The Urinal Theory

These are troubled times indeed.... inflation is showing it's apogee; economic growth has almost grinded to an abrupt stop; and madonna has released her latest but definitely not the last album. But this post is not going to address any of these issues !!!

Very recently during my tenure as a software professional, i had been witness to this modernized version of "cattle farming". YES, you read it right... just as in those days, cattle were brought together in a congested market place, bartering/bargaining of the prices (The concept of settling prices is such a complex logic, that even share market pundits fail to grasp) and later on brought together and stuffed into a already congested coup.

Times have definitely changed, the earlier market place has been re-defined as a job fair, while the pricing is currently based on concepts such as CTC (whose logic still beats me) and later on they are all dumped into a single spot of recreation, named "CUBICLE"

And here is where the urinal theory comes to play....
In my initial days, i was under the impression that the HR folk understood the need-gap analysis and could load up only as many number of people as the number of cubicles... but as an understatement i was wrong.

Not only did the number of people per Cubicle increase (From what was an acceptable number of 1 person per cubicle to the current congesting 7 people per cubicle and the numbers are rising as a trend) and to add further discomfort the size of each cubicle decrease(citing reasons of un-utilized potential of around 21% air in each cubicle);

Until ultimately they even started laying off people who do not "fit in" (for the verbosely challenged people... "fit in" is a pun used for both fitting into the organization as well as fitting into the cubicle). So i did find out much to my own chagrin of fitting into a single cubicle with 6 other IT engineers, that the maximum number of recruitment neither depends on the project requirements nor on the cubicle limitations.

But finally, after truck-loads of research and intense brain-storming i have arrived at the ultimate formula of predicting the recruitment numbers
Deepak's formula for HR recruitment a.k.a the Urinal Theory :-

"The maximum number of recruitment that would be provided by the HR officials was be based upon the number of urinals available in the office, roughly around 8.75* per urinal"

The advantages of using the urinal theory is that :-
1) It explains the huge intake of software professionals in any project.
2) Unlike Cubicles, Urinals can neither be overloaded nor shrunk.
3) You don't need to worry about employees covering up the urinals with their personal memorabilia (just as they would crowd up the cubicles with photos and stuff) and hence laying them off would be much easier

p.s: The Urinal Theory is a dedication from my end to Scott Adams who has always enlightened me with the actual knowledge of management through Dilbert.....
*: The number 8.75 is actually corroborated with another theory called BS theory.