Tech Job 9 to 9
Authors: 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.
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.
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.