The person who comes to the client location (75% US, 24.23% UK, 0.77% other countries :)) would be told that it is a loooooooooooooong term assignment and he/she comes with the dream of spending a dream vacation at Hawaii or the Alps on one side and carrying a huge sack of US $ or Euros when coming back to India, on the other. But one aspect missed by everyone is the lifestyle out there at the client location.
People might call you at 3 AM in the morning and leave you awake for 3 hours just because some dumb scheduling support person ran the wrong job at the wrong time. The next day (or rather later the same day) your client manager would schedule a meeting at 9 AM to make sure you are in the office by that time to explain what happened early in the morning. On long weekends when clients take a day off before and after the weekend (additionally) to make it a week's vacation, our hero would be sitting all alone in the office to make sure everything is 'up and running'. If he/she manages to sneak a vacation to some good place, a call would immediately follow! Isn't it romantic to sit in a cabin in Smokey mountains and ensure that your application recovered from a failure caused by an untimely shutdown of the database? Not to mention the hours spent to correct the issues created by bugs in the applications that provide data to your application! Everything ran fine but phew on the wrong data!
If this is one portion of it, there is another portion that is shared by all folks who stay out of the country - right from food until your housekeeping you got none to help you out and you need to be your own boss and servant. Thanks to the hundreds of desis out there in the US, right from a temple till cumin seeds you could get almost everything you need in your locality. But the irony is that people hardly get the mood, the material and the time simultaneously to prepare something good and hence most of the time the Indian restaurants and oat meals come to the rescue!
In this largely artificial and happiness free life, the only or rather the couple of advantages are a comparatively better pay and proud parents in India and since both of these are quite important factors, it wouldn't be uncommon to see more and more Indians volunteering to become scape goats!
3 comments:
The first part of the 3rd paragraph explains how my life was at UK. Nearly 4 days in a week I got an on-call call as I was supporting a mission-critical application. Not only in US, even in UK we get everything (including Vibudhi for that matter). Some how, I managed to enjoy my stay because of the good fellas I had there. Of course, not all the support persons going to Onsite with dreams of enjoying are as gifted as me...
But then when one is sent onsite don't you expect these kinda things to crop.Afterall we face the same even when we are off-shore.Late night calls,spoilt weekends just because some bloke in the US or UK wants us to help him out with his stuff as techincally his/her weekend would have never started then.
Part & parcel of the whole package.Kuch paane ke liye zaroor kuch khona padega.
Actually no! None expects it to be this bad! I've been both offshore and onsite. But the level of pressure here is pretty high and the extent to which you are disturbed is much greater in the client location. As I said that's why it's paid higher but still the person who undergoes all that is also human!
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