My Thoughts !

One fine morning a baby mouse was walking around the house. It was spotted by a cat and after a small chase, the mouse was cornered. The cat slowly waked towards the mouse. It heard a barking sound. Sensing the presence of a dog it ran away. Out came the mama mouse and told the baby mouse, 'And my kid, thats the power of knowing another language'.

Cut.

I was in Gangarams last weekend. After finding the books I needed, I went to the billing counter. A guy who was next to me in the queue asked me, 'which college?'. I thought,may be because of my funny T-Shirt, he might have asked that way. I said, 'I'm working'. 'How long?'. 'More than 3 years'. He was surprised. 'One of your book is in Java and the other is in C++. Its hard to find people working in those two technologies together for 3 years'. I smiled and didn't explain. I see this thing with so many people. During college people would learn a lot of things and try out various things. You ask a question in C++/Java/Networks/OS you would get an answer. But once they get into the industry, they become much focussed. They fail to look at whats happening in other languages/technologies. People work in j2ee, don't even turn at .net; people in .net never look at mainframes; people in mainframes hardly think about C++... Its rare to find people like me, who peep into the neighbourhood and have a look at whats going on there. Or perhaps its one of my strenghts I think. I started my career with Corba in C++. Then dived into J2ee - worked in the EJB layer. The next project was purely JSP based. Again I shifted to .NET and webservices. When I decided to quit, I had offers with work varying from core C++ & data structures to reporting architecture. Finally I shifted to business integration domain - mainly on j2ee and partly on all other enterprise stuff like bpel, rosettanet, mainframes, etc. Knowing the other technologies and learning them never hurts. Rather they come in handy at many times. Although specialization in something is really good, it looks good on your resume to have knowledge in various languages and techonologies.

Cut.

One of my roommates during UG is from Kerala. In PG the roommate is from Andra. After college, I moved to Bangalore, which is in Karnataka. I had very good oppurtunities to learn Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada, I never took any care to learn any languages. As a result I can understand only English and Tamil. Not knowing any other languages is a pain sometimes. Now that I'm living in an area where around 70% of the people are Keralities and most of my teammates are from Andra, I've decided to learn a little bit of those languages.

Cut.

Pack up!