New project and Miss Z..

Another Year has come to end and along with it the Project; it was another successful project for Programmer Y and his team. All the blame game earlier has now turned into mutual respect and heartfelt gratitude towards each other. The project which a month ago was under immense pressure of curtailing the defect counts and improving quality now is being looked upon as a model project to be presented as a case study on how they implemented "Agile methodology" successfully in an onshore-offshore model working model. It’s the time to convert all the unfortunate events and mishap that happened during the course of the project implementation into a fable story of success.



It’s the time when everybody thinks Programmer Y can let off his worried hat and rest for a while. But as people say you do not get what you wish and what you get is not what you wished for.


Programmer Y has always been vocal to PAPPU (Project manager) of his discontent about the technology he has been working in. This was one of the discussions which happened in one of his 1 on 1 meeting [1]

[1] These meetings are basically the open ended questions meeting with close ended answer. Where in project manger feels that he is giving individual attention and programmer feels that it’s a wasting his time. So all his questions ends up being open ended like "How's it going?" or "What's important to you these days?" gets a reply back of “Fine” or “nothing much”. At the end project manager gets frustrated and he gives programmer the list what he expects from him. This list is given to the programmer irrespective of whether he answers correctly or not.

Programmer Y: There is huge disconnect between my enormous Technical knowledge and the trivial task you assign me.



Pappu (causally): That's a temporary situation


Programmer Y (sort of relieved): Okay! Good.


Pappu (sarcastically): Eventually your technically skills will become outdated ;-)

This discussion had left Programmer Y dumb folded and no hope that he would get a better technology. So Programmer Y continued to live his monotonous boring life and was trying to rest and bask in the glory of his recently completed project by setting aside his worrying hat. But as you know my friend everything in this world is short lived and free time definitely in this time of recession. And Programmer Y was soon assigned to another project in an R&D department [2] to see which latest technology was suitable for this new project.

[2] R&D Department is other way to say that you are on bench or without any work. If you do not have any work in your project you will be assigned to an R&D department or Center of excellence. The only work over there is to create Proof of Concept, which means copying the code from Google and making it run in your own environment. And creating heaps of document supporting it which if anybody looks for copyright, I believe most of the company would get into trouble at most of their documents. In our company these R&D people are no longer called as intellectual but borrowed intellectual because of the reason stated above.

Programmer Y was happy to some extent not because he would be able to work on new technology, but the fact that he now will be able to use internet at will with out any restriction. The technology they were asking Programmer Y to do R&D, he had already worked upon it and he knew in an out of it so creating a POC and a analysis document was a task he could perform even in his free time.


First day of the project was as usual boring with all the introduction and project details being discussed with programmer Y. The only interesting thing which happened in this whole process was Miss Z...


Hey I need to go for a meeting (on a 1:1 meeting but requirements) but stay tuned to learn more about Miss Z..

Chao

- Programmer Y