Attrition

Looking at IT industry in Bangalore, one would say that the employee attrition rate is crazy.  You see so many people switching jobs every now and then, causing serious concerns for the management.  Large organizations maintain bench (or beach – additional resources than required) to solve part of the problem (of course, not solely to address this problem alone).  But can this additional cost be avoided?  Can we build that trust between employer and employee?  Can we avoid conflicts and arrive at an agreeable resolution with in the industry? 

 

I remember sometime back, when the situation was worse in the BPO industry, organizations signed *treaties* not to poach people from neighbors.  Of course, it was of very little effect as practical implementation of the same was very hard.  Employee turn over is definitely the symptom.  What is the cause?

 

Now, is a lack of employee turnover cause for celebration? 

 

I read an article recently which questioned lack of employee turn over.  And I found interesting answers too.  It is true that when people asked what they like about their jobs, they give politically correct answers – which *you* want to hear.  But some reasons could be:

 

• Business is down and other companies are not hiring.
• Your employees have skills so specific that there are few companies that require them.
• The current pay level has reached a point that other companies would be hard pressed to meet it.
• The compensation is level throughout the industry, making it impossible to switch jobs for more pay.

 

This is very interesting argument.  I think it’s more painful for the employer to have people around – who want desperately to move on, but can’t – for whatever reasons.  While all of us can discuss the reasons, I agree with Tana that it’s not those *reasons* we need to look at, but the *people*.  How can we address this?

The Magic of Making Mistakes

A good article by Robert Kiyosaki, the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad”.  What I like about his approach is that I am able to draw parallels between his ideas and, not surprisingly, agile development.

 

Just read the article and ask yourself a question:  don’t you do similar things in agile?

 

(from http://www.richdad.com/pages/article_mistakes.asp)  

 

My real dad came from the world of academics, a world where mistakes are perceived as bad and to be avoided. My rich dad came from the streets. To him, mistakes were opportunities to learn something new, something he did not know before.

Street Smart Versus School Smart
My rich dad was very successful financially for many reasons. At the top of the list was his attitude towards making mistakes. Like most of us, he hated making them, yet he was not afraid of making them.

Each time he made a mistake, instead of being depressed, he often seemed happier, wiser, more determined, and often richer from the experience. He would say to his son and me, "Mistakes are how we learn. Every time I make a mistake, I always learn something about myself, I learn something new, and I often meet new people I would never have met."

As I watched my real dad struggle financially and professionally, my rich dad said, "To be successful in the real world of business, you have to be school smart as well as street smart. In school, you're given the lesson first. On the street, you're given the mistake first and then it's up to you to find the lesson. Since most people have not been taught how to make mistakes and learn from them, they either avoid mistakes altogether, which is a bigger mistake, or they make a mistake but fail to find the lesson from the mistake. That is why you see so many people making the same mistake over and over again." Rich Dad said, "I am so rich because I've made more financial mistakes than most people. Each time I made a mistake, I learned something new. In the business world, that something new is often called 'experience.' But experience is not enough. If a person truly learns from a mistake, his or her life changes forever, and what that person gains instead of experience is 'wisdom.'"

The Art of Making a Mistake
Rich Dad taught us the art of making a mistake and gaining wisdom from it. "The first thing that happens after you make a mistake is that you become upset. At this point of upset, you find out who you really are," he said, going on to describe the cast of characters who are brought to center stage when upsets from mistakes occur:
1. The Liar. "I didn't do that."
2. The Blamer. "It's your fault, not mine."
3. The Justifier. "Well, I don't have a good education so that is why I don't get ahead."
4. The Quitter. "I told you that it would never work."
5. The Denier. "No, there is nothing wrong. Things are fine."

Rich Dad said, "If you want to learn and gain wisdom from this priceless mistake, you have to let 'The Responsible You' eventually take control of your thinking."

Mental Attitude Quiz
1. What are your attitudes to risk, making mistakes, and learning?
2. What are the attitudes of the people around you to risk, making mistakes, and learning?
3. Are there still some financial, professional, or business upsets that remain unresolved?
4. Are you still angry with some one else in regards to money?
5. And if you are upset with someone else or yourself, what lesson can you learn and be grateful for being courageous enough to have taken a risk and maybe learned something?

Agile Mumbai Rocks

*Cool*

 

That’s the four letter word  I use to describe Mumbai Conference. 

