The American Work Ethic

Well as I've stated in my last posts I'm in America for the next few days. Now as I'm hoping to get Friday morning off it means that I have to have all of my work completed by tomorrow evening. Seeing as I've been working since 8am I got a call from my boss saying that I have to have certain reports completed by tomorrow. This call was at 10pm and I was actually considering heading to bed for the night. Seeing as I had only half of the report complete it meant that I have to stay up and burn the candle at both ends tonight.

Anyhow this got me thinking about the American work ethic. In Ireland you come in at 8 and leave at around 5. The majority of workers would get their work done during this period unless you are really inefficient. The same goes for the workplace in China however they are more willing to stay behind and keep working till maybe 10pm at night. Since I have come to America I have had to give up weekends to get stuff done, this is the 7th time that I have stayed up all night in order to get vital reports completed. All of this either means one of two things:

1. I am extremely inefficient / lazy
2. My managers are piling too much work on me

I think that in my situation it is the 2nd option. My bosses are putting on so much pressure on me to get things done as they know that I'll be leaving for China soon, all this means is that I am a bitchassmonkey. Thank god I have only 2 days left to work and then I can look forward to an alcohol binge the likes I have never experienced. This will be the first time I won't be working in my parents bar for St. Patrick s Day since I was 7. Contrary to Twenty Majors blog (he won blog of the year in Ireland) I should be drinking since I was 6 but I suppose I was a late bloomer.

But to continue on with my rant, what I'm finding with my time over here is that because I work for a Chinese vendor and one of the worlds largest clonglomorate's, I'm finding my time stretched very thin seeing as they are both in opposite sides of the world. 13 hours time difference is not fun and it's very necesscary to work both timezones in my line of work. Le sigh, I need a holiday bad...preferably somewhere with some beach, some bikini's and some banana cockails...

Some new stuff going on here

So as you can see I've finally began to start making some small adjustments to this website.  The small things are finally a new AJAX comment box area which stop page refreshes, also are some html tags are allowed.

There is a small summary of each blog post on the very front page and I've decided to extend it a little further so that everyone can see the latest stuff that I am doing on last.fm, del.icio.us and flickr to name a few.  I'll also be working on a tag cloud as well as making the blog more AJAXy in general over the forthcoming months.  

So I am working for a company called Arvato Finance as a Senior Business Analyst, and much of the stuff I do is designing internal system applications on Ruby/J2EE/Rails/PHP/VB/J2EE.  It's a bit messy with all of these different frameworks at the moment but we will be merging most of the internal web applications into Ruby on Rails so that will be interesting for a time.  The core business applications are of course not written in Rails, it is viewed like the plague, something the core team wishes to stay away from.  MySQL it should be known, for a core application, is viewed as a dirty word where Oracle apparently reigns supreme.  Hopefully my time here can change such perceptions of Open-Source code and products.  

I've been developing with Ruby for the past three year and rails somewhat for the past two years now and I am still very much in love with the language as when I first saw it.  It is to this effect why much of my own code written as a hobby is primarily written in Ruby.  Having seen the Chinese mass produce J2EE code by throwing as many bodies at the problem I saw that for a one man team J2EE really doesn't suit me and my methods of fast prototyping and in this regards rails suits me perfectly.

Anyhow, at the moment I am an extremely busy guy, deadlines due and all that jazz.  If ya like what I am doing to the site over the coming weeks lemme know and leave a comment.  If of course you have any suggestions just let me know and I'll think about it further... :)

I could sleep right now...

So over the past 4 days I've clocked up about a 50 hour working week. How is that possible I hear you ask? Welcome to the other side of the wonderful world of outsourcing in China. Well when you’re the leader of a project you can literally come into work at any time you so please, however leaving the workplace however is the difficulty. At least twice this week I've had meetings with people at 2am in the morning Beijing time, 2pm for the Americans.

So while the American's wrap up the meeting conveniently at 5pm it is 5am over in this side of the world. Supposedly it is very hard to get a time for these people to meet up together however just after lunchtime seems to suit them....well they are half asleep at this time and hence are usually much easier to manage.

