The man who reads fiction

 Is right here. 

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear? - The New York Times

Last few books read

1. To Kill A Mockingbird
2. James - Percival Everett
3. Fierce Pajamas - Short stories from the New Yorker. Had a gem of a story about Gandhi playing baseball.
4. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

Non-fiction books read

1. Keeping the Faith - Brenda Wineapple
2. Caste - Isabel Wilkerson (It's been a few years though...)

Citizenship

The US Government policy on citizenship: babies born in the US are not citizens, but citizenship is for sale for $5M.

Who is more "invested" in the wellbeing of the country? A person who switches loyalties for money or a person who is born and raised in the country?

And what exactly is citizenship - a privilege granting certificate? We'll care for you if you're one of us, but we'll dehumanize you if you're born across this line in the sand that was drawn yesterday?

Let Denmark move its citizens from Greenland back, while Greenland is declared "visa free." A story is forming. It'll be named Antarctica.

The strikingly clear case for remote work

There is a plethora of weak CEOs, who abjectly surrendered on DEI, tariffs, and Executive Orders, but are happy to bully their employees under the guise of corporate culture.

Culture comes from values.

If the country is run by yes-men, there's no reason to believe that companies aren't. If values are driven by politics, then they become mere comments, not metrics for execution. Change in an organization is de facto driven from the top down, so it's imperative for the boardroom whisperers, the agents of change, the provocateurs and really anyone who feels the need to impact workplace policies as a proxy for directly changing society, to pose the following questions to decision-makers:

• Can you create a culture of innovation if you espouse conformity?
• Are "Human Rights" policies merely wall decor or is every contract evaluated based on the policy?
• What is truly of long term value to the shareholders - short term government contracts or being able to operate in a society run by laws?
• Do you want to leave behind a legacy or exit ignominiously?

But these are big questions. The obsequious industry titans masquerading as leaders will likely be too involved in the next quarterly update to find time to think about them. So here's a small step they can take that will trigger bigger changes:

Remote work.

• Remove all obstacles to remote work.
• Limit it within the country - this enables the company to follow all local laws around employment. An employee in Idaho must be able to work for a company in California. A contractor in Maryland should be able to work for a company in Mississippi.
• Commit to enabling remote work based long-term contracts / employment, just like one would commit to a local employee.
• Host regular in-person meetings for the remote employee to come meet with the team, even if it is at employee cost.

Here are the motivations behind it:

• Spread "knowledge work" beyond the coasts and cities
• Enable employees to buy a house and raise a family without getting into debt that comes from high home prices in dense cities

Employees can do their part to ensure that the employer not only gains value but is comfortable enabling the remote work:

• Instant availability during work hours
• Meetings on? Cameras on!
• Weekly reports on goals and accomplishments

I'd like to close with a salute to San Diego's very own Esperanza Gomez.

 

The Go language creator mindset

1. Let's take C and move the argument type to the back, because pointers to pointers are cumbersome to read. This makes the syntax of a defined array: var primes := [6] int {2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13}
2. While we're moving things to the back, let's also move the function's return arguments to the back too. That way, all those C programmers start to appreciate their dyslexia.
3. Let's have pointers, but we're all about safety, so no pointer arithmetic.
4. Since we don't have pointers to arrays, let's create slices. You update one slice and it updates all the slices of that array! But hey, no pointer arithmetic, so we're preventing programmer created bugs.
5. And we want all the goodies from a Python list, so let's make slices dynamically sized. For some reason, we still need arrays.
6. And we love Python so much, we'll add the ability to iterate over a range and have a dictionary type called map.
7. Let's rename typedef as type, because we save 3 characters and we're all about efficiency. But let's leave struct in, we're not just changing keywords for the sake of it are we? And struct members are accessed  with a dot even when the variable is a pointer to a structure. Let's add arbitrary syntax since we're just making things up a this point.
8. And let's get rid of breaks in case blocks, because we're all about efficiency.
9. While we're at it, let's introduce a "naked" return that magically returns all the named arguments. Readability guy took the day off when this was added.
10. And let's start time 0 on the day Go went open source - acknowledging the momentous day that must take precedence over UNIX's, Python's and every other major language's well established start time.
11. Let's import "import" from Python, but let's add the option to import multiple modules using a parenthesis, because ... efficiency.
12. Let's take the package concept from npm, but let's add our nifty touch to it by having a "tidy" keyword to updated dependencies.
13. Let's solve those pesky multiple returns in a function by adding a defer keyword, because readability is important, but not that important. And did the readability dude resign or something?
14. The parenthesis around for need to be DOGE'ed too - programmers can save a whole of 3 seconds per day skipping the typing. It's OK to spend a few minutes deciphering the for intent - makes you understand the code better. And while was such a burden on C programmers - let's just get rid of it. After all, what could while do that for couldn't?
15. C++ is admittedly a complex language. Let's avoid classes in Go and instead add a receiver that lets one add a method to a type. And let's make the syntax: func <pointer to receiver> <method> (<method arguments>) <return type>. See, the syntax in #1 now makes total sense. 
16. Let's have a standard function called len to get the length of an array but let's not have another standard function to convert an array to a string be called str - we'll call it string.
17. And breaking with the random logic that drives the rest of the syntax, let's constrain the receiver restricted to the same file as the method. The "pointer to receiver" part is important, without which the method behaves as a function that operates on a value and not the reference.

