In my old company, we developed, delivered, implemented and supported a high value payment system with onramp to Fedwire for a Top 20 bank in USA. The system handled interbank liquidity payment. Any scheme cutoff misses raised questions about the liquidity – and ergo solvency – of the bank, so the system needed to have near 100% uptime. It was so critical that, in the case of any outage, beyond 10 minutes, the escalation matrix involved the head of my SBU and the CEO of the bank. Beyond 20 minutes, Fed Governor got involved.
Our team worked 10-16 hours during the development and production support phases of this project. When we tried to log time on the customer’s timesheet system, we found that the system did not allow us to log more than 8 hours. We escalated this to the SBU head of the bank. We were told to suck it up. In other words, the bank refused to officially acknowledge our extra hours. I proposed to my management to pushback. I was told to chill.
Then, when the bank delayed our payments for no fault of ours, I once proposed to my management to pushback. I was once again told to chill.
A year later, a competitor swooped in and quoted $22/hour. The customer told us that our cost worked out to $36/h – they worked this out by dividing the total payments they’d made to us by the number of resources @ 8h/day. I protested that we’d actually worked 12h/day on an average, so our cost was 36*8/12=$24/h only. They refused to agree.
This time, I proposed even more strongly to my management to pushback, saying, if we don’t do it, the competitor will replace us. I thought my bosses would agree. But, no, once again they told me to chill. When I pushed back saying hundreds of our resources will come on the bench, they told me that was not my department.
This story has two morals:
- Indian mindset is conciliatory, not confrontationalist.
- I should stick to my lane.