Good thing, I am integrating into the team; bad thing, I have to stay late in the nights and come back early. Like today, we had meetings with the client for clarifying few issues. We had series of meetings starting at 23h00 our time, ending at around 01h00. I will go home, have a quick and short sleep and then will have to return for a weekly status meeting tomorrow at 11h00. In all these 8 years of IT experience, I somehow was free from such late night sittings. But now I can understand more clearly the plight of Indian software guys.

We are three in the team. The other two have girl friends within the firm. It is quite often that their girls want to speak to them. One guy is on the extreme; he goes for lunch and dinner only with her. He hardly joins others – in these three months, only once. As I take coffee breaks, they take chatting breaks. These breaks give us the energy to get going for the day.

By the way the title means, little bit of work and little bit chat (with a girl)

I got my cell phone ringing today morning at 5.30. ‘Good morning Joseph’, my team lead was on the other side, ‘we have a production problem. I want you to come over here at the earliest. If you want I will arrange for a car pick up’. If I take a car pick up then coming back will be difficult, so I refused the pick up and said that I will be there in an hour. A quick shower and then on to the road.

It is always difficult to clean up other’s shit. Add to it, there are no comments explaining what the code is. It took me sometime before I got the logic. Once the lousy logic was understood, it was easy to fix. Around 11, the shit was clean.

What I found strange is, there is no please or thank you. Also when there is a need, the firm goes out of its way in arranging a car pick up. But when it is over, you are just left on your own. The only satisfaction I get is, I have what it takes to put up with the shit and clean it as well.

In a typical offshore setting, when an employee returns from onsite (s)he will be inducted into either an existing team (if the project is ongoing) or a new team. But I am an atypical guy. Not knowing what to do with a senior resource like me, my firm has placed me into an ongoing vantive project. The team has been doing production support and enhancements for the past year. However none of them received any vantive training, they used the manuals to self-tutor them. They have enough knowledge to get through. Depending on the angle of view, I could be proud of a broad role or panic at uncertainty. I could do anything to empower the team – vantive training, process improvement, motivating the team and any other thing that will keep the project offshore and probably get more modules. But in all this, I am not visible to the client. So I will not get credit for the outcomes. (It already happened that I troubleshooted some production troubles and the client appreciated the existing team for the fixes. As I am not in this team officially, even within my firm I am not noticed) This could be an issue at the time of appraisal which is due in few months. Hopefully within that time, the manager of the existing team will provide proper visibility for me. As for now, I have a challenge to face.

Yesterday, a particular group from the client termed as ‘Offshore Augmentation Group’ visited our office. As this project is run for a major health-care giant in the US, they are pretty sensitive about security, privacy of data and so on. Apparently the client has outsourced to four major offshore vendors in the city. So this group, which is responsible for increasing the offshore projects, visited all the vendors and audited their performance.

Over the years, my firm has put in place lot of process. But still there was a holy aura in the whole unit. Everybody came in before 8.30, dressed pretty well (now boys dont have to wear Tie as like 4 years before), cleaned up their desks and so on. As I am still unbillable, I was asked to leave the unit, which was hurting but not that much; after all library is a good companion.

There are rumours that the offshore strength will increase soon. Hopefully this will bring some cheers for me too.

On Friday I got a call from the HR saying that there is a two weeks requirement for BO (Business objects, a reporting tool) and whether I will be willing to work on BO. As BO is also a ‘hot’ tool and it was for a short duration, I agreed. The HR manager sent a mail to the project leader of the current project about the anticipated re-allocation and requested him to relieve me from the project. What is there to be relieved off?

Monday went by, and Tuesday went by. No news from HR. As I was relieved from the project until the end of the month, I was back to the library. I got an appointment on Thursday. It was in Tidel Park (a Tamilnadu govt initiative towards IT) which is on the other side of the city. The interviewer came in, had a little discussion about my previous experiences. After listening, he was confused and threw me a question, “From VB and Vantive, why do you want to come to Linux?”. I explained what HR informed me. He went to his manager and came back to say that there has been something wrong going. Ya, of late, everything has been going wrong. I tried to contact the HR manager and he said that he was in a meeting and he will call me back, which he never did.

What pisses me off is, not that these things happen, but how it is handled and whether any remedial steps are taken to prevent this in the future. In this two months, it has happened twice and there was neither apology nor a change in operations. I wonder often, whether time has come to quit. However my interactions with the top management has been cordial and they are empathetic and I do have good faith in them. It is the next layer of managers that screw up (I consider them bunch of morons). It is highly possible that with the express growth of the company, the values and goals did not pass through the layers of management.

With what happened and continue to happen, I lost the ability to get angry, rather I am laughing at my misfortune.

After two months of unfailing support by the library, I have been allotted a vantive project. It is based on helpdesk module for a US healthcare giant.

The team is just 3 memebers – a team lead, a developer and a production support member. Currently I am non-billable. Depending on how things turn out, other responsibilities will be given in the future. Not a promising future, but for now, I have something to work on.