At first, I thought that it will be a big waste of my and my company’s time if I attend this training during this hectic months. Habits? C’mon! I don’t need those to spew out quality codes! Besides, I already have habits even if they are not the best ones around. That’s what I thought and before I knew it…

Day 1, and as usual, I was late. Not that late, but when I got to the conference/meeting room, most of the participants, including the facilitator, was already there. The setting is what you would expect in a very expensive (18-21K PHP) program: Brewed Coffee, Expensive Cookies, Cold Conference Room, Buffet Breakfast (Catered), People in Business Attire and their English Accent. The air was filled with high faluting business terms coming from the hot exchange of business talks from the business execs that joined the program. There were only 10 attendees: 4 Software Developers from our company and 6 H.R. Executives / Managers from Kraft, Aboitiz and Unilab. If you’re wondering what 4 lowly software developers are doing in this program, don’t bother to ask me – we are on the same boat.


During the start of the program, the facilitator asked each of the attendees on what they hope to get out of the 3-day program. The 6 H.R. People attended the program because they want to roll-out the same program in their own company. As for the rest of us, we gave our own expectation of the program. My demands were actually simple…

1. Work-Life Balance
2. Influence how our company produce software (Software done right)

My teammates have long insisted that I should try to have more fun with my life — the type of “fun” that does NOT involve computers, they say. I have long debated this with them and eventually I saw their point and was convinced to the point that I sorta want to experience the other side of life and see for myself what all the fuzz is about. On the other hand, At work, I would like to be able to “influence” how our company produce software. By that, I mean that I would like to have the ability to influence how our organization writes code. I would like to have the power to free all software developers who are suffering from bad software development practices. Haha.

The program started in a form of a video with the author (Stephen Covey) explaining how the 7 Habits Program started. According to him, it all started when he studied different written literatures about success and successful people for his PH.D. thesis. The said literatures that he read spans 250 years and he was shocked by the result of his study – the shift from Personal Ethics to Character Ethics. It means that people’s understanding of success shifted from “personal, more fulfilling and real success” to “public (our character), less fulfilling and perceived success”. In less jargonic talk, this means that we measure success by the “perception of other people of how successful I am” and not by “how successful I feel”.

After the introduction, the maturity continuum was introduced to us. It illustrates the 7 habits and its effects and after that, each of the habits were discussed.

Habit 1 is all about being Proactive. Its the foundation of the 7 Habits. You can never be independent without being dependent, and you can never be interdependent without being independent. While discussing Habit 1, I had some realization on why I suddenly hate deadlines now while I used to love it back in college. I hate it because I used to be very independent back then and now I’m back to being dependent. I have already achieved the 2nd level of Maturity (Independence) but now, I’m back to being hand-fed (dependence). Good news is, the Maturity Continuum is multi-dimensional. This means that for every new role you undertake, your maturity level will be back to 0.
Another important thing that I learned in Habit 1 is the Circle of Influence and the Circle of Concern. Habit 1 taught me on how I can influence how our company produce software (My 2nd Expectation). In one of my projects, I was asked to design a new Licensing feature for our product using a pre-existing library. While studying this library, I happened to point-out that we are doing some unsafe practices that can eventually lead to a licensing breach. By pointing that out, I was partly able to influence the project lead to create a new and safer library. And little by little, I was able to expand my Circle of Influence and somehow shrink my Circle of Concern.


Habit 2 preaches to always “begin with the end in mind”. In Habit 2, we were asked to write a personal mission statement. Funny thing about this exercise is that we were also asked to write a personal mission statement back in High School. Almost 10 years ago and I can still clearly remember my personal mission in life… CHANGE THE WORLD. And it still is (Yes, I know its not SMART). While writing my personal mission statement, it made me think and reflect… Have I always kept the end in my mind? In school? At work? And it made me remember my very first “usable” project in College called MAD-Files (Massive Distributor of Files).
MAD-Files was designed to aid Mapua Professors who are teaching laboratory (computer lab) subjects to distribute digital course materials to the students workstations. Before MAD-Files, the professors have to manually copy-paste each course materials to each and every “network” drive of the students. This will usually take about 30 minutes (not to mention that this process is erroneous and stressful).

According to Accenture’s website, participants will “learn about key Accenture leadership contribution areas by being value creators, business operators, and people developers through seminars and fun activities… They will also hear first-hand testimonials from some of the top Accenture Senior Executives, Managers, and Leads from various workforces and projects”.

If you have attended at least one leadership seminar in your life, you know that it will be full of ego-massaging and morale-boosting talks from some senior-management guy from some Fortune/Global 500 company. And some funny “group dynamics” that the event coordinators will link to a certain “leadership” quality but in reality, it will just make you tired and sweaty. I have yet to attend a leadership seminar that will really teach me on how to be a really good leader. Accenture SLC… here’s hoping!

During my College days, whenever there’s a new project that had to be done in groups, people never failed to nominate me as the leader (Mostly on CS* and IT* subjects) and I have always gladly accepted it. I like being the leader because I have total control of everything… from the implementation details like naming conventions and algorithms to project management details like deadlines and task breakdowns. And looking back, I was very successful on all of those endeavors. Successful in the sense that we have always submitted 2 weeks (at most 1 month) before the deadline and the specs and feature set (Including documentation and packaging) of our project is above and beyond the agreed upon requirements. As my co-worker puts it, we may have “underpromised and overdelivered“. Truth be told, all of my project related subjects garnered a grade of 1.0. (Making a point here).

But it begs the question, why did my groupmates chose me as the leader? I don’t really know. But what I know is this… They did not choose be because I was inspirational, motivational nor because I have good leadership qualities… They chose me because I can deliver (and because they know that I will always do 85% of the work). They chose me because of my technical abilities and not because of my leadership abilities.

You know what? I don’t really think that I have “leadership” abilities. In fact, I suck at being a leader, or at least I suck at the people-side of being a leader. I do not know anything about being inspirational or motivational. I do not know how to handle a group efficiently. I don’t know squat about WBS (Work-breakdown Structure) or Teamwork. Up till the end of my college days, I have, mostly, always worked alone.

That’s why my biggest learning from my On-the-Job Training is learning on how to work with my teammates. Although I have learned a lot of technical stuffs like Software Delivery (From Automated Unit Testing to Image Builds) and a whole new field of Process Automation, I still consider learning to work harmoniously in a team environment as the most rewarding experience.

At work, there are real leaders. People like my immediate supervisor (Development Manager) and his immediate supervisor (Director of Software Development) are the *real-world* leaders. And to tell you the truth, I think that they are GREAT at what they do. In both technical-side and people-side of leading a software development team.


When I was in college, one of my biggest fear is to have an immediate supervisor that has an MBA (Business Administration) degree. I call those people “the suits”. Joel Spolsky said that “Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf… The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand”. Which I totally agree-on… based on experience (I had this certain professor in college who have a PH.D. in BA and teaching management subjects like Quality Management who argues that the PENTAGON was infected with a virus ["the LOVE bug"] because their “firewall” was weak and not because, against the better judgment of his computer science student, of social engineering techniques).

So it was quite a relief when my supervisors at work happens to be really technical guys. Once in their careers, they were programmers. Real, actual, programmers. And that’s one of the things that motivates me at work. For me, that is what being a leader is all about. Leadership by example.

It is such a joy to come to work and see your supervisor, the development manager, DEBUGGING and TRYING to fix an issue. It is also a joy to have a manager who actually knows what you are doing. And there were instances at work while we are trying to fix a very complex issue, it is our development manager who cracked the case! I mean, there were times that our manager is much more smarter than us!

Just the other week, I saw the Director of Software Development seating at my co-worker’s workstation trying to fix an installer issue! I was shocked. A senior management guy directly working with a computer. That single event alone restored my faith on the system…

…the belief that geeky guys can still succeed in a world where business acumen is valued more than technical skills.

I’ll leave you with a short story from Joel Spolsky’s blog about Leadership as this story shares the same sentiments as mine. Enjoy!