Archive for the ‘work’ Category
Staying back
Last week was quite a rough week for me. As always deadline was looming (production release on Thursday) and my estimate was off the mark. I knew my estimate was already very tight, so having unforeseen requirements came up at the last moments didn’t really help. I pulled it off, but with the cost of my personal health & time, family time, time with people from bible study (missed the Friday night bible study) and to make things worse I wasn’t that confident with the quality of my work.
On Thursday the production release day, I came in at 11am and had to work on making sure everything is ok on the production environment PLUS fixing up issues from our tester (one of the issues was a very hard to detect jQuery/Ajax issue - more on this later) PLUS implementing this feature that wasn’t identified before. I was actually quite pissed off with this unidentified feature, because first of all I missed it myself, and second of all I have asked a group of people in the company who knows how the system work to have a look at my work and let me know if anything missing weeks before the go live date. But of course no one has time until few days before the release when they do a more thorough testing, well telling me 2 days before the release wasn’t really helpful.
The whole day was really intense, it was an endless cycle of fix one thing, breaks another thing. I negotiated with the customer manager to hold off this one particular feature until later on as I really not sure with the quality of it (I was really2 tired, my brain hurts I know for sure my coding quality will surely suffer from it). Anyway finally I sort of managed to implement it, it is full of unconventional coding that people one day will look at it, and say what the heck is this guy thinking. I put a comment goes along this line "its 11:45pm, I am really tired and want to go home, so pardon me for this mess".
I ended up leaving the office at 1am Friday, I know for some IT workers this is acceptable, but boy my body certainly didn’t think so. I felt really sick coming at home, got headache and felt like vomiting, didn’t sleep well that night. I spent most of Friday sleeping, as the light headache, the feeling nauseous and tiredness were there whole day. I guess that’s probably how hangover must feels like (never got drunk in my life, so wouldn’t know how it feels 
wondering why people would want to put themselves in such condition). I only recovered on Saturday.
The only good thing about this is, this should be the last of projects with tight deadlines for me (can’t help thinking about my teammates..). At least that’s what being promised to me. My manager offered me to be part of the solution so that projects can be more manage-able and developers are happier (I really have high respect for my manager, he’s a good manager, he has put up a lot for the team), so I guess I just have to wait and see whether things can be improved or not.
Star performers
I am pleasantly surprised with the vast array of books that are now available to our RA library. Never knew they own that many books.
I’ve read parts of this interesting book: 201 Ways to Turn Any Employee Into a Star Performer by Casey Fitts Hawley
Some stuffs that I get out of the book (things that I can relate to).
Casey suggested that companies should have a (long term) development plan for employees. However there are some factors (myth) why business might shy away from this
- Once developed, the employee will leave. Casey says, the good ones will leave anyway. But if possible moves this person to another role/position IN the company.
- Development takes a lot of time from the manager. Casey says managers will spend a lot of time in fixing the problems anyway if there’s little development taking place. It’s better to spend time in positive management tasks she argues.
Some of the problems of great employees:
- Move out to another job opportunity faster (higher turnover rate)
- Burn out more easily
Managing Great Employees’ Turnover
Spending time and attention to your great employees will have better ROI than spending time with the problematic ones. The cost of losing great employees is astronomical. It’s a highly likely that your great employees are being constantly approached by headhunters, family, friends etc for job opportunities.
Nicholas Stern says:
Create a culture of exclusivity so people will see working for a competitor as a step down.
Managing Great Employees’ Burnout
Great employees are dependable and high performing, they continue to push and push to meet the goals set for them and their own goals. But often they do this at a cost of their personal life and health.
By the end of the year, the burn out employees will look for another position since a failure (incompentence, which might occur due to their burnout) or a half hearted effort is just not good enough for them. The problem with these star performers is sometimes they can’t bring themselves to cut back or ask help from management, hence starting afresh elsewhere is more tempting proposition.
Possible remedies:
- Ask the great employees to think balance first, make it their responsibility to achieve this balance. Ensure employees that you are committed for them to achieve this balance. Recognize them as total person not just an employee.