But Go isn't alone in creating garbage syntax. Here's some incomprehensible JS code:

net.createServer(stream => {
  stream = toPull.duplex(stream) //turn into a pull-stream
  //connect the output of the net stream to the muxrpc stream
  //and then output of the muxrpc stream to the net stream
  pull(stream, server.stream, stream)
}).listen(8080)
//connect a pair of duplex streams together.

const stream = toPull.duplex(net.connect(8080))

pull(stream, client.stream, stream)

Let's deconstruct:

First, the problems as seen by a C programmer

1. stream is used before it's defined
2. The anonymous arrow function takes one argument stream and returns a closure that uses and initializes the same argument, stream.
3. The function pull has 3 arguments out of which 2 are the same. This is reasonable - if stream is input at one spot and output at another. 

Here's why it works:

1. The function call inside createServer is a CALLBACK. It is not immediately called.
2. The listen on port 8080 starts immediately.
3. Once the client connects using toPull.duplex, the server calls the function inside createServer with stream being initialized to the server side of the connected stream.

Callbacks are the bane of programming. ISRs are perhaps the only legitimate usage for callback constructs. For all other purposes, I would recommend using OS IPC primitives for asynchronous code.

Well, we started with Go and ended up with callbacks. Clearly, I got into the Go spirit of things too deeply.

My Uncle's Magical Printer

My uncle's health and happiness was the envy of the extended family and neighbors. Growing up, I would wonder how one man could be clever, strong, funny and creative! The kids would sing the songs he'd write, the grown ups would watch the movies he was in, and on and on.

It turns out, the reason he was so happy, all the time, is that he had a magical printer at home. It printed crisp color photos and laser sharp documents like any other printer, but the real magic was when it printed green. Whenever he needed to buy something, he'd simply make up a number, print the number in green and that's it - he could use that printed sheet to buy anything in the world!

Over time, I could see that age was catching up with my uncle. He had become less dashing, his steps appeared unsure, his machismo was lost. He was softer, kinder and sadly weaker.  But now, he's passed on and I have inherited the printer. I start to examine it closely. From external appearances, the printer doesn't seem magical. It's designed by regular Americans - not just coastal elites. It needs an electrical motor, that's made in Germany. It needs ink that I get from Japan. The paper itself comes from Canada. The software is written in India. And the whole thing is assembled in China. Pretty much like any other printer I can buy from BestBuy. The exceptional thing about my printer is that I pay for all that it needs, and all that I need, with the same printed sheet that comes from my printer! That's some real magic right there.

Now you might say that such perpetual machines always turn out to be fake in the mechanical world. But this is different in a very subtle way. This printer is powered by a source that's endless. Well, it's lasted for approximately 250 years already! Sure, the printer has been abused by past generations and its power source has dimmed and flared, but so far it has all held up reasonably well.

Now you might say, "What's the catch? Why let the world on to this secret? Just let the good times roll."

Well, here's the problem, I don't feel good. People don't laugh at my jokes like they used to when my uncle cracked them, they don't ask my opinion on any movie they're making, I'm mocked and ignored all the time, ... I think that if I fix the printer, I'll restore myself to my uncle's past glory. 

Today, every time I print, I need to follow the user manual. This 4,543 word-long manual doesn't have simple steps like "insert paper in tray and hit the print button." Instead, it has complex instructions that amount to getting permission from regular people. Not directly - I talk to their reps, who're already in my pocket, but still... I have to write down exactly why I need to print, provide details of how the money will get spent, blah, blah, blah... All this due process really slows me down. Without that permission slip, somehow the magical green sheet stops working. It's as if the entire world needs to know that this pesky crowd, albeit 300 million strong, has endorsed this sheet. It's time to make changes, big changes.

First, I'm going to buy Bitcoin with the green sheets that still work. Since I don't understand money and a whole lot of people think Bitcoin is going up, it seems like a good way to diversify my holdings. Then, and this is my most genius idea, I'm going to stop swapping my magical green sheets for finished goods and material from countries around the world. I'll force them to buy goods that I make, because I make the best stuff. As for all those pesky rules about getting permission - I'm going to ignore them and let my friends take over the printer while I own it. Let's see how it goes. See you in 2028, or 2032, or never. Heh, heh.

