Tech Job 9 to 9 (8 page)

Vinay and
Himesh started working on the cost savings and value additions the team had
implemented in the project.

“For POC, one
month we both have worked at least six hours overtime. We have worked on
Saturdays as well and two Sundays during that month. So it comes to hundred and
eighty hours overtime for one month assuming nine hours for a working day. So
for two resources, it comes to three hundred and sixty hours overtime.

For three of
us you, me and Ashutosh, we have worked at least two hours extra on the average
for the entire year. That comes to five hundred and four hours for one
resource. For three resources, it is one thousand five hundred and twelve
hours.

Sana was
working as a free resource for one year. So let’s add up her hours for entire
year for the working days. So for twenty one working days by twelve months, it
is two thousand and two hundred and sixty eight hours.

Total add up to
four thousand and one hundred and forty hours. So for twenty dollar each hour
billing rate, this comes to eighty two thousand and eight hundred dollars in
savings from overtime and a free resource,” said Vinay.

“How can we
show countless hours of work we did by framing algorithms while travelling or
at home? Will they accept?” asked Himesh.

“No. They
won’t consider those things,” said Ashutosh.

“It’s
appraisal time of the year. Let’s start filling our appraisal and submit,” said
Vinay.

Vinay, Himesh
and Ashutosh logged into the employee web site and opened the appraisal site to
fill the appraisal.

“What we have
here. Under Goals we have Deliverables, Quality, Financials and Learning. Under
Attributes we have Communication & Presentation, Problem Solving,
Leadership and Customer Satisfaction,” said Himesh.

“Ashutosh can
you guide us for filling this? What we need to put under each section?” asked
Vinay.

“Under
Deliverables, put whatever you have developed till now. Put the module names
you worked and explain in detail the work you have done. Explain all the cost
savings and value additions you have brought in.

For Quality,
it’s mentioned there maximum how many defects are allowed in your work. So
don’t expose all your defects in that section. It says maximum three defects
every hundred KLOC allowed. I know everyone have lot of defects but just
downplay it. Don’t put actual figures there.

For
Financials, say how many leaves you have taken and how much is your utilization
percentage. Just make sure it is above ninety five percent.

For Learning,
mention all the trainings you have attended and any training you have given to
others,” explained Ashutosh.

“For
Attributes section, put blah-blah. Say you did this, you did that, you achieved
that,” said Ashutosh.

“What we will
put for Customer Satisfaction?” asked Vinay.

“Just say how
you have completed work within project timelines, how you have delighted the customer
with your POC work,” said Ashutosh.

The appraisal
cycle got over after two weeks. Vinay got a rating of three which stood for
“Meets Expectations”. Vinay went over the supervisor comments in the employee
appraisal web site which were given by his supervisor Murali.

“Guys just see
here what is written under Attributes section,” said Vinay and started reading
out.

Vinay read out
the appraisal comments to Himesh and Ashutosh.

His supervisor
comments were, “Communication and presentation needs to be improved. You could
have coordinated well in getting the queries clarified in a timely manner.

Considering
the kind of issues we are facing in the project today, you didn’t fully address
all the potential problems during the POC phase itself. You need to go into the
root of the problem and resolve each issue. Need to improve your problem
solving skill.

You need to be
proactive in leading the work. There are delays in the project due to which
scope of the project got reduced. You could have proactively taken the
initiative and reduced the delays.

Customer was
not happy with the way you have approached the problem. They were not happy
with the way POC was done. They were also dissatisfied with your performance
due to delays in project deliverables.”

“Wow, it’s
hard to satisfy everyone no matter how hard you work these days,” said Vinay.

Everyone
laughed.

Murali was promoted
to Project Manager. But he called himself as Program Manager. Raghu had now
become the Delivery Manager.

Vinay asked
Himesh, “How to get promotion? Do you know the process?”

“You need a
Godfather for that,” said Himesh.

“Who is
Godfather? Can we get promotion too?” asked Vinay.

“You need to
build rapport with some senior manager here. There are ties like hailing from
the same region or city, same language or religion that can help in building
rapport with some manager in our department. It will take longtime to build
that,” replied Himesh.

Vinay’s salary
increased after receiving his annual confirmation in Holtezent as well as the
yearly salary hike. His salary was three lakhs rupees per annum before tax.

Phase-two of
the CDSTP project was postponed due to budget cuts at Dochamk Bank. Phase-one
of the CDSTP project was completed and went operational. The management made
Satish as the team lead for the Operations Support team as well as the
maintenance team for the CDSTP. He reported to Nitesh in Dochamk Bank. Nitesh
placed Anil as a team member in the Operations Support team. The management
added newly recruited people to the support team and released Vinay, Sana,
Himesh, Ashutosh, Puneet and Shanthi.

