Recently we launched our Internship Program. We’ve partnered with Amity University and Global Institute of Management and Technology, both having campus in NCR, India. We’ve gotten a great response from both universities as well as students. Our first batch of three MBA students and four MCA students joined us just last week for a 3 month internship period.
I remember my first internship in my final year of Computer Science in a company called Inspiration Software out of Beaverton, OR. I was a QA/Tester intern testing software developed at the company. What I learned there, I still remember and use. I thank them for such a wonderful experience! I hope we can also make a positive impact to the young students who have been selected to intern for us and help guide them in their career of choice.
I know we will gain a lot from them as well. Just in few days of their joining, there’s a new energy in the company. I hope to gain from their free thinking and new ideas. I hope to learn from their perception of our business, our work environment and their insight into the marketplace. And in a way, having the interns here reminds us of our college days and keeps us young and highly motivated!
We just got done doing our exercise of establishing 2010 Goals for the full company. This is a great exercise for every company. If you haven’t done so, I highly recommend it. Each employee in the company now has been given individual, team and company goals that are achievable by them. First the company has to set its goal. What does it want to achieve this year? Where it sees itself going? What is its focus? Some companies have 5 year goals, some even 10-15 years. This is the first time I’ve been able to publish goals for the company, so I’ve limited it to one year goals. I’m planning on having 2nd year goals set by second half of this year. This is a big accomplishment. From being very reactive like we were all of last year (and I’m sure most companies given the uncertainty of the market), to a more focused and organized game plan for this year. It feels good!
The feedback from the staff has been good as well. Most everyone likes to know how they can contribute and what they contribute actually matters.
If you haven’t done your goals yet, here’s a quick how-to:
http://bit.ly/bgrfZy
Now you know why I haven’t posted to my blog for such a long time. I was busy doing objectives and goals.
I’ve had my share of long hours and weird work schedules in the past. But, I must say, nothing beats running a web development and support company out of India. There has been more than one occasion that I’ve gotten way too confused and asked myself “what time, day and date is it anyway?”
I have my own take on what’s needed to run a successful, customer centric support company. Running a company from India on IST time zone has its own advantages and disadvantages. I’m going to list some below:
Advantages of the India Time Zone – There are a few advantages of IST time zone that works well for clients as well as the development team.
- The most obvious one is when it’s daytime in India, it is night in the US. How is that advantageous? Few reasons: - If we have to do a server upgrade or a major application release that can cause disruption to service for a few mins., it’s best practice to do it during off-peak hours, i.e, US daytime. When I was in the US, it was always a big deal to schedule such an update. I needed to make sure the right folks are available during the night time in the US, it was always an inconvenience and we never really could do it at 1am Pacific time, which is ideal from the customer perspective. It was usually 9pm or 10pm PT. This is a non-issue in India due to the natural time zone difference. 1am PT is 1:30pm IST, middle of the workday for us and perfect to carry out such updates and upgrades.
- If managed properly, it’s nice to get the feeling that decisions made on the marketing call at 5pm US time, can actually be completed and ready to review or live at 8am US time the next day. Timelines of projects can actually shrink by more than 50% if a solid execution plan is in place. In the US, I’ve more than once heard that why do clients send us work at 5pm and expect it to be done the same day? The simple reason is that the clients were in a meeting deciding or getting the work approved and it took them to 5pm, but there is an urgency of it to be completed. Such urgency can easily be handled due to the time zone difference.
- Imagine a 16-20 hour product development cycle. With a development team in US and a development team in India, it has been proven that companies can have a 16-20 hour development work day. With good hand-off, execution plan, and proper management this has been a great advantage for companies allowing them to release products sooner.
Disadvantages of the time zone difference – like with many, if not all, things there is a flip side. Here’s a few disadvantages of time zone difference that come to my mind:
- Friday US workday is end of day Friday for India and start of a weekend. Anything that is sent on Friday can only be looked at until Monday IST, potentially losing 3 days. With proper process for escalation, mostly this issue can be handled so clients are not at a disadvantage. Some companies in India also have Saturday as a workday to take care of such gaps as well. Using technology like Blackberry helps most of us connected to make sure we don’t miss important emails.
