This evening we just sat and typed - Greg at his laptop, churning more documents for the bank (to get a 1,5 million dollar loan or some such outrage), and I at the other end of our big room, checking email, reading the vpm code and generally enjoying myself. Except I skipped the parastos of IV5pp, which happened the same evening, and missed my chance to see Bilja, who occasionally manages to schedule her visits home with these reunions, then goes back to Boston. Haven't seen her since 1984, I guess.
Greg's assesment of the team, in the email he sent to Zero
Last night, Gradivoj and I went out for dinner with 3 programmers from his current shop to discuss our situation with Gradivoj and whether we can work with them in the future. Here are the basic details:
10 years of experience in FoxPro DOS and an 'ungraduated' mathematician (left school for work in 3rd year of University). He is not only a programmer, but is one of the key account managers- he works with the client on site to do the needs assessment, etc., and then comes back to write code himself and to manage the rest of the programming team. Gradivoj says that he is very good at prioritizing -- determining what the customer really needs and what can be put off until later.
He was one of the best students at the local college and Gradivoj picked him to join the company. He also taught English in the village elementary school. He is a 'stubborn' type who will fight with a problem until it is solved. He is somewhat reluctant to ask for help, but Gradivoj has a good relationship with him and can manage him well. He writes some Visual Basic and is very good at FoxPro DOS. Gradivoj says he can take a ball and run with it on his own.
Joja is a newcomer (started 2 months ago). He was accepted into Gradivoj's company based upon an interview with Gradivoj. At his former employers, he wrote in Clipper, Progress, and UNIX. He is familiar with triggers, stored procedures, and other elements of SQL back ends. Gradivoj says that his Progress background will make it easy for him to move to MS-SQL 7. He picked up FoxPro DOS within a few weeks. He is now working with Gradivoj's code generators and will be writing applications from scratch in a few weeks.
All three very much want to work with us as programmers.
The current economic and societal problems in Yugoslavia are very severe. The average salary for a Yugoslavian is about 130$ per month. The programmers make about 200$ per month in their current positions.
Gradivoj has 40% of his company, his partner Vanji has 40%, and Brlja owns 20%. There is a commonality of goals and methods between Gradivoj and Brlja - but there is often disagreement with the third guy. After Gradivoj leaves, there is a likelihood of some re-structuring of the company to help resolve this situation - perhaps dividing into a software company and a hardware/networking company.
In any case, there is an existing amount of software maintenance business with existing customers which the programmers can continue to create income for themselves, plus new business, plus the new ISP arrangement Vanji has created with a national ISP (his company is the local support team under contract). [Joja and Pali need to spend a couple of hours per day on the ISP situation.]
Therefore, we discussed the possibility of trying to create additional employment for them. I was clear that we would need to get Gradivoj to successfully produce the beginnings of the evaluation module first, followed by a move to the US, followed by the development of a clear method of remote management, project documentation, etc., that could permit this arrangement to work. Everyone agreed this is acceptable.
As background, you need to understand that these are all highly educated people who are very despondent and unhappy about Yugoslavia's current situation in the world (it used to be a rich country and they were able to travel all over Europe as 'normal' people) as well as the impossibility of daily life here (just day to day survival takes a lot of work). Their current standard of living is dramatically reduced from 10 years ago (about a 90% decline) and everyone is against the Milosovic
regime- with no expectation that things will get better for at least 5-10 years. There is neither nationalism nor pride of country left -- almost everyone would leave to find a better life elsewhere if there were no U.N. sanctions and there were opportunities to do so.
Even if we were able to provide salaries somewhat better than their current salaries (about 200-300$/month) on top of what they may be able to continue to receive from the existing company, their standard of living would improve strongly. (As Gradivoj says, it would not make them comfortable nor able to buy a new TV, but it would reduce the fear that something unexpected could upset their applecart completely -- and maybe they could get the old TV fixed.)
More important, they would have something to believe in and some hope that there is a future beyond what the normal decline of the country will provide for them. They all WANT to work, do interesting things, make money, and have a life. As they put it, if we could just get 2 or 3 out of these 4, it would be a huge improvement.
My current thoughts are that we need to work with Gradivoj to prove that HE can work remotely, first. The Evaluation module is the perfect opportunity to do this -- if Gradivoj can create the code quickly and work with Ford to get it up and running in the next few weeks or so, that would be a VERY strong initial proof. Through this process, we can identify how best to manage this sort of project and discuss how we might do it with the three programmers who will remain in Yugoslavia.
Then, if we feel confident that this will work, we can give it a try -- it's really very little money to us, limiting the downside ... but the upside of having 3 qualified VFP programmers is tremendous. And Gradivoj has promised that he will spend all the time possible with them in the next month or so before he leaves Yugoslavia to bring them up to speed in VFP, OOP, etc.
