End to End

Joining for my job in the company has had many positives as of late, and that has positively succeeded in overshadowing those dark days of sitting on the bench for more than a month. The overshadowing process included of some pretty rigorous training on various programming and design concepts. Now, maybe my manager(a really jolly chap), has got me brainwashed, yet I feel justified in inferring that design is something that usually is never taught to rookies such as ourselves (somewhat true in our industry, as a general rule). Yet, as say a twist of fate has had it, we have been put into the path of some serious and severe design and architecture know-how.

The company has had, as of late has a sudden enlightenment, that a really alarming proportion of the projects being undertaken by the company are under serious fire during their closing stages, identified during certification by our team and more specifically our manager(whose green light is needed for many a project to actually hit the market or the client or whatever/whoever it is supposed to hit) and that they were no where near a standard as to be called good or atleast passable code/application for the client from a non-functional point of view(say like performance, maintainability, coding standards etc). So after some brainstorming (probably meaning some heated words being exchanged) our management decided on an experiment wherein some rookies (namely us) will be trained on the finer aspects of software design and coding. These rookies were going to be a 'Vazhikaatti' to the senior architects and 7-10 year experienced Technical Leads who were, apparently not following the best practices and standards. Now don't get me wrong, but I think the senior members of our team (the whole team numbering all of 3 excluding us rookies, of which 2 we have met) are both nice guys. But somehow or the other the rest of the senior delivery managers or tech leads/project managers do not share our positive evaluation of our senior team members. Infact they just seem to think that they are complete *%&%&#!@!'s . Well, one cannot actually blame them, because after listening to some conference calls between a delivery manager and our second-in-command about our first-in -ommand while our first-in-command was infact in a very room, we could even begin to understand their consternation when they suddenly found themselves owner to red lights on all the 6-7 criteria for which they were being evaluated (non-functional aspects) and got 96 concern comments for problems with the code).

After listening to our trainer take us through the end to end of .NET and some very pheripheral concepts of UML and OOAD, all interspersed with frantic delivery managers practically begging to them over the phone for approval, we were nearing the end of our designed training. Now don't think that I am trying to blow my (our) own horn but I generally found that the 3 mallus in the 9 member team better coped up with the training. And when the manager found us a cosy practice assignment, I was not surprised to be assigned the task of dummy project manager(obviously me or Jose would have got it :D). I found to my dismay that trying to get people who have absolutely no intention of working to do what they absolutely have no idea about doing in the way which they absolutely could not imagine is much more difficult than it might seem to the casual outside observer. So you can imagine my struggle to make the Work Breakdown Structure(WBS) of the project, planning what all we were going to do for the next 12 odd days and what exactly each person was to achieve that particular day. Ofcourse the manager acting like a typical client, changing his requirements everyday and changing his specifications everyday added spice to the roles we were playing and basically everyone started getting mildly annoyed. My annoyance might have been a triffle above the general level because I had to suffer the additional annoyance of having my team members teasing me by calling me the project manager and asking me what they were supposed to do each day and each hour. We surprised the manager the third day with about 50 questions I painstakingly made that morning, we were finally able to pin down the whole intricate details of the project. This impressed our manager who usually was satified with his routine observation that team was not performing up to his expectation(but it was obvious that we were not actually faring badly). In the meantime I was making funny and silly mistakes like sending over mails forgetting to attach the required documents and the PM sending me mails in Malayalam saying what he was supposed to review.

Now half way through the project, and after some more minor "impressing" sessions he has sent mails to senior managers and head of various departments very very openly advertising our groups presence and in the process blatantly overstating our capabilities and knowledge. This has inturn lead us being assigned another "Bench" group to kind of mentor and bring upto our level. Our very own manager was all "Thallu Thallu" to the other group's manager, and we have sworn to follow in his footsteps trying to sweep the other group off their feet with our effieciency and ofcourse much better intellectual capacity :P.

P.S: And finally on a more postive note the author wishes to notify all the curious males that their concern regarding the new twist in the tale is indeed justified. The new group does include 3 quite pretty girls among the total 6 and the future is indeed bright.... The future is indeed promising.. ;)