First Time Manager

Integrative Thinking for Leaders.

2008-11-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

Today on a chilly tuesday evening, the Dean of Rotman school of Management - Roger L. Martin gave a talk about his new book at Bangalore International center,Bangalore. The book is called The Opposable Mind.

The talk was scheduled at 6.45 pm and the hall was filling up with many leaders of Bangalore. I expected a young crowd to be preset, but to my surprise more than half of the visitors were over 40 or 50 years old. Many leaders of B-schools, Business and professions such as Architecutre were present to listen to the talk about Leadership.

I was first of all intreguied, about what could, a Professor with degree from Harvard Business school have to offer to old and battle worn people sitting in the hall, to my delight he had some very insightfull ideas to share with us.

He mentioned, that he interviewed around 50 leaders of businesses and found remarkable similarity of thinking in most of the successful leaders. There are lots of books out there that talk about, how a particular leader was successful, but this Professor Roger mentions is mostly based on context. what does "Based on Context" mean?, it means that, if you find yourself in exactly the same situation as the one mentioned in the how-i-did-it books, the advise there might not be very helpfull to you, in you present circumstance.

So his work focuses on how these leaders think and not a how-to get same results book.

Next, he mentioned a what the opposable mind means, he drew his inspiration from opposable thumbs that humans have accuired that has give us an evolutionary advantage in survival. So the opposable mind is...

have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads, [and that they are] able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.

Professor then goes on to explain how we are thought in our education system to just work with models and not come up with creative solutions.

Here are a few interesting points

He defined success very well - the results that are got , to the actions that you have taken undertaken. i.e You are successful if you get the results that you set out to acheive.
Leaders have high aspirations and are highly successful.
Mastery and originality are the indicators of successful leaders. i.e in the long run, you get good at what you do - Mastery. But it is Originality that is mark of great leaders. Example: Piccaso. So ask your self every week end - Did i do something original?
The main purpose of leaders is to come up with creative solutions to models that are contradictory. A very good example he gave was of, ICICI chairman Kamalnath, he had to choose between growing the bank abroad by M&A , or growing locally in India. To his Kamalnath decided to grow with Indian dispora abroad. This was Integrative thinking.

This made lot of sense to me. The Opposable mind, is one of the finest business books that i have come to know of late. In the same league of - The halo effect, Fooled by randomness. I hope you enjoyed this writeup. open for comments.

Difference in Leadership style of Kumble and Dhoni

2008-11-02T05:59:00.000-08:00

Today, Anil Kumble one of India's greatest leg spinner announced his retirement from International cricket. After taking 619 test wickets over an 18 year career, he called it quit at Ferozsha kotla statdium in Delhi.

It was a highly emotional moment for all the people who have seen kumble over the years. He has single handledly won many matches for india. Some of the words that were used to describe him were - commitment, giving 100% to the team and integrity both as a cricketer and a human being. The Australians also appreciated him for the competative sprit that he brought to the game.

A quotable quote mentioned today was by VVS lakshman. He said that "it was amazing to see Anil (jumbo) take a catch with broken fingers, while other members dropped sitters.". This shows that kind of commintment that Anil kumble brings to the field.

This got me thinking, why does such a commited and competative player, who can raise to the heights of individual brillance, not be able to inspire and lead the India cricket team to victory?i.e The record of Kumble as Captian is not as good as Dhoni's.

I guess this is symptomatic of players of his generation, all the Sachins, Dravids, Guangulies and Lakshmans of our team are individually brilliant but have not been able to match the results of MS Dhoni and Co. I guess these players have come up throught the hard way by being individually brilliant and so have not picked up the skills that Dhoni and Shane warn have displayed to raise the performance of their teams above the individual skills of each member.

Dhoni represents the new India, where the leaders know how to raise the performance of thier teams above themseleves and above the combined skills of each members. Cheers to the New leaders of the new generation.

Looking forward to better results and performances from Team India.

which dealines are real?

2008-09-26T10:58:00.000-07:00

Welcome back google euro and mountain view readers, also the Canadians.

Perfect team players, perfect designer, perfect employee ...it this a myth or reality. then why do I expect to get everything done in a perfect manner to meet the timelines? Yes there is product to be shipped, yes customers to be satisfied, yes there are deadlines. My question is, which is real?

Most of the times the deadlines are self-imposed, working backwards from the release date. Sometimes it's real, like when your under audit and your laundry is out in the open and you frantically try to clean up add a little bit of shine :).

I believe in emergent behavior, but most economic systems are based on carrot and stick to get things done on time.

how much should information should be shared?

2008-09-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

Most teams work under project management guide lines. i.e. every body else in the team know what work every other person is doing and also the deadlines for each tasks.

But (a big but), most teams or groups don't work this way. The internal politics dictates that one does not know what his team-mate sitting next to him is working on. Also the priority of that task to the company is kept hidden. Now why does this happen? i.e even inside a professionally managed project, you have some people 'in the know' about everything and most of the workers are not at all aware. Is this a need-to-know basis management ?

while this kind of model perpetrates the status quo and the powers that be,it does hit the moral of the team members. I have seen this every-ware from the top multinationals to nimble startups.

I wonder what kind of team and task management is carried out in ING America,Southwest airlines, Toyota, threadless.com, 37Signals (they work only 4 days a week), Semco (Ricardo Semler).

after thinking about this for some time, i realized that, the kind of openness and trust that I was expecting being an employee is not available in 99.99% of the companies. Unless you are a founder, you will not know everything that is going on in your company.

I guess, I would like to create a culture where each employee is trusted and he brings his best work to work. A place where results matter as much as the people. does your work place have such a culture?

:)

what does a manager need from his people

2008-09-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

In the old work era managers used to assign work to his people and follow up till its done. Now a days , folks in IT know what needs to be done before a manager can assign the work.

Well I don't tell my folks what needs to be done in more than 50% of the time. So how can i track who is doing quality work? I guess the new age manger has to expect his people to 'keep him in the loop' :)

So the new workforce can help his manager by giving the following support ....

* what am i currently working on?
* how long will it take?
* how difficult or complicated is the job?
* what help do i need from my manager?

So instead of waiting for a report from your people to understand what they are working on, its great to find out at the beginning

:)

Great Manager or Average Manager ?

2008-08-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

Its easy to build just an ok team. All you have to do is not do the following things. Don't pick people with no talent for that job, Don't set unclear expectations, Don't ignore them when they excel, Don't play them off against one another. Now avoiding these behaviors and you will be less likely to chase your best people away. But this does not answer how do you build high performance teams?

Lets take a sports analogy: Evey sports team requires many different skills. No one is the best at everything. A winning team requires each one understand their specific roles and roles others play and how they all need to fit together to work as a winning team.

Every great manager finds what is unique about each of his people and makes the most of it.

:)

what would you advise a FTM in under 2 mins?

2008-08-06T07:34:00.000-07:00

You meet interesting people on flights. I met a Director of a medium sized telecom firm from Bangalore and asked him what should a first time manager know and do.

Your team should trust you and you should trust your team.
Each and every individual is different and is motivated by different things.
It is easier to get work accomplished when some one wants to do it.
You should fight for your team in the company.

While this advise is pretty much commonsense, Experts tell us that commonsense is not common.

:)

how little managers understand the moviations of their people.

2008-08-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

Most of the managers think they know their people, but do they really?

1. One manager was shocked to know that half of the people in his department did not know how to book a conference room using the voice dialing system. How would they know if no one has ever showed them how.

2. the next example comes from people using the normal email distribution list to talk about non-work activities. Everybody wanted a separate forum for this, but when a news group was created hardly anybody signed up as members. it turned out that most of the people did not know how to configure a news reader. the manager just assumed that everyone knew.This was not the only reason, just an empty group does not make it interesting for people to sign up, if there were some interesting discussion posted to this mailing listed and then peopel were asked to join,it would have been a successful launch of the new service.

3. People are moved around from project to project in big corporations so ruthlessly that their personal interests are never addressed. For example in one high profile project that was barely stying above the water, management decided to replace a young inexperienced person with two people who were more experienced. the reality was that this youngster was the one who was keeping the project afloat and his older college was the dead weight on the project. This information was available to the management, but they moved the younger fellow to a more mundane project without asking if he would be interested. Immediately the youngster started searching for new job and left this company for a startup and a senior position. This is not an isolated case. I have seen lots of occasions where a senior person is given higher priority just because it is more difficult to higher someone like him and the company looses a promising talent.

:)

Reading list for First Time Managers

2008-07-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

Going from doing things to getting things done is big change. There are a lot of unwritten and written rules on how to do well in your new position. this is small list that has helped me.

Start by reading First Time Manager , this book helped me understand that one of the most important things a new manager can do is - understanding the culture of the organization. The way you treat people, is the next important lesson. Finally comes figuring out how work is done.