But all this is not in vain. By some creative administration I shall be working 15 solid hours straight today from 9pm to noon on Friday. I shall then be taking the rest of the weekend off until the following Monday where the normal work hours will resume I hope. However it is with great anticipation that I shall be taking some badly needed time off from Wednesday, 3 entire days I shall have to recover from the madness that I am anticipating my birthday to be.

So I'm going to be turning 24 years old this week and it was quite funny that a group of interns asked me how old I was yesterday. When I replied that I was 23 they seemed to be quite shocked. I was very far ahead of them in both experience, thinking, maturity and confidence, which they seem to be lacking however the funny side was that most of them are older than me by at least a year. Its great being their boss and giving them direction and I can see them improving each day in different area's however their confidence is still very much lacking. Can you imagine coming out of completing 6 years of university and then signing your life away to a company for a minimum of 3 years? Well that is what is happening here to a multitude of young graduates out here.

Although I only graduated last year I have come on in leaps and bounds through what I have been experiencing out here. Exposure to many different technologies has been of great interest however I believe that if I stayed in Ireland I would never have gotten half of the experience and responsibility which I am given here, quite possibly I would be holding a small programming position without the chance to influence key points on design, quite the opposite here. So. should anyone be interested in coming out to China to work here for a year or two after graduating I would definitely recommend it. You will be amazed how exposure to a new culture and travel broadens the mind.

Anyhow, I'm rambling, time to get back to work.

Code reviews, feel that squirming feeling?

For the past year that I have been working within this company I have found myself with a number of significant applications that have fallen under my mandate.  Some of these applications have been designed by myself, others by third parties external to the company and some I have inherited as legacy applications.  There is not one set framework between all these applications, some are coded in Ruby, others in Java, PHP, VB, Rails...the list is pretty much endless.  So as you may know I have handed in my required notice for the company and with about 1 and a half months of notice remaining here I have begun the unenviable task of documentation.

Yes, yes, I hear your cries of procrastination, yes much of the documentation should have been completed with their original owners, however times have changed.  This company is no longer a startup, processes are beginning to mature and documentation must be completed at all costs.  So now as I sit before the lists of applications which must be handed over I'm discovering all sorts of pesky yet vital applications which I have had some impact on in some form or other this past year.  Apparently I am the technical owner for all of these applications, some of which I have never heard of before.  Most modern IT companies are like this, back 5-10 years ago it was natural to fire up access and pull up an application that does a bit of importing of raw data, tidies it all up and shoots off a pretty looking report full of breakdowns.  

Much of the code is well written, others not so much.  Not all of the code contains comments and some code contains such horrors that leave me wanting to gouge out my own eyeballs after viewing it.  Such treats that I talk about should never be mentioned or ever see the light of day.  Code reviews are vital however are not as common as perhaps they should be within many companies.  I will be facing a number of code reviews whilst doing these handovers over the coming weeks and came up with some thoughts on the process

Review the code, not the developer.

Let's face it, people can be assholes at least some of the time during their life.  Don't be one during a coding session, everyone makes mistakes but it is how they learn from them that counts. 

Short regular sessions

Don’t make it too long, an hour is ideal per session.  Reading code at the best of times can be a tedious exercise, reading other peoples code can be even more so.  Remember that this should be an on-going process and is a vital necesscary part of creating productive and efficient code.

Be prepared

I had this sudden image of the scouts motto there.  Anyhow most of your time should be spent in preparation. Of course, you want the handouts, program listings, documentation, diagrams, flipcharts, and other meeting necessities prepared in advance so as to not waste people’s time.

Own your code

Don't be afraid to stand by your code. It is a learning experience and these sessions will make developers write better code in the future.  All participants in a review should feel that they can speak openly. As a reviewer, give comments in a constructive and positive way. As the developer, don’t take comments personally. You’re all there for the same purpose.

At the end of the day, laugh about screwups, don't take it personally and learn from the experience.  Everyone wins!