There is no such role called "Developer"

Today is a busy day for me, but this thought came and I did not want to let it pass, so I snapped a few mins and am writing this piece very quickly, let me make my views very short and clear,

In India  (probably in other places around the world as well), there is no such person who can just be called a developer, you could, but then I would not.

They deserve to be clearly categorised and I cannot emphasise more on the importance of this branching.

There are in my view

1. Designers - These guys are creative and are good at graceful curves, colour sense, aesthetics, sense of spacing etc.
2. Web Designers - These guys are good at HTML and CSS ... Period, ask them to do Java Script and they will look at you as though you have asked a Rooster to lay eggs.
3. Front end developers - These guys are passionate about good user interface but know relatively less of HTML or CSS, they are more inclined towards JavaScript and delivering good looking/working UI but fear that that people may call them web designers (that could be seen as a bad word by most of the so called developers unfortunately), also this breed is rare to find.
4. Back end developers AKA Server side developers- available in 1000's, throw a stone and it will land on one most likely.

Its very rare that you see people overlapping these categories (Probability of finding = firefox crashing or IE showing rounded corners properly) and even rare to find someone overlapping all the categories (Probability = Microsoft becoming a fully open source company).

Its important for businesses to be sensitive to this fact and respect the skills that people have to offer. One should not pot all people into one group and expect them to deliver quality in all fronts, its sometimes almost like expecting a gardener to do a haircut just because he is familiar using a pair of scissors, he can cut your hair, but there is no guarantee for your head :D (wah wah wah).

Recruiting for start up's in todays India

Recruitment

I have been a part of a start up firm for the last few years ... I guess it is no longer a start up and is probably a small business. I was the second person to join my company, we had a challenge to build a healthy business. Obviously one of the key parts to building a business was recruitment.

In this post I want to share my journey so far on recruitment, some of my thoughts and experiences in the area of recruitment in India and based on these experiences I want to try to cull out a cunning strategy [Which I hope can be sold to someone for a million dollars :) ]!

The Story

The first few months were actually pretty cool, the time was 2007 ... the season was summer (Read as HOT and SWEATY), people were many to find, I remember the first time we conducted interviews to recruit some sharp java cookies, we used an agency who scheduled about 15 candidates to come and meet us, we were looking forward to getting some great guys and were very motivated, it was the first time I was going to interview some techies and I had to use a lot of common sense to figure out if the chap was up to the mark or not.

My boss and me rented a friends office and decided that we will play the 3 step strategy ... that is, we would conduct a series of tests that involved Java 1.5 and Database concepts and the guys who would score over 50% would be initially interviewed by me in the front room and then by my boss inside the cool big room ... The strategy was wickedly planned and we arrived with our laptops hoping to find our technical gems.

Wake Up Call - Timeliness and Skills People have are not everything

The first shock came in the form of guys arriving much later than us, and the next shock came in the form of the test results where we found that none of them actually cleared the bench mark we expected and as a result we lowered the bench mark ... we did this since Java EE5 was fairly new then and a lot of guys then did not know much about this in the market, this was a way by which we were hoping to attract some talent (hoping that the guys would think ... WOW, EE5, I ain't able to answer any of these Q's, these guys must be wizards in technology, would be fun to work here and learn ...), on completion of the test we sort of narrowed down to a bunch of guys and I did the first level of interviews hoping to rank them in the areas of Communication skills, Ability and interest to learn, Attitude and a few other things.

I filtered a few guys whom I then sent to my boss who did further interviews that were more technical in nature compared to mine, together we finally chose a few guys whom we thought we should settle with.

Looking back today, it was these lot of guys who worked for our business the longest, many more came after them and left earlier. A few of them learned a lot and delivered and a few did just what they knew. There is a good reason for that.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoooop ..... Year: 2010, Situ & Reality Check: Not everyone wants cutting edge technology and interesting work - most people today in India want more and more money and peace-of-mind* (*=Read: less work)

As time went on we had more business and this process of recruitment continued. We got more experienced and technical people who helped us identify more talent to grow the business to some extent.

One thing that could not go unnoticed over the years was the kind of people we were finding, as a business we have very strong values and beliefs, we did not want people who wanted to be in corporates or people who wanted just money and nothing else ... we look for people who want to learn and be a part of a growing business. It turns out that in today's India, these expectations are not easy to fulfill.

People were not willing to compromise on Salaries and were not willing to learn new technologies (some saw it as a threat to their careers!), we offered them work that involved using cutting edge technologies and developing applications (products to be precise) from scratch and most people thought that it was a ridiculous thing to try doing (tells why India has as few software products, doesn't it?).

One incident that a colleague narrated to me involved him speaking to his ex-colleague requesting him to join us, to which he heard something like this
"Oh, you guys are a small company, I ll have to work a lot if I join you, I ve got 2 offers one from Company "C" for 7 Lakhs and one from "T" for 6 Lakhs, I am planning to take up the offer from Company "T" since company "C" demands too much work from their staff and "T" is more like a government job where I dont have to work much.

