Nightmare Saturday

Its has only been about 4 hours into the Weekend work schedule and it has been quite close to a nightmare it can be in professional experience.

Lets start from the beginning. Reached office at 1:00 PM as asked. Got into the office after making a call to manager. PC’s started at 2:00 PM only 2 hours behind schedule. First signs of network at 2:30 PM. After that network decides to play hide and seek with us. It comes and goes and goes and comes and things like that. There is no light inside the building. No tubes, no bulbs and no AC. AC is not such a big deal as we have quite big and sufficient windows. But lighting sure is a problem. The whole day/evening goes on like that with zero network and Vishy telling every half an hour that this will be sorted out soon and Tushar telling us that we have to complete this work. Sometimes it seemed like Tushar had no idea of time at all. Maybe he was so much engrossed in work.
Or else so many people were poking around his ass that he was trying to pass some of his feelings around. And the bug list review call. More time was spend not talking on the call which went for about 150 minutes. That was simply great. The first four issues took 40 minutes to be discussed and only 4 minutes of that was spent talking. And then he started telling us that some network expert had left from Bombay, he will reach Pune soon and sort out the problem and we could finish the work and he could go home happily.

I started writing this on Saturday itself but then had no energy to finish this then so finished this on Monday.

Wow Again!

This time to the company. The staging and production were down the whole day yesterday (Indian) day. Sometime during the evening/night production was back up but staging is still down. Its has been almost 24 hours. We can’t raise requests to deploy bugs we have already fixed and gotten approval for, neither can we push anymore fixes to staging and get client approval for the same or self approval even, and given the disconnect I have already seen between development(VSS), staging and production, I would not try to fix bugs based on what I see on local. Forget even that, all this must have been someone’s mistakes a bit higher up or maybe not so higher up at the hosting company but still we are going to be the ones paying for it. We get one of our weekends sabotaged. Add to it the fact that the said escalation was being discussed from Monday or maybe a little earlier but we were informed to the thing on Thursday and the team is supposed to fix all the remaining bugs within 2 remaining days of the week or else be forced to come over on weekend. I hope this is a one time thing because if this becomes a regular feature, it might get messy for me and given the current job scenario in India and my close experiences with it in not so distant past, I am a lot hesitant against the managers United.

Now that I am at it, let me write some more about this company. There is no clear direction within the project. We were scheduled to receive some KT or knowledge transfer from the old guys in Mumbai team. That has not happened in about 50 days that I have been here and we are expected to fix all the bugs without any KT. Yeah yeah, we had some sort of KT once in Mumbai for which we were specially asked to come over there, a whole lot of us. That was originally a 3 day plan converted to a 2 day affair, then one day and in the end 4-5 hours of KT. That was great. They have time enough to organize wiki sessions and force us to take Security lessons which btw have yet to materialize.

There are a whole lot of other issues. But maybe this happens to a company which is trying to expand into another city which is close enough to be close but yet its a different city. Maybe this sort of things happen if company is only 377 strong in the new location or if all the people with project inner knowledge are in one place, they need to move on to the next big thing but someone still has to clean up their bugs but they don’t feel like helping because the newer thing is better. maybe this is just what happens in India’s software industry.

But yet I hope and believe that things can change, yes even in India.

Wow

The number of mistakes I have been making these days here at Atos in deployments has been shooting up quite admirably.
Any request you raise is not without errors it seems. Now I understand somewhat why they want me to go slow with this. But for this most recent issue, the client tested this on staging and approved and hence I am not at fault here. But still you need to go a lot slow here right now because the pace is not helping the cause. BTW, I am really poor at followups and procedures, I might get a chance to learn those here. We will see what happens.

Well many of these errors seem not to be caused by me, and they somehow manage to bypass all the checks installed here for them. So it seems I am here to test their systems as well.
Now I hope none of my current employment team members see this or there will be a whole set of new problems for me to resolve.