Tech Job 9 to 9 (4 page)

The POC results
were reviewed and approved by Dochamk Bank’s review board. Raghu sent a document
with details of the scope of work to be carried out by Holtezent. The contract for
the project was signed between Holtezent and Dochamk Bank for a one year
project.

Meanwhile
preparations were going on to commence the project work at the earliest.
Interviews were being carried out to recruit additional people into the team.
Three experienced people were taken for the project. They were Anil, Puneet and
Ashutosh.

Seats were
being allocated for additional resources. Holtezent mostly had outdated PCs.
Those PCs had first generation Intel Pentium 4 CPU and five hundred and twelve mega
bytes of memory. If two browsers were opened, all the running applications
would slow down. It would also hang at least every three hours in the middle of
work for some unknown reason requiring a reboot of the PC. Each PC had a fifteen
inch CRT monitor.

At 2.00PM,
anti-virus software would start a full-system PC scan every day. It would go on
for half an hour making the PC totally unusable for doing any productive work.
It would also eventually crash the PC. People would need to restart the PC
after the scan.

People took on
their positions where they could do minimum of work and pass time as much as
possible without doing any work. Murali would be spending time on creating and
updating the project plan and pretended to be busy with various meetings.
Satish would be spending his time doing his day trading job in the pretext of
environment support work. Shanthi would spend her time on use case
specification documents and getting clarifications for requirements.

Vinay returned
from library and was sitting in the lobby near the reception. Somebody
interrupted him.

“Hi. Excuse
me. I’m looking for someone. His name is Murali. I was told to meet him here in
Dochamk Bank ODC. Do you know where he sits?” asked the girl.

“Do you have
his contact number? Why don’t you call him and check with him?” said Vinay.

“No. I don’t
have his contact number now. I asked the receptionist. She cannot find his
number,” replied the girl.

‘Ok. What’s
his full name?” asked Vinay.

“Murali Danraj,”
said the girl.

“Oh he is my
technical team lead. I can take you to meet him,” said Vinay.

The girl
introduced herself as Sana. She was here to attend an interview for the project
Vinay was working. Vinay thought he had seen that girl before somewhere.

Murali told
Vinay to interview Sana. Vinay took the interview in a discussion room. He went
over Sana’s CV and found she was also from Mysore. She graduated few months
back from a college located nearby to his college. He then told her he was also
from Mysore and mentioned his college.

Sana said, “I
thought I have seen you before. Yes in one of those inter-college cultural
events.”

“Oh is it. You
came there? I don’t remember much. There was a group of girls from your college,”
said Vinay.

“You were too
busy organizing things there in your college,” smiled Sana.

The
inter-college cultural event took place in Vinay’s college that year. Vinay was
actively involved in organizing the White paper competition and Computer Quiz
competitions. He himself was not allowed to participate in any of those
competitions as he was from the hosting college. He finally remembered seeing
Sana there.

Sana was from
a conservative middle-class family. Her parents had sent her to college to
fulfill her desire to become a Software Professional. Her father worked in the
Mysore Electricity Board and her mother was a homemaker. Vinay too was from a middle-class
family. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a homemaker.

Sana was
selected for the CDSTP project as a non-billable resource for six months.
Non-billable resources would not be billed to the client. They were used as
buffers for the project whenever somebody went on unplanned leave or to quicken
the pace when unexpected delays occurred in the project.

Vinay was tasked
by Murali with getting all the software installed in the four PCs assigned to
the new joinees to the team. He took note of all the asset numbers and IP
addresses for each of the PCs.

Himesh was
tasked with getting ODC door access and getting the login ids created for the
new joinees to the team.

Ashutosh was
sitting next to Shanthi. Puneet and Anil sat near Himesh. Sana sat near Vinay.
Vinay then raised IS tickets for installing Java, FreeJUML, XWinClientFree and Xorbiz
client software. Java would be used for building the GUI. FreeJUML would be
used to do UML modeling for the project requirements and design. XWinClientFree
was the Windows based X Windows client software to connect to the back-end
Operating System. Xorbiz client software was for accessing the Xorbiz back-end.
He then raised another IS ticket to assign static IP address to each of the
PCs. Static IP address was required as IP addresses were tied to licenses of
some software.