Intel on the brink?

 It is sad to see a technological stalwart like Intel reduced to the state that it is now - directionless and hiving off parts of itself to keep either the process or the processor at its core alive. Taking a look at its board of directors, 6 of its 12 directors have been on the board for less than 5 years. Of the 5 that have been with the company long enough to be responsible for its direction, one has antecedents from VC land, two are from the medical devices field, one is a dean at Berkeley and one is from Boeing. The last one is the CEO. While they all seem distinguished on paper, let's parse through them a little bit. 

Medical devices are embedded systems - with microcontrollers, tiny memories and proprietary OSes. Such a market is best served by NXP / ST-Micro. Someone with that experience may not be the best to set the direction for high performance computing, ADAS or FPGAs. The VC guy seems to have led a tiny, nondescript SW company before joining Intel's board of directors. The Boeing guy is a finance guy and his experience should be valuable at these times, unless his time did not overlap with Alan Mullaly. The dean seems to be a great asset to provide direction to the process side of the business. Of all the directors, it seems only one - Barbara Novick appears to have exactly what the company needs. Her company (BlackRock) is one of the main investors and she's herself eminently qualified.

The rest of the board of directors' careers or income do not depend on the company's performance, so the headless meandering of Intel comes as no surprise to me. Others have written about this before [1, 2].  

I'm wondering how INTC's other institutional investor Goliaths like Vanguard, State Street Corp, etc. will handle this situation since there's no public evidence of a proxy fight. It appears as if institutional investors were hardly concerned about Intel's stock performance all these years. The HBR says [3] that only 17% of board changes happen with proxy fights (dated data), and that too when hedge funds are involved, so I think this slate of directors will be the ones driving the company aground.

One might say that a well functioning board needs to have independent directors. There's plenty of evidence available to counter that. And who has the time to make a well researched argument when all my searches will have algorithmic responses that strengthen my bias anyway.

I firmly believe that a new corporate structure for companies is needed. Here are my suggestions that still stay true to the legal requirement that the board acts in the best interests of the investors:

1. The board must be made of representatives of the key investors. Investors must commit to hold their shares for 5 years to discourage short-sales.
2. The 5 year period for major shareholders should be offset by 1 year, to emulate a bond-ladder kind of approach.
3. Market-wide events must also have repercussions in terms of a change of the board-of-directors.
4. The board must attend employee all-hands meetings and answer open-mic questions.
5. Layoffs must have consequences - at both the board of directors level and at the company executive management level. This will discourage hire-and-fire and encourage more investment in employee training.
6. An employee representative must be at every board of directors' meeting. This could be a rotating position at a certain title so that the board hears a diversity of voices.

I wish Intel all the best in its restructure efforts and hope it emerges stronger. A la https://x.com/michaelharriot, this post isn't about Intel.

 Further reading

1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/go-hard-home-why-board-directors-need-have-skin-game-kylie-hammond/

2. https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/european-boards-have-too-little-skin-game-2024-07-17/

3. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/06/11/the-directors-guide-to-shareholder-activism

Protestors

 सलाम उन लोगों को, जिनहोने उठाई अपनी आवाज़

सड़क पर आए और नारे लगाए बिना कोई आराम

COP28 दुबई तक पहुँची लिसिप्रिय कंगूजाम

बोली बंध करो जीवाशम ईंधन, १२ वर्षीय जाँबाज ।

डरे हुए लोग

जो मूह नहीं खोल पाते, वह क्या चलाएँगे ज़बान

वह उखड़ेगा परचम, जिसने बेच दिया हो ईमान?

जो सीधे खड़े नहीं हो पाते, वह कैसे तानेंगे सीना

इन लोगों के लिए, झुकने का नाम ही है जीना

डरे हुए लोगों की आँखें मीची है मंदिर के बाहर

लड़ते रहो बे उम्र उमर, शीघ्र समाप्त हो यह ग्रीष्म लहर ।  

In my most ideal life, I'd

1. be a manager
• of a Premier League football team.
2. be a hooligan,
• a local at any one of the English football clubs, know all the songs, and travel with the team.
3. bat, chew gum and not wear a helmet,
• like Vivian Richards.
4. get cast as the youngest son. 
• Michael Corleone.
5. not be named Kuntal.
• Bond, James Bond.
6. like mushy tomatoes, 
• but only when avoiding bulls in La Tomatina in Buñol.
7. have a milk mustache
• and live on a quiet farm in the Italian Alps.
8. run
• and bike and swim like a triathlete.
9. work remotely
• on clever things on an Apple laptop.
10. fight injustice 
• by telling bullies over the phone "you'll hear from my lawyer."
11. have no quiet celebrations
• and do dandiya on every Indian festival.
12. say "kai po chhe" every Sankrant,
• when flying a kite strung with glass-covered manja.
13. be witty
• and get published in The New Yorker as a short story writer.
14. be a purveyor of fine writing instruments
• and write cursive as neatly as my dad would, with a smooth Hero fountain pen.