- Offer self improvement opportunities, these people are usually life long learners, they will be frustrated if they are not given opportunities to learn.
- Offer variety or even job rotation if possible.
- Simply ask them to design their ideal job and learn from the answer. You might be surprised of the mismatch between management perceptions and employees perceptions of what constitute ideal.
To sum up:
Invest in the great employees will offer the greatest payback in productivity, innovation and contributions.
Breaking point
I am tired of being always busy for the last 6 months or so.
Usually the level of busy-ness comes in cycles, that is you’d have busy periods when you are expected to put more effort in (maybe a couple of days of overtime) and you’d have not so busy periods when you can do things like researching, learning new technologies to benefit the company, planning etc2.
I think I have been responsible for far too many on going projects, I just can’t handle them anymore. I’ve brought up this situation with appropriate parties, let’s see what can they come up with.
But the thing is with the key people left and not being replaced, I don’t see this situation will improve any time soon. Hm so what other choice do I have?
How would you rally a wounded troop
If I were in charge of a team/company, how would I rally your troop in the wake of people leaving?
What do I need to do to contain the damage? Not only damage to the business but more importantly the damage to the team’s morale.
How would I dispel the compounded negativity? How would I prevent other to follow suit?
I need to address the team with the following:
- Honestly admit that there is something wrong
- Quickly do a survey on what people are feeling, it has to be anonymous otherwise the quite ones won’t speak up their mind
- Hold a meeting with the team to address the issues from the survey and work it out from there
- Ask what sort of environment or working condition that the team would be comfortable and happy with. If this is not aligned with business expectations, then something got to give, perhaps adjusting business expectations is less costly than employee leaving.
I need to retrospect what is it that my company can offer that other companies can’t? And nowadays in the candidate tight market, attractive renumeration alone is not enough.
I also need to do research on who will poach the talents from my pool and what do they offer that I don’t at the moment?
After the dust settled, I would need to inject some positivity, I probably suggest a team building activity, but not just a once off, it needs to be regular. At my old workplace, weekly soccer and daily coffee breaks helped people bound very well. I would have more non work related conversations more with the team, I need my team to be comfortable talking to me about their concerns. I need to be able to read the signs of someone looking to leave and do something about it and not to be caught off guard.
It’s really tough, but this is dangerous situation, it needs to be managed not ignored.
Just thinking out loud and shaping myself to simply not just only being able to identify problems but to provide solutions. Anyone can find problems, but not many want to find solutions.
No time
I put forward a suggestion for us to have some sort of bookshelf at the office and we can stack it with books. I was thinking that by reading more all of us can improve together.
But then our manager chuckled and said one thing that hits me "who have time to read?". He is absolutely right!
I regretted putting the suggestion, in few seconds my utopian development dream crashed by the harsh reality sigh.. no time..
Unbelievable Blunder
I can’t believe what I did on Friday, probably the worst thing that I ever did in my working experience.
I was testing my local development environment, in particular I was testing the SQL scripts that I have for re-creating tables. On my SQL Manager, I have two tabs open, one for development database and the other one is for production database (as I was doing another task on production database). Now, I wanted to drop all the tables on my local database, so I opened up a new query tab on SQL Manager and run my query there.
Seconds later after hitting F5 to run the query, I realized that the query tab opened was connected to the production database not on my local database. I was frozen, didn’t know what to do, was hoping that this is just a bad dream. A minute later, some people saying that they saw hard errors on our website, by this time I know it’s very real and I have to do something about it. I quickly told DBA, Team leader and Production Manager, they all were very shocked needless to say.
To cut the story short, for the next 2-3 hours or so the whole development and customer relationship team worked together to get the site up and running again (some of the data had to be re-entered because they didn’t exist on the backup). as well as keeping the affected clients informed with the restoration progress.
The people were understanding, of which I was very grateful. I was also quite amazed how the Product Manager calmly handled the situation, he lead the development team so well through the crisis. I guess the similar thing also happened on the customer team. I was impressed as well how everyone able to work together to pull the company from the messy situation that I single handedly have created.
