The second floor on the B wing

The long conference room has people sitting side by side – there are twenty of us in that room, each with our computers screens open. There is no real hierarchy in the room, except of course we are being led by a young leader – who looks younger than he probably is. The software developers, the designer, the tester, the installer, the production guy, they all line up on that table in the room. The code to deployment cycle is minutes, not hours or days. The team is made of all guys – but there is one girl among those coders who is ready to spend the days and nights in that crowded room.

They do not use e-mail to communicate – there is no need for it. They can talk – on requirements over the table, they can curse on spaghetti code of another developer right there in the room. The code gets fixed, debugged and deployed in minutes. They would work in this mode – for weeks and months, all guys and that girl – there is no difference in how they work, day and night, week days and week-ends. This is the ultimate dev-ops and agile team. And it was two decades ago. The terms dev-ops and agile-development never existed at the time, we called it rapid-prototyping – others called it Ad-Hoc.

In many ways, the AAIS team was ahead of its time – what became the ultimate methodology of software development, existed right on that second floor of the B wing, of our Temple Terrance building. The man, who looked like a teenager from high school, the boy genius as some would call – started this team, who created probably more leaders in Verizon’s technology team than any other single team. Nalin Bansal (not his real name) would finally leave Verizon in a few years – but he created the ultimate start-up in a large multi-billion, slow moving, phone company. The company that enjoyed it’s cash cow on the plain old telephone lines, but seeing the end was coming and to survive – it must innovate and change its culture.

Legend had it- the replacement of system called MARK was attempted 20 times before the AAIS team, and failed. We never bothered to check the authenticity of that claim – since it provided the motivation to that new team, crammed in those conference rooms building something that would change the company. 

Nalin’s style did not suite many, some called him a slave driver – but who worked for the team poured their passion – the ultimate success factor – assemble a high performing team, working on the ultimate challenge no one had been able to solve before. If you get the right people on the bus – they would take the bus where it needs to go. This is why teams exist – to go where no one can go alone. And a leader – to take the team where they can’t go alone. 

Many did not agree with Nalin’s style, some even revolted – but many stayed loyal. I wouldn’t call myself one who liked the style, but I thrived, not because I could create the best code, but because I could see what others did not – I could zoom out. I remember this incident where the team struggled to optimize data retrieval for huge network information , when I look back now, it is such a simple thing, but no one cared to notice the human who is looking at the information can only process a tiny amount of data – if you reverse the problem from the human perspective – your answers would be very different  than pure engineering. So, I thrived, among the geeks, and spaghetti coders – because I could zoom out. Not many did. I went along receiving a few patents on complex telecom problems that required human engagement – alas, most those patents would become worthless as the telephone lines did.

While the patents became worthless – the motivation to simplify complex information for humans to consume, shaped my next two decades in the company. Ironically, I never took on an official ‘user design’ role, as an individual or as a leader of a design team, but everything I did following my initial years at GTE, were guided with the human – machine interactions.

That was year 1999, year before Verizon was formed, when I look back into those years, some of the key lessons that guided my career came during those years. Earlier in my career, I was exposed to both great and not so great leaders. I learnt as much what not-to-do, as what to-do as I grew as a leader. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am working a series of stories during my Verizon days, to read my other stories click below.

?The plane with a Blue Air Phone.