Standardized tests, affirmative action and government jobs

 The elite colleges of the country have deviously contrived to keep their admission policies beyond scrutiny by lumping standardized tests with affirmative action. They are, in fact, separate and you can have both in place. Affirmative action must continue and be given a growing proportion of admission spots until there is meaningful race equality. For all the spots, standardized tests must be one of the inputs. The final admitted class must mirror the racial distribution of scores on standardized tests.

Let's work through some examples of the proposal, in parts

Growing proportion of affirmative action spots

1. Say the percentage of affirmative action spots is 5% today. In the next 5 years, it must change to 50%. 5 years because corrective action requires immediacy, otherwise it becomes like the Brown vs the Education board - the students who petitioned did not benefit from desegregation. 50% because meaningful change requires substantial numbers.

Standardized tests

1. From personal experience with GRE, and my son's experience with SAT, I can say that you can prepare very well just with free material. I studied from an old book that was used by my friend and my son studied off the ETS website. ETS is the administrator for the tests. Public libraries have test prep books.
2. Within the affirmative action spots, students with the highest scores should be preferred.
3. Say the race distribution of the highest quartile is: 30% A, 30% B, 40% C, then even after all factors such as extracurricular activities have been considered, the final admitted class should have the same distribution of races.

Government jobs

Finally, the government can do more in ensuring that diversity of thought is engrained in every institution of the country. There is no reason that the Secretary of the Treasury comes from Goldman Sachs, the head of the Federal Reserve comes from Harvard and the Supreme Court Judges come from Yale.

I think socially aware companies such as Apple should withdraw its Amicus Brief here:

Documents Archive - Harvard Admissions Lawsuit

legal_-_filing_-_200521_-_businesses_-_2020.05.21-16_brief_for_amici_curiae_amgen_et_al_.pdf (harvard.edu)

Thums Up and Misplaced Patriotism

It must have been some time in the 1990s in India when the government allowed Coca Cola back into India. In my patriotic zeal propelled by teenage absolutism, I decided I would only drink the Indian brand "Thums Up," a cola that had a similar color and flavor as Coke. Thums Up was made by a company called Parle Products and it was bottled at a factory not far from our flat. Within days, I read the announcement that the owner of Parle Products had sold his company to Coca Cola. He had looked out for his own financial interest, and made me realize how naive I was to not think of mine. 

I thought of this story because of the convergence of a few events:

1. The CHIPS for America Act
2. India awarding contracts for trains to European Alstom
3. Honor's withdrawal from India

The CHIPS act has laudable goals to ensure that the US does not lose competitiveness in semiconductors. As long as the equipment to make semiconductors, the tools to design them, and the latest designs to use that equipment all originate from the US, then does it really matter where the actual chip gets manufactured in volume? The geographical closeness of Taiwan and South Korea to China and China's growing aggression in the Taiwan Strait seem to be the key reasons why this act was needed to secure continued supply of semiconductors. One can fully expect a future where the most advanced chips will be made in China, with our without American help. At that point, we'd just be artificially limiting our own access to lifestyle improvements made with Chinese technology.

Now let's take the case of the gradual build out of slow "metro railways" in India and the uncertainty of the rollout of the first "bullet train." By picking Alstom and Japan based companies, the Government of India is very likely penalizing the Indian populace by paying more for technology that's been most widely deployed in China. I had made a similar argument when India was picking mobile network technologies. National security concerns can be allayed technologically.

Finally, and Indian customer feeling patriotic and buying a more expensive local brand over a cheaper Chinese brand is doing disservice to himself, just like I was, when I stuck with Thums Up. Let's say a local manufacturer, takes a local loan and builds an inferior phone. Is that the best utilization of capital? Even with the self-evident assumption that all people are equally capable, the phone will likely be inferior because the local manufacturer does not have the same sales volume, supplier discounts, research and development as would a higher volume Chinese manufacturer.

References

1. Titles - H.R.7178 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): CHIPS for America Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
2. https://www.railadvent.co.uk/2022/07/alstom-wins-order-to-supply-52-metro-trains-to-india.html
3. Former Huawei smartphone sub-brand Honor said to withdraw team from India amid geopolitical tensions | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

India at 75. A commentary on freedom.

Freedom is the ability to act without fear. The actions could be speaking one's mind, opening a business, traveling to destination of one's choice and even to do nothing at all. Freedom is enabled by personal security. Security against hunger, security that comes with shelter and security that your individual plan for life will not be upset by the changes around you. What is the pursuit of happiness other than the feeling that you can work yourself to a better situation by acquiring the education and the skills you think you need? These thoughts come to mind on the occasion of India's 75th Independence Day. I am an American citizen now, but I feel I can credibly express some fresh perspectives on freedom.