 

The conference attracted interested minds in the Mumbai region to look at this *new* thing called as agile.  Though the turn out was not as expected, I still think it’s a great beginning.  We started creating awareness in users.

 

Great things happened over last few days.  Certainly I would post all the details in multiple posts.  This post, I dedicate to the great team work that made this conference such a hit.

 

I reached Mumbai on Friday, one day before the conference starts, just to offer my hand in arrangements.  As I witnessed, the success of the conference can be attributed to few people: Naresh Jain, Dhaval Dalal and the SP College enthusiastic students.  There may be many others who are involved, but I saw these guys live on the floor.  In spite of their busy schedules, and other commitments, these guys dedicated almost a whole week to this event, mostly working 12-14 hours a day.  I appreciate these boys from the bottom of my heart.

 

User conferences like this can *only* be successful if they are run by committed souls like these.  If you need a yard stick to measure the success of the event, talk to people who came from Chandigarh and New Delhi.  They are so fired up that we are asked to conduct similar events in their cities too.

 

I would also like to appreciate numerous other users and organizations, who contributed in various ways to see this conference as a successful event.  Great job guys, Keep it Up!!

 

Agile is here to stay.

 

(read more about it on my blog: http://nandury.blogspot.com/)

Enough space to bury myself :-)

What do you do with 1 terabyte storage on your hard disk?

 

Dump all the movies in the world?!!

 

Hitachi came up with world’s first Terabyte DVD recorder which can hold up to 128 hours of high definition television recording.  I started thinking of possible things we can do with that space (in the home user segment)…

 

• Record entire series of saus-bahu soaps
• Put ALL mp3s ever available in the world
• Pictures (can you make it up in you life?)
• Start home-video production and dump all those videos
• Movie editing and stuff (Movie DJ?)
• Anything else!!!

 

Hiring Blues

I am currently in the last phase of hectic hiring activity.  It is so sad to see so many young people, with absolutely no idea of what they want to do in future.  Not just that, even their attitude troubles me a lot.  I have seen very few people who check credentials of the company before they come to meet us.  98% come into the interview room without any idea what we do.  All they need is a JOB.  It does not matter whoever gives it to them.  "Gimme My Job!!" attitude.  I feel sorry for these guys.  They are coming here to earn a good fortune of their life time, at least for the next few years, and they don't care. 

Usually that's my first question, and people answer -- "Sorry, I didn't have time.  I was too busy with my project". 

Dude! you did not come here to hang out with your friends.  You have come here to make an important move in your career.  Don't you think you should be a bit more careful, do some homework before you show up?

Shortcomings in GDS Outlook Plug-in

After a couple of searches using the Google outlook plug-in, I realized its not that great.  Sure, it brings to you ALL the information in the mails (related to your search), but it has the following shortcomings:

1.  It has no clue if the content is deleted or moved to other places.  It displays the content, though.

2.  It does not allow to give search criteria, its just a vanilla search

3.  And the interface is not great too.

blah blah blah …

Hope it improves in future

 

Cool GDS v2

Just installed Google Desktop v2.0. (http://desktop.google.com/index.html)

 

I think it’s cool.  I liked the Side Bar idea.  Of course, there have been many applications till now that served as side bars with various applications embedded in.  But I liked this one because it has active content in it.  It has an RSS feed reader, a quick TODO pad, a scratch pad etc.  Of course, I can’t use the weather bar, as it still does not show me Bangalore weather.  Or the news bars, as the news is mostly related to the western world.

 

The best thing I liked about it is the Outlook search bar plug-in.  All these days, I have just been using GDS to search my mails.  I realized Outlook built in search is such a time wasting effort.  I found it most of the times to act dumb, and miss the content I am looking for.  It never happened with the GDS.  It picked up exactly what I was looking for, and that too at a lightening speed.  That’s the primary purpose I use GDS for.  And I felt so happy to see the latest version to come up with a special plug-in for outlook.  I hope the experience gets better.

Staganography

I came across a new word today – Steganography. I wondered what it means, and started looking for more information. And this is what I learnt.

“”Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the meaning is obscured. The name comes from Johannes Trithemius's Steganographia: a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on black magic, and is Greek ("στεγανογραφία") for "hidden writing." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Steganography has a very ancient origin. I read a story of a message tattooed on a slave’s shaved head, covered by his hair re-growth, and exposed by re-shaving. It was also used by various secret agents, during and post-World War.

