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Deployment Nightmare in Singapore Company

 
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Dear All,

I just thought of sharing my bad experience as a new employee who migrated from India to Singapore. Soon after joining, I realized that I am the replacement for a lady who was leaving the company. My responsibilities includes production deployments etc. I am suppose to take knowledge from her. I understood as much as I can and took all the documents from her and then she left the company.

The game started now. Management decided to do deployment from 10 PM - 12 AM. I went to office at 9 PM and took back up of files. I am the only Indian and that day there were 4 chinese people there. Soon after staring the deployment process, they gave me some deployment related tasks and I started doing. In the meantime, they also started taking some of my work and started doing. Because of some wrongly copied file (I don't even know that they started copying the files) deployment got delayed until 3:30 AM.
They stopped communicating with me after completing the tasks they gave me and they started talking in chinese among themselves.

Here is the brief of our deployment process.

- Shutting down servers and displyaing maintenance page.
- All JSP, Java class files to be copied from development environment to production environment manually. We don't have any version control system.
- All stored procedures to be copied manually from dev. environment to production environment and to be executed.
- All this process to be done in 3 clusters independently.
- Everything to be tested manually in all these 3 cluters.

Its fully manual. I agree that at one point of time I got confused. Finally I went to home at 4 AM in the morning.

Yesterday, our Director Delivery and Project Manager called me for a small meeting and I realized that, remaining people who had participated in the deployment complained on me saying that I haven't prepared well for the deployment hence they did that entire deployment work. Moreover, these people said they are not happy on my performance during one month.

One more incident is, I took some HTML related stuff (alignment issue) and fixed it by writing some javascript to achieve browser independency. One of my team member (he is also new employee) coming to me again and again asking me to give some work to him so that he can also learn. I shared some of my HTML stuff with him.

That guy working after evenings to night fixing HTML issue and I used to leave office at 6 PM. So the director and project manager said they are disappointed since I am not helping the guy who is working late nights. I am surprised that, why a guy with 3+ years of Java experience working late nights to fix HTML issue.

Considering all these, I am very much frustrated. I justified myself to them. I told them the following points.

- Deployment is messy and I haven't involved in production deployments before, so this happend since I am very new here.
- I did whatever my team members told me that night during deployment, I thought its team work. I didn't realized that I am the "one" supposed to do entire work.
- I didn't realized that guy with 3+ years of experience working in Singapore needs assistance in fixing HTML issue provided a solution.
- One month time is very short to fully understand the project and for doing production deployments.

So sorry for the long story guys, let me know your views on this. I am very much frustrated and in depression. I am not even happy since my family is coming from India to Singapore tomorrow. Almost, tears are coming out of my eyes.

Thanks,
 
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>>Almost, tears are coming out of my eyes.
Believe me, though you made some minor mistakes unknowingly, which I'll describe later, but still you weren't that bad. I REALLY MEAN IT. I understand the situation in which you are in, but you have to know that such issues happen and are pretty common in this industry. Speak to any of your friends or colleagues and check if they had only good professional experiences. I'm sure most of them would comeup with the tough times they had gone through at some point or the other.

By facing such experiences , you keep on learning and that makes you a better person day by day. May be after a year, if you recollect this situation you feel good about the way you might have handled it or how you would have handled in a better manner.

Don't forget the fact that you are atleast good, though may not be the best. If the onsite people were so capable of doing things by themselves then you wouldn't have got an onsite opportunity ;-) This by itself is a clear indicator that you were needed at the client's place.

From understanding, there seem to be mistakes at both the ends (i.e. client and you). The client did not clearly communicate to you. They should have told you that you were the ONLY person responsible for the deployment.

Now coming to your end, there are a few here as well

>> I understood as much as I can and took all the documents from her and then she left the company.

1. That implies you didn't try things on a test or a dummy environment and you just relied on documentation. Generally, that never helps. Understanding the documentation is the primary part but that never completes the knowledge transfer (and that too in client's place).

>> Deployment is messy and I haven't involved in production deployments before, so this happend since I am very new here.

2. You know that you are new but the client would never be ready to accept this reason and they would say the knowledge transfer was meant for that.

>> I didn't realized that guy with 3+ years of experience working in Singapore needs assistance in fixing HTML issue provided a solution.