1. Is everyone in India free? The answer is clearly no. Kashmiris aren't free. Nagas want freedom. The land belongs to the people and the people should be able to decide if they want to be associated with a certain country or they want to be by themselves. My Gujarati family emigrated to Maharashtra generations ago. I think Maharashtra would do better as a free country. It doesn't make sense for Maharashtra to send money to the central government when farmers in its own province Vidarbha commit suicide when crops fail. The central government was created by the British to manage India. Unfortunately, we Indians have been trained to think that the political party in power in Delhi is indistinguishable from India.
2. The meaning of the word Adivasi is - early resident. If land ownership were to be decided by who occupied the land first, then India belongs to Adivasis. Everyone else must start paying rent to the Adivasis for occupying their land. It's not as ridiculous as it sounds. We, Indians have been paying tax to the occupiers for a long time, just not the Adivasis. We paid taxes to the Rajas and the Maharajas, to the Nawabs and the Chhatrapatis, to the Sultans and the Peshwas. We are used to propping up royalty with our labor and bowing before them. What justifies forcibly paying a portion of the income to a state? Clearly, my family must have thought that they have better prospects in Maharashtra. Maybe we were escaping the plunder caused by foreigners in Gujarat and accepted the terms of staying in Maharashtra. I  have emigrated to the US for similar reasons - better prospects. Freedom is perhaps the ability to pick whom to pay taxes. Had the people of Arunachal Pradesh been a part of China, their per capita income would have been $17,200 per annum instead of $2,453, in terms of purchasing power parity. Of course one can't put a price on escaping the Cultural Revolution, but it does make me pause for thought that an accident of geography would have changed the lives of so many people depending on which side of an imaginary line they landed upon.
3. One aspect of freedom is the ability to travel worldwide. With an American passport, I can travel to Europe, Japan, Australia, Korea, Canada, etc. without a visa. I am the same person I was - brown skin, Indian looks, but the paper I carry lets me travel freely. If I were in India, I would have to get a travel visa by first proving that I have a strong reason to return to India. Why would a foreign country want proof that Indians want to return home before granting a visa? The answer is the stark difference in the quality of life and the emigration statistics. A vast majority of Indians prefer the higher quality of life - good schools, roads, affordable houses, cars, ability to practice religion freely, etc. available in developed countries. Unless we are educated, developed countries feel like we would not contribute to their national advancement and that makes it harder to get a visa. Unless the Indian passport works without a visa, Indians should not believe any rhetoric from the Indian leadership about the worldwide respect for the Tiranga, and that India sets an example to the world, as sometimes claimed by flag waving Indians.

Neither Ambedkar, whom I greatly admire, nor the American founding fathers had the perfect vision for a just future. The constitution, laws, rules must be relegated to their appropriate position - subordinate to the welfare of people. True freedom is still far away.

Kuntal.

Engineers for Human Rights

A peaceful progressive society is built upon human rights being respected. With large chunks of everyday life being driven from our phones, it is time we set up a code of conduct for engineers who work on building those devices and associated technologies based on connected devices. The code of conduct should be used by conscientious engineers to take concrete decisions everyday, such as: project choice, hiring decisions, career progression, research subject choice, etc.

The technologies of concern that can lead to human rights violations when abused are: biometric tracing (facial recognition, emotion estimation, etc.), drone warfare (autonomously or remotely powered drones), communications (instant messaging, audio and video calls, emails), content filtering (authenticity, hate content, manipulative content, recommendation algorithms) and medical devices (remote health monitoring, nerve interfaces).

Code of Conduct

1. I will not enable technologies that strip away individual privacy.
2. I will build technologies that take human differences into account, with regards to physical differences, speech and cognitive ability.
3. When I test my technology, I will ensure that it doesn't work unless the logging, audit and reporting mechanisms function as designed.
4. I will enable data erasure on a personal device. I will not enable data erasure on a government device.
5. The default mode of operation for my technologies will be set to private and encrypted.
6. I will not build mass surveillance technology.
7. I will not enable machines that kill.
8. I will not build technologies that prey on or attempt to indoctrinate vulnerable people.
9. I will restrict the license to use my technology so that it can only be used in a way that human rights are not violated.
10. I acknowledge fundamental limits to understanding humans and will not work on technologies that identify emotions, ascertain guilt, etc.
11. I will educate myself on whistleblowing laws and use them appropriately when asked to do something that conflicts with my conscience.

While there are legitimate reasons for law enforcement to be using the technologies available to keep the society safe, it is up to engineers to build safeguards from misuse. As someone who intends to follow the points listed above, I would not hire an engineer who works for the NSO Group company that enabled governments around the world to tap into journalists' private communications.