Vinay heard
about another project within Dochamk Bank for which recruitment was going on.
He heard it was called GF project and somebody named Mona was the technical
team lead for that project. After Murali’s promotion, he was made as the
project manager for the GF project. Murali had earlier got the updated CVs from
everyone who got released from the CDSTP project and emailed all the CVs to the
client for their evaluation for the GF project.

After many
rounds of interview by the client, Ashutosh, Puneet and Shanthi got selected
for the GF project. The client had told Murali that Vinay, Sana and Himesh
could not be made billable as their experience did not meet the minimum
criteria but the client had agreed they could work in the project but could not
be billed for the hours they work for the project.

Vinay, Himesh
and Sana were put as non-billable shadow resources. They had only one year
experience but client had asked for at least four years experienced
professionals. So Murali could not make any of them as billable. There were
many problems associated with being a non-billable shadow resource. People
would not get the variable component of their salary which was twenty percent
of their salary.

They could
also be told to leave the project anytime and sent to bench.

“What is
bench?” asked Vinay to Ashutosh.

“Bench is the
term used to refer to the period where a resource is without a project. Holtezent
maintains a pool of resources in bench which provides the buffer needed for
ramp-up and ramp-down as and when required by the clients. The buffer also
supplies resources, those who are willing to be part of a project as
non-billable resource just to learn and acquire the skills used in the project.
They are referred to as Shadow resources. These resources hope the project
experience would highlight their CV and increase their prospects of getting
into potential opportunities in future.

It is up to
the people in bench to proactively look for a project and get into it. For
every month in bench or being non-billable resource, they would not receive twenty
percent of their salary,” said Ashutosh.

“Why there is
a bench system? Could not someone work on a project forever?” asked Himesh.

“Clients like
Dochamk Bank don’t need to hire permanent employees to do the IT jobs. They
don’t need to pay gratuity, retirement and pension benefits and make provident
fund contributions for these temporarily hired contract workers. They just
recruit Holtezent employees into their project and once the work is completed,
they would just release the Holtezent employees. This allows the clients to
expand and contract their operations as and when required based on their
business requirements. This way they save huge amount of money and Holtezent
also earns lot of money through this arrangement.

Holtezent
charges for its employee’s services and the infrastructure provided to the
client. It also charges office space for each employee and transport charges
for the employee for each working day. The salary Holtezent pays to its
employee is just one-fifth of what it charges to the client for the employee
working for the client.

The risk in
this system is put on the Holtezent employee, wherein if the employee is unable
to get into a project for more than three months, he would be asked to leave
the company. It is more of a hire and fire system without pension and
retirement benefits. It has the constant risk of an unstable job due to
temporary nature of IT projects,” said Ashutosh.

Mona was
twenty nine years old. She was a lean and tall girl and unmarried. She had a
wheat complexion and long faced. She had an air of authority about her. She was
aggressive and usually ignored juniors and new joinees to the team if they
tried to give any suggestions for the project.

Mona started
to give knowledge Transfer shortly referred to as KT. Many KT sessions were
scheduled during that entire week. In each KT session, Mona would explain the
different modules of the project.

This was the
first day of the KT. Mona would usually give a one–sided monologue.

Mona explained,
“This project is called Global Funds or GF project. There are a total of two
thousand requirements, hundred for each entity. There are twenty entities. Each
entity is associated with a geographic region. It was decided that the first
three months would be spent on laying the groundwork, creating the framework
and the required foundation for the project. After the foundation work is
completed, it is planned to roll out the system for each entity every two
months.”

“An entity
refers to the software configurations, files and code base specifically created
for a particular geographic region. Different geographic regions have different
requirements like language, currency, different file formats and the set of
countries that are grouped under that geographic region.

Some examples
of entities were NA for North America, LAtim for South America, JAPA for Japan,
IN for India, MEA for Middle East Asia, EU for European Union, SEA for South
East Asia and Benelux for Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg,” explained Mona.

“The
Management team, consisting of people from both Dochamk Bank and Holtezent
leadership, had decided to follow Waterfall software development methodology
for development of the software for each entity. They had decided to complete
each entity one by one and deliver in a sequential manner,” continued Mona.

“What is Waterfall
development methodology?” asked Himesh.

“Waterfall is
a classical or traditional way of software development. There are different
stages like requirements gathering and specification stage, high-level design
and low-level design stage, development, unit testing, integration tests,
system testing and user acceptance testing. Development for each entity should
follow these stages,” explained Mona.

Mona had created
fifty percent of the framework and the foundation work till date.

