Indian IT Industry

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 May 2009 01:36

Actually in Google HQ they have been reduced big time since 2008. I never get this definition of a good work place being one where you have mounds of food.

The mounds of free food are there to keep employees in the office instead of their homes, as zimble as that!

At best it is going to cause weight problems and eating binges and at worst it will keep you stuck to your office. I said this before and I said this now...the Google culture is suitable for people who love to work, have little life or interests outside work and have no family/GHQ/SHQ to go back home to....if you look at your avg. Google engineer he/she is a yuppy all the way from buying onlee organic produce@Whole Foods to drinking Odwala juices

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 May 2009 09:12

a certain age band of MS/Phd/BS grads is what they are targeting. doing everything to keep them in workplace and not pursueing other interests away from work. I think the "collegial" mode would appeal to this band, but portly senior people would get a wee bit left out from all the "stud activities"

maybe the rules have changed? maybe you no more need portly senior people to become a world beating product/services co ? maybe all u need is a constant pipeline of hungry MS grads from the best univs armed with the latest tools & ideas from academia and lots of willingness to work long hours? I believe they have also sucked up a lot phd types for their research arm - paying handsomely over academia or other cos perhaps.

who knows...time will tell.

most other cos tend to have a mix of age groups and employees are not so keen on
"living in" @ the workplace.

one thing is goog tend to have a lot more women in the workplace if what I see
in pix are their dev/test grps ? netzilla's facility in MA had like 3 in a 500 person 1 mil sq ft cavernous building-1.

vina · Post by **vina** » 21 May 2009 09:51

Raja Bose wrote:.the Google culture is suitable for people who love to work, have little life or interests outside work and have no family/GHQ/SHQ to go back home to...

In short Google is an Investment Bank for technology ?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 May 2009 10:09

without the 300% cash bonuses every good year

a huge diff between "paying" in stock and cold hard rupiah

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 May 2009 11:01

Singha wrote:I think the "collegial" mode would appeal to this band, but portly senior people would get a wee bit left out from all the "stud activities"

Exactly! As usual Singha saar sees what others do not see

maybe the rules have changed? maybe you no more need portly senior people to become a world beating product/services co ? maybe all u need is a constant pipeline of hungry MS grads from the best univs armed with the latest tools & ideas from academia and lots of willingness to work long hours? I believe they have also sucked up a lot phd types for their research arm - paying handsomely over academia or other cos perhaps.

who knows...time will tell.

You can beat maturity and experience with brashness. In the long run you will suffer. Right now Google's position in the industry is like USA's position in world history in the 1980s. They both think they are exceptional and superior beyond imagination yet they forget that unlike MSFT (India) they don't have a long enough history of existence to know the other (darker) side of fortune. Hence, time will definitely tell.

one thing is goog tend to have a lot more women in the workplace if what I see
in pix are their dev/test grps ? netzilla's facility in MA had like 3 in a 500 person 1 mil sq ft cavernous building-1.

Yeah they have plenty o' fair sex but then large fraction are non-males too!

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 May 2009 11:25

I thought non-males == fair sex

why the but then ?

sum · Post by **sum** » 21 May 2009 11:26

The mounds of free food are there to keep employees in the office instead of their homes, as zimble as that!

amazing,....never thought of it this way.

Pearls of wisdom like these keep a SDRE IT-vity like me hooked to BR.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 May 2009 11:30

Singha wrote:I thought non-males == fair sex why the but then ?

umm....it is a term which originated from IIT iirc...non-males = entities who are not males but also don't have the desirable qualities expected by a male to be attracted to a female.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 May 2009 11:35

oh ok. usually manchester too. very tough, competitive, ambitious, dismissive of boys they dont perceive as superior in marks/smartness to themselves, eager to suck up to powerful seniors and destined-to-be-ibanker types in college, usually end up not getting married at all.

I have known my share. god knows more than my fair share.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 May 2009 11:35

Singha wrote:I believe they have also sucked up a lot phd types for their research arm - paying handsomely over academia or other cos perhaps.

Google has a research arm but it is not like the other corporate research labs which are full fledged industrial research units in their own right (and are separate business units). Google Research is strictly a chi-chi place with only top dogs part of it such as Ghemawat, Vint Cerf ityadi...no dogs and fresh chaddi MIT PhD allowed inside saar!

