Tech Job 9 to 9

  TECH JOB

  9 to 9

  By Dilshad Mustafa

  Copyright © Dilshad Mustafa 2014

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  All efforts have been taken to make the material error-free. However, the author disclaims the responsibility.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 1

  Vinay had to submit his original PAN card to get his visitor pass to enter Holtezent-Hucktekvan Services Technologies office. He had an interview scheduled at 10 AM that day. Holtezent-Hucktekvan Technologies, shortly referred to as Holtezent was the seventh largest IT firm in the country. Company’s security restrictions required that any visitor had to submit an identification document like a PAN card or a driving license in original to get a visitor pass to enter the office premises. Vinay was looking forward for this interview. He had been preparing day and night for this interview for almost a week.

  Vinay was twenty three years old and was a very hardworking guy. He could learn and understand anything related to software in a matter of hours. He felt he was a master of anything related to software. This made him an arrogant techie who felt he was always correct in software technical matters. He also tried to impress people with his technical wizardry for his own purposes. He usually did that to gain recognition and popularity among his peers, to get access to expensive software to try out and learn about it and to get opportunity to work in big and prestigious projects.

  Vinay was wearing ivory white formal shirt and greenish blue formal pant with flat front. He wore a dark blue tie. He was tall and lean. And he wore spectacles with a black plastic frame. He felt agitated as he had spent the last thirty minutes searching his way around the huge campus and he got confused with the layout of the buildings. Finally he had asked others and had reached the reception hall for the fresher recruits. There were other interviews being held in other locations inside the campus for lateral recruits.

  Vinay waited in the reception hall located in the ground floor in the East Block of the Holtezent campus. There were around five hundred candidates waiting to be interviewed that day including him. He had earlier submitted his application form, photos and a copy of his Curriculum Vitae. Interviews were carried out by ten groups in the meeting rooms and so ten people at a time were called from the waiting crowd.

  “Vinay, it’s your turn now,” called out Sudhakar who was the HR person coordinating the interview. Vinay observed Sudhakar was very formal and wore a suit and a tie. He walked almost like a robot.

  “Which room sir,” asked Vinay.

  “Just take a right there, take the lift and go to the second floor. It’s in Green conference room,” said Sudhakar.

  He entered the room. There were three people in the interview panel.

  “Good morning,” said Murali.

  “Hai, Good morning,” said Vinay.

  “Please take your seat. This is Satish and Mona,” said Murali.

  Murali said he was the Project Manager and Satish was the Technical Architect for the project Vinay was getting interviewed. Mona was a Technical Module Lead from another project.

  “Let me see your CV. Hmm…so you know this software Cobra,” asked Murali.

  “Yes sir. Actually it’s CORBA and not Cobra. It stands for Common Object Request Broker Architecture. I have knowledge of CORBA,” replied Vinay.

  He went on to explain CORBA and his undergraduate project. Satish and Mona asked questions in between. The interview went on for thirty minutes. Murali told him to wait in the reception area and said Sudhakar will get back to him in half an hour.

  After his discussions with Sudhakar, Vinay got the offer letter with a salary package of two lakh rupees a year before tax as per the company’s standard guidelines. He was told to join the company coming Monday and contact Sudhakar for on-boarding formalities.

  Vinay met Sudhakar and completed the joining formalities on Monday. Then he underwent an induction process for Holtezent which gave him an overview of the company’s organization, processes and various departments.

  He was given a company identity aka ID card which showed his photo, a card access number and his employee number. Vinay heard that if he forgot to bring his ID card, he won’t be able to enter the office premises. Without his ID card, there was no way to get inside the office and his entire day would be gone.

  Sudhakar told him to report to Murali. Vinay went to second floor to the Offshore Development Center, commonly referred to as ODC, of Dochamk Bank. ODC was a secured office space within Holtezent which required special door access. An employee’s ID card had only general door access to Library, Administration section and Human Resource section. Each of Holtezent’s clients had separate ODC for employees working on their projects.

  This was Vinay’s first day at his first IT job. IT stood for Information Technology. It represented the computer application software, hardware and all the computer related technical side of the business operations of any company be it a banking firm, a manufacturing company, an energy and utilities company, a health care company, financial services firm, etc. Most of the companies had computerized their business operations widely.

  The various jobs associated with carrying out the different work to build, maintain and support the computer applications was referred to as an IT job.

  Vinay checked with his ID card but found he didn’t have access to the door of Dochamk Bank’s ODC. He called Murali’s mobile. Murali said he would send Satish. Vinay waited for fifteen minutes outside the ODC door just standing there. He called Murali again in his mobile but Murali didn’t answer his call. After a further five minutes wait, Satish opened the door and took him to Murali.