You can get a lot of insight into managing smart people from this manifesto by Scott Berkun, who has worked as Program Manager at Microsoft. One of the striking points is that a manager is responsible for the careers of people reporting to him. Also that the best managers do not use their power often.

I also loved the management reading list by Joel on Software. Don't forget the popular Personal MBA (PMBA) reading list and its India yahoo group.

Finally do check out The Dip by Seth Godwin, cause you want to be the Best in the world.

Help from Nasscom for the First Time Manager, and a 5min video :)

How should you keep yourself upto date?

2008-03-21T20:04:00.000-07:00

I am writing this post after moving to my next company in short span of 4 years. This is for my friends who want to keep themselves updated about IT industry on a regular basis.

1) Magazines relating to IT in Bangalore.

* SmartIT
* Slicon India
* i.t.
* PC Quest
* Linux for you

2) The next question is, do you know which are the best books of your domain?
For example for QA, following are the books

Kaner, Cem, Bach, James, and Pettichor, Bret, eds. Lessons Learned in Software Testing. John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

Kaner, Cem, Falk, Jack, & Nguyen, Hung Quoc, eds. Testing Computer Software (2nd Ed.). International Thomson Computer Press, 1993.

Myers, Glenford. The Art of Software Testing.

John Wiley and Sons, 1979.

Patton, Ron. Software Testing.

SAMS Publishing, 2000.

Sistowicz, Jon, Arell, Ray, eds. Change-Based Test Management: Improving the Software Validation Process. Intel Press, 2003.

Viega, John, McGraw, Gary, eds. Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way. Addison-Wesley, 2001.

3) Blogs and Authority sites. Do you know which are the best authority websites for your domain?

4) Do you contribute to online forums? and do u know how to join the most active and interesting forums?

5) Do you use online tools like RSS, linkedin.com and Del.icio.us?

6) Have you optimized your time management routine or have you read Getting things Done?

7) Do you have list of websites you read on a daily basis? Following is my list.

http://techmeme.com/
http://slashdot.org/
www.businessweek.com/
http://radar.oreilly.com/
http://123suds.blogspot.com/
www.zdnet.com/

I will be updating this post with more details stay tuned.

cheers.

Entrepreneurship Event at IIIT-B on 26th Jan 2008

2008-01-29T00:11:00.000-08:00

On India's Republic day this year(2008) , an event spanning 16 cities was held to bring together successful entrepreneurs and new startups. This was organized by Pan IIT, TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) and NeNonline (National Entrepreneurship Network).

This is a small write up of the Bangalore Event. I will try and capture all the important details here.

There was lot of excitement at IIIT-B campus on a crisp Saturday morning. There were lots of people who had turned up to attend the event. we could see a few typical techie's with their laptops, a small sprinkling of MBA students from IIM's and lots of founders in their full pinstriped suits.

We started the day by flag hoisting and singing our national anthem. Next at about 10.00 AM we trouped into the conference hall. Four distinguished speakers were to take the morning session.

Talk #1
----------
The first speaker of the Day was Samir Kumar, who leads Inventus Capital Partners (VC Firm). Samir Spoke about "What do VC's Look for in a Startup". The first talk charged up the entire audience. The key take aways from Samir's talk are as follows.

* Address a real customer need.
* VC's look for 20x to 30x returns, because they make such high risk investments.
* VC's look at quality of the Team
* Founders should have good past track record in academics and on their jobs.
* Founders should have unquestionable integrity.
* Exit options should be considered.

the most important point in getting VC money is "Clarity of Thought".
i.e you as an entrepreneur, have to think through your target market and idea.
So unless your business can scale and grow, VC's might not be interested in your biz plan. Also there is lot of potential in India.

Talk #2
----------
Next we moved on to an electrifying speech by Amar Lakhtakia. He is a serial entrepreneur(with 5 startups of over $100 million under his belt) . He currently working on sherpaz. (which helps companies in contract workforce). He talked about the following

* As a person with ideas you have to cluster bomb people who can help you get ur idea running.
* As an entrepreneur you have a great calling card to talk to senior people
* Differentiation is important.
* Timing is very important.
* Create Barriers to entry for Competitors.
* Create Business Value.
* Simplicity sells.
* To use BSD licensed code.

He also mentioned that we can look for our competitors through RedHerring and 10-k filings (A comprehensive summary report of a company's performance that must be submitted annually to the Securities and Exchange Commission). It was an inspiring speech.

Talk #3
----------
next we moved on to a speech by Trilochan Sastry, Professsor IIM Bangalore.

Professor Sastry brought a great sense of balance to the event. He talked about how he had filed a petition to India's Supreme court for Right to Information. He said that, this is one powerful tool for enlightened citizens of India to achieve positive results in Large Public funded projects.

He also told us that if you become a "Social Entrepreneur" then funding money will chase you rather than
you chasing VC money !. There is a tremendous vacuum for good people in this space.

He also said that it took 55 years for one Indian to file a request to the supreme court and get the right to know the financial details of the people who stand in elections.

Indian farmers don't loose their income by high interest rates, but they loose it when they sell their produce to the local merchant. This is a very important point.

Talk #4
----------
This was an interesting talk by Mukul Singhal, Canaan Partners. His approach was from an analyst's perspective.

he talked about how consumption is growing in India. He also talked about
* the future telecom boom.
* A big market attracts lots of players. example: Retail in India.
* Which sector will get future spending.

His style was from the view of the market size and the predicted growth. So not much talk about technolgy innovation from Mukul. His Slides were very good, in terms of market research. Next we broke for Lunch.

Post Lunch Talks

Talk #5
----------
This was by K. Ganesh CEO, Tutor Vista.

Mr Ganesh has built a business that involves tutoring kids over the internet live by Teachers in India. Key points are as follows.
* They brought down the cost from $60 per hour for a local teacher to $100 per month.
* They got $18 million funding.
* They train and certify thier tutors.
* The median age of Indian tutor is 50.

Talk #6
----------
This was by Nagendra Ramaswami, Co-founder, CoreObjects. This was a very good talk. Their core competency is Product engineering.
He talked about
* Doing Market research, Product design and execution.
* Not having too many architect's in you company. It will lead to a situation where people end up spending time in defending their views and not worrying about the actual product.

Next we moved to few presentations by new startups each of 5 minutes.

1) Kuliza.com - founders have worked in Trilogy. They build Software products made to order. Currently building products for Pharma industry.

2) Invention labs - Very good philosophy. Low cost, but high end engineering design firm. Have built an ATM that originally costs Rs 8 Lakhs in only Rs 50k.

3) PicSquare - a web site to get your photos printed.

4) OutSourced CFO - a company with 20 crore revenue cannot afford a fulltime CEO for Rs 30 Lakhs a year. So gen an outsourced one.

5) Micro finance.

6) Buzzworks - 2 IIT'ans trying voice search + user generated content + ad revenue.

7) Authpod - trying to replace passwords in websites.

8) shunia - design work by4 IIMk grads.

9) Data analysis - 3 IIM grads take large amounts of data collected by big corporations like HLL and run the data through statistical models using Matlab and other tools to generate actionable data for CEO's.

Thanks for reading.

- Praveen.

7 Games People Play with IT employees

2008-01-13T08:24:00.000-08:00

By this time you must have read Games Indians Play. now lets take a look at IT games...

Name Dropping: Most people drop names of famous or important people in everyday conversations to let you know that they are well connected and powerful. This technique is use by IT Managers in meeting where they drop names of Directors of VP's. This is done so subtly unless you are 'in the know' you will not catch it. One give away is when a manager starts to use the same director's name more than twice and saying that "I will talk to about this". this might be true or it could also be a first time manager trying to tell you who is in charge.

Using Corporate Speak: Every specialization has its own jargon words.So people talking about WBS(work Breakdown Structure) might not have read 'The Mythical Man-Month'. software folks are artists, they create ideas out of thin air. Most great artists don't do their best work only for money, that is why programmers work on open source projects. Open source gives freedom to create interesting stuff. So just because a manager uses WBS, deadlines,etc... it does not make him an artist.

Employee of the Month: This is oldest trick in the book. But subtly tuned in IT to award folks with kudos letters from customers to drive the organization spirit. This is used in one on one's. A gentle hint that you are also expected to get these sort of things.

Strong Managers Network: The managers network might not look very close. This is just a facade. Every organization has a network of peers at each level. So the next time you are wondering whats up with this guy, just remember how you had messed with his peer.

Hiding Deadlines: This is a neat little trick. Suppose the deadline is 10 days away. You will be informed that it is only 5 days away. So this give a buffer time. In case you check in broke the code. Also early delivery makes your project manager a knight in shining amour.

Getting you to over commit: This is a classic. Stating that you need to finish this work by end of the month with out clarifying how much work it will take. Result you will end up slogging on weekends to meet the month end deadline.

