Nothing is going to happen

I'm a big fan of LOST. The last summer when I was doing some remote work back in Guadalajara, in the midst of a routine of changing coffee shops everyday in order to not get bored, one time I decided to spend some time at my house instead, and I rented the first 5 seasons of the show.

I was so hooked that I think I saw the whole thing in less than 2 weeks.

I really can't stop recommending it. It is that good.

(Now, I don't believe in spoilers. In fact I got the idea of watching LOST after first watching the ending which was running live or something. So if you ever thought about watching the show and think that spoilers could ruin your experience blah blah, maybe you should stop reading by now.)

In one of the most climactic scenes from the show, all the main characters are finally on the submarine that will take them out of the island. Everything was pretty ok until one of the main characters notices that he is carrying a bomb on his backpack, put inside by the main bad guy. The bomb is going to explode within 5 minutes.

The submarine is pretty deep in by now, so there is no chance of resurfacing the submarine and throw the bomb. The guys start inspecting the bomb to look if they can deactivate it, and it looks like there is a method to do it but way too risky. Suddenly, Jack stops everyone from trying to deactivate the bomb:

- Sawyer: What the hell are you doing doc?

- Jack: Nothing is going to happen.

- Sawyer: What?

- Jack: Do not pull those wires out, we are ok.

- Sawyer: If I do not pull this wires, this sub is going to blow up!

- Jack: No, it is not! Locke (the bad guy) can't kill us.

Everything he has done is to get us here. He is trying to get us to kill each other.

James, we are going to be ok. You just have to trust me.

- Sawyer: Sorry doc, I don't.

Then Sawyer pulls the wires out, for a moment the timer stops. Then it starts going faster, before exploding, sinking the sub and pretty much killing everyone...

I though that this was a really cool scene. Basically, Jack was right. The island would not have let them die by in the hands of the bad guy, but ego and fear could let them kill themselves, so the bad guy gave them a bomb. Once Sawyer pulled the wires, it was not longer the action from Locke, but Sawyer's ego who made the decision, so ドッカ~ン!

                             * * *

I went to the dentist the other day to get my wisdom teeth removed. I was supposed to do it in Mexico before coming to Japan, but I got sick the day of the appointment so I couldn't do it. My two wisdom teeth from the bottom were rotated 90 degrees, so the move was going to be more problematic but doable and nothing else.

At least that's what I was told in Guadalajara. Here in Japan, the approach was different. My dentist in Japan thought it was a bad idead to pull them out because there was a minimal amount of risk and his approach was "Safety First!", 安全第一。

When the earthquake hit Tokyo, the building started shaking like crazy, but things ended up being fine. I would like to think that it was this "Safety First" thing which made the buildings able to take the hit and leave most of the city intact. Nice.

                             * * *

It has been 3 months already since I was assigned to my department in DU. Given that the previous 2 months we wasted them doing programming Hello Worlds instead of actually doing something productive, I was not expecting to get a lot of done when I got into the department.

Soon after I joined I had to decide on what were my objectives, of course with the advice of my mentor (he is awesome in his own way by the way, he is in Korea right now on vacation), and it turned out that I was not going to do any programming during the first month.

Funny thing, when I was back in Mexico other classmates that were interns at lame companies like IBM, Flextronics, Oracle, etc... had warned me "Why do you even program!? We do not have to do that. We just have to tell the technical, less studied programmers to do it". I was totally against this mentality back then and it turns out that here, well, whatever...

つづきまして…

My objective during the first month was of understanding. I do not know how many times I've been in LunchMTG with a Japanese and have her told me: "You have to put meaning into the things that you do, even if they are very boring. You have to put meaning into them so that you can do it and grow according to your career path" or something like that.

So I started participating in meetings, learning how to use the 2003 state-of-the-art web application that is being developed (in PHP yikes), doing the Daily Report everyday, etc... trying to find the pattern of why would they want to do things that way.

By the way, all this time my coworkers have been really good to me, taking me to a Welcome Lunch at a nearby hotel and Welcome Party at a Mexican restaurant.

Furthermore, my mentor gives me a 70% cacao chocolate everyday.

One day I had to do my self-introduction presentation in front of the department. My manager told me to base from the presentations from my other coworkers to do mine.

I started looking at the self-introductions, at the picture of their kids, wives, family...

This got me thinking. Before this, I used to wonder all the time, why do they use the slowest software development methodology of all, waterfall, one that has been tested upon time to create software of the lowest quality? Why do they use terms like man month, given that it has been understood that such notion is ideal to make any development process slower? Why slow? Why wouldn't they want to be more productive?

Wasn't that what happened to Yahoo? http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Productive... Maybe the problem was my notion of "productive work". I used to think that productive work is that which creates new wealth to the world. As an experiment, I removed this notion of "productive work" from my head. I twisted the definition of work to mean: "that which is necessary so that everything can coexist in harmony".

In any case, nowadays for a programmer to grow it is by far more important to work on something open source and stay up to date, than whatever evidence you leave inside of a company, so as long as they are paying for my time I do not have a problem with it. I can do the important stuff later.

Furthermore, I do not see any difference between working on a big company and living with your parents. You are just sheltering under the arms of somebody else, and sooner or later you have to learn how to make money on your own. Some people find this scary somehow, which I do not understand either.

Thus, I would no longer care about doing "productive work", but instead those tasks that would make everything coexist in harmony. It is not about winning, but about harmony. Oh! And about incremental changes to land in local optima. So far the results have been pretty good I'd think! I'm looking forward to Rakuten someday go to Mexico and teach the art of harmonic incremental changes to create sustainable businesses.

Maybe it is the case that the slower things are, it means more jobs for more people somehow. And given that most Japanese new graduates do not have any skills, this could be a good thing.

I do not know whether it is a myth or not, but it is said that Japanese companies do not fire people. Compare this to what happened at Nokia not so long ago when that ex-Microsoft Stephen Elop became the new CEO of Nokia and decided to have 2000 employees let go because their services were no longer required to develop Symbian. Greed is good.

Finland was outraged. Even the Finnish government was going to investigate the move.

                             * * *

"What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to save a solid-gold baby?

Maybe we'll never know. - Jack Handey"