3. You could have put it in a better way i.e. explaining what really happend. (One of my team member (he is also new employee) coming to me again and again asking me to give some work to him so that he can also learn. I shared some of my HTML stuff with him.)

>> One month time is very short to fully understand the project and for doing production deployments.

4. For certain they would ask you why you didn't say this during or atleast after the knowledge transfer. Probably you over committed yourself.

Again let me repeat, if you don't make mistakes you have no way to learn and know "Even homer sometimes nods"

At any point of time don't over commit yourself. Saying "No" or "It cannot be done in the given timeframe" is not a bad idea - This is one of the fantastics suggestions that I got from one of my managers.

At any point of time, if you are not clear or you don't fully understand things then escalate or speakup (which I'm working hard to learn).

Hope these indicators help you.

Work is work and family is family. Once you leaver office don't think about work unless you receive a phone call (from office) and have fun with your family during the week-end. That would help you in giving your best on Monday :-)

That is all what I have to share and have a nice week-end.
 
Sai Surya
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Thanks a lot Srikanth. Now I am alright. The routine word I used to heard from managers is "put extra effort". After all, they are managers.
 
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Hi Sai,

Its good to hear that you are over it. This kind of things always happen. I was in a similar situation where I worked for 15 hours a day for deployment. We didnt have any idea about Linux. We didn't have any external help. The management told not to do trial and error, but the work needs to be done. We didnt even have a machine with Linux locally. We struggled, but completed that task. But still the management said we were not working hard. The guys who did not work, but just talked like why don't you do this way or do that way got all the praises.

This is how most of the places are unless you are close with your managers. So take it in your stride, learn from this and go on.

One more thing. As Srikanth said, do not think of work when at home and vice-versa. Enjoy your stay and have fun.
 
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Sai:

I did work with lots of Chinese colleagues, I am the only Indian guy at one point. Initially I had problems like you mentioned above, but later on adjusted to their work culture. Normally they are very hard working and very demanding when it comes to work. Don't expect them to be friendly. If you are not happy after some time move on, there are so many opportunities.....

I guess you might be new to s'pore, it will take a while for you to adjust their frequency. Take it easy you will adjust pretty soon. Its a beautiful country explore and have fun with your family.
 
Sai Surya
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Thanks Rajan and Vjy,

As you guess, I am new to Singapore. Anyway, I made up my mind to go back to India after completing my 1 year contract. I don't see any great advantage of being here working like bull.
 
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just quit and let them suffer the pain from the lack of resources which will increase the workload on those people that whined about you.
 
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I guess we all ought to learn something from this, from the technical point of view that is.

1. Start a version control system on your own.
I am not sure how on earth are they running a software shop without using one. Actually by just using them is not even sufficient, they need to use it properly. I had an experience once where nobody is supposed to checkin anything unless the manager approves of it. In another case, the source control is nothing but a central "hardisk" to save craps. Plenty is written about this already, go google for this best practice if unsure.

2. Automation is too damn important
I guess all the deployment should be been scripted and auto deploy with minimal manual works. Minimal here means just run the script.

3. Let the manager into the loop
Send daily or weekly report if necessary. From your descriptions, it sounds like the manager doesn't know what you were doing most of the time.

Cheers
 
Seymour Cakes
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4. Automated Test!
Life is too short to spend on manual testing, and I guarantee you after the 3th time after manual testing, you will begin to slack off -- well unless you love testing. :-?

There's plenty of testing tools to choose from -- Selenium IDE, Watir, OpenPGA, etc.
 
Sai Surya
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The problem is because of the framework they (now "we" ) used to build the system. Its an expensive portal framework where developers have to write JSPs and some of these JSPs needs to be uploaded to portal.
The project now is in really bad shape, touching small part causing major production failure. This is the mess I really can't clean up and I escalated this issue. Recently, they gave me a production issue to fix, I gave up to understand code written by many people in JSPs.

I am considering change if possible since I am working under consultant payroll here.

 
Seymour Cakes
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Ah I see. I understand that kind of sh*t feeling when you are into into it.

Somehow in all my years of working, I have never encounter a good working place without any major problems -- well unless it's a startup and everything is snow-flake new.

Good luck.
 
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