Telling your team that you are an expert: you might not have written the code for google pagerank. But it will surly sound like you are the sole technical guru. when you feel like this just
check if you have been Knighted or your name has popped up next to Linus Travolis, Tim Burners Lee, etc.

Tricks of the Trade

2006-09-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

I have been working in Indian IT industry for quite sometime. It about time to jot down a few tricks that are used at Work, especially at the time of your appraisal interview.

Most freshers are naive, they put in the required amout of work for 6 months after which they go into thier appraisal interview with a big smile on thier face. ( trying to keep a smiling face for 2 hours is not a very good idea. ) Expecting some nice words of recognition. But they are getting into the game without knowing the rules of the game.

Some of the interesting things that freshers assume is that they will be rated on the spot or during the interview, well the game is not played like that. Imagine a Manager has a team of 10 people. Now his plan will most likely be to rate one persone as Exceptional , the majority(about 8 people) as Average and one unfortunate guy as below average. Now why has ur manager permedidated on this kind of results. Its simple really, he has to project an image of normal/well functioning team to his supervisor, So to do that he has to have the majority of his people in Average category, a few good performers and an unlucky below average guy.

Next comming to the distribution of Bonus or a hike. Most people have not clue about the reasons other than guessing that the guy who got a bonus has a good relationship with his manager. A bit of economics will shed some light on this. A Manager might have Rs 10L at his disposal. Now how will he distribute this among his 10 people?
Manager has to give the largest chunk to the most experienced person on his team, irrespective of his productivity level or contribution to the team. I call it the 'trickle down effect', by the time Rs 10L trickes down to the fresher, it will have become 10k!

So if you do have aspirations to get the maximum out of an organization, first learn the rules of the game of that Organization. As each company has different rules for rewarding an employee. So dont expect a raise just because you put in extra 10hrs/Week unless that resulted in a huge profit for the company(in the range of few 100k's) then rewards will definitely trickle down to you.

Keep watching this space for more Tricks of the Trade.

Jobs Outsourced to India

2006-07-16T02:31:00.000-07:00

This post is a link from IEEE USA on the top jobs from top companies that are being sent to India, China & other countries.

The intresting table is the salary comparision table. It list how much an american is paid for the same work that is done by an Indian (In dollars).

One more very interesting part is Purchasing Power Parity. This indicates the value of the things you can buy in india in Rupees versus buying the same thing in USA in dollars.

Table 1 - Major U.S. Exporters of Science and Engineering Jobs
===============================
Company - Numbers of Workers and Country - Types of Work
Accenture - 5,000 to the Philippines by 2004 -Accounting and software
GE - 20,000 to India and China in 2003 - Aircraft and Medical R&D
Intel - 3,000 to India by 2006 - Chip design, tech support
Microsoft - 500 to India and China in 2003 - Software design, IT support
Oracle - 4,000 in India - Software design and support
Phillips - 700 in China - Consumer electronics R&D

Please read the Article here

The most important part is the prediction of the TYPES of JOBS that will move offshore by 2010!

Architecture - 83,000
Business Operations - 162,000
Computer Science - 277,000
Law - 35,000
Life Sciences - 14,000
Management - 118,000

Onsite salary/Pay in IT companies.

2006-06-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

Company - Wages
---------------

Infosys - $150 per day (total)

Wipro - $120 per day (total)

Huawei - $50 per day

Oracle - $100 per two weeks.

Satyam - $80 to $100 (total)

SAP - $45 per day (excluding Accomodation)

MindTree - $135 per day.

TCS - $150 per day

Nokia - $50 per day

Disclamer: Information contained here may or may not be True.

If you do know the onsite wages of other Companies please post in the comments.

Alumni day at PESCE

2006-05-15T00:22:00.000-07:00

This is post on all the questions that students from pesce had during alumni meet.

It really good to see so many fresh faces anxious to get into IT industry. The enthusiasm of 4th and 6th sem students was contagious.

Here are the list of questions. If I have missed anything please post it in comments.

Q) How should I start preparing for Campus interviews?
A) Get your basics right - told by Harsha(2005 pass out).

I would suggest reading for Aptitude:
* Quantitative aptitude by R S Agarwal
* Shakuntala devi books on puzzles
* other books on aptitude
* you could also read CAT preparation material on GD, Interview skills.

Target your prepartion for each Company, as each Company looks for certain kind of skills. Go to the companys website, talk to your friends/seniors in that firm for more details.

Develop a regular reading schedule of good quality newspapers and magzines. This will give a view of what is happening in indian IT industry.

Regular readings could be:
* The Hindu
* Economic Times( http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ )
* Magazines like - Developer 2.0, Developer IQ, digit, ExpressComputer ( http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/ )
* Business Magazines like: Business Today, Business week.

Online resources for Campus question papers
www.freshersworld.com

Yahoo groups
- "chetana" is supposted to be good, but the mails were not very usefull for me.
The files section of "chetana" can give you question papers per company.

There are other resources also, you might have to search google.com
Comming to google, I noticed that very few students in our college know how to use google for searching! This is an essential skill in IT ;-)

for Technical part -you should know your basics,
please look at pervious years papers.

Bangalore or Coolie Valley

2006-01-25T23:01:00.000-08:00

If you ask the president of any of Bangalore's software development
companies what his company does, he'll say "We provide end-to-end solutions
for Xxxx." Xxxx could be any or all of these -- e-commerce, banking,
telecom. . .

What he means to say is this: 'We'll do the software coding in any of these
areas for you. Just tell us what you need. We have a huge mass of engineers
who know various programming languages.'

These companies do not develop any technologies or products. They provide
development services. They have engineers who specialize in programming
languages rather than in technologies.

Their chief resource is the huge mass of low-cost labour that they have
taken the trouble to recruit.

Ask them about patents, and you get the reply "Huh, what's that?"
These companies start with zero risk. They do not bet on their ideas or
inventions. A company is started after getting some contracts in hand.

A typical engineer in these companies has no specialization in any
technology. He does not use his engineering knowledge. You could say his
body is employed, but his brain is severely under-employed.

Here is a sample of some prominent Bangalore software companies with what
they specialize in:
Tata Consultancy Services (end-to-end solutions),
Wipro(end-to-end solutions),
Infosys (end-to-end solutions)
DSQ Software (end-to-end solutions),
Kshema Technologies (end-to-end solutions),
Ivega Technologies (end-to-end solutions),
MindTree Consulting(end-to-end solutions).

The comparison

Silicon Valley companies are based on 'know what.' They know the market,
they know the technology and they know what products to make to earn money.
Coolie valley companies are based on 'know how.' They do the software coding
for other companies that have the 'know what.' If you tell them what to do,
they know how and will do it for you.
Silicon Valley companies invest huge sums of money on R&D. They generate new
ideas and are constantly developing new ways of doing things.
Coolie Valley companies have nothing called R&D. They do not generate any
new ideas.

A typical Silicon Valley engineer is a specialist in a particular
technology, like inkjet printing or virus detection. He spends all his life
working in this technology area.

A typical Coolie Valley engineer is a specialist in a few languages. He is
not concerned about the technology that he is working on and is willing to
develop any software with the languages that he knows.

A typical Silicon Valley engineer's education and work experience all relate
to a technology. When he changes jobs, he changes to another company working
on the same technology.

A typical Coolie Valley engineer's work experience does not teach him any
technology. He may be a mechanical engineer currently working for three
months on banking software, and then the next three months on shoe retailing
software.

Silicon Valley is all about the excitement of creating things out of
nothing. Companies like HP actually started in the garages of their
founders.

Coolie Valley does not know the meaning of creaivity. Some companies are
started by people who quit other companies and take some of the parent
firm's software development contracts with them.
Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs bet on people, ideas and inventions.
Coolie Valley's entrepreneurs bet on certainties. They start a firm after
getting software development contracts.

Silicon Valley's firms are about technology management.
Coolie valley's firms are about man management.

It is extremely presumptuous to compare Bangalore with Silicon Valley, so
all you Bangaloreans, please do me a favour and

* Don't call your city Silicon Valley ('pub city' or 'garden city', I
have no problem with -- lots of pubs and lots of trees, but very little
silicon).
* Don't call one of your new software companies a 'high technology
start-up.'
* Don't call your engineers 'techies.' They've forgotten their
engineering long ago.
* Don't say you've invested in 'tech stocks' ('body stocks' maybe ?)

SUCCESSFUL INTERVIEWING

2006-01-25T22:49:00.000-08:00

SUCCESSFUL INTERVIEWING

It starts simply enough. A warm greeting. A passing comment about the
weather. A light-hearted remark about a local sports team. Your resume
is on the desk between you and the employer. She glances down at it
and then back up to you. Her brow has a more serious cast now, "Well,"
she says, "why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself?" Her
gaze stays fixed. The interview has officially begun. It's your turn.

