India - Days 3-8

After the very busy and long day on Saturday, we took a relaxing Sunday morning and just stayed around the hotel. Late Sunday afternoon we flew from Delhi to Pune arriving in Pune late evening. We are staying at the Le Meridien hotel in Pune. It's a very nice, 5-star hotel offering every kind of service imaginable. They even stop by every night to pull back your bedcovers for you. I'm not used to being waited on to that degree.

Monday morning we headed to the office for the first time. John Deere's technology center is located in Magarpatta Cyber City on the edge of Pune. A few years ago a bunch of farmers got together and came up with this idea of developing their farmland into a Information Technology park and so started Magarpatta City. The city is circular and built around a big central park. The first ring around the park are large modern office towers (I think there are 12 in all - about 6 have been built. Outside of that ring is a second ring of office buildings. John Deere owns one of those second ring buildings. There is also a residential area, restaurants, and schools all within the walls of the city. The entire city is walled and gated to set it apart from the rest of Pune.



Arriving at the office, we met up with our teams for the first time. My India team consists of a project manager, two senior developers, and two "freshers". Freshers is their term for kids newly out of college still learning the ropes. The purpose of my visit is to develop a better working relationship with this team and to train them more on what we are trying to accomplish in our project. So, we meet every day for a few hours for training sessions, then work together the rest of the day on project tasks. Working hours are different than we're accustomed to. The workday generally begins around 10 am and ends around 6 or 7. We've actually been staying until 8 pm most nights so that we can be in some meetings with our teams in the U.S. (8 pm here is 9:30 am in Illinois).

On Tuesday my team took me out to a nice restaurant in Pune (I don't remember the name - I really don't remeber too many names of things here). It's a restaurant featuring food from the Bangalore region of India. We were there for nearly three hours and went through something like 6 courses of food. It was great, but certainly not the most productive workday I've ever had!

The rest of the week was pretty much the same. Get up early and work, eat breakfast, go to the office, meet with the team, have lunch, work with the team, work with the U.S team after they arrive, go to the hotel, have dinner, then work some more until late.