Tech Job 9 to 9 Page 3

  “Can we clock the overtime hours and the hours we have worked on Saturdays and Sundays while filling the timesheet?” asked Vinay.

  Employees had to fill in the timesheet every week for the days they had worked excluding Saturdays, Sundays and company holidays. They could fill up to a maximum of nine hours for each working day. So if someone worked for fifteen hours on a particular day, he should still clock nine hours only while filling the timesheet.

  “No. We can’t. We are supposed to bill only up to nine hours every working day. And that doesn’t include Saturdays and Sundays. If you do fill you overtime hours, your timesheet will get rejected. So don’t do that. It’s a big hassle if it gets rejected and getting it re-enabled again,” said Himesh.

  “I see. Official working time is from 9 to 6.30. But I see many people working from 9 to 9,” said Vinay.

  “Yes. That’s the unofficial working time here,” said Himesh.

  Vinay liked the simplicity and compactness of SMX. But he hesitated about the hardware configuration and from what he had heard of TeraSMX’s monopolistic history and people’s aversion towards it. People had told him stories like how they would start dictating prices of annual maintenance contracts and increase prices at their whim. He had heard they would sweeten the deal initially to get the bid but once you got locked in with them they would slowly start increasing the prices of everything. This was also one of the reasons why Dochamk Bank wanted to move to PicoEMG hardware configuration from their existing legacy technology based systems which was maintained by TeraSMX.

  Knowing this, TeraSMX had placed a counter bid with their flagship hardware configuration and announced substantial discounts for a package deal if the bid went through the evaluation process. The deal was so attractive that Dochamk Bank included TeraSMX also into the evaluation process.

  Vinay knew people broadly fell under one of the two groups one was the Legacy Systems group and the other Open Technology Systems group within Dochamk Bank. He also knew he would get very little support from Dochamk Bank’s existing Legacy Systems team as everyone knew what Holtezent team was working on especially Vinay and Himesh. Vinay heard from Himesh the people in the Legacy Systems team thought their jobs would be taken over by Holtezent’s team once this project got completed and became operational.

  In the afternoon, Vinay and Himesh took a walk inside the server room. The room was adjacent to the ODC and it required door access. Both Vinay and Himesh had the door access. PicoEMG and TeraSMX had given their hardware free for exactly one month for this POC. They hoped to bag this multi-million dollar hardware infrastructure required if the project went ahead after the POC phase succeeded in the feasibility study.

  Vinay saw the four PicoEMG’s hardware. It was bulky and bluish-grey in color. There were large vents in the front, back and sides. It had four racks inserted into four slots in the front of the machine. Each rack had four quad core CPUs. The EMG6500 was a fierce beast of a machine.

  “Why four machines from PicoEMG?” asked Vinay.

  “Don’t know exactly. It may be two for running Xorbiz and two for running PicoEMG’s database. It is up to us to decide how we want to use them,” replied Himesh.

  Vinay started to have some vague ideas how best to use these four machines.

  They then went near the TeraSMX hardware. It looked like a big wardrobe painted fully in grey-black color. It was just one single machine with eight slots. Four slots had racks inserted in to it and the remaining slots were empty. Each rack had four octo-core CPUs. The SMX7500 from TeraSMX was a giant mammoth of a machine.

  Vinay had experienced earlier that the TeraSMX hardware was almost instant in its response for any program he ran in it. He didn’t feel the same about PicoEMG hardware. His logic told him four machines running in parallel processing should be able to beat a single machine but in reality they couldn’t stand against SMX processing speed.

  Vinay and Himesh discussed about this for some time.

  “Something we are lacking. I strongly feel a single machine no matter how many racks and CPUs it had will reach its bottleneck earlier than what four machines could do. There are various points where a bottle neck could occur, a network port for instance. A single network port in a single machine will have less bandwidth than four network ports in four machines. Also I doubt to what degree these software are able to utilize multi-core CPUs. There is something we are missing. We need to find out how best to use these four machines,” said Vinay.

  “We cannot achieve hundred percent parallel processing with these four as most of the times the program running in any of the four would be waiting in queue to access a common variable or resource for reading or writing a value. I do agree concurrently running programs in these four should at least match if not more than the speed of SMX. But comparing one-on-one, yes they are no match for SMX,” said Himesh.

  Vinay and Himesh then discussed about possible approaches that could be used. An idea was starting to form slowly how to concurrently run the programs in the four PicoEMG’s hardware.

  The highest EMG could achieve stood at ninety TPS while SMX stood at one hundred and forty TPS.

  Only five days were left to complete the POC.

  Chapter 6

  “Do something,” pleaded Himesh. “I don’t want to work with SMX as back-end. Please do something. Everyone here wants EMG to win the POC contest. It’s not me alone,” said Himesh.

  Vinay was well aware people from his team preferred EMG. He decided he could not look at things objectively. Vinay thought people had biases. They tend to like certain things over others.

  Vinay went in to deep thinking. He was running out of time and many options to try out. He simply didn’t have time to implement and analyze those approaches. He had to carefully weigh in and select one or two approach which had the most probability to yield the desired transaction rate.