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 May 2009 11:38

do these top dogs get their hands dirty or are kept for branding, speaking assignments and other chi-chi wine and canape industry-academia get togethers?

experience tells me very few big dogs want to work the brutal hrs that true r&d
entails. such seniors in academia usually have a crowding of MS/Phd students to
brutally exploit

below every top dog are a pyramid of 'corpses' of half-dead phd students and non tenured faculty

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 May 2009 11:39

I almost hooked up with one such dame. For some screwed up reason she always billed herself as a chi-chi "engineer patriot" and was always dashing off to this WKK meeting or that WKK fund raiser. But when I asked her why didnt she show her patriotism by donating to Army Welfare/PRC etc., she turned up her nose and said she didnt believe in war-like organizations!

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 May 2009 11:41

for reasons beyond comprehension ALL the wimmin in PU, btech, mtech within mlrs range from me were of that type. at most "good to be friends with" but definitely not wife material.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 May 2009 11:42

Singha wrote:do these top dogs get their hands dirty or are kept for branding, speaking assignments and other chi-chi wine and canape industry-academia get togethers?

Yes. Their hiring is mainly to use top dog's face, contacts and pahunch and in a perverse way also show that we have so much money, we can buy whoever we want

Most of the world's important discoveries and inventions are a result of heartbreaking toil by the humble, they are never the result of Eureka moments of some designated geniuses.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 21 May 2009 11:44

I dropped that dame faster than Amritraj jammed his poker up Gola's Musharraf after 9/11.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 21 May 2009 14:39

maybe its the rigor of hard study and somewhat of malnourishment but quite a few of these people turn out somewhat androgynous due to lack of oestrogen(?) looking more like beautiful boys rather than beautiful girls (if they have good features).

but whatever the superficial skin or physical weakness, underneath the velvet glove is a steel fist and a iron determination to do ejatly what it is they want to do.

its impossible to convince such a determined person to change course in any way,
just as gandhism is abject failure vs a pakmentality.

Ameet · Post by **Ameet** » 21 May 2009 22:28

Infosys to hire 1000 in US

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage ... e73669e416

Indian software firm Infosys plans to hire about 1,000 people in the US in the next 12 to 18 months amid a gloomy job market.

Already, 14,000 of the company's 1,04,000 employees are based in the US.

CalvinH · Post by **CalvinH** » 23 May 2009 05:16

^^ mostly sales and customer facing roles. Also mostly USC (read Gora). Same would be followed soon by all other Indian IT service companies.

got to give it to them. Salaries of top layer are nearly doubled whereas the increment to salaries of people in trenches facing the bullet is frozen. That too when the company is sitting on 2bn USD of cash and is generating 250 Million cash per quarter (??).

They are no overhauling the whole organizations structure in terms of roles, streams and designations. Best time to do it IMO.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 23 May 2009 06:12

anecdote from netzilla hq based on a recent visit.

last year it was overflowing with people, you couldnt stand in the hallway without being run over, finding a conf room was very hard.

today there are apparently few 100 cubes empty all over the place, hallways are empty, no queues at lunch counters ....

I think reason is they have pushed out 100s of vendor contractors back to their parent co facilities to reduce support and infra costs. lots of derelict looking cubes that
havent even been cleaned up properly.

however since the cubes havent been defragmented, large groups destined to move in shortly are still being redirected to nearby leased facilities. managers rooms looked quiet, no hallway conversations and walking tour of the trenches to boost morale.

no expats and mba mkting types seen! last year they were everywhere.

also in terms of top heaviness - it seems there are 2500 people at director+ level.
this in a co of 60k people and even allowing for the small size of sales teams.
thats not too good imho.

Akshut · Post by **Akshut** » 25 May 2009 19:13

Watched NASSCOM chief's interview on BBC yesterday. He was very sceptical about Indian IT future if something is not done fast about the skilled labour shortage. He quoted the efficiency of the Chinese system and said that the biggest threat to Indian IT will be the Chinese. He said that by 2012, China will teach 5 million of it's graduates to be ready to work in "10 Bangalores of China".

.
Still many Indian CEOs will gloat in Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai theorem:-"They do the hardware, we do the software". Bullshit. They will take away whatever some people's hard-work made possible. And our netajis, babujis, policy-waalajis and janta will just wonder what happened.

markos · Post by **markos** » 25 May 2009 22:18

Akshut wrote:Watched NASSCOM chief's interview on BBC yesterday. He was very sceptical about Indian IT future if something is not done fast about the skilled labour shortage. He quoted the efficiency of the Chinese system and said that the biggest threat to Indian IT will be the Chinese. He said that by 2012, China will teach 5 million of it's graduates to be ready to work in "10 Bangalores of China".