It explained to me what a mess the majority of software industry is in India today, most people are in it not for the passion of technology and doing interesting stuff but are there for the money it offers. The big wig service companies just make clever use of these people to bill and fill rather than groom talent.

Reaching out to the niche lot ...

Having said those words, there are a few sharp brains out there who care for technology and are in software for the passion rather than just money. The challenge is on how we reach this lot.

Obviously job portals are tough to use and get value out of, they have vast databases and also vast amounts of junk making it hard to find the right people. Some of the tools that I believe may work are as follows

Linked In - Head hunting profiles that show specific interest in new technologies.

Bloggers - Finding profiles who have a decent blog, again, we dont want to end up with someone who has a blog for the sake of having a blog, someone who expresses their views is always better than someone who just copies and pastes code on blogs.

Common connections - getting referrals is the best bet you have to ensure that a candidate stands in your office on the date of joining, nothing else can guarantee that. I have seen senior architects promising to join and not turn up on the date of joining, some turn up and complain that the floor was slippery / no separate room was provided for them and go AWOL.

I think I ll stop with that for now ... else it will become a book.

Sacrifice of the Silent lambs

I'd like to start with a small story ...

Tommy was a hard working chap, he worked very hard and tried to do what he was good at as proper as possible and all his intentions were always good.

Now Sunny joined his company and was placed to work with Tommy, Sunny was a different character all together.

Sunny was the sorts who did not like doing much work and mostly specialised in getting others to do his job and never added much value, Sunny grew to his position by job hopping and the boss who hired Sunny got terribly mislead about his skills since Sunny was a good talker.

As a result of the association between Sunny and Tommy, Tommy felt very pressurised, he ended up doing all the work including the stuff that Sunny had to do, due to the situation, the output being produced by Tommy deteriorated, now the boss was pissed with Tommy and kept giving him a piece of his mind.

Poor Tommy got more and more frustrated and left the job, with Tommy gone, the boss got Jonny, who went through the same phase of Timmy and called it quits one fine day.

Then came Ben, Ben was a tough nut to crack and gave Sunny and the boss a tough time, Ben was moved out of the team and asked to do some other work.

Ben was replaced with Joy whose fate was nothing but Sorrow.

End of story

Come to think of it now ... in the course of my career so far, I have been seeing this pattern happening and thought that I must write about it.

I call this pattern the "Sacrifice of the Silent lambs" ...

The ultimate solution is simple ...
"Whack Sunny" if its allowed.

What the other guys should have done in my view ... Leaving the boss apart ...

Guys like Tommy must give the boss a jolt of reality to whack guys like Sunny. Otherwise the boss is living in a dream with false information. With all good intentions the boss is doing nothing but bad.

Guys like Tommy must speak up and stand up for themselves rather than become victims.

Guys like Ben must not give up easily and make it clear to the boss about the real problem and help him help others.

Work Ethics & Productivity

I believe that every hard working person in this world in their own mind believes that they are striving to be the best in whatever they are attempting to do. (How others see it is different, and yes, there are a few who do not care to think or know that they do not want to do anything better than what they are doing).

In this attempt to achieve self perfection, I believe that fundamental work ethics and being true to self play a significant role. These qualities I find lacking in a number of people I see today in India, I wish that this was just my ill luck and not a general happening. Any person assigned with the daunting task of managing these kind of people to deliver anything of quality will empathise with what I say.

Let me ponder around "Why?" this is the case today.

Consider the example of this person who has a no of things to do at work, his boss has assigned some tasks to him and he is well aware of what he needs to do. Mr X (I ll name him that for now) who is well known for his excellent technical skills and sharp thinking (has an established name in the business because of the lack of any competition for all possible reasons) comes in late into office ... say by around 11am and logs on to chat / personal email / social networking sites / live cricket matches (thanks 2 cric info and rediff), talks to his neighbours about the building that collapsed yesterday on the highway for about half an hour not just wasting his time but valuable time of others, continues the discussion on a cup of tea at the local tea shop.

As of now, over 40% of his time is gone down the drain for the day and he is left with the reminder of the day to deliver what is needed, now Mr X feels stressed and pressurized, it is 6pm, the wife is probably calling him about dinner and he has a lot left to do and starts to think that this organisation is ruining my life! My work life balance is getting affected! and all possible phrases. This is not a very uncommon situation if you are not aware and not afraid to confront truth.

It takes guts to question oneslf about how properly they are planning their own time?, to question how productive they are when on their own? Would they do what they are doing if they were the ones paying salaries from their pockets?. Some may say that its the level of maturity, but I disagree, it takes common sense and nothing more than that.

The ones who get on with their work by spending a good 80% of their time in Office doing what they are meant to generally succeed, the rest of them job hop to climb up the ladder.

And these are a few thoughts that I have had on my mind when it comes to productivity, more thoughts later.

A very interesitng piece I found on India Today.

 


Source: India Today, March 2010

Thats what I call Great Design!!! Kudos Gmail

I quiet like this video and would like to know others thoughts on it...