  This effectively meant he had to gamble. And if he failed, there won’t be a project to work on after this month.

  Vinay discussed this with Himesh and told him the risk involved with the gamble. The approach he chose meant that they would not have any time left to try out the other approaches.

  “Whatever you do you have my full support,” said Himesh.

  Vinay then explained the approach.

  “We will create a transaction balancer and feed the output to multiple equivalence partitioned sets running in multiple instances. This will increase parallel computing of transactions and improve TPS count especially with the four machines configuration. This approach should also show some improvement with the SMX configuration,” said Vinay.

  Then they both started working on it day and night. They would leave office at 11.00 at night and come back and resume work at 7.00 in the next day morning. Sometimes they would leave office at night 1.00 AM. They booked a cab whenever they had to leave very late at night as the last bus was at 11.50 PM.

  The last reading for EMG stood at one hundred and fifty TPS while SMX stood at one hundred and sixty TPS.

  POC analysis results had to be submitted that day to the customer. Himesh wondered what they would do. They had not yet achieved two hundred TPS. Also, the results they had till then showed TeraSMX as the winner, much to Himesh’s dismay.

  Vinay explained to Himesh there was one incorrect way of doing things with back-end. Turning off index in a back-end system was not a proper way of creating a back-end system. While it might seem faster for certain types of transactions, it would actually slow down other types of transactions. Vinay said that by turning off index in EMG configuration, it could easily reach two hundred TPS for the kind of transactions chosen for this POC. But he cautioned against doing that. He called it as the half-baked approach.

  Vinay advised that doing so would not be a proper way of designing the system and would not result in an unbiased objective analysis.

  Indexing was done by creating a hash of the values of a particular data. For example, the values of consumer name, that was the Bank’
s customer name, could be indexed to provide faster access for queries when searching by consumer name. A hash was a thirty two character long string generated out of any text using a hashing algorithm. While using index may make some queries faster, it might slowdown other queries which did not use the indexed field to search or update owing to the extra burden in creating the index by running the hashing algorithm for every query.

  “Everything is about trade off man. You will get something, you will lose something. One cannot get everything. Even if we have index also, certain queries which doesn’t use indexed data will actually slow down. It’s all about trade off which queries have higher priority and which ones have lower. It doesn’t mean one way is right or other way is wrong,” said Himesh.

  Himesh then asked for the detailed steps from Vinay for doing those changes and went ahead with the rebuild for EMG configuration. He was finally relieved when the results for PicoEMG showed two hundred TPS versus TeraSMX’s one hundred and sixty TPS. Apparently, he didn’t do the same for TeraSMX configuration to make its TPS appear lower than PicoEMG.

  Murali told them to prepare a detailed power point presentation aka PPT. He told to start the slides with background introduction, followed by chronology of events with exact dates, followed by details of various approaches used with findings and finally the results. He also told to add a section on Value-adds and Cost-savings brought to Dochamk Bank and the accomplishments of Holtezent team.

  During all those days of breakthrough by Vinay and Himesh, Murali never missed a chance to take credit for their work. Whenever a breakthrough was achieved, Murali would send out a mail to Anna, Nitesh, Raghu and prominent figures in higher management and Business Units within Holtezent and trumpeted about the breakthrough. He would make sure to delete any references to the names of Vinay and Himesh in the documents and emails. He didn’t include them in the list of email recipients as well.

  Satish then met them and told them to put as much technical details as possible in those slides detailing the various approaches. He told to list out all the challenges faced and how it was addressed. He told, “Use Visio and create lot of diagrams. PPT should look impressive. Also put detailed design diagram for the finalized approach.”

  Vinay knew Satish and Shanthi did nothing in all those days of hard work by him and Himesh. Satish was very busy with his day trading work buying and selling company shares every day using a share trading online portal. He used office time and office resources to carry out his day trading activity silently without anyone noticing him. Vinay was well aware of what Satish was doing.

  Shanthi did the bare minimum of work possible usually spending three days on documenting one use case which could have been done in just one hour. She was very good in pretending to be busy at work. Himesh’s observing eyes had noted how she worked as well. Her monitor screen would usually show one page from a document from the morning to till she leaves office. She would scroll down the page a bit every half an hour or whenever someone walked near her seat.

  The next day everyone dialed into the bridge for the conference call. Greenspan, Anna and Nitesh joined the call from Dochamk Bank. Greenspan was the Program Director for this Business Unit in Dochamk Bank, Anna was the Project Director and Nitesh was the IT Manager.

  From Holtezent, Raghu, Murali and Satish dialed in to the bridge from their cubicle seats separately. Raghu was the Project Manager from Holtezent. The rest of the team members pulled their seats near Satish and listened to the call.

  Everyone joined the screen sharing session from their PCs and laptops.

  Raghu started talking. He first greeted the client and then introduced the people in the call.

  This was the first time Vinay heard Raghu’s voice since he joined Holtezent. He had not yet seen Raghu in person.

