Tech Job 9 to 9 (6 page)

In the evenings,
Sana and Vinay would get down from the bus near the Garden Park bus stop where
their rented flats were located. They would have some chat for snacks. They
would sit outside the Garden Park and talk till 8.30 at night. They would then
slowly walk to their flats.

One evening,
they both sat in the Garden Park and started chatting about movies. Sana went
through the story of latest movie she had watched last week. She was very
excited about what the heroin did in that movie.

She acted out
a scene from the movie showing what the actress did by swinging her hands and
looking at Vinay. It was late evening. Their eyes met. He looked deep into her
eyes. She slowly blinked. They held their gaze for a longtime. Then her face
showed a sudden surprise and then a tiny smile formed around her lips. She
immediately lowered her eyes and felt shy.

Then she said
slowly, “What are you doing? Are you trying to become my husband?”

“Why shouldn’t
I try for that?” asked Vinay.

“I would very
much love you to do that,” said Sana.

He held her
hand for a few seconds then lifted it and suddenly kissed her full lips. She
released her lips after few seconds.

“Not here, my dear
future husband. Please be patient,” said Sana.

They both
smiled.

“I wanted you
as my wife the day I saw you here in Holtezent,” he said.

“I was
confused whom I will marry in future. I don’t want to marry someone I don’t
know and go abroad. My happiness is being right here. I was happy when I saw
you here. I hoped you would get interested in me.”

Vinay then
hurriedly kissed her cheek, her nose and upper lips.

“Careful.
Somebody might come,” she giggled. They then walked towards their flats.

Vinay and Sana
always stayed together while at work as well as going out to cafeteria,
spending time in library and walking together in the pathways of the gardens.
In the bus, during the commute to and from office, they sat next to each other
and chatted.

On Saturdays
and Sundays, they both went to malls. They would have lunch in the food court
and watch a movie together. On some days, they would have a pizza or a burger
at one of the fast-food franchise outlets and chatted for hours. They also
adopted talking through eye and hand signals.

They also
chatted till late night using a messenger application in their phones. They
discussed in every detail about themselves, what they liked, what they didn’t
like, what they wanted to become, what they had become and every topic was discussed
in detail. Later they moved on to talk about their family and what their mother
liked, what their father liked. And nowadays they talked about when they should
marry, how many kids they should have, what names to give to their kids and
which area they should rent a house.

Their friends
understood what was going on between Sana and Vinay.

While they
were in Mysore, Vinay went to Sana’s house in the pretext of giving back her
books. They would chat for some time in her house. She then showed him her artwork
and embroidery.

Sometimes in
the evening Sana went out to meet her friends. She used the opportunity to go
to Vinay’s house to call him to go together for a friend’s birthday party. They
would create a fake friend’s birthday party to avoid further questions from
their parents.

Their visits
and hangouts didn’t go unnoticed with their parents. Questions were raised by
the mothers.

“How come a
girl comes to meet Vinay?” asked Vinay’s mother.

  “A boy has
come to see Sana,” commented Sana’s mother once.

Vinay and Sana
told they were colleagues working on the same project in the same company. They
were close friends and should be treated as such.

On Thursday,
Sana told her parents she would be joining a team outing to Coorg on Friday and
come back to Bangalore on Monday morning. She said she would come to Mysore
next week. On Friday, Vinay hired a car and with Sana seated on his side he
drove the car from Bangalore to Madikeri. They stopped at Channapatna along
their way and had a coffee break. They had the delicious Maddur vadda for their
breakfast. They then stopped at a restaurant just before Mysore and finished
their lunch there.

Sometime in
the evening they reached Kushal Nagar. They asked around for any home stays
nearby and finally went to AM Kumaran Villa. Jitu was the home owner. He looked
at them and asked if they were newly married. Vinay lied they were married a
few months back. Jitu gave a double bedroom in first floor. Vinay and Sana kept
their bags in the room and went down to the dining room. They had coffee and
Mysore Bun. Jitu told them about nearby tourist attractions.

