.

If the grapevine is to believed, banks will now begin classifying IT guys as subprime.
Righttt....After being knocked off the marriage aspirations list of Indian girls, yet another one for the ITDonkey.

Which reminds me.... I have got an alarming propensity of doing the absolute wrong thing when being observed. I was watching the marriage video of a close cousin today, in which yours truly makes 3 appearances of about 2 seconds each. I am yawning rather loudly in 2 of them, and have my mouth full of food in the third, which I had stopped chewing from the shock of finding the camera directly in front of me.
Old ladies watching the video will come to logical conclusion about how I got to my present shape by only sleeping and eating.
Well old ladies, you are wrong.... endlessly sitting motionless and tapping away at a keyboard has got as much to do with it as is anything else.
Anyway, in their eyes, I would already be subprime, and not someone worth recommending to their grandnieces. Not that I expect or even want to find a partner in this manner, but feels bad anyway. In the same manner when the bank says I wont be eligible for that car loan I didnt ask for.

The Z.O.P.

So it has happened. Almost that is.Became a direct victim of the credit crunch. Even as I type this out, a meeting is progressing at 8.30am CST (8.00 pm IST) announcing the bad news to the offshore team mates.
Starting January 2009 year, we will proceed towards a ZERO ONSITE POLICY. (Z.O.P.)
What it means is that they wont have people located at client side at all. Every single thing will be 100% offshored.
This happened after the management decided to pay a visit to our call centre wing. And suddenly realised they dont have onsite personnel at all, and were functioning just fine. In multiple shifts, across all timezones, including a couple of overlapping night shifts.
"Aahhaa!!" said they... and out came the calculators.
"Analysing our current relationship with the customer , it has come to our notice there are some gaps in value proposition we offer them.." , a bespectacled man must have droned to an audience of bean counters.
"For every resource we bring back , it will result in a saving of 75% , and if a corresponding resource at offshore is given 1.2% over and above our current investment in resource , it would result in the nett savings of over 5.97823 %.. " , all very exciting figures, if you are an MBA in power , like the above gnome eyed fellow.

The management must be terribly excited. "What a fantastic idea!!!" , they must be thinking.

What would be implied though that we can subject the software guys to fantastic amounts of misery , and convince the customer that there is value in that . So that fat cats like us can continue to get fatter.

Panic ?

Our primary client will be sending out RFPs (Request for Proposals) for various projects, including mine, in December. All the Indian IT biggies, are understood to have an expressed an interest. That.... and some Mexican firm too, and nearshoring is a good option, say the United Voters of Obama.

This, combined with the overall recession atmosphere, has our management worried I guess.
The number of pointless prep talk meetings have increased drastically. We already had our fourth in the last couple of weeks. "What can we do make this place better?" , they ask... usually without the expectation of an answer. I usually spend the time making little dots appear in patterns on the different pages of my notepad (Which invariably everyone carries into the meeting, but noone ever does anything with it.)


I keep asking myself, is it such a bad thing if this thing goes ??

On another note, my project details were suddenly changed last month. From September 2009, its now down to Dec 2008. This isnt the case for everybody.
Annndd... a big list of around 200 people to be laid off is being drawn up. This is one of those confirmed rumours.
So am I on my way out ?
I dont know. Watch this space.

Office Space (contd)

Forgot to mention in my earlier post. I seriously got my own version of the "TPS Reports" .
And I kid you not, we even got a dedicated resource, who does nothing but review our equivalent of "TPS Reports" all day long.
A little background on TPSR:
In the movie, our protagonist (believe me, if you are ITDonkey, its terribly easy to identify with him) , who is a harried IT company employee. And works, like me, in the field of Databases (dBase III, I guess, from the below screengrab ) .
Now on a Monday morning, our hero gets picked on by his bosses for forgetting to follow a new 'process' of putting new cover sheets on his "TPS Reports".

At one point in the movie, the chap asks his colleagues , "What if I am still doing this by the time I am 50 ? "
This , seriously, sent a shudder down my entire body. What if I am still doing what I currently do ?? The stuff which isnt, for me, even slightly constructive or interesting and doesnt add an iota of value to my life and leaves me feeling empty. Okay, there is the money (not much to begin with, just enough to create an understanding of how little you can afford ) , but little else.
For someone like me who has absolutely no other skills (not that I classify what I currently do under a "skill" ) , I guess carrying on is the only option.