Divided Loyalties

Sorry for a title that sounds like a Mills & Boon novel, but I could think of no better phrase for a very common situation that occurs in outsourcee companies. I'm talking in detail about one of the factors that prevent employees from "giving their 100%", as I mentioned in an earlier article.

While talking to a colleague today, we got onto the topic of promotions. This was his opinion: "It doesnt matter if the client sues u, if ur boss is happy, ur on ur way." Which is kinda wierd, because if you are writing software, and the person for whom you're writing it doesnt like it, you ought to be in a very bad position. But that isnt, often, the case in an outsourcee company.

Very few companies do proper "360 degree appraisals". By which I mean, appraisals in which the client, the person who is paying for a project, gets to give his opinion on a person who's working on that project. Feedback from the client, if any, comes in the form of mails sent to the team lead, or his manager. Those mails, of course, come only in extraordinary circumstances: either the guy is doing really, really badly, or extremely well. How to interpret that feedback, too, is up to the team lead.

This means that the person who decides a programmers future, his promotions, his pay, is not the person who is most qualified to judge his work : the client. Granted, there may be any number of circumstances where a person does good work, but it isnt visible to the client. But that doesnt make anyone else *more* capable of judging our programmer. So our hero has to make sure he doesnt get into his team lead's bad books, if he wants to get ahead. I've personally seen situations where people did amazing technical work, which was appreciated by the client, too, but because they'd annoyed their team lead for some reason, they were given bad ratings in their appraisals.

I know exactly what everyone's thinking right now: Sucking up to your boss happens in all companies, not just in outsourcee ones. True, it does happen. But look at how rarely, in normal companies, a programmer interacts with a client. The people who interact with clients, Sales types or site engineers, are defined by the work they do. They arent the people who write the code. Come appraisal time, they are judged only by how well they handled the clients. Programmers are judged by how well they coded as per their bosses' instructions. But in outsourcee companies, programmers are judged by how well they interacted with their boss, when the meat of their work came from a different person, the client, and was only superficially handled by their boss.

Also remember that we're talking of programming, where the output of a whole day's work could be 5 lines of amazing code. It could solve all the client's problems, but your team lead, who hasnt spent as much time on the problem as you and the client have, cant see the complexity of the problem.

In short: Make sure your boss is happy with your work. Make sure he knows why you came in late, or why you couldn't deliver on time. It doesnt much matter if your client isnt convinced. Its your boss who is going to be promoting you, make sure you explain everything to him. You have to make sure he knows what you've achieved. Code doesnt speak for itself.