Vinay and Sana
started their site seeing. They immediately went to a nearby reservoir which
Jitu told them about. It was a huge backwater reservoir. They stood there
watching the scenery for some time allowing the strong gushy winds caress and
blew around them.

The next few
days Vinay and Sana did not miss a tourist spot nearby Kushal Nagar and
Madikeri. They had gone to the elephant camp last night. They went to a hill
nearby and bathed in the waterfalls there and ate delicious and fresh home
cooked food for lunch and dinner.

“I suspect
Anil is an unqualified resource. Not that I’m saying his profile is fake or
something. That should be obvious by now. He basically lays out a skeleton of
the work assigned to him and then asks people around and gets bits and pieces
of his work done for him in his PC. We are indirectly doing his work for him
without us realizing it,” said Himesh.

Anil had
obtained a B.Com degree. He had failed in the Chartered Accountant exam. He
tried in an Entrance test conducted by a local private bank named Kritika
Mercantile Bank and got selected.

Everything
seemed to go well when one day when he was clearing a check, he by mistake
credited a transaction to the wrong account. The bank detected the error in the
ledger after one week. But it was too late then. They could not revoke the
transaction. The credit was lost.

Bank staff
would be held personally accountable for the banking operations assigned to
each of them. If there were any errors in transactions, the staff in charge had
to compensate with their own money according to the bank’s policy. Anil was
given two choices either to pay five lakh rupees to the bank from his own
pocket or risk going to jail. He had somehow paid the required money to the bank
with the help of his parents.

He then
decided to leave the job unable to bear the risk associated with the job. With
his domain skills in Banking, he got a job in Holtezent as a Domain Analyst in
the Banking and Financial Services department. He was without project for more
than three months. He was getting rejected in many project interviews.

Inside Holtezent,
each project team would conduct its own internal interview to determine the
suitability of the employee for the project. Employees who could not get into a
project for more than three months would be asked to leave the company. They
called it as involuntary resignation. Finally he was forced to join this
project or leave the company. The skills required for this project were
different from what he had. They told him to re-skill or up-skill. He feared he
would face performance issues. Faced with no choice, he joined this project and
tried to survive in the project with his wits.

He befriended
Vinay and Himesh. He maintained good working relationship with everyone in the
team. He tried to pick up the job but with a weak foundation in IT skills he
struggled. He attended many training. He hoped with Vinay and Himesh helping
him, he would be able to survive in IT job. Vinay and Himesh, both being
energetic, didn’t seem to mind doing part of his work or spending time guiding
him. They liked chatting with him and discussing in general about economy and
finance.

Vinay, Himesh
and Ashutosh just finished attending a conference call. They then went to cafeteria
for a coffee break.

“Are you
interested to go onsite Vinay?” asked Himesh.

“I may be interested
in future. Right now I have other plans,” said Vinay.

“Puneet is
already bugging for onsite. His visa is ready. He will leave anytime now,” said
Ashutosh.

“He is one lucky
fellow. How long is the assignment?” asked Himesh.

“Not sure. May
be anywhere from six months to one year. They can always put him into some work
there,” said Ashutosh.

Puneet always
wanted to go onsite. He had dreamed of long-term onsite opportunity within Holtezent.
He had bugged Raghu earlier and initiated the visa process. Finally his dream
came true. The chance for which he waited for so long was given to him. Raghu
was in need of an onsite coordinator to coordinate his multiple projects from Dochamk
Bank’s office in US. So he chose to send Puneet for this requirement. Ragu
didn’t fully tell him all the requirements of the job.

Puneet was
very excited. He immediately went into daydreaming. He went on a shopping
spree. He bought a heavy sweater and coat for the harsh winter cold in US. He
bought a rice cooker, clothes and some ready to cook items. With much fanfare
he departed to US. He reported to the US office after two days and worked as an
Onsite Coordinator for Holtezent from the office of Dochamk Bank.