  Raghu then gave a background of the engagement. He talked much about the POC challenges and accomplishments of Holtezent. He went over the chronology of events in the PPT. He then moved on to Value-add and Cost-savings section. He boasted how Holtezent completed a three months of work in the POC within one month time frame. He talked about the industry standard of hundred TPS and Holtezent’s accomplishment of two hundred TPS.

  Greenspan said, “I appreciate the results so far. Good leadership by Raghu and Anna. I appreciate the team for giving a quick turn around on this. I look forward to take this engagement to the next level.”

  Murali then went on to present the various approaches they implemented. He talked about the technical challenges and how they overcome those. He then explained the final approach laid out in the PPT and walked through the diagrams.

  Chapter 7

  The POC results were reviewed and approved by Dochamk Bank’s review board. Raghu sent a document with details of the scope of work to be carried out by Holtezent. The contract for the project was signed between Holtezent and Dochamk Bank for a one year project.

  Meanwhile preparations were going on to commence the project work at the earliest. Interviews were being carried out to recruit additional people into the team. Three experienced people were taken for the project. They were Anil, Puneet and Ashutosh.

  Seats were being allocated for additional resources. Holtezent mostly had outdated PCs. Those PCs had first generation Intel Pentium 4 CPU and five hundred and twelve mega bytes of memory. If two browsers were opened, all the running applications would slow down. It would also hang at least every three hours in the middle of work for some unknown reason requiring a reboot of the PC. Each PC had a fifteen inch CRT monitor.

  At 2.00PM, anti-virus software would start a full-system PC scan every day. It would go on for half an hour making the PC totally unusable for doing any productive work. It would also eventually crash the PC. People would need to restart the PC after the scan.

  People took on their positions where they could do minimum of work and pass time as much as possible without doing any work. Murali would be spending time on creating and updating the project plan and pretended to be busy with various meetings. Satish would be spending his time doing his day trading job in the pretext of environment support work. Shanthi would spend her time on use case specification documents and getting clarifications for requirements.

  Vinay returned from library and was sitting in the lobby near the reception. Somebody interrupted him.

  “Hi. Excuse me. I’m looking for someone. His name is Murali. I was told to meet him here in Dochamk Bank ODC. Do you know where he sits?” asked the girl.

  “Do you have his contact number? Why don’t you call him and check with him?” said Vinay.

  “No. I don’t have his contact number now. I asked the receptionist. She cannot find his number,” replied the girl.

  ‘Ok. What’s his full name?” asked Vinay.

  “Murali Danraj,” said the girl.

  “Oh he is my technical team lead. I can take you to meet him,” said Vinay.

  The girl introduced herself as Sana. She was here to attend an interview for the project Vinay was working. Vinay thought he had seen that girl before somewhere.

  Murali told Vinay to interview Sana. Vinay took the interview in a discussion room. He went over Sana’s CV and found she was also from Mysore. She graduated few months back from a college located nearby to his college. He then told her he was also from Mysore and mentioned his college.

  Sana said, “I thought I have seen you before. Yes in one of those inter-college cultural events.”

  “Oh is it. You came there? I don’t remember much. There was a group of girls from your college,” said Vinay.

  “You were too busy organizing things there in your college,” smiled Sana.

  The inter-college cultural event took place in Vinay’s college that year. Vinay was actively involved in organizing the White paper competition and Computer Quiz competitions. He himself was not allowed to participate in any of those competitions as he was from the hosting college. He finally remembered seeing Sana there.

  Sana was from a conservative middl
e-class family. Her parents had sent her to college to fulfill her desire to become a Software Professional. Her father worked in the Mysore Electricity Board and her mother was a homemaker. Vinay too was from a middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a homemaker.

  Sana was selected for the CDSTP project as a non-billable resource for six months. Non-billable resources would not be billed to the client. They were used as buffers for the project whenever somebody went on unplanned leave or to quicken the pace when unexpected delays occurred in the project.

  Vinay was tasked by Murali with getting all the software installed in the four PCs assigned to the new joinees to the team. He took note of all the asset numbers and IP addresses for each of the PCs.

  Himesh was tasked with getting ODC door access and getting the login ids created for the new joinees to the team.

  Ashutosh was sitting next to Shanthi. Puneet and Anil sat near Himesh. Sana sat near Vinay. Vinay then raised IS tickets for installing Java, FreeJUML, XWinClientFree and Xorbiz client software. Java would be used for building the GUI. FreeJUML would be used to do UML modeling for the project requirements and design. XWinClientFree was the Windows based X Windows client software to connect to the back-end Operating System. Xorbiz client software was for accessing the Xorbiz back-end. He then raised another IS ticket to assign static IP address to each of the PCs. Static IP address was required as IP addresses were tied to licenses of some software.

  IS tickets for software installation would go through three levels of approval: Project Manager, Security Manager and lastly IS Manager. He had to send email to each approver and follow up to get the IS tickets approved so that the IS ticket could proceed to the next approver.

  By then Vinay knew very well this approval process alone would take a week in Holtezent.

  Sana who was sitting next to Vinay asked him if he could come with her for tea break.

  “Are you busy now? Shall we go for tea?” asked Sana.