Start-up Vs MNC

How some educational institutions kill innovation in India

Recently, I have had the pleasure (or should I say nightmare) of meeting some young minds who are going through the grind of studying Engineering across India. On speaking to these people, I realized that there was one thing common between them that swept me off my feet.

They all came to me for a common purpose, "assistance for college project". They all walked up to be and told me boldly to my face that they had bought off projects from other people or other institutions. While telling me this, they had no shame or regret and told me as though they were taking a walk in a park with a straight face.

This left me wondering if it was me who did not understand what they were telling or it was a common and acceptable felony (like littering in public places).  I then went and spoke to some of my friends who more senior and had the pleasure (or pressure) of having to study Engineering / MCA (Masters in computer applications) courses. They explained to me that it was a very normal thing for students to outsource project work and several colleges encourage students to outsource work rather than experiment on their own.

I also found out that some of the most common projects that are done are in the field of HRM, Security, Healthcare. Obviously when you ask questions about these projects, they have no clue about it and are happy to admin that they plagiarized the work (it is highly unlikely they know the word  Plagiarism though).

It also dawned on me that when students go to their lecturers and tell them about an original idea, they are strongly discouraged (probably because of the fear that the guide is incapable of understanding the work that will be done). I also had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing several people who are struggling to get into IT companies who work as lecturers in colleges right after finishing their studies.

Putting all of the above together, I can reasonably conclude that many and probably most (not ALL) engineering colleges across India are run as businesses (without morals) and not as educational institutions. This also probably answers to some extent the question "Why India does not produce as many innovations as the west in-spite of having one of the largest number of educational institutions?".

Some tips for doing good graphic / web designer CV's

• Give a link to your website, if you don't have one, at least create a free blog to highlight some of your design skills (wordpress / tumblr / blogger etc).
• Never give links that do not work - last thing you want to do is provide a URL that gives a 404 error.
• Presentation of your CV is a direct reflection of your presentation skills. Try using creative tools like Prezi / tag clouds etc.
• DO NOT say you know things that you have never worked on or have half baked knowledge of.
• Try to blow the readers mind, if not at least don't get them annoyed.
• Ensure that the CV is written using proper English.

All other common CV techniques apply in addition to the above.

Good infrastructure is a basis for good output

Businesses expect high levels of productivity from its resources. One of the most essential things that affects the productivity of developers that many businesses ignore is the base infrastructure.

Most developers in India are given 1 or 2 GB RAM machines with a slow preprocessor, low network bandwidth and are expected to turn around things in a matter of seconds. While this is unfair, the reason why this happens often is because of abuse of infrastructure when it is provided.

The solution is a fine balance between giving the freedom in the form of bandwidth and infrastructure and keeping a tab on how it is used. Getting this balance right is important and good CIO's often figure it out.

Google and Me

I was recently checking out my Google settings dashboard and suddenly the penny dropped. I realised how much Google has influenced my life, here is a summary that nicely quantifies it.

AdSense - 1 product Account

Alerts - 2 active alerts

Analytics - 2 Analytics accounts 2 website profiles

Blogger - 4 blogs

Buzz - Followers 36, Following 48, Posts 67 public 11 private

Contacts - 900 entries

Docs - 26 documents

FeedBurner - 1 feed

Friend Connect - Sites I've joined 5, Sites I administer 4

Gmail - 3000 conversations

Groups - 9 memberships

Health - 2 profiles

iGoogle - Gadgets installed 77 gadgets, 6 tabs, 5 themes

Maps - Starred 1 item

Orkut - Scrapbook contains 729 items

Picasa Web Albums - Albums 95 total, Photos 5352, Fans 11 people, 132 comments

Reader - Subscriptions 56 total

Sites - Owned by me: 2 sites

Social Circle and Content - 2533 connections

Talk - 225 contacts

Webmaster Tools - Sites 3 

Desktop tools - Google Chrome / Picassa / Google Desktop / 

It also shows the tools that I use more vs the tools I use less. Anyway, that's how dependent I am on Google, check out how dependent you are by clicking here and entering your Google credentials.

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.