If you're a student, I'd encourage you to take a look at UConn's excellent Engineering for Human Rights Initiative to plan your courses and join some organizations. While I don't have personal experience with them, it seems to provide good guidance on how next generation engineers could develop a social sense. After graduation, you may also consider joining the On-Call Scientists. For further reading: despite suffering from rigor mortis on the executive side, the UN does produce good quality documentation: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Regards,

Kuntal.

QCOM Stock

QCOM stock की यह दिक्कत

Market गरम तो stock गुनगुना

और market नीचे तो छूटे पसीना

बेचारे Cristiano पर आई मुसीबत

मुश्किल से Wall St. में जमाया वजूद

चंचल Fed ने यूं बदली हकीकत

तब छापे नकद और अब बढ़ाए सूद

How to rapidly kill innovation

 Is your company too innovative? Are your engineers reading material beyond their immediate assignment? Is your audio expert taking too much of an interest in machine learning? Is your corporate culture so strong that it needs to be whittled down to command and control of automatons?

Here are simple steps to make execution slower than a dried up slug: 

1. Divide your company into as many groups as possible
2. Handpick the least co-operative people and empower them to deny access requests
3. Classify the company knowledge into meaningless overlapping categories
4. Build elaborate processes around how each category is handled and revise those processes every few months
5. Further split the knowledge into Sharepoint, Teams and OneDrive folders, each with limited access permissions
6. Encrypt all information
7. Mandate usage of special tools to decrypt information that you already have access to.

On a more serious note, there are legitimate safeguards that a company needs to implement to keep its innovations from leaking out. One needs to implement them with limited scope and even then, emphasize that sharing knowledge enables the organization to be a learning organization that moves fast.

Here are my recommended steps:

1. Start with trust
2. Ensure that trusted people have unfettered access to the information they need
1. This means engineers get access to engineering documents
3. Limit access as required by regulation and by genuine business need
1. Earnings outlook, production and supply outlook, etc.
2. Acquisitions, divestitures, etc.
4. Watch points of ingress and egress
1. Lock down SD cards, USB sticks, private email, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
2. Limit internet access to a list of reputed websites that are audited regularly
5. Eliminate usage of company devices for personal purposes
6. Accelerate the timeline from design to patent filing
7. Rapidly flag violations and include immediate supervisors in the violation notice
8. Design documents are naturally resistant to the most common attacks - such as pictures or screenshots - ensure wide availability of these documents since they increase organization intelligence
9. Audit regularly for company content on the public internet

Anything else is eventually making your organization slower and dumber. Talented people soon leave and that only accelerates the demise of the organization. 

Don't let your organization become a resting place for dead slugs. Rethink document access.

Transactional Coaches, not Gurus

A parable of good behavior that I was told as a child, was that if you're walking and you meet god and your teacher together, you must first greet your teacher since the teacher shows you the path to god.

Since Sanskrit is dead, and the general populace only understands smatterings of it, any shlok/mantr in Sanskrit is taken as the word of god. One such subterfuge is "gurur brahma, gurur vishnu, ...," which basically says that the guru is the boss of the universe.

Eklavya's story from the Mahabharat made me question who was on the side of dharm vs adharm. Eklavya learnt archery on his own, but gave misplaced credit to the guru Dronacharya, who had promised to make Arjun the best archer. So Dronacharya asked Eklavya to slice off his thumb off as dakshina, a tuition fee, to the guru, thereby enabling him to keep the promise made to Arjun.

The rampant abuse of people by the current generation of sri-sris, swamis, yogis and acharyas has been getting widespread public attention in recent years. It is time for modern Hindus to free themselves from the yoke of gurudom and think of people who guide them as transactional coaches. A transactional coach is takes on the role only for the duration of the transaction - no more. You need to play soccer well, you work with a soccer coach. You need to learn yoga, you work with a yoga coach, etc. 

No more spiritual mumbo jumbo. No more dakshinas than the established free market rate. This will enable the "tax" on the Hindu household that currently goes into maintaining the lifestyles of gurus to be used into more productive community building activities.

A coach is an experienced person who has spent years absorbing the field he's coaching about. Is advice from anyone else even legitimate? If Modi, a person who dropped out from school, starts to preach on how to perform well in exams, he needs to be vociferously ignored. Rahul Dravid's personal experience in the Indian national side has enabled him as the head of Indian Cricket's youth program, to keep a full pipeline of cricketers ready for the next level. He has picked winners such as Mohammed Siraj with regularity. 

A coach is able to identify weaknesses to improve upon and guide you on how to play to your strengths. But coaches are only that - experts in their field who get paid to provide guidance to improve. Their guidance is neither a favor to the player, nor indispensable to the player's growth. Granting a coach mythical guru-like stature simply enables abuses - whether in India or in the US at places like Penn State and US Gymnastics.

Have a good long weekend.

Kuntal.