"I attended St. Mary's University and graduated with a degree in
Business Administration. I'm very interested in retail management,
having worked part-time as a sales clerk over the past two years. Your
company is a leader in retailing and I'd really like the opportunity
to prove myself."

Positive. Eager. Safe. You check out the employer's reaction. A polite
nod and a pleasant smile. You congratulate yourself on the fine start,
thinking, "Fire away. I'm hot."

But are you?

Probably not. Chances are good that the employer's agreeable manner is
only a professional veil to hide her true feeling, boredom. Why is she
bored? A better question: Why shouldn't she be? After all, all you did
was recite the most skimpy, superficial, and obvious facts about
yourself. Moreover, she already knew them from your resume. Making
matters worse, you gave her your version of the same worn-out answer
that she's heard in almost every interview she's ever conducted. Far
from excited, she's pigeonholed you early. You are predictable,
commonplace, run-of-the-mill. You are like everyone else. That's not
good enough. The employer is looking for someone exceptional. For all
practical purposes, the interview has concluded. It will drag on for
another twenty minutes or so, but don't kid yourself – it's over.

You didn't have to make this mistake. Behavioural science has given us
legions of studies of the interview process. Boiled down, these
studies have produced three documented-to-death findings.

1. Interviews count. To the degree that the interviewer will influence
the hiring decision, he makes up his mind during the interview. He
decides then that he either wants to hire you or he doesn't. Probably,
this won't get communicated to you during the interview, but the
decision is real and it's firm.

2. The decision gets made early in the interview. Researchers differ
on just how early – some say in the first minute or two, some stretch
it to the first five minutes – but all agree the die is cast in the
beginning. And it's difficult to reverse the interviewer's first
impressions. If you get off to a good start, you can stumble later and
be forgiven. The interviewer will stick to his earlier judgement. He
knows you are wonderful. It works the other way, too. If you start
poorly, it doesn't matter that you come on like gangbusters at the end
of the interview. A poor start can doom the candidate.

3. The driving force behind the interviewer's assessment is a
subjective perception of your personality and capabilities.

Here's a list of words drawn from studies which asked employers why
they selected certain candidates over others:
· oral communications · motivation
· initiative · assertiveness
· enthusiasm · confidence
· drive · energy

Another study ranked the top selection factors as communication skills
and impression of personality. Different studies use different
language, but considered collectively, they all reach the same
generalized conclusion. It's critical that you communicate to the
employer that you are confident. Employers don't want to hire people
who feel that they might be able to do the job. They are looking for
the sure thing.

Wrap these findings into one tidy sentence. You must start your
interview by establishing yourself as confident and assertive. This
sends tremors of fear up the spines of some. "I'm not brash and
aggressive. I don't dance on table tops, tell terrific jokes, and slap
people on the back. I'm not confident and assertive. All is lost."
Relax. No one said you had to be loud and obnoxious. Anyone, I repeat,
anyone – including those who are reserved, quiet, even a little shy –
can come across as confident and assertive in an interview. And it
doesn't take a radical overhaul of your personality. You don't even
have to put on an act. You can be yourself, even if you're quiet.

Consider the question literally. "Tell me a little bit about
yourself." What is the "little bit" that would be most helpful? That's
easy – it's the most impressive and substantiated thing you can say
about yourself. What is it you do best? And what's your proof? Before
you ever get into an interview, have answers to these questions firmly
in mind. They are your ammunition. Don't be afraid of the open-ended
question. Hear it as an opportunity. You have been invited to tell the
employer why he should hire you. Do it. "The most important thing that
I am eager to say is that I'm very adaptive and respond well to
pressure and change. As a sales clerk, I worked in three different
departments and under two different managers. I had to learn new
product lines quickly and, at the same time, different sales
approaches preferred by a new manager. I found this challenging and
exciting and my portion of departmental sales grew steadily. My
manager commended me for how well I handled the pressure. Retail is
always changing and I think I'm very well-suited for such a career."

This kind of answer – even if stated quietly – gets you off to the
all-critical right start. The employer will sit up and take note. You
will have distinguished yourself from the herd. You are confident and
assertive. You are special.

We're all special. Each of us knows that we have some special
qualities or characteristics that cut us away from the crowd and make
us good prospects. We've seen the proof time and time again in our
lives. The beginning of an interview, when responding to an open-ended
question, is the one time in life that it's not boorish to be right up
front with it. The employer wants to know why we're special. Tell her.

All other interviewing advice pales in comparison to this. If you do
everything else right, but don't get this down, you'll be stuck with
mediocre results. Conversely, if this is your only preparation, you'll
still be a shade or two above most.

Presuming that you'd like to have a wider margin of success than a
mere shade or two, let's cover a few other points. These tips can be
roughly divided into three groups: before the interview, during the
interview, and after the interview.

BEFORE THE INTERVIEW

After carefully preparing to identify and substantiate your main
strength, concentrate on three other areas of preparation.

Get inside employers' shoes. What do employers care about? This is not
a great mystery. They have been asked this question many times and
their responses are generally quite similar, giving more weight to
interpersonal skills and other personal characteristics than to
objective measures such as grades, institutional reputation, and past
work experience. For example, in a recent study conducted by the
National Association of Colleges and Employers, here's how employers
rated the importance of various qualifications using a five point
scale:

· Interpersonal skills 4.67
· Teamwork skills 4.65
· Analytical skills 4.56
· Oral communication skills 4.53
· Flexibility 4.52
· Computer skills 4.32
· Written communication skills 4.12
· Leadership skills 4.08
· Work experience 4.05
· Internship experience 3.77
· Co-op experience 3.37

In a related question, employers identified the personal
characteristics that are most important to them. They are, in order:

· Honesty/integrity
· Motivation/initiative
· Communication skills
· Self-confidence
· Flexibility
· Interpersonal skills
· Strong work ethic
· Teamwork skills
· Leadership skills
· Enthusiasm

All this emphasis upon personal qualities doesn't mean that you have
wasted your efforts accumulating a lofty GPA or stacking up an
impressive work history. Far from it. But it sure does mean that you
cannot rest on these laurels alone. Instead, see them as contexts
from which you can draw examples that prove you have the traits
employers seek.

Before interviewing, look at the above lists and sift through your
experience, inside the classroom and out, identifying situations that
prove that you have what it takes. For example, the fact that you
maintained a solid GPA while holding down a part-time job says
something significant about your time management skills and your
motivation, as well as your work ethic. Your teamwork skills might
have shown through on a class project. Perhaps you exhibited
initiative and leadership skills while holding an office in a student
organization. Your experience will be as valuable as you make it by
translating it into proof that you have the skills employers seek.

Research the job and the organization. Learn what you reasonably can
about the nature of the job. Ask if a written job description is
available. How about an organization chart. Talk to others. Visit the
organization's website. If you have been given or directed to printed
materials, be sure to read them. Don't get carried away with this
task. You don't have to become the world's leading authority on the
subject. Just make sure that you understand what the job entails so
that you can envision yourself in it and that you have a clear
understanding of what the organization does. That will keep you from
looking like a know-nothing.

Anticipate the questions and practice. Look at it this way: Almost all
of the questions will be about you – your goals, skills, work
attitudes, education, expectations. You are the expert. No one knows
more about this subject than you. Still, a little practice can help.
Get friends to simulate interviews and ask you predictable questions.
You can even do it by yourself in front of a mirror. Don't strive for
rote answers to the questions. Instead, aim to get the main points of
your desired responses into your head where they can be easily
recalled. Evaluate honestly, but don't worry about the fine details.
Look for evidence that you are answering with poise and clarity,
coming across as comfortable and confident. Your answers need to be
clear and concise, directly responding to the questions.

Stress specificity. It's critically important to make sure you back
up your claims with specific evidence. Think of yourself as a trial
lawyer proving your point. While this is always good advice, no matter
what the situation, it's absolutely essential when employers are
deliberately conducting behavioural interviews. This methodology has
been adopted by many employers who feel that it helps them discern the
"best" candidates from those who simply talk a good line. Using their
most successful employees as models, employers identify traits that
these employees have in common. This exercise tells them what they
need to look for when interviewing candidates. They then frame
questions that ask you to provide specific evidence drawn from your
past that proves that you have what the organization seeks. The basic
idea is that past success is the best predictor of future success.

For example, a company that values teamwork may ask you to tell about
a time you worked on a project as part of a group. Then you will be
pressed for specifics. What exactly was your role? What contribution
did you make? How do you know the project was successful? Precisely,
how did you make it so? Sometime, this questioning can seem aggressive
if you aren't specific enough.

Behavioural interviews stress specific experiences you've had. If
you've done your homework properly, thinking of examples that prove,
beyond all doubt, that your sterling qualities are not figments of
your imagination, you will be ready. Being ready for behavioural
interviews, even if that method is not anticipated, is ideal
preparation. It requires you to arm yourself with facts that prove
your merit. This is what interviewing is all about. Specificity is
your most important ally.

