Sairam Venugopalan, Qualcomm
August 1, 2021

Janaka had a technical degree to proudly hoot,
With erudite English acumen to boldly boot.
Even if it be that his semantic skills had no aberration,
They’d only been garnered as a medium of instruction.
This profile in the job jungle just shone brighter,
For him to don the hat of a technical content writer.
In his early days, he rued being a misfit,
As his written work was brutally bit.
Aiding his regret was the oddity in the crowd,
Which had pros of varied backgrounds to shroud.
“Do I set sail for a programmer role?”, Janaka wondered,
“Or are these teething troubles?”, ripple as he pondered.
With an inclement climb in the corporate club,
He put paid to such dilemma to prevent more drub.
Ebbing his self-qualms were only transitory,
As he had to surge inherent belief to lift his trajectory.
He patted himself for the novel path he’d chosen,
As this was an era when engineers didn’t dime a dozen.
A scientific technocrat with a writer’s wear,
Was akin to a desert seeing a polar bear.
The blend of prowess of a drafter and a developer,
Had recognition for being wrapped in one worker.
Slowly, but surely, he buttressed his authoring ways,
With heavy helpings from his work seniors’ rescuing rays.
Janaka’s verve for work began to blossom as he rooted deep,
As he was carving a niche with his flair and finesse to leap.
With a strikethrough and a rewrite order ruling his drafts,
Every round of SME and edit review bolstered his crafts.
If you remember those drilling days of paper-pencil edits,
That caused one’s eyes to pop out and toss into pessimistic pits.
“I’m learning all the time, thanks to my beaconing cohorts,”
“My sense of global English is honing with all supports.”
Thus ran Janaka’s self-assessment of his tender work ride,
And he was quickly trotting towards the one-year side.
He was shrewd to realize he still had loose ends to tighten,
Be it incoherent constructions or dense sentences to lighten.
From day one, graced with a merciful mentor and project lead,
His rookie caliber and novice traits were pruned with a strong seed.
His chief editing officer was slickly nicknamed by him as CEO,
As he imagined himself at her hand to be a bouncing yo-yo.
That imagery was because of the back-and-forth his drafts took,
For them to be shaped after re-edits into a lucid look.
Feedback oft arrived, way beyond the cutoff date,
Despite all his repeated pleas to not deal such a fate.
Worse was the case of a late-creeping flag by sluggards,
Who were engineers holding peace, unrevealing their cards.
A UI change here, an API alteration there all come to scare,
When these alerts could have been well-ahead to not ensnare.
The hapless writer was left lamented with no other go,
But to obey such erratic summons and just silently do.
He was profoundly thankful to his CEO for her counsel,
Be it with the whipping for words of wrangle or the weasel.
Brevity is a virtue, clarity and cohesion are bedrocks,
The tutoring at the hands of his CEO was his building block.
As years rollicked on, Janaka wasn’t an exception to time’s ravages,
His guardians had left, leaving him to adapt to the turnstile’s cages.
Similar to being exposed to the elements, his protection fort was gone,
He had to come of age, and the call was dire with the path shown.
A natural progression had occurred of a wobbly writer to a rounded expert,
Though in his heart of hearts, he knew he wasn’t ripened and acutely alert.
Akin to a bird that soars after taking flight from the nest,
He was blessed to be primed up by his mentors for the test.
From planning to scoping to training to troubleshooting,
Janaka’s forays at work were constantly surmounting.
While he was braced up for the exploits, goaded by all grooming,
He was realizing that he had to acquire new skills to avoid dooming.
As an individual contributor, he could happily fall back on his tutors,
With roles reversed, he finds himself in the world of proctors.
Even if he didn’t have to manage a team of writing members,
He had to lead projects and represent at cross-functional chambers.
Bereft of a defender, he amassed intellectual independence,
As it was needed to give him conversance and credence.
If a writer wounded by a truant authoring tool cried for rescue,
He instantly turned into a doctor to cure with a soothing sew.
“I can’t make sense of this mumbo-jumbo in the design doc,”
That was a frantic call from a writing colleague he’d to unlock.
With mind-numbing source specs to probe and parse,
He researched the content-impact and jotted the scoping verse.
He could correlate and help his audience easily cogitate,
For whatever new-hire training he had to disseminate.
Besides the helper role he did, he had his own plate full,
As he mopped his writing assignments with an exerting pull.
Chalking out ToCs and adding content flesh to the skeleton,
He clinically compiled descriptions with a quick turn.
His daily pursuits as a lead writer became demanding,
With review fixes and impromptu tasks protruding.
Janaka envisioned himself as a support mechanic some ways,
Why did he feel so when he was only handling authoring trays?
The answer was simple! His workload and pattern lost prediction,
Despite the best of planning and with no duty dereliction.
The advisor garb he was adorned had infused these extra grooves,
Being a counsel for content-structuring had aggravated his woes.
Just as a developer that resolved coding bugs that throbbed,
He could rectify the content omissions and flaws that bogged.
Forensic sleuthing was needed at times to drill down the history,
As he dealt with customer cases on content cracks that were a mystery.
More than grammar, style, and minimalism being his aides,
Logical reasoning and analytical thinking were extinguishing the raids.
Though he documented weird symptoms with tools and techniques,
Every occasion perplexed him with a new strangeness in its tricks.
Weathered out, he had harnessed a resilient and steely resolve
His adroit and assiduous armor were laced with a humble absolve.
When he saw smoke arising in its early quotients,
He doused it before it snowballed into a fire of catastrophic proportions.
He was developing the uncanny knack to sniff a smolder,
And ready the apt document arsenal before they turn into a boulder.
A tech-support agent frowns at a section with a factual flaw,
A direct nit straight out a customer’s web feedback carps with a claw.
An ongoing release needs the final release notes out the door EoD,
And all these raging fires need to be quelled swiftly, oh lordy!
A fire-hose is the ammunition that Janaka valiantly wields,
Fiercely fighting with blatant bravado to net the desired yields.
From a cocooned writer to a courageous ninja,
He continues to transform himself and enjoy his work…aha!