IS tickets for
software installation would go through three levels of approval: Project
Manager, Security Manager and lastly IS Manager. He had to send email to each
approver and follow up to get the IS tickets approved so that the IS ticket
could proceed to the next approver.

By then Vinay
knew very well this approval process alone would take a week in Holtezent.

Sana who was
sitting next to Vinay asked him if he could come with her for tea break.

“Are you busy
now? Shall we go for tea?” asked Sana.

“No. I’m not
busy. Why don’t you go with Shanthi?” asked Vinay.

“No. They are
seniors. I cannot talk casually. I’m not comfortable. Ok. So you will go with
Himesh only right?” smiled Sana.

“No. It’s not
like that. Come let’s go,” said Vinay.

They walked
towards the cafeteria. Vinay then called Himesh and told him to come to
cafeteria. While they were walking, Vinay observed Sana. This was the first
time he was having a close look at her. She was two years younger than him,
almost as tall as him and had a lean body frame. She would usually wear a
simple cotton chudithar with an elegant design. She was wearing one plastic
bangle on each hand. She had a long hair neatly folded in peasant braid
fashion. She had a long face, high cheek bones, dark black eyes, arched thin
eyebrows, perfectly cut medium shade pink lips and milky wheat complexion. She
was wearing a flat sandal. Vinay disliked heels. He thought heels made the
girls look ugly with their legs especially when they wore skirt.

They chatted
in cafeteria for a while. They talked about what happened after college. Sana
had joined Holtezent only a few weeks back.

“Every weekend
will you go to Mysore?” asked Sana.

“Nowadays I’m
going. Yes. Now work is not that much hectic. I will board a bus on Friday
evening and come back on Monday morning.”

“I’m also
doing the same thing every weekend. It’s taking three hours to reach Mysore. It
takes almost one hour to leave Bangalore traffic.”

Vinay checked
the status of all the IS tickets he had raised. All are now pending with
Jeetender who is the IS Manager. He and Himesh then took turns and gave
sessions to the new joinees. They explained the project requirements and what
they did as part of the POC.

The project
was in the initial stage and had not yet picked up steam. Vinay and Himesh came
at 8.00 in the morning and left at 7.00 PM.

“Wait. I’m
coming with you,” Sana called out to Vinay.

Sana and Vinay
travelled together in the same bus as they had to travel along the same route. They
stayed in nearby flats. Sana stayed in a 2BHK rented flat shared with three of her
friends. Each bedroom would be shared by two people. She shared the rent,
electricity, water bills and maintenance charges of the flat. She and her
roommates mostly ate outside. Sometimes they would buy groceries and cook food
in their flat during Saturdays and Sundays. Vinay was staying in a rented 1BHK flat
nearby to her flat.

Vinay slowly
walked to his flat. There was no electricity in the entire street. His computer
UPS was beeping. He turned on the monitor. He had two software ran in two
console Windows. Both the console showed some error. He shut down the PC.

Vinay first
got to know about computers when he was in his eighth grade in school. His
father had bought him a videocassette about computers. Vinay loved that video.
It used a combination of graphics, animation and block diagrams to explain
bits, bytes and the Input, Output and CPU modules of a computer. It also showed
real computers running a program written in BASIC language. BASIC stood for
Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It was easy to pickup
especially for beginners learning a computer programming language with its
simple set of commands which could be memorized without difficulty.

Vinay had
varied interests in different subjects. He loved reading about Geography of
various countries in the world. He loved learning Mathematics and solving
problems given in the exercises of his school textbook. His interests gradually
shifted to computers. The videocassette had sparked his interest in computers.

Vinay then got
hold of a book titled “How Calculators Work?” The book explained in detail the
functioning of a calculator from the press of a key in the keypad to the
display of a digit in the LCD panel. The concepts were similar to computers.
His knowledge of computers grew more and his understanding got deeper.

Vinay found
other school subjects like Physics and Chemistry difficult. Though he could
understand little bit of Physics, Chemistry was incomprehensible to him.
Getting into a good Engineering college by merit required a good score in Physics,
Chemistry and Mathematics as well as the score in the Common Entrance Test shortly
referred to as CET exam. The CET entrance exam was usually conducted by all
colleges to further shortlist candidates based on their score. A merit list of
students would then be created by combining the scores of Physics, Chemistry,
Mathematics and CET entrance exam score.

