What's important in Life???

Well again a question and an answer, but yes this one is a valid one too. This intended to tickle the guts of all us as we always never ever get to understand "What is important in Life?"

Well to start the post I would say that we all want certain things in life, viz. a decent job, money, house, food, friends, family, etc. (Plz. don't go by the ordering of the words here they are just written as they came to my mind ;-)) and so a human goes about achieving this right from his/her commencement of life/when he starts realising that he is a human.

Down the line we do forget what we want inside. What I am trying to get to is something that is an inner desire of a person (Believe me it is difficult to put in words too... I am trying my best here...). I am not talking about the saintly things of life but an innate demand from our soul, if you'd like to call it like that, or probably something that would make us feel that yes we have done our bit and achieved something.

Without beating around the bush, I would like to say that the most important thing in life is "Inner Happiness".

Now what is Inner in happiness?? Well that's a good question. The answer lies inside you. This happiness is something that makes you feel comfortable, secure, peaceful and happy. Don;t we all crave for this little thing so much that we think that maybe by earning more money we might get it, or by travelling, by becoming the King of the world, by ruling the unruly, by becoming a tyrant, by performing arts, by terror, by peace, by anything. But once we get into trying to find it we just forget that this small thing is of prime importance and give up to 'Maya' or the worldly desires.

Believe me a street-side vendor may not be the richest person but he might be happier than what you are right now.

So let's try to find that one thing that is the most important thing of life, Inner Happiness.

What drives a SE ???

I am writing this to bring forth my thoughts on what is the desire of a software engineer...
I think that i might be able to justify this as I am myself a SE working for a reputed company and have seen many things in my day-to-day job/life that I can take this up.

My thought stems from the fact that what do we actually want to get as a SE? Meaning after toiling hard through the college, all those 4 years, do we actually get what we always wanted or dreamt of? And if we do, then how many of us actually get it? And if so, then How???

Too many questions i suppose but lets face the facts...

I have been working for sometime in this field now and have taken up roles and responsibilities of all kinds. I am not saying that I am a guru in this or have been working all my life, but still I see people working day-in and day-out on a piece of work, sorry work-packet, that they don't really want or don't care for or are doing it because of sheer pressure and no where to go.

I had this one thing that happened. It's a support project and the people do the usual activities but suddenly one day a small 'work-packet' comes in which is of developing a small piece of code. This code is not a very serious one or important in terms of the application but it is still going to be a part of the app so... Ya, coming back to the topic... So this team gets real excited and starts questioning the folks as to what is the code for, what is the input, the output, how to go about it and all. There is a lot of commotion for what has come in. Believe me there is a lot of excitement too as they all want to lay their hands on it, no matter how small it is.

What I want to get to by saying all this is that - Development is a hunger and a inner desire of each SE. We keep doing all sorts of work and in the end get frustrated and either leave our jobs, go fishing, become a nomad, go to the hills, become a traveller (as one amasses a lot of ca$h) or goes and starts his own organisation! But deep down the desire is to break through the shackles of stupid mundane activities.

I believe a driving force for the SE is always, and will always be, Development. Thy can be in peace only if thou has new things to achieve.