Depression in the IT Industry

I was terribly disturbed by the news of the Pune-based techie who committed suicide due to work pressure. It is no less important news than the suicides of farmers in India. 

Software is all about passion - tickling our brains with new innovative ideas. It's really surprising to know how a worker in this field can ever feel depressed. 

I think we need to seek the answers to this dilemma from within the organization. 

We can easily assume that usually, people with an analytical bent of mind come to this IT industry. However, the path to becoming a good IT professional is full of bumpy rides.

I think the first and foremost thing for a software engineer is to seek the answer not only from the "How's" point of view but also from the "Why's" point of view. 

We must encourage the inquisition that a newbie in the industry comes with. We must encourage software engineers to go beyond the routine work and seek something extra. That extra thing varies from person to person. Moreover, we must create an environment where a software engineer should feel proud of the organization he works for. Without that emotional bondage, it's difficult to get the motivation to work on any sort of innovative work with all our body, mind, soul, and even senses directed to it. And it's difficult to create such environments without Gurus. It's all about mind games. I think we should stop thinking that salary and perks are the only factors to be doled out to motivate people. This way we can create some managers and workers, but not leaders and innovators.

I will tell you the reason for such a mindset to decipher Why...

When I joined NOKIA, India - I got a chance to see a different C++ dev framework - the S60 platform for Symbian.

There I found about the new concept called two-phase construction of a UDT

Everybody said - this is the norm - but nobody tried to decipher why this is the norm

So, my Why was nurtured to figure out this

And, I got it

When Symbian became a popular mobile OS, the mobile device had limited memory. And there was no template at that time to maintain smart pointer or auto pointer to tackle exceptions while constructing a large object

So, there was the answer

The two-phase construction was carefully introduced in the Symbian framework just to avoid the exception during the construction of large objects in the Symbian OS

I worked with NOKIA in 2007 and in 2008 I got the answer in Japan. I started studying Boost's library to answer such Whys' of C++ right inside Japan and then voila, the Boost library was introduced in the C++ standard library in the release of a brand new C++ in the year 2009.

Here goes a write-up by another sage that mentioned Swamiji's clarion call for the "Why's"

In search of Why...