I have been told by several people lately that its getting almost impossible to comment on my blog. This is because at most times, I am getting enormous amount of comment spam which totally chokes my site. It has been happening ever since I upgraded my blogging software and removed my old 'nospam' check. So now, the nospam check is back. When you post a comment, please type 'nospam' in the No Spam box. Sorry for the inconvenience.
November 2005 Archives
I have made a post on Venturewoods comparing the boom in Silicon Valley with our own IT boom.
When its hot, he wants it cold,
When its cold, he wants it hot,
Man is strange, always wanting what is not
I got reminded of this quotation I had read somewhere many years back. First, I felt the heat on the weekend having to spend almost the entire weekend in office in the face of looming deadlines. Today, office heating was cranked up in preparation for winters. Unfortunately I had already come well prepared with my thick sweatshirt. So I spent the day feeling the heat again (albeit of a different kind). Today being my least favorite day of the week, I was in a whiny mood cribbing to myself about having had to work yet another weekend. It used to be my biggest grouse in Microsoft that we never were under much of a pressure at work (mainly because Longhorn was so far away from shipping and our group usually moved way faster than the groups we depended upon). Well, what can I say. You gotta be careful of what you ask for. Sometimes you actually get it ;-) No more complaining - get back to work!
A question has perplexed me for a long time. The big software companies of India all started as services companies. Today, Infosys, Wipro and TCS are all $1 billion plus companies with margins of 30% or more. So, needless so say, they have tons of cash. All these companies employ tens of thousands of employees and continue to hire by the hundereds every month. All these companies have deep domain knowledge in finance, telecom, insurance and several other sectors. They have developed solutions for thousands of clients. And yet, none of them have any major software products to their credit. Why? Considering the abundance of man power, money and knowledge at their disposal, diversifying into product development would appear to be a natural choice. And yet, none of these companies seem to doing any technical innovation.
This question has been bothering me for a while now and I have given it lot of thought because Tekriti also started off as a services company. I have been wondering if this lack of technical innovation has something to do with the extremely process oriented culture of these companies. The common wisdom of services business is that the organization should be process oriented and not people oriented. Basically, what that means is that the entire process, right from hiring and training employees to delivery of projects is so formally documented and engrained in the DNA of employees that it almost resembles manufacturing. No matter who runs the machine, the end product will look very similar. Obviously I am oversimplifying things but this is the key to scaling a services business. That is the only way you can add hundreds of employees every month and still maintain a level of quality. This is the way to make sure that project delivery is not dependent on certain key employees.
Contrast that with a products company. I have worked at only one previously (Microsoft) and based on my experience, Microsoft product groups are far less process oriented. And this is when Microsoft is actually said to be getting bogged down in process! Every product group, and even sub groups within a group have their own way of functioning. There are no company wide guidelines or templates on how specs should be created, how code should be written or how estimation should be done. Nobody has heard of CMM levels or ISO standards. There is a certain amount of individuality attached with whatever you work on. This is why we know of top developers like Raymond Chen or Larry Osterman by their names. That is why devs want to leave easter eggs in their code (but no longer can!).
So, I wonder if technical innovation can happen inspite of a process driven culture. It seems hard because innovation requires free and out of the box thinking. But if you are constrained within boundaries of rigid processes, it is difficult to deviate from them. It is an issue of profound importance for us at Tekriti. As our company grows and the projects grow in size and complexity, it is inevitable that we will have to introduce more formal process. At the same time, we certainly don't want to thwart free thinking and individuality of our team. This is our unique selling point and that is what sets us apart from the Infosys and TCS of India . This is what gives us the best chance to attract great talent Besides, even within our services business, we have been fortunate to have had lot of oppurtunity for doing innovative work. So we need to develop culture that respects process but is not at its mercy. Considering that between Ashish, Manish and myself, we have experience from both Microsoft and Infosys, I think we are well placed to walk that fine line!
I wanted to make this post a while back but just did not get the time. KBC, which, for the uninitiated, is the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, has of late started inviting celebrity guests to increase viewership. The celebs somehow always manage to do well on the show and in fact how much they make in the game seems to depend on their pecking order in the industry. For example, a super star pair like Kajol and Ajay Devgan would fare better than a TV starlet etc. Recently, tennis star Sania Mirza and former Ms. Universe Lara Dutta were invited. I always suspected that celeb shows are fixed and the answers are known before hand. During this particular show, my suspicion was confirmed. Amitabh asked an absurdly simple question to the beautiful pair - If August 1 was a Friday, then how many Sundays would fall in that month? Now, the answer is rather simple and it would have been fine if they had just blurted out the memorized answer without trying to give an explanation. But no, the fair ladies wanted to put up a show. So they started counting out the days loudly. And got it terribly wrong. To begin with Lara hypothized that if 1st was a Friday then 4th would be a Sunday. So naturally each time they counted, the answer came out to 4. When in fact the correct answer is 5 (which I suspect they had been told beforehand). It mightily confused the lasses who were wondering where the 5th Sunday disappeared. After a couple of attempts at getting it right, Lara brought her acting skills in use, and simply blurted out the answer as 5! It was hilarious. Not that there was ever any doubt that the show is rigged. But such an obvious goof up was worth a chuckle. and definitely worth blogging :)
On the occasion of the birth anniversary of our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, I came across a little known fact:
A very interesting footnote of Nehru's life, which perhaps only a handful would be aware of, is that he once figured in an interview in Playboy magazine!
And looks like he even read that magazine.
