multiple rounds of advertisements and filtering by education ministry staff 3 solution proposals are sent to Complex Ity for his review.
By two students (Mr. Mad Genius and Mr. Hundred Ex) of the famed HiTech Institute of Technology aka HIT, students coming from this instiution are called HITMAN/HITWOMAN.
It is very hard to crack the entrance examinations for this institution and only the briliant of the brilliant minds crack it. Preparation starts from the previous generations where a man/woman if decide to put their kids on HIT start preparing for the entrance right from their youth so that when they marry each other and get impregnated they can start teaching the child right from womb. It is a long and hard path! Mr.Mad and Mr. Hundred’s mothers started preparing at age 16 and 17 respectively so that their sons could get into HIT.
The students Mr. Mad Genius and Mr. Hundred Ex are studying 3rd year Mining Engineering and dropping out because they felt they did not learn anything useful in HIT which they don’t know.
Having seen the name HIT of which he is also an alumni Mr.Complex decides to listen to them.
Second proposal is from a company named Yangtze (a river) which owns almost all the businesses in the world. They have the best engineers in the world working on the most complex problems of their verse like showing ads based on user behavior, upselling pillows to people who have bought beds, upselling 2 more pillows to people who have bought 4 pillows last week etc.
All the employees of mentioned company believe they are changing the world and bettering humanity by upselling items.
Just seeing the name Yangtze brings back nostalgic memories to Mr.Complex who worked there a couple of decades ago solving the most complex problems of their (uni)verse. He agrees to listen to them as well.
This comes from a retired school principal who claims to have solved this problem in her tenure. Since the proposal synopsis did not have any mention about technology Mr.Complex ignores this and moves the email to Trash folder immediately because he strongly belives all problems can be solved only by technology.
Mr.Complex gives appointment on 01/01/2020 to Mr. Mad Genius and Mr.Hundred Ex at 10 AM in his office. Both of them reach sharp at 10 and are kept waiting outside Mr.Complex’s room lined with glass walls, yes a mark of transparency of Mr.Complex.
They wait nervously outside his room watching him drink plenty of water every few minutes for the next 2 hours.
Around 12:00 PM Mr.Complex comes out and asks the other 2 to follow him. He rushes into the Men’s restroom and occupies a toilet bowl allowing one each on his either side for the other two. Once all 3 are in position he tells Mad and Hundred that they have 50 seconds until he empties his bladder to convince him with their proposal, this ritual is called Washroom Pitch since elevator pitch is a stupid idea according to Mr.Complex.
As he starts emptying his bladder and listens Mad and Hundred convey their idea of using Machine Learning combined with Deep Learning to predict when kids will get thirsty and alert them on mobile devices while they are in the classroom so that they drink enough water throughout the day.
Hearing the words Deep Learning made Mr.Complex happy and he immediately agreed and sanctioned 200 million dollars for this project pilot.
Gushing with joy Mr.Mad Genius and Mr.Hundred Ex register their own company named Thirst Inc with a tagline “Thirst for disruption!”. They start recruiting for Software overengineers, User Experience Screwers, Chief Complexity Officer etc.
Meanwhile the date is 10/01/2020 and Mr.Complex has invited people from Yangtze to present their solution. Since he already knows the people he foregoes the Washroom Pitch ritual and asks them to present their solution in a meeting room.
The Chief Blahrchitect of the Yangtze Mr.Droppedfrom Heaven presents the solution as follows:
Their idea is to embed non-intrusive sensors in the throat of each student which is connected to Yangtze Cobweb Services (hence secure!) to form an Internet of Things that keeps sending data to the Artificial Intelligence backed agent which will alert the kids to drink water by creating a sharp tinge in their throats depending on thirst levels. Each student will be added to a Blockchain for extra security purposes. They have their hardware partners in the city named Dungeon in the country Dyna who can manufacture these sensors in order of millions within few weeks using their human power!
Hearing the words Internet of Things , Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence made Mr.Complex so happy he went into a state of trance for a while, he accepted the proposal immediately and agreed to spend 300 million dollars on a pilot.
Back home at the Yangtze headquarters they scramble existing people and put Mr.Droppedfrom as the chief of product for this pilot and asks him to form his own team of blahrchitects and overengineers and user experience screwers.
Being the co-founders and best buddies they are, Mad & Hundred are always in sync hence they speak the same words in unison all the time.
Mad & Hundred: We have designed the architecture with below points in our minds:
And they present their architecture diagram to the team comprising 3 junior overengineers and 1 senior overengineer.
Senior Overengineer 1: We should use Focker (which downloads a copy of server along with database and runs its own instance on the client machines to sync with server so that OS of the client is irrelevant anymore and performance is top notch due to zero network overhead!) to develop these services and deploy them on Loobernetes for infinite scalability
Mad & Hundred: 100% agree!
