Two days without any internet connectivity due to BSNL cable issues. No internet connectiviy meant no mails, no blogs. Really was a pathetic scenario, and also proved how much iam dependent on the world wide web in my day to day life. If this is not addiction, then what is?
I got this as a forward through email. This is supposed to be written by a Global IT Manager of an MNC in Bangalore. I can't vouch for the source, but the note is worth reading.
Every day for the last four months I have been hiring. I come to office each day, hassle my recruitment team, agencies and consultancies for resumes, perform interviews, negotiate salaries and make offers.
It's amazing to see how people negotiate for salaries and perks, no one asks anything anymore about what the job entails, what they can contribute, or how they can grow and realize their dreams here. It's about pay, and people are eagerly willing to display unbridled stupidity in managing their careers by focusing incessantly on money.
Heck, the time it takes to finalize an offer nowadays, I could send out an offer letter, go have several children, watch them grow, put them through school and then head back to office, the candidate is likely to have finished negotiating his pay and ready to join.
This is all fine and dandy; it's a hyper-inflationary job market. What's disturbing is the not-so-new trend of IT jobs flying out of India. I hear an 850-seater call center has decided to move out of India due to attrition and increasing costs. Hell, my own company has pushed out 100 jobs out of India into Eastern Europe, and I was part of that decision.
We need to wake up and smell the stink of the decay we are creating all around us in the IT job market.
Year-on-year end people here expect nothing less than 30 to 45% salary increases, where as the average salary hike in the US per year is 3% and Eastern Europe is 4%.
I could go on and on about the quality of the flotsam and jetsam that washes on to my desk in response to job ads, but we all know it. Sometimes it takes as many as 40+ interviews to close one position. Sad part? The bozos still think they are worth it.
At this rate IT India better ensure they have transferable skills, because in a couple of years from now they will not have jobs to feed their money-frenzied lifestyles.
Let's do justice to the lessons the dotcom tried to teach us, what goes up must come down.
Blogging will be at a very slow pace for a week or two. My bloglines "to read" items have already reached a very huge number, and Gmail account has lots of mails waiting to be replied. :( Hope to atleast catch up with reading blogs soon!
Was generally browsing and wanted to figure out what Managed Code in the .NET environment was all about. Here are the links that I found interesting. In case you know of some good links that provide more info, please feel free to leave the links in the comments.
Today at the Sathyam Cinema Multiplex in Chennai, India will enter the world of digital cinema or DLP CinemaTM, with the premiere of the final part of the "Star Wars" saga - Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith. For the uninitiated, DLP is a Texas Instruments Technology. Visit TI's site on DLP for more info.
Napster's Response To Yahoo? Sit And Stare, Dumbfounded.
When you can't even admit who your real competitors are, it certainly makes it difficult to respond when they cut your business model out from under you.
Aww. This sucks. Iam trying to figure how different these are from pop-up ads on websites. Now every browser in the planet has an option to block pop-ups. Wonder how long before RSS readers start providing an option to block the ads in RSS feeds as well.
Primate programming Inc. Funny :)
Oreilly Radar on How to roll out an Open API. Interesting Read!
Proposition from an Indian ad-clicking syndicate! Never knew click-fraud was so well planned out!
We met up at Barista/Koshy's on St. Mark's Rd. We had a great time at both places. Nice to meet up with so many high enthu people! Here goes the list of folks who were present. Adel, Aditya, Ambarish, Anand, Arnab, Kiruba, Kishore, Madhu, Muthu, Prabhu, Rahul, Sam, Shubh, Sathish, Suman, Shyam, Venkat and of course, me. Really looking forward to meeting you folks more often! One interesting statistic was that out of the 17 or so bloggers who attended, around 11 were us Tamilians!
As i had forgotten to pick up my Canon, i had to settle with my cellphone for these pictures. So most photos are of not-so-great resolution! In case you want to look at slightly bigger photos, you can do so at my Flickr Page
Long Tail vs. Bottom of Pyramid
Today's Hindu Sunday Magazine on The Train to Pakistan. Really Painful!
High-Dimensional Spaces Are Counterintuitive. Part One, Two
Blogs and social networks and wikis, oh my! - Interesting!
I have been using Notepad2 for a while now, and I really love it. I have never been a fan of bloated up and fancy IDEs, and so this should come as no big surprise. Notepad2 is very lightweight, has syntax highlighting for all languages I use, and has excellent keyboard shortcuts for most of the editing functionality. The only thing i miss sorely is the lack of tabs for editing multiple files at a time. Luckily Notepad2 is open source and is licensed under the GPL, and so i guess i can just add this missing tidbit. Let's see when i manage to find some time for this!
Hiring is obsolete - Full essay
This chilli is so hot, you'd have to drink 250,000 gallons of water just to put out the fire
Folders That Now Seem So Yesterday May Be Very Handy Tomorrow - A viewpoint. But the author doesn't spell out why he feels folders may be very handy. So an argument which I can't buy!
Under this program startups can license technologies developed by Microsoft's research labs and product development teams. A few technology areas also have been mentioned.
BusinessWeek has published an interview with Watts Humphrey, in which he talks about why companies should be moving up to TSP/PSP from CMM. Watts Humphrey was in TI India during March 2005 when he gave a talk on these topics and other related topics.
Philips has reorganized its semiconductor business to get a market-focussed organization. The changes include the creation of an Automotive and Identification business unit. The other business units are Mobile and Personal, Home and Multi-Market semiconductors. So we are clearly seeing a renewed focus on automotive from the semiconductor companies. Nice.
Scoble pointed to Dori Smith's utterances on Microsoft being boring. I liked the following statement in the blog post.
The fact of this business is that disruptive technologies happen, whether you like them to or not. If you create them yourself, you've got some control over how/when it happens. If you refuse to create them yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself when you become obsolete. It's the difference between good products and great products.
Scott Granneman has posted a list of reviews for Firefox and Thunderbird books
Gates' sights set on automobiles with his gizmos
Might there be an SP3 before Longhorn?
Microsoft learns to crawl - The Story of MSN search!
Rajdeep Sardesai is no longer with NDTV !
TI has kicked off its 75th anniversary celebration with a website focussed on the company's history, innovative creations and evolution.
Video conferencing gets quantum security - Scientists from Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory unveiled an invention, which is capable of generating 100 quantum 'keys' every second. This is fast enough for every individual frame of video to be protected by its own encryption. "This makes the system highly secure," says Andrew Shields, who leads the Cambridge team. "It would take an enormous computational resource to crack this frame by frame."
Opening my blog page in IE seems to come up with a dialog box similar to the one below. Iam not sure why IE doesn't think my blog home page is a html file. The second time you open the page, it seems to work fine. Weird!
As life has been a bit hectic both in and out of office, iam still trying to catch up with reading blogs, news, mail etc, etc etc... Expecting return to normalcy in a week or so.