Humour

The alley cats

T A Balasubramanian asks who will bell the cats possessing nine lives

“At last, we seem to be down to a handful of the least wanted among the breed,” says Gulabi Manpowa, the indefatigable HR Head of Baffle Corporation, looking at the last few pages in a thick file.

The contents of the file have been assembled by your fastidious and fanciful project team leader, Brooke Bond, and it has been left to you, Papyrus Bytewala, the wary and watchful CIO of Baffle, to wrestle artfully with what are called ‘people requirement projections’ in corporate speak.

“What Brooke has here,” says Manpowa, “is what he calls the Alley Cats, or in some places, the Undesirables. Going by the flourishes, you would think this is a script for a Hollywood movie, Papyrus.”

“Oh, I can well imagine Brooke sitting at his desk dreaming up a movie. He has all the skills, but here we are dealing with his .artistic spin on software engineers and their traits, rather than family members of a gangster mafia clan. So what does he have in his closing chapters?”

“He starts off with The Dummy. ‘This is the dimmest creature in the lot, and often so utterly dumb that it does not know it. We need to keep a wary eye out for these non-starters. We seem to have inherited a few of them. However, under no circumstances should they be hired.’

“It happens by accident,” you say. “I do not have anything against those who may not be gifted in the upper deck, but you must understand that they just do not have a useful role in a profession that needs constant mental refreshment and a lot of discipline. A Dummy can be tolerated as long as the roots of dummyhood are not beyond human redemption. We sometimes use them for testing programs, since they are often good at doing repetitive tasks like seeking and finding bugs.”

“Well, whatever your view on dummies, many of the IT programming kids I see do struggle a lot in the beginning, Papyrus. Do you want to avoid all these, too? Maybe they could become performing cats with the right ring master.”

“Hmm, I see what you mean, Gulabi. In my experience, there is a clear difference between the Improvable Dummy and the Unrecoverable Dummy. In fact, there is an entire industry of publishing devoted to the average Improvable Dummy, if you notice. They have this line of easy-to-chew books written especially for Dummies—‘Programming for Dummies,’ ‘Java for Dummies’ and so on—and these are fairly easy to digest, provided the cat in question is amenable to such feeding.”

“Do you think I could learn a little about programming from one of the Dummy books, Papyrus? Not that I want to lay claim to being a Dummy, do you understand?”

“I do. Well, I suppose you could learn something about programming, considering that you do interact a lot with me and my real-world cats—some of them, as Brooke takes pains to point out—who ought not to be programmers in his team in the first place.  With the right Dummy book, you could even pump a little BASIC in your vocabulary. If you look at any college computer science or programming course, and you will notice that almost every one of them starts off with BASIC—usually Visual Basic, which is even easier in my opinion. You can get an earful on Boolean expressions, arrays, looping statements and subroutines and maybe even get up and running with simple programs all by yourself.”

“I do not want to get that deep into it …”

“Come on, think about it. From there on, the sky is the limit, Gulabi,” you say, warming up to the theme, “You could dive into other programming books with more arcane topics or higher-level languages. Then, if your curiosity is piqued, you may decide to get into programming full-time, who knows? You could take Java courses, or C plus plus. I can imagine you delving into Python, talking glibly of Django and Zope—and then …”

“Hey, hey. Go easy, Papyrus … that’s way beyond me. All I am interested in is in being able to converse in your own jargon without appearing to be a complete dunce. I know you need Improvable Dummies desperately in your herd, but I would rather stay focused on my HR home turf, if you don’t mind.”

“Ah, pardon my enthusiasm,” you say. “But we do have a place for the Improvables, the aspiring Alley Cats—where the challenge is to sweep aside ignorance. What we do not have, however, is the space to manage plain stupidity—which is the signature style of the Unrecoverable Dummies. We all suffer from the constant disconnect that occurs between the computer and the brain that makes it perform. If writing programs did not require some intelligence, everyone would be doing it, right? So we watch out and make sure that we have manageable ignorance on our plate, and not stupidity. Still, we do inherit some of these specimens who arrive by chance at our gate. Business heads from other lines sometimes put the group together from Unrecoverable Dummies who had presented themselves as programmers and stayed on, unquestioned, in the herd.”

“I leave the pruning of Dummies to you, Papyrus, bowing to your superior wisdom,” says Gulabi, dramatically gesturing with a wave of her hand.

“So be it. And what else do we glean from Brooke’s epic?”

“The Gourmet Chef, he says. Listen to his description. ‘A love of cooking up software is the dominant trait with this breed. Imagine a bit of the Mechanic, the Slacker, and a not-so-gifted Picasso combined, but with the ingredients all out of proportion. The result is a smorgasbord of coding styles and add-on condiments, and a general disorderliness of preparing code. The dish may look appetizing, but one bite and you know you are about to choke.’”

“Ah, we run a restaurant with nothing but experimental cooks, Gulabi. The Gourmet Chef, indeed is a wayward cat. We send this mixed-up programmer to a cooking class and it is up to us to make sure that he does not let the underlying Slacker take charge of what appears on the surface to be talent. This mongrel is seldom seen in a pure form, but I am aware of it because the trait shows up in a number of coding styles that we are destined to suffer in our projects.”

“So what do we do with the Gourmet Chefs?”

“Well, if they cannot buckle down and conform to Baffle’s corporate standards, such as they are, I have a full-time job on my hands just trying to figure out what dastardly concoction they have brewed, and how best to maintain their code. Brooke’s role as a code nanny will be important to rehabilitate them.”

“Be ready to take the heat or get out of the kitchen, eh, Papyrus?”

“Your metaphors make it all seem so easy, Gulabi.”

“And I do have a few more, Papyrus. Now that we have all the cats out of the bag, and all of them with nine lives and more, do tell me, who is to bell them?”

“I have no clue. But I wish I had eyes that could see in the dark, Gulabi,” you groan.