I think I shouldn’t be trusted with administration privilege on production servers every again.. I always consider myself to be very cautious person, but I was proven wrong that day, a timely reminder for me.
New RA site is live
RECRUITadvantage’s new website went live this morning. It will be a central component to the new marketing campaign strategy that seeks to boost RECRUITadvantage online presence.
I spent few days converting the static HTML from the marketing company to CFM templates. I also ported some functionalities from the previous website version to the new one as well as adding new functions.
I am quite happy to be doing some front end coding once again, especially given that my role is mainly focused on the logic side of things.
Left
Today marked my last day with fforesite. It has been a crazy 1 year, 1 month and 1 week with the company.
I think in overall it was an amazing experience working for them. I’ve got to work with highly talented, intelligent, interesting and nice people.
I also got introduced to ColdFusion and somehow that led me to a whole lot areas that I haven’t think or encountered before. The best thing about ColdFusion, in my opinion, is the community of bloggers behind it, the quality of the blogs is just top notch ranging from issues like IDE, RIA, Code generation, OOP, deployment etc2. The wealth of resources and information is just amazing. I think I quite like the idea of being an Adobe Web Specialist as a viable career direction, which somehow a change from my old dream of being a pure Java developer/architect.
Back to the day itself, (I think) I managed to keep the golden rules of leaving: “shut up, shut up and shut up”. Although I think I did say one stupid thing in the end, but I guess in overall it went OK.
I wasn’t quite emotional about the whole thing, maybe because I have pondered about it for quite a while. Although it’s still sad for not being able to work with the people anymore, but I’m hoping that I can keep in touch with most of them one way or another.
Moving forward, Monday, I’m starting with my new employee recruitAdvantage. I honestly don’t know what to expect, all I know is I will still be coding in ColdFusion (with possibility of Flex thrown to the equation).
But I am embracing the change, I hope I will be a good fit for the company and it will be lasting work relationship.
Googling my company
Someone pointed out to me that my blog came up when someone googled my company name and this is actually not desirable
Although I think that I wrote nice things so far.. see here if you don’t believe me. So my boss should be happy if my blog comes up on higher ranking than some other links that.. let’s just say not putting my company at its best light.
Must resist criticizing..
Rules to better team members
I stumbled across SSW’s rules to better team members and rules to better project.
I haven’t read much of the later, but I read most of the points of the first one. There are good points there, although most of them are just common sense. Having said that, common sense is not common, is it?
I would want to see whether the points preached are also practiced there, but at least having those points compiled and put up for everyone to see is a good start. I would like to see lists like this for our company and that people are actually working towards better work environment and process.
These are points of interest:
- Point 13 turning free work to billable hours. On my terms, this means do not be too lenient to our clients (ie doing lots of free work) and do not over estimate your capabilities to deliver, eg if you promised to do something in x hours of time but turned out that it actually takes x+y hours, then of course you have to work the additional y hours for free.
- Point 8, persistence when you think some things need to be done and create a list somewhere to store your thoughts on these things. I think this is an excellent point, I have done this for previous company, I created a list of things that they can improve on, but I somehow I just didn’t give the list to them when I left and I can’t remember exactly why. I probably should start my list and give it to my boss (before I leave).
- Point 38, knowledge sharing. I am a huge fan of knowledge sharing, I set up a Wiki at my old workplace (which unfortunatelly hasn’t been updated since I left) and tried to put up some of my knowledge and experience in my current workplace’s wiki and chase up the Chief Architect to put up his as well.
Some points that I think are questionable (and a bit silly):
- Point 74, always carry a thumb drive.
- Point 34, don’t listen to music at work. I actually can understand this point, but I personally think listening to music helps me a lot in tasks that require undivided attention.
- Point 52, speak correct Egnlish. What happen if you are not a native english speaker? Surely you can forgive someone having grammatical or pronounciation errors at times, as long as he can communicate well.
All in all, it is a good guide to read up and to reflect, kudos to the SSW to put it up on the net so that others can benefit.
