Hi,
This is a big description. So please be patient.
I have around 4.5 yrs experience and I worked on j2ee platform. The first 1.5 yrs of my career in IT was in UAT and production support and the technologies were jsp, servlets, EJB. That was around year 2006-2008. While I was 6 months in to my first project, it was in UAT stage and post that all the seniors moved out. It was a product for banking domain and was already running for 3 years before I joined the firm. So for production support I was the senior most in project terms although in experience there were others. Our management picked me up for production support and the product was not stable at all and we had hell lot of issues. We missed SLAs almost everytime and I had worked and stretched like anything to deliver fixes as per SLA terms. I knew the application flow. All that was required is to change existing jsps or servlets or pojo classes etc. It was application related and I was expert by that time in application terms. Still, the loop holes in the product hit us with 4-5 issues per day on an average and no matter how long we stretched, we missed many SLAs. When I was picked for production support for my module, I dont know if they meant it or otherwise, they said I had the best analytical skills among the team members of my team and so was picked up. All my daily routine was to work on fixes, talk to senior management on daily status and the status meetings often went for an hour frequently. I also used to speak to SME of the project, interfacing modules and attending any calls that might impact our modules etc. That is how my first 1.5 year went. I was out from B.tech in CSE in 2006 may and was in job by june. I never learnt java or jsp or anything for that matter myself and everything I learnt was on job. Never did I write a jsp from a scratch neither did I know what collections do and what they were. All know what we learn during B.tech years. Finally the client got frustrated and rejected our product when it was in AMC stage and so complete team was released. During the last three months one of the project manager came new to head us. Till then I had reported directly to Program manager or Project director. The new manager saw my independent handling and hardwork and when we were released, he took me into a development sort of project which had new technologies like XML, XSLT etc. The role was supposed for a 5 year guy, but impressed with me, he some how managed me to get into the project due to his rapport with one of the client managers. It soon turned out that I didnot have the basic skills in java - I have never really worked on from scratch anything at all. So within in 6 months, he lost all regard and confidence and used to sit beside me to get the things delivered. I had excellent communication skills among the team and that is the only thing he liked in me. Soon the mistrust and frequent bullying saying that I am not even fit for a one year guy hurt me and our relationship severed. I for my own personal problems in addition to neglect did not learn new things or basic things. All my life went in office. In that firm on an average I worked for 12 hours a day and had literally no time except on weekends which I wasted. With the severed ties, I opposed him and at one stage refused to work with him. In the previous production support project I was appraised 4 out of 4 meaning an outstanding performing and with in an year and half in next project everything down, I had to quit the company hearing rumor that they were preparing grounds for my termination and rated me 1 out of 4 partly due to my non-performance to their expections and partly due to rupture with this new management.
I quit and joined a new firm. For 1.5 months I was on bench. For another 1.5 month I worked in a project which had a client specific framework based on spring/hibernate, stuff I never even heard of. But all the tenure went solely for documenting design documents franklly, formatting the documents for the client expectations and purview. I was given a developer who was a fresher and he also knew little about technologies and the framework. However, there was one developer who had a week time training in framework and helped us. I tried my bit whatever I could to my knowledge to help him. The manager for this project moved to some other firm after the completion and the review he gave about me was very positive as I hear from my current manager and program manager. I am working on a new maintenance project yet again for past 3-4 months and during this appraisal period, my manager was satisfied with technical skills, commitments and all the stuff and asked me to improve on application and domain and processes followed by organization.
Recently I was asked to give a session on java to freshers. Basic concepts..core java. Ofcourse I was not touch with those concepts especially collections and I some how brushed up for 2 days for training. I gave the session and ofcourse I was not satisfied my self. I had no time to brush up deeply and especially collections were alien to me. I am also supposed to send them an assignment and ask them work on it and submit back to me for verification. People are saying that they are college level programs and pretty simple. I have been working on the assignment myself and could work out only one issue, that too after going through collection concepts once more. The other programs I am struggling to achieve.
This is my current stage, and I wonder how I can call myself a J2EE guy. Deeply immersed in maintenance projects stretching out myself hard gave me nothing but application knowledge and recognition in that project alone. Once out of that I am nothing. My earth is shaking and I am not able to keep up. Fortunately I am working again in a maintenance project which is far more stable. It involves java, flex, webservices etc.. Right now it does not involve much coding on flex side almost nothing at all and neither on web services side. A little bit changes are requird on java and mostly it is analysis and not bug fixing that is going on right now. But a simple training session and its assignment is devastating to me and I am working like anything now on assignment.
With all the maintenance backdrop it only contributed to break of my spine and nothing else. I am a team lead now, a position less than project lead and still have 4-5 more years to become a manager at which point I will have practically have no need to worry much on technical aspects. But in the mean time, I am facing lot of embarassment myself. I am just thinking of approaching my manager to ask him to not to assign any more sessions this way. But it is a two sided arrow and it will likely force me work on developing my technical skills at this point of time in addition to shattering whatever expectations or opinion he held about me till now.
For me I learnt that maintenance projects are most damaging in the initial stages of one's career. Does anyone agree with me. While I am also the one to blame to not have updated myself on technical aspects being in delivery stream, is it not the maintenance project aspect of my career, which landed me in this soup and what is a way out.
I can only quit IT. But now I will have to join at most junior position in any other field as this experience has no relevance at all.
What are your thoughts?
Regards,
Ram
, but here I go..I would like to know if there is any tool that does the creation of Junit class for the methods in a java class. A method might have different processing steps. So is there a tool that creates the JUnit test case for a method.
