Looks like I have developed a habit of promising to write something and then writing something else. I have something to write now, that’s closer to my heart than what I had promised to write.
Let me take you about a year back for this. I had been sent to Pune on deputation as an SME for a MOSS project. Things started well, and as I have always been, I was bullish on all the technical stuff; nobody could stop me in my areas. I had built a good rapport with the team as well. As more and more team members joined the team, and the build phase started, I felt there were few things not right from the management of task and resources perspective.
Though I was there as a technical SME and did not have any role in the management side, I could not see wrong decisions being taken, or obvious issues being not tackled (as it affected the deliverables and deadlines) and always provided my point of view and suggestions in the daily team meetings. Some were accepted as good ideas, but not applied citing various reasons, and others were ignored.
I have this habit of trying to keep or make everything perfect, whether or not, I have ownership/responsibility assigned in that area, and that has landed me in trouble even previously. Even here too, what I was looking for is to improve the project and satisfaction of the resources, at the expense of my own relationship with the management. I did not care about my feedback or promotion.
The project kept going from bad to worse and everybody’s frustration levels were at an edge and crossed the boundaries as well on few occasions. Everybody was working like animals, and I had the additional responsibility of being the only person experienced in this technology, and so leading from the front and showing an example. But it was getting too much. A sprint can be made for 100m race, but for a marathon, jogging is the way to go. Even this was brought to the managements notice, but for them, getting the work done was top priority. Every weekend there would be a “one last push”.
But things went on; we had huge number of defects, a whole lot of change Request, and numerous conflicts within the team and between the onshore and offsite teams as well and finally the project ended with appreciations from all ends. The team won the reputed Delivery excellence award (now don’t ask me how).
By the time the award was announced, I was well back in my home location in chennai and into other project and same goes for the rest of the team. But the irony was that, nobody noticed my name in the awardees list, because people in Chennai were looking for names under the Chennai location and not other location, but mine appeared under pune location (rightfully so, but unfortunate for me).
Here in Chennai, there are frequent connects with the DU where he would give the latest and greatest news, give out awards, and tell a few good words about the winners. I used to go to each of these DU connects and stand there expectantly, that my name would come, but that was not the case. He never knew I won. Infact nobody in Chennai knew.
About 6 months went by and I had lost hope, when one day, a HR from Pune sent a mail that she dispatched my award to another HR here in Chennai. Ah! So finally it was coming. And a couple of days later, again there was a DU connect. This time, my Manager and colleague pushed me ahead of time for the meeting, and I felt there was some secret smile on their faces. I went there and stood with legs trembling (I don’t know why), 5 mins.. 10 mins.. 15 mins.. the connect went on and got over, Nothing about me or my award :( .
I was dejected, but at the same time, I thought maybe they had reserved this for the bigger occasion of Family Day, which was coming in another fortnight or so.
The next day evening, the Chennai HR called me to his seat and handed me the certificate and vouchers, in person. Nobody around to see. No good things said. No claps. :(. After, 1 year of hard-work and 6 months of wait, I got 1 piece of chart (which nobody outside of our company will recognize) and Rs.1500 worth of Taj vouchers using which 2 ppl may settle for a dinner on a weekday.
It really hurt me a lot. I had been toiling hard to get appreciation in front of the crowd. In 7 months I had put in effort much more than what I had done in past 1.5 years combined, but in-spite of that, what I got from the project was bad feedback (because I worked for the project and the resources, and not the manager) and not a word of recognition in public.
I remembered a earlier event in the pune project as well, where they started a “Star of the Week” award, and I was the first one to receive it, but I was given it like a formality and nothing was said about what for it was given to me, whereas the others were given with words of praise for the effort.
There was another occasion in the same pune project where our TL was awarded a prestigious People developer award, and he was given the same in a large gathering of about 100 people in a hotel with words of praise (those words actually belonged to me, but showered on him, as if he did all those stuff!).
Fine, so back here in Chennai, I was feeling too bad and went home and started saying how I felt, but I noticed, Mom was deep inside TV and Father busy with food. Sis was split between TV and food and it didn’t look like anybody heard or cared. That just broke me down completely.
The next day I put this as headline in my MSN status message, but I got only a couple of pings on the same. I told my counselor and he felt bad and said he will talk with the HR and DU. One of my friend told to write this episode out and so here it is.
It’s about 10 days since the above episode and there’s no update. But theres surely a learning and that is: "Noboday cares about your problems, you need to take care of them by yourself".
Before closing this, It would be a wrong on my part if I did not mention about the good things that happened to me while I was in the pune project. I made a number of very good friends- friends with whom i can talk on my favourite topics, friends with whom i can converse in my mother tongue(hindi, gujrati), Friends who would join me for an outing-just because i should not feel bad/lonely. And yea, I went to a lot of wonderful places around and had great weekends.
If you have been part of this and have any comments or opinions or a different perspective to the same, please feel free to provide the same in the comments.