- Monday workday IST is Sunday night US time. This one is tough and I could have easily put this on the list of advantages, but I chose to put it here instead. Reason being, it should be noted that without proper planning and task assignments, Monday IST can be less productive. It’s important to have all work needed to be done on Monday IST to be assigned on Friday US time.
- Lastly, not being on the same time zone means that any meetings that need to held, at least one party will be meeting late night. Same is true for any real time communication.
I and most of my customers are so used to this working style that these have become a natural way of working together. But once in a while, I am sure they feel the same as I do “what time, day and date is it anyway?”
Do you have an interesting time zone story to share? Feel free to comment.
I had a recent experience where we were supporting a client using VirtueMart, an open source e-commerce shopping cart product. There were issues, things weren’t working. Shipping information was showing up twice, taxes weren’t getting calculated properly and a bunch of layout related issues. But what I discovered leads me to post this thread. As many are core developers, have built code from ground zero, open source offers a very tempting proposition, direct access to code and fix any problems we face.
But before you succumb to this temptation, STOP! Did you just say you were going to edit the core code of a 3rd party software? What if this was not open source software, what would you have done? You would have gone to the knowledge base for that software, done a Google on the issue you were facing to see if others have faced something similar and how they went about resolving it, contacted the software company’s technical support team. If all fails, you would add this as a bug on their tracking system and waited for a patch or workaround.
The way you approach an open source software should be no different, except for the last couple of steps. We don’t have to necessarily wait for a patch or workaround, we can actually code it ourselves and move forward, then post our patch or workaround to the community to benefit from it immediately. But this should be the last step, not the first step. Like most software, many issues can be resolved within the configuration options. Remember that you are using a software application, not building a custom solution from scratch. Evaluate the request from your client and educate them on how it can be done using the software. If they want something custom, then build them something custom, instead of customizing an open source application. Like many things, there needs to be a compromise made so we don’t make the software customized to a point that it can’t be upgraded. It’s easy to customize an open source software, but when it’s time to upgrade it with the latest release, it’ll be more than what you can chew. Happy configuring!
There are many articles written on similar topic, here’s one I felt contained some good Best Practices in Open Source Development.
So I have read a lot of articles on offshore outsourcing, its advantages and disadvantages. There are heated debates now regarding the US companies “shipping” jobs overseas and instead of keeping and creating local jobs. Government is putting pressure on US companies to keep jobs in America and giving them incentives to do so. Conversely, and interestingly, a similar issue exists in India. Indian companies, from the telecom industry executives to Pilots of Indian owned airlines, currently employ foreign nationals or expats. They need the most experienced at the top to guide the company and there is a shortage of people in India with such relevant experience in certain industry segments. Now the Indian government is also putting pressure on Indian companies to not hire expats for these top jobs. Recently, a local newspaper reported that the Indian government is going to put in a rule that for a company to be classified as an Indian company and be eligible for certain benefits, the top executive must be an Indian.
Ok, so what’s wrong with this picture? It is the job of the government to promote local jobs, create jobs, but there is a fine line between that and interfering with a company’s growth and strategic vision. And frankly, the government on both sides is stepping over that line. If this is taken further, it will only yield to lower quality levels, higher prices and lower competition. An analogy would be to say that US must build and provide all things that it needs locally. US is very resourceful but like any country, it does not have enough people, enough materials, enough skills to meet the need and lifestyle its people. Imagine if all the manufacturing jobs were shifted back to America from China. That alone will require millions of people to support it, and then who is going to build software, or do farming or build houses? Where will you get the right skills? and is the product going to be affordable? Com’on. The facts are that we live in an intertwined and interdependent world now. Simplifying this and stating that jobs must remain locally, and think that this will solve the job loss and economic issue is foolish.
The outsourcing market is here to stay. Any growing and competitive company is not going to discount it. The governments around the world need to accept and embrace this and come up with innovative solutions for the 21st century to solve the real issues we all face. The issue is not job ’shipping’ from one place to another; the real issue is that we are not able to create new jobs and learn new skills fast enough. Don’t make offshore outsourcing the scapegoat for the problems today. It needs to be leveraged instead.
