Transition from Software Development to Content Writing

By

Rajakumar Duraiswamy

Until Joe Winston asked me, why I shifted from Software Development to Content Writing (on 25-Feb-2019), I haven’t given a thought about it. I think I liked writing or perhaps I liked using my intellectual capability than losing the intellectuality in educating the software masons aka software programmers. 

In the year 1993, soon after Christmas, I was at Bangalore with my father’s student Rajagopal seeking a change in job. Rajagopal was then working at ISRO, who used 1M RAM with an intel486 processor having 200MB hard disk, to display Indian weather map from the 100MB data per second from INSAT. I asked him if I could move into advertising field. He asked to say a copy for colored condoms (I’m still unaware if colored condoms are available in market), instantly. In a jiffy, I said, “Love your love with the color you love”. I’m not sure if the copy was impressive, but instead he asked me to learn analytical geometry in parametric form.

I have a few notebooks that I’ve writing since my schooldays which I’ve never revisited since my marriage, almost all of them written in Tamil. They are all secrets that I hold close to me. In the year 1999, while I was working at IBIL Tech Limited (originally it was named Ignifluid Boilers India Limited), I had no work to do for the office (and the organization wasn’t paying us for ten months, and everyone left, not really wanting to leave) I used the time and computer to write two stories I Just Can’t Stop Loving You and Colorless Dream (both unpublished). 

When I joined CI.COM (P) LTD (Computers International and CI.COM (P) LTD are seamless organizations for its employees except that the payslips carry different company names, now I think both the companies have amalgamated into CI Global Solutions) in the year 2000, I woke up from hibernation and entered into creating marketing materials (back then it didn’t carry the name Content Writing). I was involved in creating brochures, one-page collateral for products and services, corporate presentations, success stories, whitepapers, proposals for RFPs and RFIs, business plans, designing exhibition materials that include banners, etc. I have exceptional love for technology, and hence I always imagine myself as a great solution provider in integrating information technology and human thoughts. Therefore, I created materials that connect people with technology.

ActiveSoft Technologies was a big break for me to understand the ground realities of people when we work as a team. Prof. V.T. Chellam (author of the book New Light on the Early History of Tamil Nadu and many other books history and socioeconomic history of Tamilnadu), my father’s friend, told me in the year 2016, that since the society changed from agrarian society to entrepreneurial society, with the advent of liberalization of education and raising up of information era, there is considerable drop in ethics, and knowledge. Computers simplified work, but it also seems that people dropped their knowledge somewhere in the path of evolution. Money is the only driving force [when I went to an interview (2012) at Annai Raani Convent Higher Secondary School, Katterikuppam, Puducherry, I ate lunch for Rs.25 and when I left job I 2013, the same lunch cost Rs.45, (after an intermediate raise of Rs.35), and when I asked the person why the price raise was almost 100% in a year, he said he is constructing his house (cost of infrastructure development!)]. At ActiveSoft Technologies, I learned business ethics is all about building innocent scapegoats. Perhaps, it’s the Darwin’s survival instinct!

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Educating a software programmer is a very difficult job. In India, it is general belief that writing a piece of program code (which would have been already copied from some internet source and customized) is the most intelligent work. I know persons (Rathinaganesh Ayyamperumal, a classmate and colleague of me, who live programming as an art, and breaths Oracle; Elango Muthu Kumar, who writes code for any business process anyone imagines; and both of them, for the love of programming, they still lives as senior programmers). Mass of today’s youth (not everybody) applying for a programming job lack logical and analytical skill and they deem a job and salary for their educational qualification. 

Being a Project Manager or Pre-Sales Consultant is a tough job; programmers believe that their bosses are brainless people. When one asks a programmer to customize some logic in a segment, invariably they will be forced to assume it’s not possible, instead writing a fresh segment of code would be suggested. Probably, because of this Indian attitude, US companies never allow deleting codes while customization of their projects, the programmer can only comment the existing code and write fresh code. Next day, after code review, the American will comment the whole day’s work of the Indian programmer by modifying two or three lines of the existing program segment. I have listened to a term “workaround” frequently, which gives a complex logic while a simple solution is already available. I also know a few intelligent programmers, who work only two or three days before the deadline; now they either own their companies or still live as senior programmers. 

Sometimes we hire persons for acquiring special talents, the HR department pump in resumes, and they feel frustrated when most of the resumes are rejected after interviews. I interviewed a boy from Cape Engineering College, who had his project on grid computing, but he couldn’t explain what grid computing was. When I couldn’t find a suitable Java candidate for an onsite project, I got frustrated with the HR department, and refused to conduct further interviews. I find a continental drift between Projects, Marketing and Human Resource departments; technical teams live far away in another island.

Sometimes, the efforts on connecting knowledge doesn’t yield the desired results, I have realized that time is the only healer (this is what people call as wisdom!). For me, personally, my quest knowing more branches into several streams and leads me into unknown territories or sometimes stops me at a dead-end. Wherever I land, the quest for knowing more never quenches. At certain times, I stopover puddles of stagnated knowledge for a while, trying to absorb it as much as possible, later I realized a stream of flowing knowledge helps absorption better (long live Socrates!). Reading books of different genera, helps in integration, differentiation, unification, fusion, diffusion, fission, grafting, hybridization, cloning, the knowledge from different fragmented domains. 

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At times, my thoughts are linear, yet another time thoughts move laterally. Similar to my thoughts, my transition into Content Writing was phased, not accidental, but it’s very natural to accomplish needs of my family and to utilize my acquired skills.