I realized there is a great benefit of Steganography in the modern times. This technique can be used to watermark the images – unknowingly. You would not be able to see the watermark unless you run the image through a program. You know the origin of the picture. It can be applied to pictures posted on the internet etc.

I came across another, rather, abuse of this technique.

Flickr is a great photo-blogging site. A pro account gives you unlimited data storage. But all you can store is pictures. Nothing else. People started experimenting with the steganographic techniques to store all kinds of data, under the cover of a jpg file in their flickr accounts. As data storage does not have any limit, it can work as a ‘virtual online backup’. Of course, people would notice the abnormal size of the pictures etc, but I leant that currently the website does not restrict uploading such files. What happens if everyone wants to use these sites as virtual backup sites? Do the websites know about it? Are they willingly allowing it initially so that they can become popular?

Leaving these questions for the websites, I think steganography is a great idea. I think Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code”’s anagrams can be termed as steganographic too. Fun.

Wonderful story on pipline income

I have always been interested in domains that allow people to strech their abilities to reach their financial freedom. I have been reading the likes of "Rich Dad Poor Dad" series (by Robert Kiyosaki) a bit seriously. I realized how powerful the message is in those books, but only for the people who looked for it. I came across a great story on building a pipline income vs bucket income. I tried linking the presentation I have, and could not find a way to do it on blogger. Please bear with me while I figure out how to do it. I just cant resist publishing this post even before I figured out how to export files and put them on blog. Sure, the content is so cool.

PipelineParable

Blog Writing Style

Some nice tips that I liked....

by Molly Holzschlag and Darren Barefoot

· Content

o Blogs lend themselves to quick writing and shorter posts

o Understand the blogging environment by reading for a while before you write

o Companies don't blog - people blog. Passionate ones make the best bloggers.

o Blogging is about telling a story, and extending that story into a conversation

o Having a voice and a personality is critical. Boring or bored people aren't engaging.

o Blogging is an act of courage, because you are putting things out in the public that never were before

o Define the audience, offer public feedback mechanisms and listen to them

o Cite other blogs, you can't do this enough

· Editing

o Edit your materials before you post, but don't let your own editing censor your voice

o Resisting the temptation to push "Publish" too soon can be helpful

o Corrections are best handled with strikethrough text on the error. "Update:" at the end of the post works well too

o Editing too many times can irritate people because subscribers to your web feed see it as a new post each time you update

o Don't excerpt email discussions unless you have the person's approval

Bottom line: be transparent, be authentic, tell your story

Love

Love is such a beautiful feeling. Love makes things happen. When you are in love, you see a different world -- where you dont find the usual flaws, and everything around you is so elegant. You start appreciating the GOD's creation. It happened to me and I am still living it. I dont think I can express how it is to be in love or being loved-- it is beyond expression. One has to live it to understand it.

I read some where ...

I feel you...
in every stone
in every leaf of every tree
you've ever grown [that you ever might have grown]
    I feel you...
    in every thing
    in every river that might flow
    in every seed you might have sown
I feel you...
in every vein
in every beating of my heart
each breath I take [in every breath i'll ever take]
    I feel you...
    anyway...
    in every tear that i might shed
    in every word i've never said

What a beautiful thing it is to be in love, and being loved!!

GOD, when Love is the definete cure for all the challenges we have in world, why didn't you "install" a "love-OS (operating system)" in every human being?

Quick tip for driving traffic to your blog

I really liked this idea.  It’s again about collaborating.  Cathleen Moore shared a quick tip from the Blog Business Summit (posted at http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/003764.html

)

“One gem of wisdom (among many) shared is that bloggers should be active blog discussion participants. Driving traffic to your blog often occurs as a result of contributing to someone else's blog.  The process of finding what to write about can lead you to other blog sites that you can contribute to, and that is the one of the biggest drivers of traffic to your own blog.  Being involved in other people's blogs is the best way to drive traffic to your own blog.  Spend time on someone else's blog; add comments.   According to Scoble, it's all about getting on the radar screen of other influential bloggers.  "When I am in the comments of other people's blogs, they see it and appreciate what you have to say. You are on their radar screen," he said.”