I was advised to take up an office space in the industrial zone where all the other hi-tech offices were located to be competitive and to attract good talent. What? no one wants to work in a garage? where’s the fun in this..:) I bit the bullet and spent the money. I got a 2600 sq. ft. space. I called Airtel, the largest telecom provider to make sure there was good Internet connectivity and that they provided broadband at the building. They confirmed. I signed the office lease for 1 year. I submitted the paperwork to Airtel to get my broadband started so I can officially start my operations. They kept saying the connection will happen next week, that it is almost done, then finally, after about 3 weeks of getting the runaround, the Airtel agent finally said that they don’t have connectivity to my office building, and somehow which I don’t know how, he took no responsibility and put it all on me. Boy was I fuming, but I could do nothing. Since broadband was critical to my business, I spent the money to get a dedicated private fiber dropped to my office to make it functional.
Soon I also realized that by getting an office space, all I got was just that, space, empty space! There’s a large power issue here. So in order to do business, one must have a generator unit that can run for hours as the power can go out for 4-12 hours daily. Summer months are the worst due to increase in power demand. Need to have ample Diesel and someone to fill the generator, turn it on and off and maintain it. Secondly, the power fluctuates from 150v-300v so if you hook up your computer to the wall, expect something to burn. One day I was having a meeting with another business owner and the bulb on the ceiling hanging light exploded and shattered glass fell to the ground. Luckily it didn’t hurt either one of us. I’ve fried my Apple MacBook adapter and batteries due to the fluctuation. I now finally have my whole office running on stable UPS batteries with the UPS getting its charge from the city power and generator backup unit.
As soon as other vendors knew that I am starting a new company, I would get daily calls and visits from those who promised to help me with my interiors to computers to any type of services. All sounded genuine and caring, but hardly any of them were. I was like any other business they would go after to get short term gain. Being from the US, I was easy picking. Only through tough experience and due diligence over time I was able to separate the crooks from legit and credible vendors.
Now I look at the past and smile about it. I have a good office space with a sound infrastructure, great talented staff who enjoy their work and get what it means to work for a startup and vendors that I can trust. Amazing learning experiences along the way. Finally I find I have time to attend to what I wanted to do, chase my dream of running a startup. The timing is perfect…smack in the middle of 2008-09 global financial melt-down. Let the fun begin…
After about 22 years being in the US, having studied there from 6th grade till I left college, from my first job to one that lasted 10 years (it was the same job), one fine day me and my wife decided we are going to pack our bags and move to India. What a thrill! I’ve always wanted to start my own company, my wife wanted more time with family who were back in India and we both wanted our son to spend more time with their grandparents. I gave my notice at work; we sold our house and almost all our belongings and moved countries, just carrying 2 suitcases each and our little 1 year old son. It was exciting and scary at the same time.
Since then, it’s been 2 years. Me and my wife have had another son and have hosted our parents many times for long stays with us. I am leading a web development start-up in Delhi/NCR. Our company is called OnSumaye, meaning “on-time”, is around 20 people strong and growing. Getting this far was not an easy venture, but worth it’s weight in gold (that too at today’s prices!).
Once I came to Delhi in 2007, setting up the business was a real challenge. I was, and still am, self funded, had a dream but realized soon enough that hiring talent in India required a brand name, not a dream. The US culture of working for a startup is not yet in India. When I joined my company, a startup in the US, and was one of their first employees, no one had to convince me to work there. It’s a known fact that many have gone out to become very financially sound by working for startups, not to mention the new and challenging work you get to do. But I discovered in India, if you are not a brand name like Google, Intel, IBM and similar, you will not be able to attract good candidates. Secondly, your office location mattered. Is it a tall glass building with all the amenities? Lastly, salary. Those coming to work for me wanted 20%, 30% and sometimes even 40% pay hike from their previous jobs. One guy, during the current “so-called” recession times, came for an interview knowing that his company may lay him off, asked for a 100% pay increase. Can you believe it! Obviously, I didn’t hire him. These types of hikes were unheard of where I came from, but was a common place here. Some cases these were justified as the past salary levels were very low. I soon realized the real meaning of boon time in India. Being now a business owner and that of a small startup, I was looking at things in a different light. I also realize what they mean by emerging market.
