Quote:
Originally Posted by lostinlife365
Would like to find out more about the job nature of the above from those who have worked in this position/role in NCS before. I believe this is primarily a software development role.
Some specific questions:
- 1.Location: are they stationed at customer's remote offices/sites, or they are primarily at NCS Hub?
- 2.Weekday Overtime: can expect how often and how late can it get?
- 3.Weekend Work: do they have to work on weekends in office, client site or at home?
- 4.After-office hour maintenance: do they have to do system backup, or software updates / deployments after 6pm on weekdays or weekends? Or is there a system/deployment engineer or system administrator for that?
- 5.Time-off: if they are involved in after-office hour backups/deployments at night (7pm-10pm) or early morning (1am-4am), are they required to report back for work at 8:30am until 6pm (assuming no OT) the following day?
- 6.Career progression: are application consultants pressured to take on team lead or project management role? Can they choose to stay on technical route and be some solution architect role in their 40s and 50s?
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1. Depending on projects, you can be either in one of the following :
a. Base in Hub
b. Base in client side
c. Base in Hub but travel to client side for meeting/deployment/testing (Since access to UAT and above environment is restricted to only at client side hence cannot do in hub or home)
Option B and C are more common.
2. For development project, definitely will have OT, latest should be 2-3am. But expect to work overnight during production deployment of brand new system aka first launch.
Maintenance project usually can end work on time but when there is big CR, you are expected to work OT but not as late as development project maybe 10-11pm
3. Weekend work is highly dependent on project unless project is on fire they won't call you back on weekends.
If you on 24/7 support then if system got critical bug then you would get called back to office on weekend to fix the bug
4. System backup and software patching is done by infra team.
Within the team there might be a deployment team or just every take turns to deploy. As for deployment, it is totally dependent on the system and customer. Some are ok with deployment during working hours, some die die can only deploy after working hours.
5. Usually if you work until until 1am, you can report to work slightly later at around 10am but depend on your project manager. 10pm is not considered late and you are expected to report to office during normal time next day hehe.
Usually if weekend work, you get off in lieu of abt 3 days work for 1 day off in lieu. Then again depend on how good your project manager is.
6. Application consultant main work is development and coding. Unless the team is short on manpower, you won't get to do higher level work(Senior Application consultant work which is requirement gathering/Business analyst stuff). They won't ask you to do team lead/PM work as you are not experienced to handle them
After application consultant is senior application consultant... After senior application consultant you can choose to go on project mgmt path or architect path. (But usually fresh grad dun stay so long till this stage ^_^. Usually is move out after 2-4 yrs then come back if they want to as the pay you get by jumping out and back in is much higher than the pay you climb the ladder in
ncs)
All of the above is subjected to which project you get assigned to. Different project can have very different culture and progression aka like a different company. If you get a sucky project, you only have 2 option which is to quit or request for change of project which is hard.
Getting a good project in
NCS is equivalent to joining a good company. Getting a bad project is equivalent to joining a shitty company.
So if you are given a choice of project, please decide wisely before agreeing to go. If you are given no choice then too bad suck thumb.