A Story...

Today I will tell you a story about a person who has nine years of working experience and is presently my onsite coordinator. Be seated, have patience and bear with me as I try to unfold before you a serious case of genetic malfunction:

To start with, he is presently at US and his wife called him yesterday and since he didn’t pick up the phone, the call got auto forwarded to my friend sitting here at India as a part of or offshore team. Yeah, my friend’s number is set on his handset as an auto forward option. That can give you an idea of how frequently he calls us. While US calls are common and almost an essentiality in IT, here we are dealing with a calling maniac. He feels comfortable being on call and we spend four-five of our working hours with him. As for the details of the call, well, better let’s not go into all that. I say that because whenever he fails to get what we are saying or explaining, he would say “I think I am doing too many things at a time…give me some time”. He is a person with a skill set of 2/10 in core java and believe me, fresher’s out of college come with at least 5/10 expertise. That is where his nine years becomes questionable. So, amidst all this when you try to communicate and work with him, you will often find him doing an FTP to move a log file from the server to his machine and when you ask him why, the answer comes “I thought it is a java file yaar”. Only a blind can have that freedom. Even a fool looking onto a system is able to make out a “.txt” and a “.java” file extension. And as to why he expects a java file sitting under a log folder is beyond the capabilities of human logic to understand or reason. Now, when you try to answer his queries, as he shoots at you all possible combinations of “How & Why” before his call with managers, he often maintains “I am better when I see code…logs doesn’t make much sense”. So, you move on to explain him the code and in the process all you deal with is his simple innocent futile foolish dumb basic java fundamental questions. If you make him realize that he forgot something or misunderstood something which he had said earlier he prefers saying “You can ask me as many times you want and I can ask you about the status of work as many times as I want. I don’t know why you are asking me the same thing again and again”. If you set up a call with him and your manager in loop, he maintains “I don’t want to waste time on call with managers”. As to his performance, he is giving us a single SQL select query for the last two months and he still isn’t able to complete and get us the final one. The query changes every two days and without testing it, he would send it to us via mail and ask us to test it. He often displays a high incapability to understand questions too. Like when my manager asked him about the final date by which he would be able to complete his SQL query, he replied “this query is supposed to pull all the data based on a date”. He feels power in making us work on weekends, quite pointlessly though. He maintains “our project is in a red state..we need to put in efforts to make it go to a yellow/green state”. And he is proactive enough to send a mail asking offshore to work even if there is no work to be done. Since I have put down my papers, I refused to do so and he was quick in sending out two escalation mails highlighting the fact that he isn’t getting the needed support from offshore. He would often comment about this to my friend as “If he had been under me, I would have taken good care of him”. He is supposed to understand the business requirements and communicate the same to us. On the contrary, he is busy feeling a lead and someone who watches over us and inspite of several mails, long hour calls we have failed time and again to make him understand the very same requirements which he was supposed to understand and communicate to us. Before the start of the project, we highlighted a couple of issues that we may ran into while moving to production and he gave all of it a deaf ear. Now, he is asking the same things and wants us to own the whole show and explain as to why these were not highlighted earlier. Any efforts to make him realize as to the fact that these were already highlighted gets us a response “see, I can very well remember that I have never heard any such thing” and any effort to get to a solution gets us a reply “u guys have the code yaar…you are supposed to tell me what has to be done but ideally you should have told it to us long time back”. As for a mark of his individuality, he spells "Google" as "Gugul".

Well guys, this is him. There is so much more to say about him. He is a genetic malfunction born to exemplify fools with dumb brains and is here to stay and make life miserable. These are the kind who makes things difficult and pose real challenges during the lifecycle of a project. My four years of experience rates him as the worst that I had ever seen or heard of before. This makes me wonder the quality of product and commitment these companies and clients are now a day’s fine with. And if you are from US, well, beware if you work in IT…you may come across him one day and if you are reading this, you will be the first one to identify him with perfection. And, he is enjoying the so called glorious much wanted heart throbbing “Onsite”. LMAO.