I’ve been annoyed at my job situation. There is a cultural and organisational gap that is difficult to cross when you work for an Indian IT consultancy.
First, they are stingy with the pay and benefits. I am making about GBP 3,000 less than I was at Searchspace. Well, no problems with the money, of course, as I do not need it to live, just to live well. However, it does rankle a bit.
My boss is a procrastinator. He is always running behind, comes in late, never has time to have a proper discussion, and doesn’t exercise good judgment when it comes to assignments.
The consultancy itself is a mess. There is a lot of pointless bureaucracy, most of which is exercised through an online “system” that is like a patchwork quilt of the lowest quality, riddled with holes. It obviously grew from a small system into a behemoth, and was never designed or tested in its entirety. Trying to understand how to enter a timesheet is dire. Nothing else is easy to find or to do. But they are enormously proud of it.
They put inspirational wallpaper and screen savers on your computer, whether you want them or not. And cheesy is not the word for them. They are worse than cheesy. If you’ve seen those dis-inspirational office wall posters, you’ll get some of the flavour of it.
When you need information from someone, it is like pulling teeth to get it. They clutch it to their bosoms, feeling that if they let you in on the information you need to do your job, they’ve in some way lost something. The salespeople (who are responsible for selling testing consultancy) do not understand testing at all.
As a consultancy, the only metric they use is the percentage of utilisation of the consultants. If you are doing things that aren’t billable, but are useful and even necessary to the health of the consultancy, that doesn’t count. You are not pulling your weight. You are a drone. You will be reprimanded (even if you were not billable through no fault of your own).
So, last week, I got a call from an old chum of mine who is CEO of another testing and training consultancy, through which I’ve done a lot of my training work in the past. He was looking for someone to take a course this week, and of course I told him I was working full time and couldn’t take this one, but that I was looking around for a change.
He called again today and we’ll be having a coffee and a chat later this week or early next week. I like training, and I’m good at it (my pass rate is better than the average pass rate for the ISEB/ISTQB Foundation Certificate in Software Testing). There will also be consultancy involved, but I don’t think it’s far away or onerous–we’ll see.
I’ve only been at TCS for 5 months, and I feel somewhat annoyed that it isn’t working out, but my main mistake when I started looking for work again was this:
I didn’t use my networks!
So, remember that when you’re looking for work. Use your networks first. It may not pan out, but you never know.
Watch this space!