Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Geeky BUT Composed

It was the time when i initially joined ST Ericsson, place where I am presently working. I was recruited in place of a person named Sudheer who used to handle most of the integration related activities in Symbian single handedly.

The project was in its completion phase and most of the work was already completed except for one activity CTC++ that was still pending and results were trailing well behind the expected targets set by Nokia. I had worked on application layer before but this was the first time in drivers and I had no exposure to how drivers work at the lower system level in integration with the hardware. The difficult part was that there was a scarcely narrow time frame to learn these things and achieve the targets for CTC++ activity as the product delivery dates were reaching fast. From the day I started working there was a pressure from management side to speed up the learning and bring the CTC++ to a logical end. But the real challenges presented themselves when along with CTC++ , I had to take up the responsibilities of USB package releases to NOKIA, the bug fixes for ER requests raised and running an entire validation cycle for every small bit of tweaking done with the code which is a day long activity.

In the early days I was completely alienated by the pressures of work and the burden of expectations management had put on me when i was just a beginner in embedded systems. I hardly used to get any time for nearly 4 months for my personal life. But what kept me going was the support of my team leader who himself is so dedicated to his work that it really motivated me to exceed his expectations. Another thing that created a lot of problem was my obliging nature. If a team member asks for support in there activities I could not say no. Things got really difficult for me when my mentor left and there was no one to help me or guide me through. That was one time when I found it really difficult to keep up my spirit but only my persisting nature , my penchant for hard work and a bitter dislike for failures kept me going.


At the time of knowledge transfer from Sudheer I constantly tried to imbibe his expertise and skills on CTC++. I used to sit at his desk and handle things on my own while he used to guide me through only when needed. I had to go through the entire documentation beforehand to get inline with the flow of information. I spent the following days absorbing as much information about USB drivers and Symbian Operating system as my brain would permit. I asked my team leader to arrange separate presentations for different aspects of USB Drivers so that I can get an insight on the structural organization of the driver and how it was being written. I used to have difficulty saying 'no' to people , but since CTC++ was a time consuming activity and I was approaching the deadlines I learnt to better set priorities and sometimes had to say no. Whenever I used to feel the burden of pressure I used to remind myself that I was learning so many new things in such a short time and was gaining an expertise with every passing day and people had actually started to ask for my help in their activities.


When I started working on CTC++ activity , the decisional coverage was 55% and functional coverage was 72% with an effort of two years whereas the targets set by Nokia were 80% for decisional coverage and 95% for functional coverage. Last week I got a mail from Line manager appreciating the constant efforts I have put in last 6 months to overshoot the targets well before the delivery deadline in March. I have got an outstanding rating for this activity. This certainly is one of the most fulfilling experiences of my professional life.

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