11 minutes reading time
Inbox Ashish Tanwar : aktanwar@google.com Fri, Jan 7, 2022, 4:21 PM to India, me
Hi Team,
This may be my last allowed communication here, doing this because I really doubt the reality or rather applicability of those values and culture (LT, its called SRE, something we preach) in our team.
Now : I alleged harassment, discrimination, bias and all bad things after i was rated NI by enligtened and respected Rajesh Ramdas with firm endorsement from L/T . I appealed and lost.
I will leave the judgment to you...needy, delusional, whatever.....i am gone anyways.
Now I have you hooked, so I will make it absolutely worth your time.
First 3 months:
My CV is on my MOMA profile, it won't take a genius to notice that I should be in the D/N or AppMod team. I was ACE and PCA certified even before google interviewed me. Thats something which Mitesh and Rajesh, Rachit, Kapil have "conveniently" chose to ignore and plead the third amendment - "Management reserves the right to allocate based on priority of business..blah blah".
Anyways, I don't have either the equipment or work allocated to me, I used this time to learn about the culture ( proof - see my moma batch, and my annoying memegens). One thing became evident - we survive by logic and foresightedness.
Enter Rachit Mitesh and Arun Sajwan.
I am allocated BFSI - no rhyme or reason. I am starving for work, put under immense pressure by Rachit and Arun Sajwan, combined with Mitesh and Kapil. eg - cold calling, pursuing leads via partners, being humiliated for not being good at it. These "leaders" force me to use stolen artifacts from oracle to create their elusive "account plan". I resist, and get crucified for it. Arun is OOO to never return. I am constantly humiliated by Rachit who is openly targeting me now. Focused on learning about BSI, I created a solution based on my 3 months ``expertise" on BFSI, on boarding customers and seeking new opportunities.
Start of 2021 :
I ask Rachit to allocate me D/N. I wasn't given. I was given CPG and an opportunity to help every FSR who needed help. Rachit was shortly out of action, so I took this as a challenge to max out and put my skills to test. Here is the somewhat comprehensive list of accounts on which I have worked, Remember, even auto, iot accounts were denied to me. All i got was "maruti" as the "Biggest Opportunity"
Unacknowledged Impact in BFSI:
I even got a deal closed - Voice translation API for PNB bank. I even went to interview potential partners to realize the deal - wipro, infosys, tech m - finally selected and on-boarded by me - Saurabh D can attest.
I never got even a mention in the pipe I predominantly created and realized when Arun Sajwan was out of action. Ask Pranshu - If i did not go over and beyond to onboard him. All I ever got was 2 shadow sessions and a reminder in every team meeting that I am not good enough. I choose to focus on the skills I lacked - patience, communication and anxiety in big meetings.
Remember, this is the time when the team was falling sick, left and right. I am helping Vipul, Nimisha, Nitin, Diya, Kamal, Rohit and doing capacity planning with Himanshu, also trying to fill in for anyone that is feeling unwell. Except for 2 contentious meetings of probably 200+ senior personnel I communicated with, these meetings went well - something that I believe none of my FSRs can deny.
Contentious Meet 1 - Mr CIO (not sure) Manish Garg/Patanjali.
Rude person. Immensely lacks manners, logic or value. I was insulted initially by title, then by experience, by skill, by values and finally by "Indianness". That was the last straw.
Trivia/Shameless self boasting : Not many people can claim to have proven a crucial contribution to development of our country's newly launched nuclear powered sub. Yes I am now proud that my code runs there....and it is still being used, reused and appreciated. I can get you un-official testaments from a currently serving Col. and Cdr and their lead engineer.
Snide comment : I know embedded, micro-controller, electronics, mobile apps, now cloud. When I say know - I have and can build them from scratch - from a chip supplier to programming or creating the toolchain, apps and finally selling it to end customers.
My end customers have been Cairn energy, then Home Minister, Trai Chief engineer, Heads of Police, BSF etc, Kiran Bedi mam, heads of state security to mobile manufactures like karbon, micromax etc.
I influenced the requirements by TRAI on mobile operators that now have made it mandatory for them to provide at least 30 mtr of geolocation accuracy for tracking. Influenced and made them aware that telecom providers are not providing "real time" tracking as they are hiding the X interface - GSM ref.
Anyways - i ended up telling the customer - "Sir, I will send you the link to the entire portfolio, Please do call me if you need us. I have more intelligent customers who actually need me". I know....this was after an hours of humiliation being labeled a data chor (Google and I were betraying the country for working there).
10 seconds of silence. He could not believe a "sales" ka sirf customer engineer can tell the factual truth to an "innocent" person. Then he starts selling patanjali to us - giving us requirements and all. I am really running late to an yum IOT opportunity - renew meters. I wanted to calm my nerves before that, so this time i am genuinely asking Dear Customer to let me go, he ends up giving us requirements for his immediate "VM/Physical server requirement" - GCPs value proposition. FSR and I sync up after call, HI5 and conclude that this was an amazing meeting.
