It’s not often that you come across wise men. They are hard to find and even harder to get advice from. But if they advice, be sure that you listen to it and act on it. No matter how uncomfortable it might be.

The other kind, which is the show offs are found every where, and they will give advice anytime on anything. Literally speaking , if one has the power to fold his/her ears into the ear hole to stop listening to anything, then the right time to use it will be when the show offs start speaking.

Recently we embarked on a big project in eBay. We started working on it and went deep into the Design Doc. We proposed to change the existing code base to add the new feature we were trying to add. We had completed most of the doc and were about to start the Implementation.

Enter the wise man, the wise man looked at the design and advised that we change it totally. He brought in a totally different perspective. He had the business sense or I should call it the sixth sense. His point was that our project was an experimental project and it could be taken out anytime. So it’s better to have a design which touches the existing system to the minimum.

Of course, we were reluctant to take the advice as we had already done lots of work and changing things now would have caused considerable rework. Anyway with lots of squalling we decided to take the new approach. When we were finished with the task we actually found that the design was actually much cleaner now.

We just started implementing when we got the shock. They downgraded the priority of our project due to some weird issue. Good that we were in the initial phase of implantation. I can’t imaging what would have happened if we had taken our earlier approach and we got this shock a month or so later. All our efforts would have gone for waste. Plus we would have spent time to restoring the system to the original state.

The moral of the story.

“Always listen to the wise man. He knows more then you do.”