Year-end blues are here again, and everyone is being robbed of his/her savings, when he/she realizes that it is high time that one should invest in something to avoid paying heavy sums as taxes to the government, which apparently has developed a habit of wasting public money in corruption scams and inefficient fund allocations. But, this post is not another blog post which one can archive as a proof to the non-governance of the government, it is about me and my company (X). Before the managing director of my company can decide on my appraisal, I would like to stack up my opinions on my company,which I joined 1 year back. So, here it goes.
Overview:
To begin with, my experience with X has been absolutely beautiful. Right from day one, I always felt that I am learning something new and exciting, and more importantly something different and exclusive from others. The dynamic nature of a start-up coupled with individual independence resonated with my vision, and with time helped me bring out more strengths from within. I grabbed this rare opportunity and delved deeper into both the technical and business aspects of each client I worked with. Being a quick learner, I not only delivered much more than what was expected from a resource with only 2 years of experience, but also developed strong relationships with clients, who recalled us for further phases of the project. I have been part of all major projects and even extended my role to recruitment when the time arrived. But, of course, even such a beautiful experience cannot be perfect, and is embodied with scars which are few in number but brings down the rosy picture, slightly.
In the next section, I would analyze my contribution, my potential to contribute in future engagements, studded with examples from the last year, and then put everything into the performance framework which has been accepted in our company.
1. Attendance:
The very first aspect of the performance is office attendance i.e. being physically present in office. Yes, I totally agree that I lay way behind the norm in this regard and hence have been the victim of ridicule from my peers, but I am absolutely sure of the fact that my physical absence has in no way caused any loss to the company. To start with, there are various reasons which can be cited for my absence. First, my place of residence. I live so far away from the office that travelling encompasses 5 hours of my daily life. It seems profligate and inefficient when the tasks you are working on involves utmost urgency and proactive response. At times, the tasks are individual in nature and do not need help or guidance from team members. If I take the example of the DOE project, even though many of the tasks were not individual in nature, the delivery time would have been adversely affected if I had to visit the office every day as it would have taken away valuable 5 hours from my day. Also, there was a time when there was apparently no work at all - not even the internal projects. That time saw the most of my physical absence. Further, the time spent alone at home helped me recall and revise many concepts and experiment a lot more with the technology than would have not been possible otherwise. This brings me to the second point - the environment at office. One thing that I have observed is the efficiency of my working capacity at both home and office. At home, I am disturbed by nothing and by no one, and hence my efficiency is at the fullest. But in office, various distractions (not the doubts or clarifications asked by team members) are prevalent which reduce the smooth flow of thoughts and hence increase the implementation time of things that do not need concerted effort. That said, I have not missed any important part of team building which took place, be it project work or otherwise. Thirdly, on a more personal front, I had to attend to some important responsibilities at home. I had to accompany my mom to regular health check ups since my dad was out of the country for some time. But this was only temporary and not the major reason.
To summarize and to propose a strategy, I would say, rather pledge, that from now on, you would not face any complains on the attendance front whatever the situation be. If I falter beyond the allowed limit of 20 holidays, you are free to deduct my salary on day to day basis. And this limit would not hold true in case of tight schedules during client engagements when my contribution is more important than my physical presence in office. Also, this limit would extend in case I work extra days, in form of Saturdays or Sundays or both.
2. Quality of Work:
I can say, without a doubt, that the solutions or the code that I have delivered throughout, be it client engagements or the internal projects, were of epitome quality. Given my range of experience, I have used all my analytical and interpolation power to learn the best way of delivery, be it code or even a video demonstration for internal project. I feel that this point brings no debate to the table.
3. Time:
This parameter basically means - how much work is completed? Is time in office well spent or is it wasted? As per this definition, I believe there are no instances of incomplete work from my side, and I have never "wasted" my time in office, in fact, my focus has always been on increasing my value, and hence many a time, when there is no internal or external project work, I solve programming questions so that I develop a new skill or a new way of implementing things. This feature has helped me a lot to translate knowledge from one domain to other, and understand the back-end of various tools in place.