All pumped up, we have a great opening meeting at Renew again. Good, hard week....this is Friday....finally a weekend when I can be proud of the week I had. 10 PM, unusual chat ping from FSR. She inquires whether we can talk.
Trivia : I am a father of one 5 year old human, 2 very loving yet annoying dogs and a pseudo father of 40 - 60 street dogs.
After 6 PM, my highly stressed wife had given me a notice - money is not enough, you are needed. There was proof to that - my son was not speaking Hindi even at 4 years. Corona time....we all struggle with this. I am barely giving time to anyone.
My mom passes - i am in Noida, she lives in our old permanent home at rohini, Delhi. I am guilty of not making enough time for her, and probably causing her death....i am still coping up with this guilt.
The reason I am telling you this is to simply imply that 7PM to 11Pm is an absolute must for me - I have to take over from my wife who is highly stressed being in the final leg of her Phd. She is doing well.
Anyways, Mr Patanjali Customer, probably after getting drunk at 10PM on Friday, gave a call to former FSR and apparently threatened to file a police complaint.
I was all for it - It was on web conf, and I thought the version is exaggerated, I tell the FSR to sleep it off, after i finally get done with my day which ends at 11 PM normally - this includes making food for my street dogs - being hated for it, and recently being attacked for it. I hope you saw the video. This is after my moms's demise on 28 April, coincidentally the week when Rachit joins back from vacation. He is trying to do his thing again - perpetrating general hate against me - my lack of patience, skills and after this meeting 1, even my character for taking a call late at night from a female FSR.
Made up Contentious meeting 2 : Dabur
Nimisha lead a disaster of a meeting. Nimisha, Ampy, Raghu are speakers in the meet, i was just a mute spectator.
The meeting goes horribly wrong, time management, content - everything. Nimisha is panicking and trying to convince me to put blame on Raghu, who is a noogler at this point. I refuse to intervene and tell her to think about it.
BTW, its the same account where I got CIO's approval for Stratozone assessment just a few days back. This is the only reason why we have an edge over competition, and why Accenture has really partnered with us in this account - a fact that LT conveniently forgets to consider.
She tells the management that I screwed the meeting up (I was not even allowed to speak in the meet - Raghu/Ampy can validate).
I am never asked to clarify or asked what went wrong. (L/T - Blamelessness and RCA is part of SRE)
This is the same time period when I am dealing or rather coping up with implications of my Mothers' death - the ugly material part of it. Summary - I ended up abandoning all my savings, investments, property to focus on work and move on.
Things are going well in other accounts - All the other FSRs seem happy.
18 June, when things were at their decisive time, I was attacked by 3 crazy but quite well built people with Iron rods for 15 mins.
I got my first entitlement of being a Googler - got the days off while I dealt with these all pending issues.
August 2021
In August, I joined back with a barely functioning hand, trying to handle the piled up work. Got exceptional support from Narendra, he created a few deals while I was gone.
I had lost 3 absolutely winnable dials - the FSRs don't call me out of respect or sheer self promotional reasons. There were many wins, I was never credited.
Meanwhile, Rachit is going and Rajesh joins, I request Kapil to give a true assessment of my progress to enlightened Rajesh Ramdas, but I am "hinted informally" that I am not meeting the OKRs.
I give a very detailed and logical lay of the land - progress, key developments and the general good feedback I was getting from customers, partners and even my peers. I am told to prepare 10 account plans as per OKRs, I inform him that these are "traditional enterprise accounts' ', their tech stack cannot be deduced by nmap or any other open source intelligence tools. I inform him about my participation in DevJam and the other bits where I have been helping, but he doesn't listen. I tell him about my experience in D/N and my love for gaming and IIOT - power sector etc.
Power accounts are taken away from me, the regional IIOT lead is a guy who doesn't even know "IT/OT". I am left with Nimisha who has been lying and claiming credit for all my work even till day.
Now:
I was given NI, and contested that, just lost that appeal. My accounts have been ignored - bKash, Beximco, ACI are all big accounts which need a higher level handshake - all of them have been ignored by my local leadership just to continue painting me as incompetent.
And that is my journey till day.
My customers seem to like me more than my management, and they are easier to work with too.
Dabur deal is on because I pivoted the deal. Here is the deck/proposal which finally put the deal on track. LT is going to continue sabotaging my deals in BD- Beximco, ACI and recently bKash.
I am not a likable person by any means, if you have seen me in meets - I give it all, and I believe thats what matters - being there for your colleagues and picking up the right priorities.
Yet i am labelled incompetent for simply refusing to "dance" as per standards set by luminaries like Rajesh/Rachit and Kapil.
Happy new year!...I am going to make sure that mine makes me grow and evolve.
All the best, dealing with all this - I am going to do what I do best - stand up to the bully no matter who and how big they are, and it may get worse....I am prepared for that.
Why it all happened, is something which is going to unravel in next few months.
Sincerely,
Ashish
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/team-communications-informal-mails-ashish-tanwar-vzunc