If Chinese provide cheaper services, they will replace indian teachies, just like Indian programmers replaced more "expensive" americans. I bet companies like Infosys, TCS etc. will layoff employees in India and go to china just like IBM did.

Now Satyam is ready to layoff around 8000 "non-billable" staff. Looks like that is close to 20% of the head-count of legacy Satyam.

http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Sa ... /1#pstcmnt

Satyam Computer Services, which is now backed by Tech Mahindra is all set to sack 7500 to 8000 'non-billing' staff from June. Tech Mahindra is opting for such a cost cutting measure to control the falling revenues in the company.

Vineet Nayyar, CEO of Tech Mahindra had said last week that Satyam has about 10,000 surplus staff and "we are looking at the least painful ways to tackle the problem." The 'least painful' ways of sacking is asking the bench, non-billable and support staff to go.

vera_k · Post by **vera_k** » 25 May 2009 23:48

Akshut wrote:Watched NASSCOM chief's interview on BBC yesterday. He was very sceptical about Indian IT future if something is not done fast about the skilled labour shortage.

Depends on what he means when he says "skilled labour". India will not have enough MTech/MS and PHd graduates to compete with Western or Chinese numbers at least for another generation and will lag in technology intensive industries.

Akshut · Post by **Akshut** » 26 May 2009 14:11

vera_k wrote:
Akshut wrote:Watched NASSCOM chief's interview on BBC yesterday. He was very sceptical about Indian IT future if something is not done fast about the skilled labour shortage.
Depends on what he means when he says "skilled labour". India will not have enough MTech/MS and PHd graduates to compete with Western or Chinese numbers at least for another generation and will lag in technology intensive industries.

I am a CSE student. I know what he means. We are still being taught only about the 8085-processor when we should be studying Quad-Core. Practical classes are all about practical files only. No knowledge of how to make something work, how it works, and for what. That is an unskilled labour. For that reason IT companies have to spend 6-8 months and millions of rupees teaching these students the technicalities which they will face, and which are NOT taught in the Univ./College.
.
Infosys already have staff in China. And in this manner it will increase only. RIP Bangalooru.

derkonig · Post by **derkonig** » 26 May 2009 14:51

^^^
Whoa dude, don't diss the 8085. I thought the same way when we learnt microprocessors back in my B.Tech days. But, then I realized that engg. or for that matter college education in general is about getting your basics right. If you need to learn things in detail, don't expect the college to teach you, you gotta learn it yourself.
In fact I am pretty sure no UG engg course in the world teaches you about quad core, some whisy washy theory at best may be.

Cos. today have made it fashionable to crib about lack of skills in students, but tell me honestly what are these skills they talk about? Is it about learning 5 new computer languages or knowing 3 different s/w packages? Are those skills? If that is the way cos. think, they are doomed. I once worked with a top-3 s/w product co. & there one is hardly ever sent for learning tech skills. You gotta learn all of that yourselves. In fact while the co. runs a large & very profitable training programme for s/w professionals, we as employees were neither encouraged to take those courses, nor were we ever reimbursed for those courses in spite of being employees of that co. More importantly, I never heard the co. crib about employee skills.Yes, one may may be sent to that one off soft-skill-team-building stuff, but that was it. You need skills, you learn them, that was the prevailing atmosphere.

From what I understand about the s/w industry, I can say with confidence that while the chicoms will huff & puff & put up with 'we have caught by with India olnee' shakinaw show, they cannot catch up with us. I had the misfortune of working with some very experienced 'architect' level TFTA chicom MS/PhD types at that office & trust me, forget coding, they haven't even figured out their engrish right. Heck, one would need a rosetta stone around to communicate with them. So much for chicom gleat leap forward in IT. And Chicom land doesn't exactly qualify for cost savings wrt Yindia unless the cos. open up shop in the Gobi. Also the workers' paladise (slave labour complete with whip yielding PLA slaveship commanders) chicom model doesn't excatly work well for IT industry.
So relax, B'lore will not get upstaged by chicoms.

Akshut · Post by **Akshut** » 26 May 2009 15:45

^^^^
Well about the Angrezi, NASSCOM chief said that they are teaching 5 million graduates in English.
.
But what is more worrying is the lax attitude of the countrymen. We should be challenging Chinese in hardware industry, but we are being threatened in Software onlee.

manish · Post by **manish** » 26 May 2009 15:49

Akshut wrote:I am a CSE student. I know what he means. We are still being taught only about the 8085-processor when we should be studying Quad-Core. Practical classes are all about practical files only. No knowledge of how to make something work, how it works, and for what. That is an unskilled labour. For that reason IT companies have to spend 6-8 months and millions of rupees teaching these students the technicalities which they will face, and which are NOT taught in the Univ./College.
.
Infosys already have staff in China. And in this manner it will increase only. RIP Bangalooru.