Junior overengineer 1: We should also use picoservices where each line of code is deployed as a separate container/service so that we can scale each of Line of Code independent of each other and we can generate graphs containing zillions of nodes of these services in prod for me to brag at my twitter TL.
Mad & Hundred: 100% agree! We did the right thing by hiring a ninja rockstar like you! Yay!
Mad & Hundred: What about the User expriences?
There enters the Chief UX screwer Mr.Leave Jobless wearing a black turtle neck sporting a frameless glass. He comes in, sits there and starts asking critical questions to enable better experience and add immense value to the product.
Leave Jobless:
Mad & Hundred: It is lunch time shall we order some pizza?
Leave Jobless: Not for me, Stay Hungry and Stay Foolish is my life motto so I don’t eat and don’t read any material that might make me wise.
Mad & Hundred: Amazing principles to live by! We did a good job hiring you!
Mad & Hundred: Let us use Fizzure cloud services provided by Nanosoft and ask them for discounts since we are rivalling their chief competitor Yangtze Cobweb!
Everyone else: Brilliant idea!
Mad & Hundred send their data collection team to 10 schools for collecting data patterns on when students usually drink water to create a predictive model which is going to be their scecret sauce and the product gets built brick by brick!
Mr.Droppedfrom Heaven is trying to resolve conflicts between two teams on what tech stack to use, team A is saying they should use Object Oriented Programming with a garbage collected, dynamically typed language while team B is fighting for Purely functional, explicitly memory managed and statically typed language.
Verbal altercation escalates and people stab each other in the meeting room. Security guards are called and the wounded are taken to hospital. Worried about this development Mr.Droppedfrom Heaven summons his Senior Prinicpal Distinguished Engineer Mr.Knows Everything.
Mr.Droppedfrom Heaven schedules another meeting a week later once the injured have recovered and the yelling begins…
Team A: Our way is the right way you fools!
Team B: Our way is the right way you idiots!
Mr.Knows enters the room with a grin in his face as he looks at his phone for a notification alert.
Mr.Knows Everything: Happy to share with you all that I have been granted my 10182nd patent for “A Systematic Method to Navigate Office Spaces to enter Meeting Rooms” which I filed few minutes ago, I got this innovative idea while walking towards this room from my cabin.
Mr.Droppedfrom: Woah! Thats a superhuman achievement Mr.Knows we are so proud to have you as part of our team.
Mr.Knows: The approach suggested by Team B i.e. Purely functional, explicitly memory managed and statically typed language is the best way forward since that is something I am missing from my resume so lets go by that
Team A & B: Hail Mr.Knows for showering us with such impeccable attention to detail and logical reasoning. We are happy with the decision.
Mr.Knows: Give me a few minutes while I apply for my 10183rd patent on “A Systematic Method to Resolve conflicts in Technological Decisions between Mutually stabbing teams”
Mr.Droppedfrom: OK! Great let us start working on this from tonight, inform your near and dears that you will be missing from the face of the planet for a few months to work on this prestigious, world shattering innovative project!
Team A & B: Claps……
Meanwhile Mr.Knows: Happy to share with you all that I have been granted my 10183rd patent on “A Systematic Method to Resolve conflicts in Technological Decisions between Mutually Stabbing teams”
Mr.Droppedfrom: I have only request to you Mr.Knows and the entire team! Just ensure we use all the 69543 offerings/products that we provide as part of our Yangtze Cobweb services
Date is 01/01/2021, a year has passed on and both Thirst and Yangtze are ready with their pilots.
All students are given mobile phones to receive alerts, Mad & Hundred are eagerly awaiting the first wave of alerts for the past 5 hours to no avail.
They then call their production support to identify an issue with a firewall configuration due to which all notifications generated by the system are blocked from reaching the student mobile phones.
They resolve the issue at evening and all of a sudden the entire school is resonating with mobile phone alerts where each student is receiving 100s of alert messages. There is chaos and headache all over. The senior overengineers analyse the root cause to find that they have implemented a smart retry mechanism which will keep re-sending alerts every N minutes until a positive response is received and due to the firewall issue this SMART retry system re-sent 100s of notifications for each student. Finally they had to disable the SMART system to avoid flooding of notifications.
Students start complaining that the app is showing alerts at random intervals even when they are not thirsty or not showing alerts when they are thirsty.
Mad & Hundred blast their deep learning scientists and ask to remedy this, they find that the data collected for 3 months was during rainy and winter seasons and it is summer now so the models are inaccurate.
They add season or time of the year as another feature to predict thirst.
Students and teachers still complain about inaccuracies and then the overengineers realise the data collected was from schools on hill stations while the pilot is being done at a school situated on hot plains.
