Tag Archives: ETL

Jayashree – Selling Out

28 Sunday Feb 2010

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Jayashree watched Shankar’s face as he stared into his tea cup.  “I really thought Raj would be here by now.  Just tell me the deal Shankar.  Raj probably had something come up at work.”

Shankar looked at her directly for the first time since he met her at the Internet Café.  “Well, that’s a nice segue into our investors’ feedback.  They expect you to both give notice right away.  You said you were cool with that, right?

“Depends.  How am I going to pay the rent?”

“As soon as you quit, you go on salary.  They’ll match your current rate with a 20% raise.  They would like to see your last 2 pay checks as artifacts.”

“No problem, Shankar.  What about our programmers?”  Jayashree was in an intense mood although the thought of a raise nearly distracted her.

Shankar looked out the window as he said, “You sure you don’t want to wait for Raj?”

“I’m sure.”

Shankar faced Jayashree again and looked at her for a few moments before finally saying, “Like I expected, they want to hire the programmers themselves.”  Shankar knew she expected this too but waited for a response.  Anything to delay the coming storm.  No response from Jayashree, just big round, unblinking, dark brown eyes.  “The programmers will all be skilled in Ruby.”  Did she blink?  She might have.  “They are being hired to expand our data feeds.  These guys said support features can wait until we need support.  They want to go to market with as wide a scope as possible.”  Shankar lost his train of thought as he saw Raj walking up through the window enabling Jayashree to respond.

“Holy cow Shankar!  You total foot wipe!”  Jayashree stopped as she saw Raj walk in and simultaneously realized the entire café heard her outburst.

Upon entering Raj noticed everyone in the café looking at Jayashree and Shankar, and was unsure whether to talk to them or the crowd.  He nodded toward his partners in a hushed voice, “Hey guys.”  They just stared at him quietly as he took his seat.

Jayashree maintained the hushed voice and pointed to Shankar with her left hand as she exclaimed to Raj, “Our partner just hired ruby programmers to develop ETL for new data feeds.”  She paused to let that sink in for Raj.

Raj stared at Shankar for half a minute before asking him, “Clearly, you lost the argument for developing a robust product, but did you not know that our ETL is in Python?  It’s just the web services and Jayashree’s stuff that’s written in Ruby.  This is a train wreck.  What else should we know Shankar?”

“Our ownership will now be diluted to half with these guys.  So Jayashree, you go from 35% to 25% and we each go from 17.5% to 12.5%.”

Jayashree broke the hush and shattered all sense of decorum as she shrieked, “WTF!  No deal Shankar!  No deal!  Are you hearing me?”

Shankar remained his composure and his hushed voice as he responded, “They said if you had issues with that, they could double your rate.”

Jayashree – Balls Out

26 Friday Feb 2010

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Jayashree and Raj sipped tea in the Internet Café waiting for Shankar to meet them.  “I see him.”  Raj had been scanning the sidewalk.  “Remember Jayashree, we need to be clear with Shankar on our priorities.  He can talk tech, but he doesn’t have the experience to understand what’s important.”

“Gotcha Raj.”  Jayashree shifted the chairs to better seat the 3 of them.

Shankar saw them through the window and nodded his head.  Upon walking inside he greeted them individually.  “Jayashree, good morning.”  He shook her hand as they weren’t very close yet.  He sat down before acknowledging Raj as they were childhood friends.  “Raj, you look tired man.  Been moonlighting?”

“Yeah, on this little project.  Here, we printed out our funding priorities for you.  It’s paramount that you communicate this clearly to our investors.  Feel free to show it to them.”  Raj handed Shankar a sheet of paper with 5 bullets on it.

Shankar was about to ask for soft copy when Jayashree took over the conversation.  “Let me summarize for you what we need with this next round of funding Shankar.  We can’t go prod with the present state of our code.  I know it passed all our test cases, but you have to trust me when I tell you that in prod, stuff breaks.  We need audit logs.  Especially on the ETL processes.  Then we need error checking on all our web services queries.  If a query fails, we need to control what the user sees.  We have to start on these things now because we won’t have the cycles to respond to all the potential issues after we go live.  But this isn’t complex stuff either, we can recruit junior programmers.  You think your investors are going to be good with us hiring?”  Jayashree stopped talking and took another sip of tea waiting for Shankar to respond.

“Absolutely.  They understood this second round of funding would be to staff up.  A couple of things you should expect though.  They are probably going to want to recruit these programmers themselves.  They have other businesses they want to support; so I’ll be surprised if they let us hire anyone directly.  Next, I expect they will want to begin funding you both fulltime.  You need to consider dropping your safety nets and committing balls-out to this.  Are you ready for that?”

Jayashree and Raj responded in unison.  “We’ve been ready.  Don’t mess this up.”