Being a Wreck

I am a little sad today. I got mildly scolded by my otherwise sweet team lead. I had screwed up the build, thus blocking check-ins by other developers. This is an absolutely unpardonable offence for someone with my experience. Yet strangely, I do not feel remorse appropriately.

I was being unproductive for quite some time now. Now, I have also started messing up. Bigtime. I am slipping. And that too fast.

Who is this person whom I see in the mirror? Is it really me? The bright and technically gifted girl who used to the centre of attention of every manager? The one everyone looked up to fix their coding issues?

When did I become this way?

I believe, demotivation crept in after a few months in GCP. I have observed that the sweet-tempered and mild mannered managers are effectually useless. GCP had a similar type of manager. He promised me the moon (and more) when I tried to leave the organization. I kept up my hopes and my motivation around 6 months further. After Puja 2008, I gave up hope completely and I was simply listless after Dec 2008. All I did in office were the cursory status updates and the daily telecons with the client. The lions share of the office time was spent in gossiping and surfing the internet. I actually read the entire collection of Byomkesh Bakshi within a fortnight - all of it sitting in office!

I was able to pull myself up a little around March - April 2009 because an internal startup project required a lot of effort. Also because I could see the long desired onsite opportunity around the corner.

When I joined the current project, I was quite enthusiastic in the beginning. Within a couple of days, I had figured out how things worked. There was no Knowledge Sharing whatsover, the team members all spoke Hebrew at the daily scrums, the code base was enormous and unintuitive and I definitely did not fit in. After about two and a half months at offshore, I came onsite. I did small bug fixes here and there. I spoke to my team lead that I wanted to do more - achieve more. He listened to me patiently but quietly passed me by while delegating tasks. Incidentally, I became the only person in my team working on bugs. All others were involved in tasks. All my requests to be assigned to a task fell on deaf ears. How could they expect me to learn the nitty gritties without actually getting my hands dirty with the BusinessLogic and DataAccess code?

Again, the same vicious cycle started. I lost all interest. I started blogging in office hours. The rest of the time, I spent in browsing online shopping catalogues. I did not want to be in office.

And now this. I am a wreck. I sent out the wrong timesheet for Jan 2010 - THREE times in a row to the timesheet helpdesk. I need to pull myself up - get my acts together. I absolutely need a job change. And I really need to stay away from 'internet candy' when I am on the job.