Last two weeks at office have been pretty rough. It all started with me losing 20% of my bonus. It came as a rude shock as quite a bit of money was in jeopardy.
I really did not know what to do, the amount was yet to be given to me on paper. I had seen on the basis of amount given as a part of salary.
Nothing was going well this season. Temperatures around was horrible, travel this month was almost impossible. Working out during summer and following a diet has been thrown off gear. Loads of reasons to crib about. And on top of this, I get nothing in the form of bonus.
I could be quiet and quite satisfied with the outcome, had I not performed. In fact the non performing team members had gotten more bonus amount than me. I literally lost my sleep. I felt like beating the living hell out of everyone out there.
Well, I can say non performing, the reason being, I was continuously working on production issues, end user support, talking to onsite people, local QA, onsite QA, doing screen sharing with onsite QA for issue replication, giving builds/fixes for production issues, doing hell a lot of work and there you go, whilst the others, yup, I bet, did lesser than this, though they were working on development issues. I do development work but highly occupied into production sustaining work since last 3 months plus atleast.
Yep, development work gets far more time and no one to return back to until QA passes it. Production work has the management standing on you, asking updates from you and the questions of timeline. Its like asking for trouble.
And then the inevitable happened. Lack of exercise due to summer was taking a toll on me. And then the stress levels were increasing too. On top of that, was continuously being pin pointed to in the meetings for being quiet and not participating.
So finally, I had to really stretch some muscle and tell people who's who in the team.
When I was finally called for discussion regarding performance bonus, with our Sr Director, I told, let me bring my laptop. Though my director insisted on not having my laptop for meeting, I still carried it over there.
And boy, did I make a big dent over there. I made clear what work I had done, and I even pointed to what work others had done and I unleashed hell a lot of uncomfortable questions which our's truly director gave answers, which according to my standards, were nothing short of unsatisfactory.
I even showed exact statistics of how people were misusing official time, going for food courts, how when I was on leave, people were so apathetic that, they could not do even a screen share with onsite team. Just shows, whose got real guts after all to deal with US/Europe teams. (Well, one is me of course, now I can say that proudly!)
Finally the tide turned to my side, and the meeting ended abruptly, when two people interrupted us, since our director had other meetings too.
Before leaving, he told, meeting is not fully done and held back the bonus letter, not before folding the paper exactly in half.
So there you go, its almost a week to that incident, and I anxiously wait for my new bonus letter which should have turned up with a 100% number. (though I was targeting 120%).
And my biggest achievement was not losing temper. If I generally lose temper, I do not care who is around. So this time, I kept quite and directed all my difficult to answer questions to our director.
Next installment of our meeting, well, few more statistics and few more uncomfortable questions, and I guess, more embarrassment not for me though!.
Cheers,