  “Hai Vinay. I need to get into a meeting now. Satish will show you your seat. He will introduce you to the team. Satish take care,” said Murali and started peeking into his monitor.

  “Yes sir,” said Vinay.

  “Don’t call me sir. Call me Murali,” smiled Murali.

  “Come we will go to your seat,” said Satish.

  Chapter 2

  Vinay kept his bag in his desk. Slowly all the team members gathered around him. Satish introduced Vinay as new joinee to the team. Vinay then briefed about himself and his past project experiences. Everyone introduced themselves to Vinay. Each of them told when they joined Holtezent, how long they were working in this project, how many years experience they had and the areas they had worked. Everyone got back to their seats except Himesh.

  Himesh pulled a chair and sat next to Vinay. Vinay got to know from Himesh that this project started two months back and was in requirements specification stage then. In this stage, requirements from the customer, for the software to be built, were documented as Use Case specification
documents. Each Use Case referred to how the end-user or the customer could use the final IT system to carry out a particular operation. This activity was planned to be completed in two weeks.

  “This is a two-year project man. It’s called CDSTP project, Credit Debit Straight-Through Processing. First we will do a Proof of Concept for two months. This POC will be exciting. We have to build two prototypes one with Xorbiz in PicoEMG back-end combination and another with Xorbiz in TeraSMX back-end combination,” said Himesh.

  “What language will be used to build, C or Java?” asked Vinay.

  “Not yet decided. OS and database will be determined based on POC results but Xorbiz will be the Transaction Handler,” said Himesh.

  “Why choose Xorbiz? Why not other Transaction Handling products?” asked Vinay.

  “Client has already chosen Xorbiz. They said they are comfortable with the licensing agreements and the annual maintenance contract. I heard support is very good from Xorbiz. It has got very good reviews from the industry,” said Himesh.

  A transaction was said to happen when the user carried out an operation in the banking system. When a bank customer wanted to transfer money from one account to another account, two operations, Credit and Debit, were carried out to perform the customer request, resulting in a transaction. Transactions varied in size and time it took to carry out the transaction. Based on this, transactions were classified as simple, medium and complex transaction types.

  Xorbiz was a software package specializing in implementing banking transactions. It was the widely used Transaction Handler of those days. A Transaction Handler was used to handle and process the incoming transactions of an IT system. It was the core for carrying out the business operations of the bank. It could be bought off the shelf as a ready-made software package like Xorbiz which allowed high-level of customization.

  A Proof of Concept, abbreviated as POC, was a prototyping development methodology which would be usually chosen if a company wanted to develop quickly a prototype by implementing a subset of the typical requirements to analyze and study the resulting software to better understand the suitability of the underlying technologies to be used for a project. It enabled a detailed feasibility study of new technologies for use in a project in a cost-effective way.

  Two competing vendors, PicoEMG and TeraSMX, were competing for the bid for providing the complete hardware infrastructure for this project for Dochamk Bank. They specialized in providing computer hardware for back-end server systems.

  A back-end system referred to the computer IT system that would host and run the software for the banking system. It was also referred to as the server system or back-end server system. The back-end system usually encompassed both software and hardware. As IT professionals more directly worked with software on a day-to-day basis and rarely got to work with hardware, they usually referred to back-end systems by the name of the software being run there. Only in the case of legacy systems, they would refer to the machine name along with the name of the business application running in the legacy system. They also referred to a combination of software and optionally hardware as a platform or as a software platform.

  PicoEMG provided its flagship computer hardware EMG6500 Series. That hardware used PicoEMG’s own Operating System aka OS and its database as the back-end system. PicoEMG’s OS was the widely used OS of those days for back-end server systems. Its database was a widely popular back-end system and well established. It had lot of features and supported many different configurations. Himesh referred to this combination of software and hardware as the EMG configuration.

  TeraSMX lent its computer hardware SMX7500 Series for one month. That hardware used TeraSMX’s OS and its database as the back-end system. Himesh called that combination as the SMX configuration.

  Back-end systems were usually built around PicoEMG as back-end or TeraSMX as back-end combination. So a POC was planned to choose a back-end software and hardware configuration which would meet the requirements and several other factors like costs, reliability, up time, annual maintenance contract, support quality, etc.

  Both PicoEMG and TeraSMX were big companies. Their products range over many different areas in both software and hardware. They could give discounts when their products were bought in a package deal. They lent their hardware for the POC for exactly one month free of cost.

  Himesh started discussing about the hardware and the software.

  “What’s the challenge? Looks straight forward to me,” said Vinay. He already thought of in his mind how this POC should be created.