4. Client Relations:
It is another point which is non-debatable, as both of us know how the clients have responded to my work and the my work ethic. Never have I hesitated to go an extra mile for them, and hence maintained a very good rapport with them.
5. Profitability:
Well, this is something that is not in my hands. Yes, to some extent, I can deliver new ideas, new methodologies, etc but this is something which depends entirely on the value of the project I have been put into. Bringing projects for the company was never in my job profile, although I never mind bringing them. But again it is something that is not in my expectations list, and so cannot be used against me for my low profitability, if any. Whenever I have been on projects, I have been extremely valuable and hence the profit margin that I bring to the company is huge.
6. Training:
This is yet another point where I have left no bounds. Right from day one, I have been training on various tools, which are uncommon and have no trace on the internet. But my training was never restricted to the technologies in which we had projects. I started capturing the basic concepts of JAVA with the help of the book which you had in the office. I even participated in few online contests where I applied my concepts and solved the problems successfully.
The points mentioned above were my justifications, reminders and examples of the value that I bring, but there is another part to the whole appraisal framework, that is - the 360 degree feedback, which essentially includes my feedback to the company. The next section will deal with it.
Positives:
As I have said above, X provided me a lot of opportunities to enhance my growth and increase my value. Firstly, one of the most important aspect has been the exclusivity of the technologies in which we are dealing, and also the in-depth training of it. This is a very big positive. Secondly, the exposure to Informatica's environment, be it technical details or the marketplace, has been a boon to me. Being an inquisitive person, I always like details of everything, and that's what the in-depth training of Informatica has done. The marketplace products boosted my confidence. It placed me in an international arena, where the products developed by me can be seen by professionals worldwide. Thirdly, the independence of thought has been liberating and hence I always feel special and being valued. This aspect provided me a lot of opportunity to explore and experiment, and being an opportunist, I never procrastinated in grabbing them.
Negatives:
Although positives steal the show, still there are some negatives that are embedded in the picture. They are just some observations or opinions from my perspective. Firstly, the promise of an incoming project with transparency. I agree that there are uncertainties involved in the field of business, but giving a sort of false hope/promise that we are about to land into a client engagement is something I didn't like. This is not a one time phenomenon. This has happened many times and we all are frustrated with this aspect. It becomes difficult to bring the element of trust in such promises. Yes, there were projects and we worked hard on them, but for the last 6-7 months, we have not applied our working knowledge on the niche tools. This could easily bring our value down as a resource and erode our existing knowledge. Also, it becomes very tough to keep oneself motivated only through training and not actually applying the concepts and tricks that we learn. Training, I believe, is just an introduction, the main conceptualization starts with experience. Secondly, team work is not unilateral. This perspective applies specially to me. Before you hired the trio, if I may call them so, there was no problem with team integration as such. But since then, there is an obvious polarity in the team. I, being the odd man out, have ,almost on all occasions of team work, either being ignored or being not informed about important advancements/learning irrespective of my physical presence in office. This happens even now, and it is I, who keeps on checking with them to get updates on the projects/training. I am not blaming them for this, but this is what it is. They know each other well, they live together, they go out together (even during office timings), so there is a natural cohesion among them. They are bound to share things naturally among themselves. But they never do it with me on a person to person basis, unless I am at the source of that issue. Also, there has been an unfortunate incident where one of them messaged me, by mistake, where he was back biting against me for my unnecessary mails to you, stating that I am trying to gain some extra points from you by sending more mails and stealing their idea, which in fact came up after an discussion, and hence I mentioned "we" in the mail instead of "I". I completely ignored it, and let it go for a better future. Since that incident, I reduced my interference so that any one doesn't get a chance to say such things about me. So, it is not that 'team-work' actually happens when I am physically present. I try my best to inform them of my learning, but they never talk to me in first person. I need to capture all their learning/opinion/views in third person.
So, this concludes this blog post, and just to be clear, this is not something I actually mailed/said to my managing director. This is something that I feel inside and may never come out. So, blog is the way to capture such things. May be one day when I move on to some other place, I get to say a final word.