Don't fear technical questions. For some jobs, you may be asked
technical questions. These questions are asked to see if you are
familiar with a particular technique or process required by the job
or, if the question is of a problem-solving nature, to determine the
process by which you reach your answer. Usually, that is more
important to the employer than the accuracy of the answer. This type
of question is not typical and doesn't merit a lot of anxiety on your
part. It's the sort of thing that either you know or you don't so
don't sweat it. Concentrate instead on this list of common questions.
They are far more likely to be asked and far more likely to cause you
to stumble.

Practice with these.
1. Tell me a little bit about yourself.
2. Why are you interested in this position?
3. Why did you choose this type of career?
4. What are your greatest strengths?
5. How would you describe yourself?
6. What motivates you to put forth your greatest effort?
7. How do you determine or evaluate success?
8. Provide an example from your past that demonstrates the
contribution you could make to our firm.
9. Describe the relationship that should exist between a supervisor
and those supervised.
10. What are your weaknesses?
11. What accomplishment has given you the most satisfaction. Why?
12. Describe your most rewarding educational experience.
13. If you could do so, how would you plan your preparation differently? Why?
14. What major problem have you encountered and how did you deal with it?
15. Cite a situation from your past that required you to respond to
pressure. How did you deal with it?
16. What are your long-term goals?
17. Why should I hire you?

There is a perfect answer to questions about salary. If the employer
asks you about your salary expectations, don't be bashful. A perfect
answer: "I'm aware that the typical range for this kind of position is
___ to ___ and naturally I'd like to be at the higher end of the
range. This type of answer is positive and assertive but still
non-demanding enough to leave room for negotiation. Of course, to be
ready with this kind of reply, you need to do some homework. Research
salary issues. The Internet provides an abundance of salary
information. Check it out. If your career centre conducts an annual
survey of graduates, that may be your best source of comparable
information. You don't have to get extremely precise, but it helps to
have a realistic, five-thousand dollar range in mind.

Be ready for inappropriate questions. One other type of question
deserves attention. Once in a great while and fortunately with
diminishing regularity, you may be asked a question that you consider
illegal, unethical, or at least inappropriate. The question may have
to do with marital or family status, race, gender, or some other taboo
topic that has no bearing upon your capacity to do the job. The
question might be something like, "Will your spouse object to you
traveling alone or with members of the opposite sex?" Or, "How do you
feel about working in a predominantly white environment?" could be
asked of a job seeker from an underrepresented ethnic group. An older
applicant might hear, "How would you feel about reporting to a younger
supervisor?" Marriage, race, and age aren't supposed to be the
subjects of job interviews. We all know that, don't we? But it can
happen. When it does, it customarily catches the job-seeker off-guard.
Stunned, uncertain of how to answer, the applicant simply unravels
until the thread of the interview has been lost altogether. For better
or worse, so has the job.

A little forethought might have saved the day. Anticipate
inappropriate questions just as you have anticipated the predictable
ones listed above. How do you want to answer? Basically, you have
three choices. You can refuse to answer or you can go along with the
employer and respond. Those are two of your choices and in both cases
the results are unpredictable. It may well be that there was no
pernicious intent to the question and your response, whatever it is,
will be inconsequential. Or the opposite could be true and you were
being deliberately tested by an irascible employer and your response
brought the curtain down on the job. Or labelled you an easy mark.

The third choice has more merit. Decipher the question and respond
only to its appropriate content, ignoring the offensive issue. For
example, the question regarding your spouse's attitude about
work-related travel contains a legitimate, though unspoken, question.
"This job requires travel. How do you feel about that?" You can
respond to that on your own terms. Forget your spouse. Simply tell the
employer that travel is not a problem for you (assuming it isn't, of
course). "Working in a predominantly white environment" can be
translated into a question about the type of environment within which
you prefer to work. No racial overtones to that. Just describe in
non-racial terms your preferred work environment. Don't talk about the
age of supervisors. Talk about the relationship that you'd like
between you and your supervisor. Thinking this through in advance will
keep you from falling apart during the interview. When it's all over
you can decide if you think the employer made an honest mistake or
acted deviously. And whether or not you want the job. That has merit.

DURING THE INTERVIEW

Even with your preparation to rest upon, you can still expect nervous
tension. You're on the spot. It's natural to feel a little uneasy. The
employer knows that, having experienced the same thing himself. It
doesn't have to mess up your interview. Proceed, and as you do, keep
these tips in mind.

First impressions count. Be on time and look sharp. The employer is
already employed and has the luxury of being late. You don't.
Tardiness will be taken as a sure sign that you will always be late
for work. Dress, at the least, as you would if you were on the job,
and probably a step or two higher than that. It's almost impossible to
err on the conservative side and easy to go astray by being too
casual. If you are a bit over-dressed, the worst that will happen is
that the employer will assume you are trying to impress her. Is that
bad?

Start strong. As stressed above, research proves that it's important
to begin on the most positive note possible. Be on the alert for that
predictable open-ended, beginning question, "Tell me about yourself."
Don't interpret it as an icebreaker. It's the real thing. The
interview has begun. Trot out your main strength and its proof. Get
the flying start you want.

Send the right behavioural signals. Let's not belabour what pop
psychology has already beaten to death. To the greatest degree
possible, relax and be yourself. Aim for a demeanour that is attentive
but moderate. You don't want to look like you're ready for a nap, but
you also don't need military posture. If you normally use hand
gestures, go ahead. Just don't flap around like a seagull. Establish
eye contact to show self-confidence.

Communicate carefully. Since we all know that interviews are all about
us talking, we are quick to rush in and fill any silence with our
words, whether or not we've decided what we want to say. Often, to the
listener our words sound like gobbledygook. It figures. How can you be
clear when you aren't organized? Take your time. If you need
clarification, ask for it. It's okay to pause, reflect, and get your
act together before you start talking.

If you know you speak with an accent that others sometimes find
difficult to decipher, you'll naturally want to do your very best to
speak as clearly and intelligibly as you can. Be especially alert for
speaking too softly or too rapidly. Adjust you pace and your volume
accordingly. If necessary, ask if you were understood.

Appear enthusiastic. Projecting low energy or being flat in your voice
or demeanour can be devastating. These impressions are drawn from your
expression and your tone of voice more than the words you utter. If
you know that you tend to have low affect or speak in a monotone, it's
advisable to use a little trick. Raise your eyebrows when talking. It
may sound silly, but our voices tend to follow our expression and
raised eyebrows put liveliness into your voice. Try it. A smile here
and there is nice, too.

Participate, don't dominate. Let the employer set the tempo. In most
cases, that won't be a problem. The interview will move briskly along
and you'll be surprised when it has ended. You can expect to do at
least half of the talking. Some, though, may be torturously slow. The
employer will plod and pause and hem and haw. Don't let it rattle you.
Your task remains the same. Make a good impression by settling in for
a rather tedious pace. Perhaps the most difficult situation is the
employer who converts the interview into a monologue. It's awkward,
but you need to occasionally find a way to interrupt the droning and
make a few points of your own. Look for pauses and use "That reminds
me…" beginnings for your own comments. Mostly, though, you can expect
to do a lot of listening.

Ask questions. At some point in the interview, you'll be asked if you
have any questions. Count on it. You look disinterested if you don't,
so prepare specific questions for each interview. Some of these
questions can be general but others should reflect the research you
did on the company.

You can always begin a question with the line, "I noticed on your
website…" or "Your annual report indicated that…" and then ask for an
elaboration. The point won't be missed.

Use the closing. The closing minutes of the interview are kind of a
wrap-up. Don't ask about salary. Never leave an interview with an
uneasy "I wish I had said…" feeling. If there were omissions, get them
in now. Likewise, never leave an interview without knowing when you
can expect to hear from the employer. Most will make a point of
telling you, but if they don't, ask. The best way to end your
interview is the same way you started it. While shaking hands, thank
the employer for the interview, reiterate your interest in the
position and cite your primary qualification as a reminder of how good
an employee you would be. If you weren't offered a business card, ask
for one.

AFTER THE INTERVIEW

Hiring decisions can be hair-splitting exercises. Often, the employer
must make a tough choice between two or more closely matched
candidates. Give yourself the edge after the interview.

Keep notes. As soon as you can after the interview, jot down some
notes to yourself. Record the date of the interview. If you didn't get
a business card, make sure you have the correct spelling of the
interviewer's name. If it is a tricky pronunciation, write it out
phonetically as well. What are your impressions of how the interview
went? Did you learn something new and important about the employer?
What is to happen next and when? Were there any weak spots or points
that you failed to make? Keep these important notes in an orderly
fashion. You need to stay organized and have this information at your
fingertips. Scribbling upon little pieces of paper that get lost in
the laundry won't work.

