Its gonna be a Busy Day

Last night I worked till 2.30AM and today came to office by 8:30AM. Now this is what I see for today’s schedule apart from my daily development tasks. Huh, its gonna be a long and busy day.

Busy Months

Its been busy two months on both personal and professional front and I was unable to write anything on my blog wall (Wall? .. Thanks to FB ). So what happened in last 2 months and what kept me busy .. Here we go:

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- Raghav (my elder bro) came to Singapore with his friends and stayed at my place. Even though the stay was just for the weekend, we had a great time.

- Hectic Project work getting on to my nerves. I have been kind of leading a project taking care of all the technical aspects. There have been some goof ups from my side and in return gifted me Late night working

- Nagaraj’s family was again in Singapore after almost a year. This time even though we did not travel anywhere we were quite busy in Singapore.

- I have been playing Regular cricket matches and attending practice sessions. I have been following all the IPL matches, even though they were less interesting this time.

- The new craze in town for our group is badminton. We have been playing badminton every weekend without fail and we are enjoying it.

- There is one surprise, I haven’t seen enough movies in last 2 months. I hardly saw any new movies as these activities kept me quite busy.
- Because of my bro, Nag’s family & birthdays almost all the weekends have turned to party nights.

- This summer, we have done lot of activities right from bowling, pool, wake boarding to ice skating.

- Oops last but not the least Swetha’s resigned. She is happy to leave the organisation and all those shifts which took a toll of her health.

Ignorance or Stupidity?

A: Hi

B: Hi

A: Do you work on Saturdays?

Surprised B answers

B: No

A: OK, then I will organise the meeting on Monday.

B pissed off

Bad day at Work

Have you ever felt that everything is going wrong. Nothing is working out as planned. Everything is out of our control. Yes this happened to me in the last two days. I was stuck in the office late nights and nothing went as planned. Hope next week would bring in some good luck for me.

New Year Fever

We are in the last day of the year 2010. Everywhere I see talks about the new year parties and the resolutions for the next year and the recap of the current year. As many of my friends are not in Singapore for this new year we have planned to go to Clarke Quay first and then decide where to go once we are there.

While all this is happening, I have loads of work at home and have a development deadline for today. Where as people around me are already in holiday and office looks quite empty these days.

That’s the view of other teams desks in my office

 

That’s the view of my team desks which are more empty

I don’t know what to say

I am right now working under such funny managers, who have no clue how to work and how to make things work.

Manager1: Sends 11 meeting requests in the first hour of the day and still do not have an agenda for it

Manager2: Cribs for half an hour of time, while the resource helped for hours when the project was critical

Manager3: Has no clue whats going on and still arranges status meetings which is nothing but waste of time

Manager4: Doesn’t trust anyone and does micro management

Huh, hopefully I wouldn’t face such managers in my next companies.

Technical skills or Communication skills

Since Day one of my career I had this argument about the “Importance of Communication Skills over Technical Skills” with many people in different positions of the organization. There were so many different opinions and arguments that I heard depending on individuals perspective. But since day one I have been saying that “You need communication skills to support your technical expertise”.

In my view right from cracking the interview to performing the job, you need support of communication skills more than technical expertise. You cannot impress the interviewer with correct answers but with bad communication skills. You can argue the other way round also, but I would say that the percentage of skills that we need in communication is more than what we need technically to succeed in the job.

Below are some of the arguments that I used to support my statement:

- A good solution if cannot be communicated properly will not help. But a bad solution with good communication skills can buy some time.

- You can always attract the right kind of attention needed.

- You can use your communication skills to get the response you want.

- As a lead you can be assertive with your fellows rather than being intimidating.

- You can apply communication skills to sell your ideas to the group

- Once you know what you speak, you can give constructive criticism and positive reinforcement

Finally I would say that to make others understand a technical solution needs effective communication.

Filling Timesheet is Painful

The most annoying task for any resource in the month end would be filling in their time sheet. Having worked for some of the largest companies, I have seen really monstrous time tracking systems. Every employee thinks that they are frankly Painful, horrible, soul crushing, and pointless. No one likes time sheets.

I have seen those tensed faces during the month-ends as people have to clock the each and every minute they are in the office and also have to justify their work for those hours. I am not sure why managers think that any resource can actually justify his work for all the 8 hours.

I have also seen some managers resort to public humiliation to get their employees to submit their time sheets on time without any discrepancies. Even though we are at work busy doing a task given by the same manager, he still insists in submitting the timesheet on time.

Below is one such conversations which I have actually had on the floor.

Manager: Where is your time sheet Sudheendra?
Sudheendra: I’ll get it to you.

Manager: But it was due two hours ago.
Sudheendra: Yeah I know. Look, I’m really very busy, and I don’t really have time to figure out all that I did in the past week and fill it in the time sheet.

Manager: Do you want to get paid?
Sudheendra: Do you want me to work or not. Of course I need the salary. Look, I’ll get it to you, I just need some time to finish some things given by YOU.

After all this struggle, one questions that always recurrs while filling the time sheet is:

Hey buddy, Do you remember what we did last week?

In a place where we do multi tasking and work on many projects, I guess our memory about the tasks done would often become blur. I know we all are intelligent and have started writing about all these tasks in a Excel sheet to have it for reference at the end of the month.

But after doing all these exercises, justifying all those tasks each day for all 8 hours would always be a very big & tedious task for the employee.

I am now ready for the comments from the managers

Team Building Party

Its been around 2 years that I have been part of this team in Credit Suisse in Singapore. The team has grown enormously and have delivered many a projects, but none of us know each other properly and doesn’t really know each other personally.

Finally this Friday, management has taken a step to give a Team Building party to the team. The attendance to this was compulsory. So evening by 4PM, we were all at the Ceylon Cricket Club to start a great evening. We were told that we will be having some games and then dinner at 6.30PM. When I heard about the games and saw the people around me, I thought what these old guys will play and this whole exercise would be a flop.

To my surprise once the games were started everyone forgot where they come from and what position they are in and have actually enjoyed the games part of the evening. We were split into 4 groups and were supposed to compete in 3 different games.

That’s my team Red Bulls

After then games we went for dinner and drinks. After having 2 or 3 drinks we asked for some good music and then started dancing for a long time. We had food, drinks, danced and spoke to each other and in fact knew each other well. We had a great time till 1 in the night. In fact this is the first time I have got a chance to speak to all my bosses with whom I haven’t really spoken for 2 years.

That’s the final group who were there till Late night

Hope I will have these kind of parties quarterly.

How can he ask me?

Friday night at 7.45 PM when I came home and was talking to Swetha, I got a call. I could see that it was someone from my office. I hate to receive calls about work after office hours. But what can we do, its recession time and have to be in my limits. I picked up the call and below is the conversation.

I: Hello, Who is this?
Other Side: Hi Sudheendra, this is P*****.

It was my manager.

I: Yeah tell me P*****.

Next 10 minutes blah blah blah about work. You dont believe what he has asked to do. It was not my work nor it was so urgent nor it was something to do with me and still he asked me this.

Manager: Have you planned to work this weekend?

I was so angry on him. First thing how can he call me on my personal mobile at that time after office hours and ask me if I was planning to come to office on a weekend without any work from my side but to cover someone else’s mistake and save their arse. I dont like anyone calling me on a weekend for any work related matters. What will they do for the whole week. Managers just want to cover the arse of their favorites.

I dont know what and why I am writing this, but I was frustrated and spoiled my whole weekend mood because of that.