M'aider for corporate culture

Will the spring revival of "corporate culture" come after the widespread availability of COVID vaccines? 

Corporate culture provides an execution framework for employees. It determines the rapidity of response to executive direction, sharpness of focus on the competition, moderates the risk taking appetite and determines the approach to solve problems. For Qualcomm, while there is no definition of culture enshrined, my perspective would be that our culture is to pivot our work to topics raised in all-hands meetings, do what it takes to make the customer launch on time and escalate when needed regardless of title to resolve an issue.

Unlike project-specific top-down command and control, corporate culture is an emergent phenomenon. 

In Emergence, Steven Johnson paints a panoramic canvas on the topic, albeit somewhat haphazardly as compared to Drucker's books, with useful insights. He draws analogies from ant colonies, slime growth, how cities develop over time, etc. "A successful ant colony can live up to fifteen years, despite the individual worker ant living only up to one year." "... the global behavior that outlasts any of its components parts - is one of the defining characteristics of a complex system." A system in which "local behavior leads to global wisdom" is how I would summarize as the key definition of an emergent system.

Corporate culture depends on the collective knowledge of employees that is built up over time. It outlives an employee's career in the company. For executives that cherish their corporate culture and want to preserve and maintain it, questions that might arise are:

• How to ensure that the year-long work-from-home hasn't diminished the prevalent culture in the organization?
• How do new hires, who haven't even stepped into the office since they joined their jobs, participate in the collective knowledge?

To enable macrointelligence and adaptibility in emergent systems, here are a few points Steven Johnson makes, paraphrased by me:

1. Make information widely available within the organization - information on competition, new technology, performance of business units, etc. 
2. Keep organization structures simple: too many dotted lines and joint responsibilities detract the focus from execution. It forces employees to learn a non-simple vocabulary to talk the language of each leader. 
3. Encourage cross-team encounters: when a company is young, everyone knows everyone else and information flows rapidly. As a company grows, one group does know know the activities of other groups. This diminishes the adaptability of the collective. 

Here are my thoughts on implementing the above - starting now and continuing upon return to campus.

1. Have multiple touchpoints per week for the employee that require the employee's active participation: 1-1 manager / team-lead meeting, small team meeting, cross team code/design review meeting, etc. Large group meetings are good for broadcasting content but don't provide the opportunity to the employee to ask questions or influence the outcome of a decision, which could lead to disengagement.
2. Use video calls for 1-1 meetings: this baselines expectations for mutual attentiveness, environs, grooming and dress code.
3. The speakers and people with a question in a large meeting should turn on their videos: this establishes a question / answer protocol and enables non-verbal interactions.
4. Allow working-from-home for two different teams. Since chance encounters at work are not possible currently, encourage short-term cross team projects as a way to build up connections within the organization. Two is a good number - I think more would lead to a diffusion of effort. 
5. Let the participants ask questions that a leader would normally ask for the sake of speedy progress toward the conclusion in a presentation. In an in-person meeting, body movements, hand gestures, etc. signal to the speaker to pause and let the other person speak. In remote meetings, the leader should step back and steer the participants to do a bulk of the talking, while steering the group in the direction of productivity.
6. Leaders should explain why they are taking a decision a certain way and let the team correct them real-time. The "why" enables new joinees to understand the thought process and the motivation in achieving a decision. 
7. In-person high-level design review meetings, energized sprints in bring-up labs, cross-team debug efforts, chance meet-ups for lunch in the company cafeteria - were good opportunities to bring people together for cross-team encounters. Bring them back as soon as safety protocols permit.

If you have reached this far, I owe an explanation for the title. Vaccines will be widely available by April. The first of May could be considered as the first day back at work in the office. May Day, celebrated on the first of May is a celebration of the Spring season. Corporate culture needs to be celebrated AND saved. The word for asking for help is "Mayday" repeated thrice, which itself comes from the phonetic equivalent of the French "venez m'aider" - come and help me. Too much cryptic crosswording at an impressionable age leads to an overly convoluted precis. 

What are your thoughts?

Kuntal.

The problem with Bitcoin

Middlemen induced carrying cost is the main problem with Bitcoin and all public ledger based currencies.

Until a few years ago, paying a $2.50 fee to withdraw cash from the ATM was the norm. Fee-free withdrawal was available only at your local bank's ATM and that too was limited to a few withdrawals per month. Now, with credit union networks or by maintaining a certain balance, one rarely comes across ATM fees. Bitcoin takes us back to paying a fee, not just for a withdrawal, but for any transaction with it. Let's work out why this fee cannot be removed and why a better solution is needed for wider adoption of public ledger based currencies.