Write a thank you note. It's standard advice, but only about ten
percent of all job seekers follow it. That's precisely why you should.
A few well-phrased words of gratitude, as well as a reaffirmation of
your interest, can make your interview – and you – more memorable.
Unless you're specifically asked to correspond by e-mail, it's best to
send this note through the postal service. If you omitted something
important from your interview or didn't adequately bolster one of your
points with a pertinent specific, you can briefly include it in this
note. Send the note within 24 hours of the interview.

Stay in pursuit. If the interviewer suggested that you take additional
steps such as completing applications, visiting branch offices,
calling later, or talking to others, take the advice seriously. It was
given for a reason and if you ignore it, it could cost you the offer.

Don't wait too long. Employers don't always live up to their own best
intentions. If you were told you would hear by the end of the week and
you haven't, give the employer a reminder call. It's reasonable and
will underscore your interest. Usually, you'll simply be told that the
decision is still under consideration and be given a revised timeline.
Go back to waiting, and after the new deadline has passed, if you
still haven't heard, call again. During such calls, you may get
disappointing news. "Sorry, we should have gotten to you earlier, but
we hired someone else for the position yesterday." That's tough and
it will hurt, but it's still news you need to hear.

A FEW SPECIAL SITUATIONS

Telephone Interviews. Sometimes an employer may ask to interview you
by phone. Sure, this takes away the obvious advantages of going face
to face, but, on the other hand, it gives you a couple of advantages,
too. Pick a time and place that maximizes your comfort and privacy.
Make sure you will be in a quiet setting. Schedule your phone
interview carefully, avoiding times or situations when you might
become hurried or interrupted.

If the employer calls without warning and you don't have these
conditions in place, politely explain that and ask to arrange a
different call. You won't have to sit in one of those uncomfortable
hard-back chairs. And you can be equipped with notes. Keep these
simple, you won't want to be shuffling through papers, looking for
your prepared answer to a question. Having a few helpful reminders on
hand – points you want to be sure to make – can give you a boost.

Don't short-change yourself in preparing for a telephone interview.
You should take exactly the same steps as you would for any other
interview.

Video Interviews. Talking to a camera can be taxing. Subconsciously,
we are always looking for signals and reinforcement from our listener.
Often, an expression or body language tells us if we are being
understood or if we are successfully making our points. To be without
that instant reinforcement and direction hurts. To the degree that you
can, do your very best to remember that you are talking to a person.
It might even help to envision someone if the situation is not a live,
two-way video interview. If your career centre offers practice
videotaped interviewing sessions, take advantage of them. If not, you
may want to try it on your own just to get comfortable with the
process.

Group Interviews. Interviewing panels or committees are commonly used
in government, education, and social service agencies. You might find
the prospect of facing a group of interviewers intimidating, but don't
confuse this process with the "Grand Inquisition." Consider it an
advantage. With more people in the room, everything doesn't rest upon
the reactions and judgement of one person. Although you may not click
with everyone, your chances of finding an advocate within the group
are reasonably good.

The most important thing to remember in such situations is to address
every person in the room. They are all there to be a part of the
hiring decision and if you seem to be talking with the highest ranking
person or the friendliest face, you run the risk of offending someone
else, losing their vote. From time to time, visually scan the room,
making eye contact with even the most silent or foreboding members of
the group.

NO FAILURES, JUST LESSONS

Well, that's probably stretching it a bit. You will blow some
interviews. You are human. But even when you are clicking and doing it
all right, you won't always come out on the right side of that
hair-splitting decision. Let there be no doubt about it, even in the
best of economic times, rejection is a nearly inevitable part of the
interviewing process. Not everyone loves us. Toughen up and live with
it. Your success rate multiplies with persistence. Try to learn from
problems you encounter. Work on questions that give you a tough time.
At your next interview, remember to work in those items that you
wished you had said in the last interview. With outstanding
preparation and a little practice, interviewing can be fun.

10 myths & facts about working in the Indian IT

2005-11-16T21:55:00.000-08:00

10 myths & facts about working in the Indian IT
industry

October 27, 2005

India's booming information technology industry
already hires more than a million employees and the
numbers are set to grow manifold over the years.

Yet, the Indian IT sector, which has brought India on
the global map (far removed from the West's perception
of India being the land of diseases, poverty and snake
charmers), is still grappling with the issue of
high-end and low-end jobs and seeking out ways to go
up the value chain.

Here are the 10 myths and facts about IT industry that
you must know.

Myth #1: Company A has offered more salary than
Company B, so it is better than Company B.

Fact: A bigger salary does not always mean better
job-satisfaction. Big companies (with good cash flows)
can afford to give more salaries than other relatively
mid-sized or small companies or start-ups.

Also some companies outsource loss-making units or
less revenue-generating product and maintenance work
to India to cut costs, so job satisfaction for someone
more interested in work content than the money is
going to feel low.

For start-ups and small companies, salaries might not
be very good, but they might offer stock options or
bonus to compensate for this. Also work content in
these companies might be better than big companies.

Some venture capitalists in the United States, when
looking to fund start-ups, have begun to ask those
companies whether they have an India-specific plan.
Since these companies work on new/innovative products,
work content is likely to be good.

Myth #2: Let me join Company A. If I don't like it, I
will leave it and find a better job elsewhere.

Fact: Unless you are very clear about your goals and
ambition you will keep changing jobs time and again.
The best thing is to decide what you want to do quite
early on in your career.

However, this seems a daunting task. This is true for
someone with less than 3-4 years' experience and has
no idea about the industry and what one wants to do.
In addition, most of the companies hiring from
campuses do not decide in advance what project the
selected candidates will be working on. Later on, when
works get assigned it does not match one's ambitions.

Also, most institutes/colleges put restriction on the
number of job offers one can accept, so the selection
of companies is not by choice. However, if you have
joined a company that works on specific areas that are
not to your liking then it is best to look out for
another.

It is quite difficult for the company to find
something that is specific to your interest, as it is
beyond its scope. However, for you next job search,
you should clearly indicate to your prospective
employer that you are looking to work in a specific
area (it is advisable to specialise in one domain/work
area) and whether the company does that kind of work
and you can be involved in that work.

Do not put off asking this after joining as it would
be too late by then. It is best to give multiple
interviews and decide on the one that best matches
your aspirations. Don't let salary be the lone
criterion when you make your decision.

Myth #3: Infotech work is more of 'a routine job.' No
high-end work gets done in India.

Fact:This might be true in many cases, but the
opportunities to work on challenging and complex
projects is increasing in India. Currently, very few
companies (rough estimate: 10-15%) in India are doing
this. If you are the brainy type, seek out such
companies. Using the best brain to do routine jobs can
lead to job-dissatisfaction soon.

Also, most companies that launch their operations in
India tend to give easy assignments in the beginning
and you might feel that the job content is quite
simple. But the important part is that is once you
finish the project to the satisfaction of all
stakeholders, the overseas management becomes
confident in offshoring more complex work.

If the management is not convinced, then you will
continue to do the daily chore. So, the bottomline is
that if your team delivers quality product on time,
you will get good work in the future.

Myth #4: Only product companies do exciting work.

Fact: The fact is that the typical work content in
product companies involves a mix of routine and
challenging tasks. In product companies, delivering a
quality product is of great importance and as a result
a typical product release involves multiple rigorous
testing and bug-fixing phase.

This is a typically mundane and repetitive task and
not always interesting. But it is important to
understand that this is a critical task from company's
perspective, as nobody would want to deliver a buggy
product in the market and lose customer confidence.

So you cannot just focus on design and coding, and
ignore testing and bug-fixing. Not only this, you
should be flexible enough to work in any area whether
you like it or not. You get both exciting and
non-exciting work in the long run.

Myth #5: The Indian IT industry cannot offer the kind
of job requirement I am looking for.

Fact: It requires a lot of effort to select the
company of your liking. With so many companies setting
up shop in India, this has made things even more
difficult. Don't follow the principle 'my friend is
working there, so I should follow him/her.' The
requirement of your friend might be different from
yours and you should seek companies that meet your
requirement.

For experienced people, it is best to go through
recruiters and indicate your exact requirement to
them. If the recruiter is good, he will shortlist the
companies that meet your expectations. If you find
that the recruiter is not going by your interests,
look for another recruiter.

Myth #6: I received a mail from a placement service
saying that the job openings it has matches my
profile.

Fact: Most of the recruiters/placement services send
bulk mail to all and sundry. They do not scan resumes
properly and just match keyword(s). Personally, I have
received mails from recruiters, who say that my
profile matches the job they have on offer, but if I
look at the opening it does not match at all.

It is best to clear this with the recruiter before you
agree to appear for an interview. This saves you the
embarrassment of being on the ground that your
profile/experience does not match the job profile.

Most companies rely heavily on recruiters for
non-fresher openings and if they do not filter the
candidate correctly, then most likely HR will not
filter it either and call you for an interview!