Isn’t this a smart (wonderful) way of give-n-take?  You contribute first, and others follow you.  It boils down to the same principles of community collaboration.  Of course you do have the “selfish” motive behind the idea, but who doesn’t want to be famous? :p

The Little Things

I usually get spam mails (jokes and stuff) from friends that go to trash can with lightening speed.  But this one, made me think.  I really liked this approach to POSITIVE thinking.  See if you like it.

 

 

The 'L I T T L E' Things

 

As you might know, the head of a company survived 9/11 because his son started kindergarten.

Another fellow was alive because it was his turn to bring donuts.

One woman was late because her alarm clock didn't go off in time.

One was late because of being stuck on the NJ Turnpike because of an auto accident.

One of them missed his bus.

One spilled food on her clothes and had to take time to change.

One's car wouldn't start.

One went back to answer the telephone.

One had a child that dawdled and didn't get ready as soon as he should have.

One couldn't get a taxi.

 

The one that struck me was

 

The man who put on a new pair of shoes that morning, took the various means to get to work

But before he got there, he developed a blister on his foot.

He stopped at a drugstore!

To buy a Band-Aid.

That is why he is alive today.

 

Now when I am

 

Stuck in traffic,

Miss an elevator,

Turn back to answer a ringing telephone...

All the little things that annoy me.

 

I think to myself, this is exactly where God wants me to be at this very moment..

 

Next time your morning seems to be going wrong,

The children are slow getting dressed

You can't seem to find the car keys,

You hit every traffic light,

Don't get mad or frustrated;

 

God is at work watching over you.

May God continue to bless you with all those annoying little things

And may you remember their possible purpose.

IE and Fire Fox

Images on websites were displayed distortedly ever since I started using my brand new Dell D610 Lattitude. I thought it was a problem with the OS. And I started looking for help in this direction. But after installing Fire Fox, I realized it's do with the browser settings. I still can't figure out what was wrong with my IE as it was up-to-date, latest version, with all possible upgrades. Not only the image was distorted, also they lay out of the site were screwed up for certain sites.

I have enclosed screen shots of both the browser windows. Anyone knows what's wrong?

Image with Internet Explorer. You can see image distortion, and even the lay out is screwed up.

Image with Fire Fox. Perfect.

Collaboration Rules

I read an interesting article, Collaboration Rules in Harvard Business Review that draws parellel between collaboration techniques of open-source software development and Toyota production. Philip Evan and Bob Wolf authored the article, and they brought up very interesting similarities found in collaborative efforts, irrespective of their domain.

Building vibrant human networks has always been my dream. A network that is self-organized, completely sold-out to do something that they have passion in, and enjoy success as a group. I agree with the authors that three things are critical factors of success for these groups;
a) a common work descipline,
b) widespread granular communication and
c) leaders-by-example as connectors.

What strikes me the most in the article is the level of trust these teams share. It is surprising for me to learn that when a fire broke out in the factory of a supplier of components (of Toyota), they trusted their rival suppliers with critical blue prints (to make sure Toyota does not suffer because of the accident). And yes, this is the same kind of trust shared by open-source community, too.

What if we, in the regular software development industry, can build the same amount of trust in our teams? Wouldn't that radically improve productivity of the individuals and the teams? Shouldn't that be THE natural way to build the teams? How do we achieve this?

Let's try something new

I have always been the greatest fan of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Though I heard rants from geeks about its performance, it never gave me problems. I was fine with it. Though I used other browsers like opera and mozilla, that was for a very very short time. IE dragged me back into it's lap. And I felt OK.

Things have changed. Technology has improved. New tools arrived. Enthusiam for experimentation never died, and with all my recent assignments, it is headed for a smooth-north-bound-cruise :-) And I installed FireFox.

My first reaction, "Cool". First of all, I liked the real estate of the browser window (compared to the ever-crowded-IE). Google search integration is just great, I think. It not only saves space (I don't need to have a 'seperate google search bar' that used to clutter the browser), but also so convenient as it points to other search engines as well.

I liked the live book mark feature too. Of late, I have become an ardant fan of RSS feeds. I tried different ways of synchronizing the content, and finally settled with the Outlook plugin -- attensa (this also used to show on the IE toolbar -- too many buttons there). Adding RSS feeds now is so easy in Firefox. Great.

I think now I am going to continue with this newbie for the fore-seeable future :-)