Holtezent
enacted a policy change requiring all onsite resources to work on Saturdays as
well. His Business Engagement Manager aka BEM from Holtezent told him he should
divide his time to handle multiple projects. He was told to work thirty percent
on one project, twenty percent each on two other projects and another thirty
percent for one more project.

He would
suddenly receive some email discussing about some unknown project and his name
would pop up in the email out of nowhere. His name in that email would be
highlighted. And then he would be roped into that unknown project as well to
provide coordination between the client and the offshore team. Life had become
like firefighting for him. He had to work as an individual contributor as well
as the coordinator for many projects. He could not perform in both of them. He
lost focus. He was getting stressed out every day. He was unable to cope up
with the pressure from multiple ends.

People started
circulating lewd comments his performance was not up to the mark. Each of them
had different demands for their projects. He could not meet any of their
expectations. He was only able to pick up bits and pieces in each of those
projects and struggled to perform in his job. It was beyond his capacity to
meet the demands of everyone. The level of focus and multitasking required for
the job was simply too difficult for him to handle. He grew tired and exhausted.

He regretted
his decision of coming to onsite. The golden years of onsite assignments were
long gone.

“This is not
what I wanted,” he thought.

He then booked
his flight ticket and planned to depart by end of that winter. He cooked up
some compelling reason.

“I’m getting
married.”

‘It’s ok. You can
get married and come back,” told his BEM.

“No. The girl
is already working there. So I cannot come back,” he said.

“It’s ok. She
can join Holtezent and come with you here. We will find some onsite assignment
here for her,” said his BEM.

“Never again”,
thought Puneet.

“Ashutosh, can
you tell us how this Agile method works? What kind of challenges you faced
before?” asked Vinay.

Ashutosh
started explaining Agile methodology in detail to Vinay and Himesh

“In Agile, a
Sprint consists of a set of tasks. Each Sprint is for three to four weeks. Stories
are tasks assigned to each person. Each Story has to be completed within the
specified time.

As a person
starts work on a Story, he gets to know more specific details of the tasks
which are not known at the time of effort estimation. This amounts to
additional work. But the catch is you have to finish the work within the
specified end date. So you stretch and work extra time every day or work on
Saturdays and Sundays, it’s up to you,” explained Ashutosh.

“What did you
do when you are faced with tight timelines that you could not meet?” asked Vinay.

“If you find
additional work is involved and you cannot complete within the end date, just
discard those hidden requirements and the additional work,” said Ashutosh.

“What do you
mean? Discard that additional work because you could not meet the end date?”
said Himesh.

“Why bother?
Why try hard and explain? It’s a pain to explain every detail of the additional
work involved and how much more effort it will take to someone who will turn
only a deaf ear to you. And the next day they will ask you the same questions,
pretend they didn’t understand. They will even say that you have to plan and
work efficiently to meet the end date and not ask for extra time. They will
pass snide comments like you have to grow up.

They will make
it as a big fuss. They, the higher up will talk like why additional effort
needed, it should be completed within estimated effort. They will talk like you
are not working and sitting tight. That will be the indirect comments on you.
They won’t directly tell in your face. It will come through Raghu and Murali.

No matter what
work you do, they will make you feel bad. If your work gets blocked and you are
unable to proceed or if your work gets delayed because of somebody’s fault,
they will make it look like you are responsible for that. No matter how much
work you do, they will make it look like you are not working. They will pass
lewd comments and say ‘you didn’t follow up, you didn’t ask, you didn’t
check…you didn’t work with proper planning.’

You get the
message right. You know what I mean. You have to read between the lines. They
expect you to do the work of two to three people. That is possible if you work
at least eighteen hours a day. But they will pay you for nine hours only.

They will not
accept or consider your additional work. Your additional hours of work will not
reflect in the actual efforts of the tasks in the Agile portal. If you took more
than nine hours to complete a day’s work, Agile portal web site would still
show the work as completed within the estimated efforts hours only,” said
Ashutosh.