Please think about this opportunity and feel free to email back and forth to Gradivoj with your questions, comments, etc. I don't KNOW this would work, but my gut feel is that it is something we should pursue -- in fact, the process of documenting Hossy so that remote programmers can do work for us may actually instill better organization and habits in us as an extra benefit!
******
My additions:
- Brlja is the only guy of the team who has gone into some depths with the NT server. We have one in the office (SBS) and it was mostly him who fixed all of the "this won't install" stuff. We've had lots of HW incompatibility issues and he was stubborn enough to solve them. I admit he knows more than me on that, and I was a system manager on a Vaha machine.
The other two guys have an university degree, from a local college which was profiled to produce professors of computer science for high schools. I've seen only a few good programmes come out of that school, I'm just lucky yo have grabbed two of those.
The numbers on the salaries (130$ vs 200$) are there just for proportion - they largely depend on the value of dinar. There's always a discrepancy between the official and black market rating. Greg got 1240 YUD for 100 USD, and would have got 1052 in the bank. The ratio may slide more away in weeks to come. It has gained about 2-3% in last two weeks. We've seen worse, though.
I've had other comments, but Greg interspersed them in the above text already, so this is all.
From - Sat Dec 05 20:24:54 1998
Next day, I took him to the airport. The fregata stalled somewhere halfway between Novi and the airport, as it was prone to do. We messed a bit with what we could see - luckily he had some tiny screwdriver somewhere - and I don't know whether we fixed it or it just needed some cooling off, but it started within five minutes and we were there in time.
I took this route over Novi because it's longer and faster - the other route would take us through downtown Belgrade around morning rush hour. Near Žabalj I explained what a kotarka is, and he duly took shots of that. Later in the day, I commented over all this with Burt:
It is certainly remarkable for your boss to come all the way to Yugoslavia to visit and work with his employee.
I still am impressed. He gave an impression that I may solve lots of their problems. They have only one old fox of my size (but far greater weight :), regarding experience and knowledge of computing in general, one old Pascal/Delphi guru, and the rest are probably freshmen from the Uni who didn't have any previous experience, so they are somewhat limited in capabilities. As he put it, "they've made progress to some level and stayed there".
He must be into travelling. I would be interested to hear his reactions to everythingHis other business (with his wife as partner) is a restaurant with catering, so he was interested in trying all the possible different food here. We ate ćevapčići (cylindric minced meatballs, grilled, sized 1.5' in length and 0.5' in diameter) in a kiosk on the market, smoked pork knuckles with sour cabbage as salad in the pivnica, tried the dark and light local beer, then burek (several layers of transparent-thin pastry stuffed with fresh cheese and baked in a pizza-sized pan in the oven, cut in quarters) with yogurt (our yogurt is a thick liquid, so we drink it), had pumpkin pie at my mother's - so he got some vertical section of our food.
In general, I'd better arrange that you hear it from him and see the photos he made here, but, in short, he had a general impression that we're mostly very educated (that's disputable, because he met my folks only), and obviously were a relatively rich country yesterday, which fell into a chaos this morning. Architecturally, he took lots of shots of the old buildings in the city center, but was mostly interested in a kotarka, which is actually about eight meters long, two meters wide, has walls up to shoulder height, and a wooden construction enclosed by railing, and a roof. In the lower part, they usually keep pigs, and the upper part is used for drying corn.
Had he been to a place like Yugoslavia before?
Greece was closest, and he's been to Berlin, Netherlands, France, probably other places too. No East Europe, except the Trabbies [i.e. trabants] he saw along the corridor road to Berlin. He remembered them, and had a chance to be driven in one. I intended to let him drive it, but as soon as we sat into it, the brakes started leaking, so I drove very carefully and didn't want to take the risk. He actually managed to open the door once - usually I had to get out every time. I'm opening my door from outside, also, through the window. Lately it just became impossible to do it from the inside.
I've had Germans and the Dutches in seventies, and it did feel the same at times. My parents actually reacted just like those years - I predicted that my father will draw some historical issues, Serbian kings and the stuff, and we couldn't avoid his forcing Greg to try at least three different drinks. He even pulled some bit of 33 year old šljivovica, leftover from my wedding. I didn't know he still had it.
...
I've seen lots of hunters by the road lately, walking with double-barrels and an occasional facon (feasant - spelling?). This comes after the rabbit season which ended couple of weeks ago. Hunters are well organized here, and we used to have lots of Italian hunting tourists before. They're returning, but very slowly.
20-XI-2013 - 16-VII-2026