  “Their existing legacy system gives ninety transactions per second. Our target for the new system is to achieve four hundred transactions per second. I heard people say it’s impossible. The industry standard is only hundred TPS,” said Himesh.

  “Oh is it? Let’s see. Then it will be amazing to work on,” said Vinay.

  Transactions per second or TPS referred to the number of transactions that could be handled by the IT system every second. A subset of typical transactions were sent to the IT system over a time period for one day and then using the volume of transactions and the time duration, the number of transactions handled each second would be calculated. It was used as a measurement to gauge the rate at which transactions would be handled by an IT system and thereby to measure the capability and scalability of the system.

  Himesh chatted with Vinay for a few more minutes and got back to his seat.

  Satish came over to Vinay and told him to create an IS ticket in the Holtezent employee web site for ODC door access. IS stood for Infrastructure and Software and IS team was handling the infrastructure and software installations and configurations in Holtezent. Request for ODC door access, installing software and PC request can be raised by creating an IS ticket in the employee web site.

  Vinay learned that he had to complete seven online courses and attach screenshots of completion to the IS ticket. The IS ticket would then go through three levels of approval each from Project Manager, Security Manager and IS Manager. So he proceeded to access each of these courses on Security, Business Conduct, Banking Domain Fundamentals, Health & Safety, Email Etiquette, Communication Fundamentals and Web Security. Vinay realized completing all these courses would take a good six hours of time.

  Vinay felt uncomfortable to stand next to the ODC door whenever he needed to go out for lunch, rest room, tea break and come in again. Every time he had to stand there for five to ten minutes near the door until someone opened the door. He felt delicate to call other team member’s mobile to ask them to open the door.

  Vinay attended lot of internal discussions and meetings. Satish came and told him to start work on the POC along with Himesh. Vinay then went through the project documents available so far. He checked his mobile. It showed 10:40 PM. He had swiped-in the office at 8.15 AM. He had worked around fourteen and half hours that day.

  Chapter 3

  Over the next few days Vinay and Himesh became closer to each other. They both started going out for lunch and tea breaks. Himesh ensured they took only thirty minutes for lunch and fifteen minutes for one tea break in the afternoon. They mostly went to the office canteen. This way he said they would spend only forty five minutes every day for lunch and tea break and could concentrate more on work. Vinay liked that. He loved working on technically challenging things related to software. He considered lunch and tea breaks as unnecessary time off from work. They sometimes went for lunch at 5 PM and could find only snacks and ate it for lunch. But then Vinay knew without food he would become weak and so he ate something that was available.

  Sometimes Himesh took Vinay on a walk around the sprawling Holtezent campus. The Holtezent campus was built on a twenty thousand acre area of land. The main building formed an X shaped construction. The four blocks in the X were designated as North, South, East and West blocks. Each block had four wings, two wings on either side of the block. These wings were denoted as A, B, C and D. The main building of each block was denoted as M. There we
re conference rooms, meeting rooms, ODCs on both the main building of the block as well as the four wings in each block. For example NB-A-4-ODC3 would refer to North block, A wing, fourth floor and ODC3, whereas SB-M-9-ODC14 would refer to South block, main building, nineth floor and ODC14.

  Vinay had attended his interview in EB-M-2-ODC4 and he had waited in the reception area hall in EB-M-G-RH1 in East Block. Each block had ten floors. The terrace in each block contained a cafeteria. There was a big library located in WB-M-G-LB1 in the West block. There was also a big food court located in SB-M-3-FC1 in South block.

  Vinay and Himesh would always talk about many things related to computers, software, latest researches in Science. They rarely talked anything about salary, taxes and finances.

  “You know I have been working here for the last six months. Previously I worked in another project and there was a ramp-down. And then I joined this project. I already know quite a bit of how things are in this company and also a lot about the people around here,” said Himesh.

  “Please tell me your story,” smiled Vinay.

  Himesh went on to tell the difficulties he faced in his previous project. He told how it took thirty days for him to get door access for the ODC, how it took two months for him to get all the software installed in his PC. He explained how Agile methodology was used and how he ended up as the only working resource for that project. He explained the unrealistic demands from the client and was asked to complete a one year project in just six months in the name of Agile methodology. He said he lost count of how many times he worked on Saturdays, Sundays and company holidays. He told how many times he was blamed for somebody’s fault.

  “It was horrible man. It was very horrible,” said Himesh.

  And then he explained how he was released from the project with the feedback that his performance was not up to the mark.

  “I was in bench for two weeks,” said Himesh.

  “So Murali took you in after that project ended? Do you know Murali before joining here and other Project Managers?” asked Vinay.