Akshut, 8085 was my favourite part of the curriculum as far as microprocessor/microcontroller subjects went. You see, till then I had only heard jokes about how tech geeks spoke hex - I got to experience it first hand with the 246(?) instructions that make up the 8085 instruction set - it sure gave me a rush

Anyway, I don't know that much about what colleges should be teaching regarding microprocessors and stuff, I will leave it to the many industry folk who frequent this very thread. We have representation from most of the top chipmakers/semicon firms right here on BRF.

But I would like to add something about China and Infy sending jobs over there. To the best of my knowledge, infy (and TCS, Satyam etc) all have offices in China because they are trying to target the markets that are culturally and geographically close to China. They are in the IT services segment, and many here would tell you that local knowledge and 'boots on the ground' would come in handy in that line of work. IMHO, the RIP 'Bangalooru'

might be a bit premature. If Infy and TCS have gone there, Huawei and ZTE have come here and set up R&D centres here. It is not all one way. Huawei, for example, has outsourced work in the past (and still continues to)to Indian tech firms like Infy, Satyam, Cognizant etc from their India R&D centre.

It is not all lost yet. However, the basic tenet of your argument that curricula should continuously be updated to reflect the industry requirements holds true, but it may not perhaps mean changing the syllabus everytime a new processor model turns up on the market. And without learning the rickety old 8085, how will one study the multicore monsters?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 26 May 2009 16:05

I am a CSE student. I know what he means. We are still being taught only about the 8085-processor when we should be studying Quad-Core

manish · Post by **manish** » 26 May 2009 16:14

Singha wrote:I am a CSE student. I know what he means. We are still being taught only about the 8085-processor when we should be studying Quad-Core

GD saar, I knew it was only a matter of time...

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 26 May 2009 17:08

nobody should be demanding to study multi core until they have mastered both of henessey & patterson textbooks imho.

single core is tough enough when one gets down to it.

Akshut · Post by **Akshut** » 26 May 2009 19:38

manish wrote: but it may not perhaps mean changing the syllabus everytime a new processor model turns up on the market. And without learning the rickety old 8085, how will one study the multicore monsters?

I surely meant that alongside 8085, some newer technologies MUST BE introduced. But that's not the case actually. The books still make references to languages like PASCAL and FORTRAN, which IMO are not used in wide scale anymore. No where in books will one get any reference been made to Java or VB or ASP or even very rarely in C++.
.
A student who goes strictly by curriculum will be equivalently Computer Illiterate, what he was 4 years back in his 1st year. The teaching is not even remotely near to Industry standards. A graduate should be skilled to enter industry just after graduation. But here after graduation one has to go through 8 months of training, 12 hours a day, continuously.
.
If 8085 is so important then students should also be taught the working of computers made by Blaise Pascal and Konard Zuse. But no. No. Some foolish made the syllabus 20 years ago, and the following foolish ones do not know what to introduce new and next.
.
Oh I forgot Ministry of Human Resources was busy in applying 27% OBC quota. So who cares.

Suraj · Post by **Suraj** » 26 May 2009 20:56

Processor design is a sufficiently complex field that there is an enormous amount of research background about just sections of a processor, e.g. the branch predictor. UG courses should not be talking about multicore designs as a matter of regular coursework. It is far more important to build a strong foundation than to have a superficial knowledge of all the latest technologies.

If you really want to make it in the processor design field, you need a minimum of a masters degree with a specialization in the field of processor design, preferably the thesis option, where you put yourself through the task of reading not just the comp.arch. bible (Hen & Pat), but also a range of technical papers in the field, from the old DEC WRL ones to the latest ones.

Not being taught specific computer languages is not such a big deal. I'd much rather students understood and learned effective programming skills, rather than any particular language. If your coding is sloppy in Pascal, it will be sloppy in C++. Learning a new language is not such a big deal, and you can easily teach yourself a few, as most in the IT world have done.