With cash, one central bank issues the currency, regulates its supply and checks for fraud such as counterfeit bills. Once the currency is printed, the cash could undergo many transactions before it comes back into the banking system. Verification is done at the point of transaction without the requirement of a public record of the transaction. For example, you buy groceries, you pay with the cash in your wallet, the grocery store clerk checks that it is familiar looking money and accepts the payment. The proof of the transaction is that you got your groceries and the grocery store has the physical currency you used as payment.

The problems with the central bank approach are: virtually unlimited paper money can be created by a small number of decision makers - thereby eroding trust in the currency, slower innovation by established financial systems such as SWIFT, periodic financial cataclysmic events such as the dot com crisis in 2000 and the housing bubble in 2008, etc. Having the inherent value of a currency tied to purchasing power is actually a good thing for a central bank with reserve currency, but not so much for countries whose currency does not get accepted beyond their borders. 

Bitcoin provides an elegant solution to many of the shortcomings of the current system and kudos are due to the early adopters for supporting the value of cryptocurrencies with real money. 

However, there are structural shortcomings to the current generation of cryptocurrencies. Let's start with the public ledger - a record of all transactions done on a coin, and in my opinion one of the biggest shortcoming. The reason for Bitcoin's public ledger is that since the currency is digital, it can be easily copied. To prevent copying, the transaction must be publicly validated and recorded so that if the same money is used for a different transaction, that transaction will fail. This carrying cost - of always remembering the transaction along with the actual cost of the transaction are unsustainable for widespread adoption. 

Although physical cash isn't "fee free" either, it is very likely always better than Bitcoin in terms of transaction costs. It takes resources to operate the mint, mine the metals to make coins, pay for law enforcement for checking compliance, pay salaries to central bankers, etc. Even if the world were to fully move to a cryptocurrency based society, these agencies would still be needed to some extent, so the current system is cost-neutral.

An ideal cryptocurrency would function with cash-like properties - uniqueness, fungibility, stateless verification and low transaction cost. Are there central bank issued cryptocurrency or quantum computing solutions that can address the above problems? 

I think than an algorithmically managed coin issuance scheme operating like a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) but operating under regular tuning by the Federal Reserve will be a strong candidate for the next generation US Dollar. Another option would be to stay decentralized but use the uniqueness guaranteed by the quantum mechanical property of teleportation. More of this later, perhaps when work-related downtime again aligns with the Christmas break. It's going to be a busy 2021.

Happy New Year everyone. 

Kuntal. 

PS - the US Congress did a great thing recently by passing the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA).  The lawmakers that deserve praise and support are: Carolyn Maloney, Mike Crapo, Sherrod Brown, Maxine Waters and Patrick McHenry.

Dysfunctional Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

 Juxtaposing three news articles from this week: the University of California considering a tuition hike, a new parliament in India and Sweden moving to a bitcoin-like official currency eKrona, leads one to cast a skeptical eye on whether the government is the rightful arbiter of how to best allocate tax revenues. 

At a time when California communities are suffering from high unemployment due to COVID and education remains the one dependable pathway to higher income, it is unthinkable for the regents to further "tax" the populace. 

In India, the ongoing farmer protests call into question the central government's method of running the country, the unnecessary money being spent build a shrine to autocracy provide the answer on how out of touch the new rajahs are with the populace. 

While Swedish bankers can't keep track of the source of external money that flows into the country [1], they seem to be proactive in ensuring that the internal tax base is maintained and has improved traceability with the move to eKrona.

Rather than representing the people, the UC Regents and the government of India are operating like pseudo Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Instead of the ideal software-contract run organizations where decisions are taken algorithmically and transparently, these organizations are "decentralized" in the sense that organization outlives the operatives and are "autonomous" in the sense that their decisions are not changeable by the people having a stake in them. An appropriate term for such organizations would be "Dysfunctional Autonomous Organizations."

What can a regular person do? Simply voting for a change does not seem to be enough. Thoughts?

Thoughts on tracking large engineering projects

 Here's a short summary of my thoughts on efficient tracking of large projects that I have used with some success and gradually refined over time. 

1. Only track milestones.
2. Minimize the number of tracked milestones.
3. Make the dependencies between milestones explicit.
   This requires minimal tooling.
4. Express upstream dependencies only.
   A milestone owner must document what they depend on, not where their deliverable will be used.
5. Do not track effort.
6. Do not track offsets from milestones.
7. If a milestone’s date is in the past, assume it to be done.
8. Track changes in committed milestone dates. This is the weekly tracking that is needed.
9. Build tooling such that every team only updates their own milestones and the tooling alerts the dependent milestone owners of changes.

This can be all done with Excel and minimal IronPython. There is a place for rigorous tracking using MS Project for tasks and resources, but in my role as an engineering lead, I need to react to movement of large milestones and I've found the above methodology quite useful. 5 and 6 are bread and butter for program managers and 7 borders on heresy but for a lead engineer these guidelines do help reduce the management time spent on things that are on track.

What are your best practices?

Regards,

Kuntal.