The enterprise software engineer me (or application technologies specialist as they call it here), or simply put as a developer, is working at his almost entirely different cubicle compared with what he had as a SAP Basis administrator. As of now, the obvious spot between the two IT job is that I am not YET bound by a SLA or service level agreement.

Previously, if I commit a mistake because of a single shell command (or even with only three digit difference like what happened to a transport to a different production server client by a former colleague) and the business productivity of the client suffers beyond the allowed period, then we, the company, would be penalized and should pay thousands of dollars to the customer. So it is then very important to keep off that dangerous time and be always reminded of the SLA concept. Others can understand now that it is not fun to be an incident manager even for eight hours because there are critical issues that are needed to be resolved by an hour or worse even less. That’s pressure without mentioning the pain of being slated on a night shift.

Meanwhile, on this whole new world I’m living now, deadlines are still drawn on developing projects. Although as of now, I haven’t received major assignments on my desk. My colleagues cheered me on the timing of my arrival – today’s when everything seems to be fine and everyone seems to be fine too. Lie low, low, low, low. They are actually missing their overnights … with Pay. Take note of the emphasis on P = Pesos, dude! A single line in the source code which I played earlier caused me half of my day to debug, to tweak and to pay attention on the System.out.println(“Here!”); and System.out.println(“Argh!!! Why?!); outputs on the screen. If such case and not out of sh*t or carelessness, then if my next project required me to do work beyond the normal hours because of its complexity, it is quite ok because I’ll be paid. SLA or the deadline is still present and working like a convenience store, Gising 24 Oras, degrades the quality of service. But on the lighter side, you get some benefits out of it, some bucks out of it.

I don’t know how to wrap up this post. It will end this way.

P.S. I’m still SAP Basis Administrator with 20% of my FTE. That would be another story to tell.