Mad & Hundred quickly deploy a team of overengineers to integrate with the National Weather Service and fetch temperature, pressure, humidity etc every minute for each school to tweak and predict thirst levels. Junior overengineers become mesmerized at this awesome idea and start worshipping Mad & Hundred.
Teachers observe that kids have figured out how to install games on the mobile devices given to them, they have installed a game named BLUBG developed using VR and AR where they can take a snap of anyone and emulate scenarios/worlds to torture and kill them using creative methods. Most of the students are found to be using photographs of their teachers. This creates a huge furore among teachers and they complain to Thirst Inc.
Mad & Hundred hire a Distinguished Principal Security Analyst to identify ways to block installation of other apps from the mobile devices and deploy new software. Kids being smart find ways to circumvent the blocks and still keep killing their teachers after elaborate torture in their VR generated worlds.
Mad & Hundred vow to fix this once for all and decide to write their own mobile OS which will support only one application for receiving thirst alerts! Thus is born ThirstOS or called tOS in short.
After having spent nearly 8 months and a team of 20 overengineers Mad & Hundred deploy their new tOS in the mobiles of students to prevent them from torturing and killing their teachers on imaginary VR worlds.
Mad & Hundred are worried as they have already spent 160 million dollars on Fizzure cloud and still trying to figure out what costed them so much, they hire Mr.Cloud Billing who is an expert in Cloud platform billing algorithms. He writes script to analyse the gigabytes of billing data using ML and report the anomaly but they soon run out of funds to even employ Cloud billing!
Yangtze engineers land with a set of devices for students on school. They make students stand in a line and prick each student’s throat to embed the thirst sensors. Students on seeing some of their friends crying and slightly bleeding try to run away but are caught and forcefully pricked to embed sensors on their throat.
Some students complain of pain while some students vomit due to the sudden tinge caused in their throat because of the alerts. Most of the students take sick leave due to pain and vomit in subsequent days. School staff complain that it is not viable and call off the pilot temporarily.
Yangtze engineers return with pride and a new sticky sensor which can be patched on the students throats without having to prick and can detect thirst from skin. They call it a revolution in thirst detection and their Senior Principal Distinguished Overnengineer has already filed his 18546th patent with this technology.
After having used the patch sensor for 3 months students start complaining about irritation and burning sensation, some students say they feel thirsty too frequently only because of this patch and they drink too much water to take too much bile breaks in the day. Parents sue Yangtze for because they tried to stress their children’s kidneys by overworking them.
Yangtze overengineers again resolve to fix this by completely eliminating the need for a sensor
Yangtze engineers come back after some more months with an idea of using camera and image recognition to detect thirsty faces and alert students. Students will have just have to tie a band on their hands for vibration alert.
Thirsty face detection fails miserably since it was developed in a few weeks and marks dark skinned people less thirsty always, biased towards giving water for white skinned people and girls even if they are not thirsty, meanwhile students play tricks like keeping their faces close, applying make up etc to fool the system and generate fake alerts.
Without an accurate solution in hand Yangtze overengineers are in a state of failure, despair and burnout. Some of them escape the office premises and run away to their families with hope of recovery and inner peace!
500 million dollars and 1 year later still pilots are in evaluation phase with no improvements in sight for daily water consumption of students.
School teachers and parents complain to the minister of education that their normal life is disrupted because of this pilot initiative.
Minister of education meets Mr.Complex at complex’s office where he learns from Mr. Complex’s office assistant that a 3rd proposal was received and trashed even without opening the email. He tries to retrieve the email with the help of the system dictator. The email reads as follows:
Respected CTO - Ministry of Education,
We have been making children of our school drink water every 2 hours by ringing the bell
thrice every 2 hours which means they have to drink water if they feel thirsty at their desks.
This has worked well for us for the past many years.
Please implement the same on all schools across the country. Thank you.
- Retired Principal
On seeing this Mr.Complex laughts it off and raises the following concerns:
On hearing all these the Minister fires Mr.Complex for wasting 1 year and 500 million dollars. He sends him off with a severance package of another 500 million dollars as per the initial agreement on his appointment.
He then passes a GO (Government Order) to enforce all schools to ring 3 bells every few hours to remind kids to drink water and it worked to improve the state in a few weeks!
– END –
Disclaimer:
#1 This is not an attempt to romanticize old times without tech and spread hatred against tech, this satire is merely an attempt against over doing/over using tech where it is not needed at all. I believe tech has transformed lot of lives and will continue do so, all we need is some restraint IMO.
#2 Just because I have written this does not mean I have not committed any blunder or overdoing tech or over engineering in my career. I am also complicit like anyone else in the industry for all the complexities we encounter and I do not claim any higher moral/ethical ground to have made fun of this, in a way I am making fun of myself as well
References & Acknowledgements: