Your honor

Last week, for the first time in my life I stood in the courtroom before CJ of family court. (I filed my petition for divorce there) Unlike my expectations and imagination about legal profession the environment over there was really sick. It will really give major attack of nervousness if anybody spends a week in atmosphere like that. I was fascinated by this profession since I was working with Spectrum (Once I even thought of studying law).
The three years at Spectrum were some of the great days in my life. My career was just kicking off then. My earlier job was in Oracle/D2K. I always dreamt my career in C++, so when the opportunity to work with Spectrum came I just grabbed it without a second thought. For the first few days I was just wondering why my boss was bombarding me every now and then with every small-big tasks when there were 20 other experienced programmers around. A week later I realized, I with a just passed-out were the only programmers there and the other guys were either data entry operators or Lawyers.
So I started with Spectrum as junior programmer. It was fairly easy for me, as my boss and his bosses really showed trust in me (It might be that they didn’t had much choice either) to climb up the ladder of promotions as the team gradually grew up. We used to work for days and nights dreaming that one day Jurix will become major share holder in legal information retrieval market. We used to have long and brainstorming discussion about search and retrieval algorithms, database design and so on. Most of us were fresher or less than one year experienced, so everybody was trying to put things together which he/she learnt during academics. We never had any formal training about any language/technology, but we were so full of enthusiasm and energy that we managed some Herculean tasks without knowing what we were upto. (My first COM server was sheer product of my understanding of pure virtual functions, the words like interface, inproc server etc were not even in my dictionary then) The side effect was that we were never contented with the end product as by the time we were close to deliver it, somebody or the other used to discover much better technique to do so.
One of my bosses used to call us bunch of masons, who never had any plan, schedule or even an idea about the deliverable. He used to blame us that we start putting bricks and cement if somebody asked us to build home, without even understanding how many rooms there should be. Today when I can see myself surrounded by so many smart architects, I wonder if anybody of them has ever built a single room out of his knowledge. Most of these smart architects do the maintenance of old houses or put extra storey to the building which probably was product of some enthusiastic masonry. :)