Vinay had got
a score of two hundred and thirty eight. Through merit he got a seat in a
college five hundred kilometers away from his home. His parents had wanted him
to stay nearby their home. So they had booked an Engineering seat under
management quota for a seat in Mysore Engineering College. They had paid one
hundred and fifty thousand rupees. The college was just ten kilometers from his
home.

While he was
just joining his undergraduate, he got to read about Bitcoins and was intrigued
with the concept of Bitcoins. Out of curiosity, he had created a Bitcoin
wallet. The Bitcoin wallet was software based electronic wallet which would
hold the electronic virtual currency Bitcoin. He had two miners running in
separate consoles in his PC. He had scheduled them to run for a few hours every
day and then automatically shutdown the PC.

Bitcoin was
trying to gain acceptance as a virtual currency. Many computers could
participate in a process called Mining. Mining was the work carried out by a PC
to validate a transaction between two entities or between two people. The
computer which successfully validates a transaction first would get the
transaction fees as a fraction of a Bitcoin. This was how new Bitcoins were
created in the system.

A miner was the
software used to do the mining work. A CPU based miner ran directly on the CPU
and a GPU based miner utilized the PC’s Graphics card for processing. Vinay had
joined a large mining pool. A mining pool was a large collection of computers
which used their collective computing power to validate transactions. For every
successful transaction validated by the pool, all the computers participating
in the pool would get a certain percentage share of the transaction fees
received by the pool as a fraction of a Bitcoin.

Vinay had a CPU
miner and GPU miner running parallely. Each of them had been assigned to one
worker created in the mining pool. The worker is the entity through which
mining work is sent to the miner by the mining pool. His PC would be up three
to four hours a day and then shutdown automatically.

Vinay scored
average in theoretical subjects while his interests were in practical
applications. During his third year, he was pulled in by his seniors to
organize Quiz Competitions and White paper competitions. He joined as Project
Intern in SokoLabs for one month during the college holidays after his third
year. He learned image processing algorithms for digital cameras, while working
on a project there.

During his
final year, his college hosted the computer festival with the inter-college
cultural events. He had met a group of girls along with Sana from State
Engineering College of Mysore aka SECM college which was located nearby to his
college. But he didn’t get to talk with Sana much. He was very busy with
organizing and managing the various events planned out then.

During the
economic recession, companies had frozen fresher recruitment. Not even a single
company came to the college for campus recruitment. His parents told him to go
for higher studies abroad. He wanted to be in Mysore or Bangalore. He was also
not interested in higher studies. After his graduation, he was unable to get a
job interview. The economic recession lasted for a few more months.

Vinay used the
time to learn new technologies and broadened his knowledge. He read books and
self-taught himself. He also worked on his own projects to keep himself
occupied with some work. He used the time to write a small game for both iPhone
and Android. He used software simulators to run the game in iPhone Simulator
and Android Simulator.

When the
economy recovered slowly, his friends told him to come to Bangalore. He then
stayed with them and started attending interviews. That was when he attended an
interview with Holtezent and got selected.

Vinay’s
enthusiasm in Bitcoins gradually reduced over the last few months. Lately, as
more and more computers joined the network for validating the Bitcoin
transactions, it was getting difficult even for mining pools to finish validating
a transaction first. If a pool succeeds, each computer in the mining pool will
get a paltry sum something like 0.000001 Bitcoin. The payout varies and was
computed based on the percentage share allotted based on the computing power of
the miner.

Vinay rarely
checked his Bitcoin wallet. He had no idea how many coins he had and what was
the exchange rate. The exchange rate was very fluctuating which was based on
high speculation and acceptance of the Bitcoin by people. He didn’t know that
he had an early adopter advantage as he started mining from four years back.

Mining
difficulty had increased over the years. CPU and GPU miners could no longer be
used for practical mining. It now required ASIC miners. ASICs or Application
Specific Integrated Circuits were specialized miners created for Bitcoin
transaction validations and usually were expensive depending on the hashing
rate each second. It came in a variety of configurations with varying computing
power ranging from over one Giga hash each second and reaching anywhere to hundred
Giga hash each second.

Vinay had no
plans to spend money on that kind of hardware. He soon discontinued Bitcoin
mining altogether and hoped to cash in on the coins he had sometime next year.