Swarm of XeBees

In our times, the salaries at IIM Campus Placements grab the headlines and we draw satisfaction with how many Indians are in the Forbes billionaire list. In the mad race of outsmarting others in profession, the professionalism has taken a backseat. As society interacts with the professionals, we are confronted with situations that make us wonder if professionalism has any role to play our life. We are professionally qualified and we are in profession. The question is – are we professional?

Any professional behavior must incorporate three traits – Ethics, Commitment and Integrity.  All the three traits must be present when you deal with every situation in your professional life.

If I map the above traits to the professional life of a software professional, then an example of ethical behavior would be to credit the right person for a job well done. An unethical behavior would be to check in the code in repository that does not compile while you along with other team members have agreed to check-in only compilable code in the source code repository.  To extend this a bit, I would say that any behavior of a team member that violates the team rules and culture is unethical.

Commitment is a common trait among the professionals in all walks of life. As a professional, you do your best to serve your customers but you are also aware that you do not carry a magic wand to solve all the problems. You commit when you are reasonably certain that you can deliver the expected solution. You are able to make a judgment in a situation, from your experience, what would work, given the constraints of time, quality and money. For software development teams, delivery on time and budget, as per your commitment in Sprint planning or estimation, is an example of good professional conduct.  As a good doctor would keep a patient informed about developing complications which would slow down the healing, in the similar manner a software professional should keep customer informed about the technical and business changes that would impact the delivery date.

Integrity is about getting compensated in a fair manner for your professional efforts. A doctor who sells a kidney of a patient to make some extra money is not an example of integrity. Software professional who sells code or customer confidential information to third persons for any kind of gains lacks integrity.

Professionals are not barred to solve the same problem several times for different customers. Actually this is how you develop the expertise. When you apply the learning from one situation to another situation, you need to be careful what is common knowledge and what constitutes proprietary knowledge.  Common knowledge is public code libraries, design patterns, common algorithms etc. Proprietary knowledge is customer specific algorithms, customer database and cost etc.

I finished reading the book “The Professional” by Subroto Bagchi. In the first chapter titled Burial of the Dead, Mahadeva, the morgue guy who did the last rites of unclaimed bodies, performed his duties in a true professional manner even though he was not professionally qualified.

In everyday practice, we see almost no examples of good professional conduct. Keeping ethics, commitment and integrity always in mind when performing your work, you can become a shining example of a good professional.

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