Myth #7: Working abroad is better than working in
Indian companies.

Fact: This might not be always true. If you are going
to work as a consultant in the US, you might land up a
worse job than what you were doing in India. With the
IT doom of 2000 there is a very small pool of highly
qualified professionals available in the US and they
normally get better jobs than Indian consultants do.

Typically, in product companies, consultants are hired
to do less critical work or work that can be done
easily. If your expectation is to do high-end work,
you will have to wait longer to do it. It is a much
better option to obtain a master's degree from
top-rated university in the US to bag better jobs.

Product companies usually hire the best brains from
these universities to do the challenging work for
them. Also the biggest advantage of working overseas
is that you get to work with the best brains and learn
a lot from them. It typically takes 4-5 years of
overseas experience to get a good understanding of the
overall execution of software products.

Myth #8: Management ladder is a much better option
than technical ladder.

Fact: If you are the kind who loves to be technical,
look for an organisation that encourages career growth
for core technical work and pays salary at par with
management salary for the same zone.

The demand for senior technical and senior architect
professionals will grow as more high-end, specialised
work gets done in India. Some companies have both
managers and architects in the same project.

The manager takes care of the people and project
execution, while the architect takes care of all
technical aspect of the project. For complex and large
projects, it is not possible for the manager to wear,
both, the technical and the managerial hats, and hence
the need to hire architects to take care of all
technical aspects.

If you find the employer saying that you will be doing
20 per cent management and 80 per cent technical work,
treat the statement with caution. Most likely it might
turn out to be the other way around!

Myth #9: I am working abroad. If I relocate and work
in India I won't get the same job satisfaction.

Fact: This is no longer true. The nature of the jobs
done in India is as good as that in the US or other
countries. The only difference is that the products
that are futuristic in nature are not so prevalent in
the Indian IT industry. In addition, career growth in
India is much better -- and faster -- than overseas.

Myth #10: My satisfaction with the Indian IT industry
is not in my hands.

Fact: As stated in the facts to the above myths, you
yourself are solely responsible for job satisfaction.
You have to research well when making a career plan
and ensure you are at the right place.

The author is a software architect working for a
product company in Bangalore. He has more than 10
years of software experience working mostly in
product-based companies in India and the US. The views
expressed here are personal and should not be
construed as an industry view.

The Real Reason Employees Leave

2005-10-30T02:04:00.000-08:00

Every company normally faces one common problem of high employee turnout ratio. People are leaving the comp for better pay, better profile or simply for just one reason' pak gaya '. This article might just throw some light on the matter......

Arun,who is a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing pecialized software. He was thrilled by the offer. He had heard a lot about the CEO of this company, charismatic man often quoted in the business press for his visionary attitude.

The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office, and the very best technology, even a canteen that served superb food. Twice Arun was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined.
"It's a real high working with such cutting edge technology." Less than eight months after he joined, Arun walked out of the job.

He has no other offer in hand but he said he couldn't take it anymore. Nor, apparently, could several other people in his department who have also quit recently. The CEO is distressed about the high employee turnover. He's distressed about the money he's spent in training them.
He's distressed because he can't figure out what happened.

Why did this talented employee leave despite a top salary?

Arun quit for the same reason that drives many good people away. The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called First Break All The Rules.

It came up with this surprising finding: If you're losing good people, look to their immediate supervisor. More than any other single reason, he is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he's the reason why they quit, taking their knowledge, experience and contacts with them.Often, straight to the competition.

"People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. "So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people - in the form of better pay, better perks and better training - when, in the end, turnover is mostly manager issue." If you have a turnover problem, look first to your managers. Are they driving people away?

Beyond a point, an employee's primary need has less to do with money, and more to do with how he's treated and how valued he feels. Much of this depends directly on the immediate manager. And yet, bad bosses seem to happen to good people everywhere. A Fortune magazine survey
some years ago found that nearly 75 per cent of employees have suffered at the hands of difficult superiors. You can leave one job to find - you guessed it, another wolf in a pin stripe suit in the next one.

Of all the workplace stressors, a bad boss is possibly the worst, directly impacting the emotional health and productivity of employees.

HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find public
humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave, but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he starts looking for another job. When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only
what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information.

Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don't have your heart and soul in the job." Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious, too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over seemingly trivial
issue.

It isn't the 100th blow that knocks a good man down. It's the 99 that went before. And while it's true that people leave jobs for all kinds of reasons - for better opportunities or for circumstantial reasons, many who leave would have stayed - had it not been for one man constantly telling them, as Arun's boss did: "You are dispensable. I can find
dozens like you." While it seems like there are plenty of other fish especially in today's waters, consider for a moment the cost of losing a talented employee.

There's the cost of finding a replacement. The cost of training the replacement. The cost of not having someone to do the job in the meantime. The loss of clients and contacts the person had with the industry. The loss of morale in co-workers. The loss of trade secrets
this person may now share with others.

Plus, of course, the loss of the company's reputation. Every person who leaves a corporation then becomes its ambassador, for better or for worse.

We all know of large IT companies that people would love to join and large television companies few want to go near. In both cases, former employees have left to tell their tales. "Any company trying to compete must figure out a way to engage the mind of every employee,"
Jack Welch of GE once said. Much of a company's value lies "between the ears of its employees". If it's bleeding talent, it's bleeding value.

Unfortunately, many senior executives busy traveling the world, signing new deals and developing a vision for the company, have little idea of what may be going on at home.

That deep within an organization that otherwise does all the right things, one man could be driving its best people out.

Reasons behind IT attrition

2005-10-30T01:59:00.000-08:00

Reasons behind IT attrition
NANDKISHORE S RATHI

The issue of employee attrition is reaching alarming proportions and CEOs along with their HR managers are ready to take all-out measures to tackle the menace. Generally, the basis for these measures is either `satisfaction surveys' or ‘exit interviews'. But these two don't really reflect the true story behind people turnover.

During a five and half year study on attrition among software professionals I have, among other things, identified that software professionals have different aspirations at different stages of their career. If we divide their career into two experience levels, the aspirations can be described as follows:

Early career stage (0-3 years).
These youngsters value money a lot . They perceive the best job as the one that offers a huge amount of money. Foreign trips (mostly to the US) is next in priority. However, this is becoming increasingly irrelevant with most of the work now done offshore and client-interaction being facilitated by conference calls.

Another of their aspirations is to work on hot/cutting edge technology. They mainly resort to using popular media and employment advertisements to judge this. Hot technology, it may be noted, is different from `high-end' work.

The more mature professionals in this category also look at career from a slightly long-term perspective and thus look at exploring opportunities for learning - if it is explained properly to their advantage. Another factor peer and family pressure. The young software professionals always compare their present job with that of their ex-batchmates and colleagues.

The usual criteria that are discussed are the money and the project. Family members can influence their decisions.

Mid-career (5+years experience)
These adopt a strategic approach to their career needs. The company's placement in the software industry value chain becomes a key parameter for taking up a new job or leaving the present one.

They want to move up from body-shopping and coding kind of job to programming and business solutions companies. Most of the services people want to move to product companies because they are looking for challenges.

Secondly, they know that developing next level skills will only keep them ahead in the job-market, also finally resulting in better compensation. They also look for a job with higher level of responsibility.

At this juncture they begin to look at the organisation's culture. By now they would also have experienced variety in terms of leadership of supervisors (boss), performance appraisal system, top management competence, company's vision & mission, bureaucracy vis-à-vis meritocracy and so on.

Since software professionals have different priorities at different points of time, organisations need to structure their offer-mix while recruiting new hires, as well as promoting/advancing the potential ones. The same may be kept in mind while designing recruitment ads for focussed groups.

The author has been working at IIT Mumbai on campus placements since 1995.

A Dream Job

2005-10-30T01:53:00.000-08:00

Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore on defining success. July 2nd 2004

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government - he reiterated to us that it was not ''his jeep'' but the government's jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary. That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe. To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it". That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant. Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions. Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed.

At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited". That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination. Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success. Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes. To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe.

The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told meto do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self. There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the next day.

He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world! Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives. Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world ...

How does one build a successful technical career?

2005-10-30T01:47:00.000-08:00

THE other day, I met a bright young engineer in MindTree and asked him what his ambition was. He was very clear. “I want to be an architect”. My next question to him was, what does he read? He looked surprised and then replied that he does not read much outside what appears on a computer screen. My next question to him was whom all does he admire in MindTree among the three best architects? He named the predictable three. Then I told him what the fundamental gap was between him and the best three. It was about the ability to make intelligent conversation about any subject under the sun — a capability borne out of serious reading habits.

The next thing I asked him to do was to poll these three on what were the six books they had read last. The result was amazing. The three named eighteen books in all — of which at least six were common. Ninety percent of the books had nothing to do with information technology. The exercise proves a key point — to be a great nerd, one has to have interests outside writing code. However, many engineers think that the path to a great technical career is about technical skills alone.