Ashutosh said Agile
methodology was making life very difficult to survive for the team. While it
provided a very good tool to efficiently track the work of each resource in the
project, it was more suitable for projects that didn’t require R&D work.

Ashustosh went
on in detail how the project used many technologies which were new to the team.
There were many areas of work that would require R&D that were not clear
while doing effort estimation. Due to high-pressure from the management, the
team had to give some effort estimation for all the tasks that also fit within
the already fixed timelines of the project. If the estimation exceeded a timeline,
the team was told to cut short the estimation and complete the work within the
timeline by stretching and working extra hours and by working on Saturdays
explained Ashutosh.

Ashutosh
explained further. He said Agile methodology didn’t encourage teamwork in any
way. As each person’s work would be scrutinized in the everyday morning status
call, people concentrated only on their work and stopped helping others. When someone
got stuck in their work unable to proceed because of gap in his technical skill
or the task required some R&D to be carried out, there was no one coming
forward to guide him or help him out. People were more concerned that they
would get blamed for any delays in their work or would be made responsible for
somebody’s work. Such was the team spirit Agile methodology created within the
team. Even hardworking people like Vinay, Himesh and Ashutosh struggled to cope
up with Agile methodology.

“Certain
people are good in certain kinds of work. They may be slow or weak to pickup
things in other kinds of work. In teamwork, this will complement as well as
provide cover to one another. But in today’s world of corporate greed, this
kind of teamwork is overlooked,” said Ashutosh.

“What about
other ways of developing software?” asked Himesh.

“In Software
Engineering, there are many different software development methodology and
software design models. A development methodology defines how to develop
software right from gathering requirements from the customer for the software
to be built, to designing and building the software, to testing and deploying
the software for the customer. There are various process-driven methodologies
like Waterfall methodology as well as an approach like Agile methodology with
more emphasis on customer interaction.

A design model
on the other hand defines how to specify the requirements which were gathered
from the customer and then create a high-level design model of the software
without actually creating the software itself. There are various approaches
like Object Oriented Analysis and Design techniques, Unified Modeling Language
and Use Case driven approaches. I think, for this project, a combination of Use
Case driven approach and Unified Modeling Language is chosen as it is better
suited to work with customers with non-IT background,” said Ashutosh.

“Why these
jobs have come here?” asked Himesh.

“IT firms like
Holtezent specialize in providing these services and supply the staff for doing
the IT jobs to its clients like Dochamk Bank. This provides a mutually
beneficial arrangement between Holtezent and its clients. IT job had become a
demanding and stressful job due to the high-level of collaborative work
involved, tight project timelines, reduction in number of quality staff and fewer
number of resources deployed to increase profit margin and under funding in
project budget due to budget cuts at client end,” said Ashutosh.

“Look at the
work environment. You might get blamed every hour for no fault of yours.
Imagine if you are shouted at for somebody’s mistake. This is a business
environment where each minute counts. Each hour is paid and the work expected
from you is at least two person’s work. This is a blame oriented work
environment where they always suspect you are not working and slacking out,” continued
Ashutosh.

“Not everyone
will have the emotional quotient to sustain the emotions and stress involved
while working in this kind of blame oriented work environment. Not everyone
will be able to adapt and survive in this work environment. Just think of it,
doing at least two people work, sweat yourself out every minute and absorb all
the blame thrown at you. Some people might get fear to come to workplace and
work the next day,” said Ashutosh.

“But we have
to. There is no other way for us,” said Vinay.

“Yes that is
why we are doing it right now. But how long we will be able to survive in such
a harsh work environment?” said Ashutosh.

“What is this
emotional quotient?” asked Himesh.

“It’s just a
measure of your emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is how good you
are in reigning in your emotions at the workplace. But having a good emotional
quotient doesn’t mean you can overcome stress at workplace. It will at least
enable you to stay cool and have some sanity in a hostile work environment,”
explained Ashutosh.

