January 2020 – I was promoted as a Technology Consultant – first step of the huge staircase that would lie in front of me – I had been given a team to lead. I could design the technical architecture now solely , I could decide on what task who can work on – I could even take the heavy tasks with myself – I could guide everyone – I could be small -level god. I liked the promotion – I had worked my ass through day and nights and it felt I was rewarded for it. But there was a big ‘But’. That is the thing with life – everybody wants to be Dhoni but barely people scratch the surface. People hardly listened to me when I was the Senior Software Engineer. I had tried multiple times giving them work but they had refused most of the times on my face – I did not had it in me to be authoritative without pulling a rank on the junior or without being rude. I even had the habit of not listening to the calls fully. I would always skip some details. At the start, it struck when everyone in the team was kind of looking at me to distribute the task.
Part 1 – The Novice
I faced a lot of challenges but it did not come in ways I expected before. My onsite welcomed me with great gesture – for a moment I felt someone put a red carpet in front of me. Reputation precedes the man. He assigned each one at offshore some task. I liked the initiative. He was being helpful .Even I had hands-on to work on – I was so good at being a developer. I felt he was being reasonable in the calls or distributing the tasks or setting a timeline. The first call – it went for almost 1.5 hours – it was quite informative. Since I was so bad on listening to the whole calls – it was good that he was there. Being a TC was after all not that hard – is it. So, the call finished and my journey started. I came to the office at around 12 , sipped coffee , met with my juniors .I asked them outright – if they have any issues with their tasks – how good were they ,they said ,”Yeah .We are fine.” Wow ,life is going to be so easy. I chit chatted ,went for a puff ,then, lunch and came back at 2.30 PM. Whatever developer work was I assigned, it was easy for me to complete that within 2-3 max 4 hours concentration. One day ,two days passed and they never had issues. Whenever they had some – my onsite was very easy in making them understand where they were going wrong. There was a call in the night as well daily – which went for 1 hour. I felt it is fair – the onsite needs to have a clarity on the deliverables. It seemed like the sweetest part of my career – there are some persons (juniors) who always respected me and I had a 1-1 with the client – I could give him my timelines rather than someone bargaining on behalf of me plus I got juniors who were smart.
And then, when does life becomes so smooth, isn’t it…
As usual, I came to the office at 12 PM, was going for a puff – My manager asked me to come inside. She likes me. She did not seem to be in the mood. She started,” There were a lot of quality bugs that came in yesterday deliverable. The code/results were never QCed . The resources feel that there is no guidance in how to do tasks – they feel lost. They feel exhausted at the same time – they are working so hard and still the results are not great. They are spending 3 to 4 hours daily in calls. They have exhausted and are on the brink ” For me, It felt like I was living on some different planet altogether.
What are the mistakes I did. Let us look at them –
Quality Bugs – How did it even come in the first place? Well, the the juniors were delivering but they were just doing it without any medium or deep level QC ( in fact no QC at all) – their perspective of looking at things was wrong. They thought since they were arriving at the result somehow , nothing would have gone wrong. They did not check the code – did not take care of all the test cases. It is the responsibility of the TC to set up a process and make them learn how to cover all scenarios, cover all test cases. But surely, I ignored what was in front of my eyes.
Strict timelines – This was not entirely my issue. But it is kind of a general norm that onsites push for stricter timelines to impress the clients – they commit for short timelines, which become a burden for offshore to handle. Sometimes , the onsites even have less idea of how much capable or how much time certain task should take in the ideal or normal conditions. The juniors in my team ranged from fresher to 2 years experienced – they were not capable to think of all the complexities that could come up in the solution design and thus, were unable to roughly estimate the timelines. Even with
TO be continued..