Yamming & Tweeting

Its a week where I read in the newspaper that Paris Hilton wants to stimulate the world economy by shopping more (Hmmm, I dont know about her stimulating the economy, but she certainly managed to stimulate a lot of men by her videos ) . On a more serious note now, one of the events that happened during this week, made me think about the kind of work one ends up doing. It all started in a meeting, where my manager stressed on the need of increasing communication. The topic here was site called Yammer , it basically your Twitter modeled for your office, communicating with your colleagues. Personally I have never moved beyond FaceBook and Orkut with respect to Social Networking. It was one of those days in office where I had time to myself, that enabled me to try out Yammer. I found it interesting, when I joined it. So went ahead and joined my Team's private community on it. (PS : My team's community on yammer was owned by Software Development Director in US i.e, SDD for short). What happened was,I used my actual name as in most of my official documents G@#@!# K#@!#!. But in MCE( my company) its screwed up as G@#@!# R!@#!@#( Apparently when I joined here, they wanted the name as in Passport, which was G@#@!# K#@!#! R!@#!@#) . Taking the first name and last name, they made it G@#@!# R!@#!@#, again nobody knows me by this name outside MCE.

Coming back to the point, When I joined my team's community on Yammer, Mr SDD was wondering whom I was. Since people were exchanging pretty confdential information on that community. On searching his Outlook address book he couldnt find anybody there going by my actual name, which totally got him freaked out. Thinking I could be some sought spy from our competitor's such as Big Blue. He went as far as asking the Site lead to ran a background check against the names of people working out of Bangalore, which led my manager to scamper to my cubicle where I was happily listening to songs, to enquire my name. Leaving me to explain the mix up that was created because of my name. When to two manager's come running to your cubicle during this times , it could either mean you might be promoted or getting laid off ( more likely during this recession times). In my case , it turned out to be neither. In the end, Mr SDD did approve my membership request in that community. Apparently, I latter found out after joining the community , I am probably the youngest member in that community with most people there in the level of Managers, Senior Software Engineer's and so on. Now for the other side , when one of my friends tried to join his products community on Yammer, his request was rejected on the basis he is not a part of R & D team by his team's SDD. Leaving him to wonder, whether India is just one big Customer Support Centre of US MNC's for carrying out back office operations or whether any serious Software Engg work goes on in bangalore. Now thats question I am asking myself, the answer of which could well lead to a lot of changes in what I end up doing in my career.

(PS: I have joined Twitter after Yammer, I am loving it. I cant go about saying everything that I want on a official corporate site like yammer, Can I??)

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