Not long ago, I had a a call with my boss. It was about a ticket that got delayed. There was a bug in it, I explained that my server-side code was okay, and there is something wrong in the JavaScript library that’s causing this bug. My boss, as usual, was sure I was the culprit, he told me how to debug the Rails app, and I listened even though I had been coding in it more than 15 years. He explained it to me as though I were a kid. I just listened without protesting. No storm lasts forever. I am a mountain range, I weather millions and billions of them.

Finally, it turned out that the QA was an inexperienced or sloppy one, she did not know how to distinguish between a new feature or as bug, and she conveniently called what should be a new feature as bug. Later, I would find out that if our APP was less buggy, the QA would be put on to the noose and asked why there were few bugs. So they frame a new feature as a bug.

I coded the new feature, it took some time to understand D3js, but I finished it and was proud of it. The thing is, my boss was absolutely wrong, and he is still thinking he was absolutely right, and I created a bug. He was so sure that the data I sent to the front end was wrong and caused the bug. He never had the intelligence to question, ‘Why did the front-end developer who developed the code for this chart display not check the data integrity and raise it?’. In that case, if I had sent the data wrong, I would have had an instant feedback. Simple!

In one of the Machine Learning companies where I was a Director, my co-director suddenly thought 100, with a margin of \(+-\) 20% error means the values ranged from 60 to 120. He wouldn’t budge. I assure you, he passed engineering, and I still wonder how he passed, and I wonder why I chose to work with him. He became s difficult to deal with, so I came out of the company.

In every company, there is a way to give feedback from the more powerful to the less powerful ones, but there is no way for the less powerful ones to grade the more powerful one. That’s a fatal flaw. That’s not democratic. That’s not freedom. If one gives an open opinion in an Indian company, he will find himself boiling in a soup very soon.

I feel there must be an anonymous feedback system in every company where one can rate his or her boss, so that the real truth comes out. Otherwise, corporate lifestyles will dominate, and people will believe their destinies are like those of soulless machines and zombies. Fact-less thoughts will dominate brains, and less and less efficient bosses will be created, ruining humanity. We need a reverse feedback system.