Main input given by him is my development skill is very weak because I need to many man days to revamp AIF module. Oh, hard to swallow that. In spite of much hard laboring into development lately (so many hours I have been working outside working hours), is it still so far to meet his super high expectation. I think he expect that AIF enhancement/revamp only take 5 man days while I gave him 25 man days. Thinking back, the man days I gave didn’t take into account that I got one week (5 man days) as backup support and another week (5 man days) as primary support in between.
I think if the module is 100% developed by me and they have a clear requirement what they need to change or add in, then I think I can complete it in 5 man days. And don’t forget this 5 man days include other job function as well like first level investigation from ihelpdesk, attend weekly meeting, other training.
To do first level investigation/troubleshooting can be one of the most difficult thing to me, because the scope is extremely wide. Even if all the programs are developed by you, to support all of them also not easy because so many modules and you need to know so many business logic as well. Example for your the core system and for one bank, there are 40 queues and one queue come from some conditions. And there isn’t a lot of documentation like system flow chart for your reference. But the actual fact is those programs are developed by so many people and majority of them are already long gone from the company. In order to know and understand the system flow and because there isn’t much documentation like system flow, you need to open the source code to understand what is going on there. One of the source code module I open last week, when I look at it, those source code are very neat as well.
And also about multiple version of source code due to multiple banks factor. What about testing. Just one bank itself, the testing can be so comprehensive due to so many validation and so many different types of scenarios. And what about the documentation part? Now, technical team lead requires three types of documentation: system flow diagram, sequence diagram and class diagram and what about code standard. There could be a lot of redundant code in it and to clear them up, you need to retest it and what about comment standard? what about the existing code is not too maintainable and revamp the module might need to make sure the code is easy to maintain as well. What about consistency area? Need to make sure that the term in comment or method name is consistent. What about those hard coded code? Need to make it a common code for all banks, so code merging will be easier.
One thing he asked me to do from now is to update my team lead weekly (Monday or Friday) on how do I spend my working hours. Example how many percentage on support and how many percentage on development. And to give reason on why I didn’t achieve certain goals if there is.
And for future, start from October 2009, my manager might most probably transfer me to GWC team which is using JAVA programming language. I can makan JAWA mee and drink JAVA coffee but I don’t think I want to go into JAVA programming now as I have been into ASP and ASP.NET from the beginning of my career until now. I wish I can continue to stick with VB.NET.
No matter where I will be next month, for now I should give my best to do a good job for this AIF enhancement task. Another thing I should tell myself also is I don’t have to ‘kill’ myself to meet my manager’s super high expectation. If he has extremely unreasonable expectation again on me in the future, I think I will go straight to his manager or HR.
Nevertheless, I should continue to work hard and to give my best to do a good job in whatever tasks given to me. One more thing I should tell to myself is not to take his remark so seriously and personally.