To expect a bachelors degree to sufficiently equip you with all the basic knowledge and skills is asking for a lot. If all you want to do is be a common C++ coder, then maybe. But if you want to get into chip design you're better off getting further education. We don't use Java, VB, ASP etc in the chip design world. Rather, we understand their compiler implementations and how to optimize their code generation/virtual machines to work on targeted microarchitectures. Learning the languages doesn't teach you much about that.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 26 May 2009 21:20

during my college years I moved from pascal (1st yr), C, 8085 assembly, bash & fortran (2nd & 3rd yr), prolog, lisp, cobol & c++ (4th yr), java, tcl & perl (mtech).
my mtech being in compilers I knew lex and yacc to the nth degree.

today after 14 yrs I use and remember onree C. everything else is just a fading memory and the bridges I have burnt and loves I have lost on the dusty road.
I do have a template tcl script to login to a given addr and execute commands off a table..donated by someone.I use that for testing. recently I relearnt bash shell scripts.

to those starting out, one would advise not to focussed on languages or packages but figure out how to solve problems efficiently apart from pure subj knowledge like compiler theory, comp arch, networking. eg "timeless books" like the compiler dragon book, tanenbaum's comp networks, the two H&P books, the compiler implemention book by holub, some new ones like network algorithmics by george varghese, unix internals by uresh vahalia, the tcp/ip and unix books by richard stevens. all deserve well worn place on the bookshelf. there's also pretty
good linux guides and tutorials on the web these days.

true knowledge never goes out of fashion but languages and pkgs will change.

putnanja · Post by **putnanja** » 26 May 2009 23:16

Yup, suraj and singha have it right. It is not the language or the "latest and greatest" that is important, but the fundamentals. If you get your algorithms right, you can use any language to translate that into action. Ultimately, a language is a tool to convert the right algo to working code. I still remember that some of my classmates used to memorize fortran programs for practical exams!

It is the same regarding processor architecture. If you get your 8085 and 8086 fundamentals right, and can read and write the assembly language, and understand the underlying architecture, it is easier to read up on higher processors yourself. fundamentals are more important, and if you get that right, you can read technical documentation of any processor/language off the web and easily understand it.

derkonig · Post by **derkonig** » 26 May 2009 23:55

manish wrote:
Singha wrote:I am a CSE student. I know what he means. We are still being taught only about the 8085-processor when we should be studying Quad-Core

GD saar, I knew it was only a matter of time...

And somehow the poor-humble-hardworking-value-creating MBA is always to blame for dropping jargon, creating 'wampum' & all that is wrong in the world...ghor kaliyug...AoA

pgbhat · Post by **pgbhat** » 27 May 2009 00:09

^^^

Singha wrote: ....
the tcp/ip and unix books by richard stevens. all deserve well worn place on the bookshelf. there's also pretty
good linux guides and tutorials on the web these days.

true knowledge never goes out of fashion but languages and pkgs will change.

I was absolutely terrified of that series. Had to take two courses in networking when I came to massa.
Only true TFTA C mujahids can handle the coding part but nevertheless learnt a LOT.

Sanjay M · Post by **Sanjay M** » 27 May 2009 04:52

Cloud Computing is a little ahead of what mainstream business is ready for. Meanwhile...

Virtualization is the Latest Big Trend in IT

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 27 May 2009 06:27

yeah with quad-core processors and 8-16gb ram on servers std, its easy to fit in virtualization

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 27 May 2009 06:33

Singha, are you now going to style yourself as a "Quad-Core Cloud Consultant"?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 27 May 2009 06:37

Nope. one detail missed is dual processor sockets.

"2xquad-core" is more like it.

Dileep · Post by **Dileep** » 27 May 2009 08:03

Well, I wouldn't dump on Akshut's head. We start spoon feeding the kids from age 2, making them to learn words and phrases without understanding the meaning. Then we move on to the great CBSE system, where you have to memorize and reproduce the same strings and bitmaps in the textbook, without understanding the science. Then you get into BTech. There you memorize the 'derivations', circuit diagrams, waveforms and code snippets without understanding the technology.

For most, 8085 is a picture with rectangles marked with abbreviations like ALU. Quad Core, if taught, will be another block diagram, only bigger. You draw that nicely in the exam paper, and presto! you get 20 marks. Of course you can name drop Quad Core!

I know what is to be done. I have used it successfully in hiring for my company. Form questions that look for actual understanding of the subject. Not DEEP understanding, mind you. Just understanding the science/tech behind the strings and bitmaps of the textbook. Worked very well for the company. All we need to do is to change the exam questions. Nothing else need to change. Once you realize that you can't 'score marks' without understanding stuff, you will.