Vinay had
written around ten KLOC of code for one module but the logging and reporting
functions were not ready yet. Himesh was working on those functions and he
would take another three days to complete. Vinay had already reported the
status of the ten KLOC code as completed, but refactoring the code to use
Himesh’s functions would take another four days work for him. When Vinay
explained this to Nitesh in the status call, Nitesh cut him off saying Vinay
had to stretch extra hours every day and complete the work and those four days
work would not be counted.

KLOC stood for
Kilo Lines Of Code which referred to a thousand lines of code. Ten KLOC meant
ten thousand lines of code. Refactoring of code referred to changing the
structure of code, data, function calls and modules. As more and more
functionalities were implemented, more details would emerge and it would become
clear that certain code and data had to be restructured for a better design.

Ashutosh told
Vinay and Himesh that usually design was carried out in the design stage and
would result in two levels of design, high-level design aka HLD and low-level design
aka LLD. No matter how much work was put into designing in the design stage, it
would still be revisited when the ground realities change which happened often.
There were many times during design stage one file format was given but when
they started working on a module, a sample file was given to them which
differed vastly from the file format given earlier.

Vinay, Himesh
and Ashutosh found that many tasks assigned to them were estimated as four
hours. But when they started working on those tasks, they found that R&D
work was required and they could not complete within the estimated hours. When
they raised this concern to the management, they were told that efforts had
been estimated by SME team who had prior experience in these types of projects.
They were told to stretch extra hours every day and complete the work within
the estimates given and estimated efforts would not be revised.

SME stood for
Subject Matter Expert. It referred to the experts who had expertise in the
underlying technologies used in the project and had worked in similar projects
before. Nowadays the term was loosely used and anybody with little bit of hands
on claimed to be an SME.

Vinay, Himesh
and Ashutosh thought there was a mystery surrounding the SME team. Ashutosh
suspected there was no SME team. He also suspected the estimated efforts were
laid out by Nitesh and few other executives from the business team. The term
SME was used to give authenticity to the numbers. The management would also
handpick someone and say this was the SME. Nobody could question them.

Management
told them failing to complete within the timelines would be considered as
performance issue with the resource.

“Consider this
as an opportunity to prove yourselves. If you talk about revising the estimates
or if you cannot complete within the timelines, it will be considered as
negative thinking, negative attitude. It will have an impact on your appraisal.
SMEs have estimated and reviewed the estimates and they are correct,” told
Raghu in one of the internal team meetings.

Raghu told the
team to work on another subproject as well and he had told them not to tell
Nitesh or Anna about it. The team had a hard time juggling work for the two
projects and meeting the timelines for the CDSTP project. They got severe
blaming from Nitesh for even the smallest slip in the deadline and were unable
to explain the delays in the deliverables.

In the
cafeteria, Vinay, Sana, Himesh and Ashutosh started discussing about the
project.

“How can we
work on multiple projects and still meet the deadlines imposed by Nitesh?”
asked Himesh.

“It’s getting
difficult to focus on any particular work. I’m getting overloaded,” said Vinay.

“This is
corporate greed at its best. If we switch between multiple project works, if we
multitask heavily, we will lose focus on any particular work. This will impact
our productivity and so we will be slow in doing our work. Not everyone will be
able to cope up with this way of work. You will soon burn out. It’s only a
matter of time,” said Ashutosh.

“What is corporate
greed?” asked Himesh.

“Corporate
greed is trying to make use of one person to do the work of two or three
people. What this means is he has to work for more than nine hours a day and
must complete the work of two or three people. But he would be billed for nine
hours only. It’s basically getting somebody to do additional work every day.

For example we
are asked to work on multiple projects but Nitesh will not know about our other
project work. So he will think we are not working fully.

The greed also
comes through other demands like value additions cost savings, etc. you name it.
Again the idea is to get you to do extra work every day or make you work more
than nine hours each day,” said Ashutosh.