Long back, Bell Labs conducted an interesting study - closely watching the common characteristics among a group of technical professionals who rose to the top. The exercise revealed nine key factors outside just technical competence that differentiated brilliant technical folks from the masses. The study was conducted by Robert Kelly of Carnegie Mellon and Janet Caplan of Williams College. As I see the Indian industry today, I think the study done at Bell Labs remains relevant in every detail.

The Bell Labs engineers who did extremely well for themselves - as they progressed in their career, showed the following qualities that differentiated them from their peers: taking initiative, cognitive ability, networking, leadership, teamwork, followership, perspective, organisation savvy and show-and-tell capability. Let us look at each of these and see what lies underneath.

Taking initiative

This is about accepting responsibility above and beyond your stated job. It is about volunteering for additional activities and promoting new ideas. None of these will jump out as apparent as a young engineer gets in to her first job. She will tend to think that her career progress is really dependent only on the ability to write code. The concept of initiative begins by looking for technical and other opportunities in the organisation and volunteering for them. The idea of volunteering is little understood — both by organisations and individuals. In the days to come, it will gain increasing prominence in our professional lives.

Initiative is also about two other things — dealing constructively with criticism and planning for the future. The latter is a function of many things — a good starting point is to start mapping the environment, learning to understand how the future is unfolding and then stepping back to ask, how am I preparing myself?

Cognitive abilities

The concept of cognitive development is about understanding the interplay of technology and trends in how they are getting deployed. It is also about recognising the business eco-system in which technology works. It is about situational understanding and consequence thinking. The importance of consequence thinking is very critical. It asks us to look beyond the immediate deliverable of a task and it is about asking who will be impacted by my work, what is the end state? People in our industry just think in terms of modules and seldom ask where is it going, who is my customer and more importantly - who is my customer’s customer? Cognition is a key faculty that determines how much we are able to read patterns, make sense of things. Refining cognitive skills helps us to go beyond stated needs of our customers to explore unstated needs.

Networking

We tend to think of networking in a social sense. As one grows higher in life, we are often as powerful as is our network. Building a professional network requires us to step out of the comfort zone to look at whom can I learn from. Quite often, and more as one progresses in life, the learning has to come from unusual sources. At MindTree, we expose our people to social workers, architects, graphic designers, teachers, people who lead government organisations, leaders from client organisations. The interesting thing about benefiting from a network is that it works like a savings bank. I need to deposit in to it before I withdraw. We all have heard about how important internal and external knowledge communities are. Again, in MindTree, we encourage people to belong to 26 different knowledge communities that run on a non-project based agenda and are vehicles of learning. These create networking opportunities and open many doors.

Leadership

Next to networking is development of leadership skills. Many technical people associate it with “management” and shy away from developing key leadership skills like communication, negotiation, influencing, inter-personal skills, business knowledge, building spokespersonship and so on. Take for instance negotiating as a skill. Imagine that you are an individual professional contributor. Why should you learn to negotiate? Tomorrow, your organisation becomes member of a standard body and you have to represent the organisation as a technical expert. You will find yourself needing to negotiate with powerful lobbies that represent a competing viewpoint or a rival standard. Unless you have honed your capability alongside your hacking skills, you will be at a complete loss. Yet, you do not discover your negotiating capability one fine morning. You need to work on it from an early stage. Negotiating for internal resources is becoming another critical need. You can choose to remain an individual professional contributor but from time to time, you have to create mind share in the organisation where resources are limited and claimants are many. Establishing thought leadership is another key requirement of growth and independent of whether I want to be a technical person or grow to be a manager, I need to develop as a leader who can influence others.

Teamwork

Our educational system does not teach us teamwork. If you ever tried to solve your test paper “collaboratively” - it was called copying. You and I spent all our school and college life fiercely competing to get the engineering school and seat of our choice. Then comes the workplace and you suddenly realise that it is not individual brilliance but collective competence that determines excellence. Collaboration is the most important part of our work life. Along with collaboration come issues of forming, norming, storming, performing stages of team life. Capability to create interdependencies, capability to encourage dialogue and dissension, knowledge sharing become critical to professional existence. All this is anti-thesis of what we learn in the formative years of life. Add to it, our social upbringing - our resource-starved system tells us to find ways and means to ensure self-preservation ahead of teamwork. In Japan, the country comes first, the company (read team) comes next and I come last. In India, it is the other way round.

Followership

The best leaders are also great followers. We can be great leaders if we learn and imbibe the values of followership. Everywhere you go - there are courses that teach leadership.

Nowhere you will find a business school teaching you followership. Yet, when solving complex problems in life, we have to embrace what is called “situational leadership”. I have to be comfortable being led by others, I must learn to trust leadership. Many people have issues reporting to a test lead as a developer, or being led by a business analyst or a user interface designer. In different parts of a project life cycle, people of varied competence must lead. I must be comfortable when some one else is under the strobe light. I must have the greatness to be led by people younger than I, people with a different background or a point of view. That is how I learn.

Perspective

This is the hardest to explain. It begins with appreciating why I am doing what I am doing. Quite often, I find people having a very narrow view of their tasks; many do not see the criticality of their task vis-à-vis a larger goal. So, a tester in a project sees his job as testing code or a module designer's worldview begins and ends with the module. He does not appreciate the importance of writing meaningful documentation because he thinks it is not his job or does not realise that five years from now, another person will have to maintain it.

I always tell people about the story of two people who were laying bricks. A passer by asked the first one as to what he was doing. He replied, “I am laying bricks”.
He asked the second one. He replied, “I am building a temple”. This story explains what perspective is and how the resultant attitude and approach to work can be vastly different.

Organisational savvy

As technical people grow up, they often feel unconnected to the larger organisation. Some people develop a knack of exploring it, finding spots of influence, tracking changes, creating networks and in the process they learn how to make the organization work for them. The organisation is not outside of me. If I know it well, I can get it to work for me when I want. Think of the difference between one project manager and another or one technical lead from another.
One person always gets the resources she needs - the other one struggles. One person knows who is getting freed from which client engagement and ahead of time blocks the person. One person reacts to an organisational change and finds himself allocated to a new project as a fait accompli - another person is able to be there ahead of the opportunity. Larger the organisation, higher is the need to develop organisation savvy. It begins with questioning ones knowledge about the larger business dynamic, knowing who does what, tracking the work of other groups, knowing leaders outside of my own sphere and a host of other things. Importantly, it is also about tracking what the competitors of the organization are doing and keeping abreast of directional changes.

Show and tell

This is the bane of most Indian software engineers. We all come from a mindset that says; if you know how to write code, why bother about honing communication skills? Recently, we asked a cross section of international clients on what they think is the number one area of improvement for Indian engineers? They replied in unison, it is communication. Show and tell is about oral and written communication. Some engineers look down upon the need for communication skills and associate it with people who make up for poor programming prowess. It is the greatest misconception. Think of the best chief technology officers of companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM Global Services or Sun. Their number one job is evangelizing.

If they cannot forcefully present their technologies, nothing else will matter. So, every engineer must pay attention to improving the ability to present in front of people, develop the ability to ask questions and handle objections. In a sense, if you cannot sell the technology you create, it has no value. So, building salespersonship is a key requirement for technical excellence.

The foregoing points are not relevant if you have already filed your first patent at the age of eighteen. Everyone else, please take note.

The author is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting.

Defining Success - by Subroto Bagchi

2005-10-30T01:44:00.000-08:00

Pay-package for fresh graduates 2005

2005-10-30T01:37:00.000-08:00

Pay-package for fresh graduates.

Company Pay in LPA

Momentum Technologies 1.44

Patni(PCS) 1.7

Infosys 1.8

TCS 1.8

Tata Elxsi 1.9

Caritor 2

HCL 2

Syntel 2.05

Accenture 2.1

CTS 2.1

Hexaware 2.1

Wipro 2.1

Kanbay 2.25

Satyam 2.25

Virtusa 2.4

IBM 2.5

MBT 2.5

Perot Systems 2.5

Flextronics (HSS) 3

GE 3

Mindtree 3

Verizon 3

Compro Technologies 3.2

Yash Tech 3.25

Amdocs 3.6

Motorola 3.6

Tavant 3.6

FREESCALE 3.9

CISCO 4

SAP Labs 4

Induslogic 4.2

Oracle 4.2

Computer Associates 4.5

Impulsesoft 4.5

STM 4.5

Interra Systems 4.6

Samsung 4.6

Attrenta 4.8

Fiorano 5

Sun Microsystems 5

Kritical 5.6

Adobe 5.7

DE Shaw 6

Deloitte 7

Amazon 7.5

Trilogy 7.5

Microsoft 7.8

T-Mobile 8

Google 12