“There are
four main modules in this project. Application Transit Module, ATM for short,
Business Transit Module BTM, Application and Business Transaction Module ABTM,
Statement Sender Module SSM.

ATM will
receive all the files from different applications within Dochamk Bank. BTM will
receive different files from external business partners of Dochamk Bank. ABTM
will do the transaction handling for these files. And SSM will send these files
to other applications and business partners,” said Mona.

“Read through
all the project documents. From Monday I will start assigning you work. I have
high expectations from you all. We don’t have time for learning. I expect
everyone to put extra hours and work on Saturdays and Sundays if need be. By Monday
you should be up to speed. There won’t be any hand-holding and spoon-feeding. And
you have to be proactive and take the initiative rather than being reactive and
waiting for me to tell you each step what to do. If you can’t perform, just
don’t waste my time and leave the job,” said Mona.

Mona assigned
tasks to the entire team. Every day morning she would call for a status meeting
at 9.00 AM. People were more and more getting scared to attend that meeting.

In the meeting
room, Mona would start asking the status from each person. She would ask how
many tasks were completed and how many tasks were assigned yesterday. Mona
would go in a Round-Robin fashion starting with the person standing on her left
side and ending with the person on the right side. Everybody had to meet their
daily target. If anybody slipped from their daily target number, they would get
a bash and insults from Mona. Mona would tell them to work till late at night
that day and complete the work. They were to call her and update her about the
status before they leave the office at night. Some people even if they had not
completed their assigned work for yesterday, would report their status as
completed for fear of her bashing. It was a horrible numbers game.

It was a
Friday evening, Mona told Vinay to stay in office for a few more hours to help
her edit some report. Ashutosh was sitting nearby. Sana had left early to
receive her parents coming to Bangalore.

Vinay thought
why Ashutosh didn’t leave office yet. Mona rarely spoke with Ashutosh. She
usually didn’t directly assign him any work instead she would indirectly do
that through Vinay and Himesh. Vinay thought it to be strange.

“It’s nine
already. I can drop you at your home in my car. I will drive through that way
only everyday,” said Mona.

“It’s alright.
I will take bus,” said Vinay.

“Oh come on.
It’s nine. I will give you ride,” persuaded Mona.

“Shall I also
come with you Mona?” asked Ashutosh.

“Ok. But I
cannot drop you exactly at your place. I’m going through different route,”
replied Mona.

‘That’s all
right. I will get down at sixth cross. And from there I will take bus,” said
Ashutosh.

They started
out of office.

“Mind dropping
by my house. It’s just around that next turn,” said Mona.

Mona drove her
car inside a large penthouse. She then took them inside her house. It had one
floor and was a huge five bed room house. It had a big hall highly decorated
with expensive decors, a huge LED TV on one wall, a big dining table which can
seat ten people and a modular kitchen.

“You stay
alone here?” asked Vinay.

‘Yes. I worked
in US before for six years for Holtezent and then I came back here. My parents
are in Delhi,” replied Mona.

She served
coffee to everyone.

“I’m well
settled. Money is not a concern anymore. I have lots of money. I don’t need to
actually do a job. I just work still to get myself occupied with something with
what I know already. I have very good contacts in Holtezent. If you are looking
for career progression or salary hike, it’s pretty easy for me to arrange.
Think of the possibilities,” said Mona.

“I’m looking
for a shift to SAP line of work within Holtezent,” said Ashutosh.

“I know the
Vice President of SAP department in Holtezent. He is actually my family friend.
I could help you with that. And Vinay what are you looking for?” said Mona.

“I’m not
looking for anything specific right now. I’m just content with what I got,”
said Vinay.

“What about
onsite? Or salary hike? Or higher position? Oh come on. You have got just one
year experience. You may not even know what you want. You and Himesh are my
dark horses. With both of you, we could realize our project targets and impress
our client. Just think of what I can get you, a double promotion. You can
become a lead Architect or Technical Team Lead. Think about it. Work harder, prove
yourself and the possibilities for you are endless in Holtezent,” said Mona.

Mona served
dinner. They chatted for few more minutes. Vinay and Ashutosh thanked Mona for
the dinner and then went to a nearby bus stop to wait for their buses to come.

“Why you came
along Ashutosh?” asked Vinay.

“Hmm, to study
how high-class people live. What do you think? No. I just came to see if I
could find any ladder for my SAP aspirations,” said Ashutosh.

“You are
looking for a Godfather through Mona. You are being very proactive man,” said
Vinay.

“Proactive and
reactive are the much overused and abused words in IT. No I’m a reactive guy in
general except this case,” laughed Ashutosh.