"He knew it was a good magazine. Yes, the women were pretty, but even the articles in it were very intelligent," reveals Sharma.
I am just going to do a brain dump of all of my experiences with hiring over the past year here. Hiring in a hot market like India is especially hard. And for startups, even more so. My experience has been quite in contradiction with common wisdom. And my experiences are probably more relevant for startups and small companies which do not have an army of recruiters and which do not need to hire by the 100s (if not 1000s). Without much ado, here it goes -
On screening resumes:
1. Don't be hung up on which college somebody went to. If somebody went to IIT or one of the RECs, it means they are smart. But the reverse is not true at all. If they didn't goto IIT, they can still be plenty smart. So I rarely care about which college a candidate attended.
2. Check what they scored in class 10th and 12th. College grades can vary a lot and it is impossible to compare grades from two different colleges. But everybody wrote the class 12 school leaving exam. Really low score in class 12 (by really low, I mean less than a 1st division - 65%) is a red flag for me and can indicate a lack of aptitude. Yes, I agree this is not universally true. But when you have got a few hundred resumes to sift thru in a couple of hours, watcha gonna do?
3. Does their list of skill sets look like a kitchen sink? Some people have every single programming language, technology, platform and hardware listed on their resume. You know what that means, right?
4. Be very suspicious of "MCA"s. This is a much abused degree that I think is as easy to obtain as pirated software in Palika Bazar. Don't get me wrong. There are several genuine MCA programs also. But there many distance learning programs which I suspect confer the degree merely for signing up. So, I always double check on MCA degrees.
5. Dump the grass hoppers. Its amazing how frequently some people switch jobs in the tech. industry. If the number of jobs somebody has been in is greater than their number of years of experience, then that's a problem. There will always be greener pastures for them no matter how great your compensation or work environment might be.
On written tests
1. For freshers and people with less than 3-4 years of experience, a written test is a must.
2. Have a couple of sets of papers because these things leak out really fast.
3. Always put some really simple questions in the test - these are the "elimination" questions. If somebody failed to answer those, they get summarily eliminated.
4. There have to be a few programming questions also - because if they can't write code they are obviously at the wrong place.
On scheduling interviews
Just because they said they will come for the interview doesn't mean they will. And just because they won't be coming doesn't mean they will call and inform you. This is the worst part of the interview process. It is shocking to see this kind of unprofessionalism in the software industry. In any other industry, this would be quite unheard of. I guess this is a sign of growing but still immature industry. Anyway, the thumb rule is that if you want to conduct 10 interviews in a day, call in 15 candidates.
On conducting interviews
1. Use the whiteboard. For software development positions, there is really no point in chit-chat (except maybe to gauge communication skills). I learnt this at Microsoft and it works great. Ask candidates to solve problems on the white board. It helps in getting an interactive discussion started with the candidate. Give them a tough problem and keep dropping hints. Ask them to think aloud. See if they can think through the problem. Doesn't really matter whether they finally arrived at the right solution or not.
2. Try to do an objective evaluation. Have you ever had the feeling that you spent an hour with a candidate and yet at the end of the interview you are not sure if its a hire or a no-hire? That is really important to avoid. It helps to ask several distinct questions thru the course of the interview rather than continuing to elaborate on 1 or 2 problems.
3. Do multiple rounds. Startups can't afford bad hires. Always conduct multiple rounds of interviews. It reduces the chances of making a wrong call.
A final note on working with freshers
I have had the good fortune of working with a lot of freshers in the past year. I think it has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my job. Freshers require lot of hand holding to begin with. But they are also extremely motivated and very willing to learn. They have few prejudices and they are not jaded. They are full of energy and can bring the office to life. With a little bit of assistance and lots of patience, freshers can become the most important assets for any software company. So don't hesitate to bet on people fresh out of college!
We have all heard (and even predicted ourselves!) that browser based rich internet applications will replace desktop applications. But amongst so much talk, I had not come across a browser based application that could really match desktop apps in terms of user interface and responsivness. Sure there is Gmail which is fast and zippy - but the UI left much to be desired. But today I saw the demo of LaszloMail - an email service developed on top of OpenLaszlo which is an open source platform for developing rich internet applications. It is the single most impressive utility application I have seen inside the browser. Completely mind blowing! Its email on steroids. And it makes feel much more sure that all this web 2.0 talk is not just hype!
Check out LaszloMail here.
I have been helping Alok setup VentureWoods. VentureWoods is going to be a group blog compromising of people from all spheres of the Indian venture ecosystem - entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, journalists etc. If you want to get into the minds of Indian VCs and angel investors, this is definitely one blog to subscribe to!
A day after Diwali is "Vishwakarma Pooja". Traditionally, this is the day to worship your tools of the trade and give them rest for a day. As a kid, I particulalry enjoyed this day because it was my official excuse for not studying (had to give some rest to my books and pens!). Many facories and offices remain closed today. However, when you work in a global environment, tradition often needs to give way to practicality. I mean, try explaining to a client in America that you won't work today because you need to give your laptop rest :)
It is interesting how our festivals have been effected by globalization. The firecrackers, statues, and even the fancy light bulbs that are such an integral part of Diwali are now manufactured in China. Kids are so environmentally aware that they refuse to touch those fire crackers! So now we see the reverse of what used to happen 10 years back - parents cajoling their kids to go out and burst some crackers! With a booming BPO and IT industry, many of us now commonly exchange Diwali wishes with people around the world - but don't get the time to visit our neighbors to greet them!
Yes, times - they are a changing!
