Bharat Rakshak

KarthikSan wrote:I work for the largest semicon company of all. We are still hiring PeeYechDees in droves. I feel that hiring has actually increased now because they have the chance to pick and choose among the best of the best!

Raja Bose wrote: Was very surprised on last visit to India 2 years back to see relatives who work in call center/IT coolly dropping 10K Rs. at the drop of a hat for a new phone Nobody's asking to become Uncle Scrooge but surely there must be some sound logic behind spending. The guy in the article who claims he needs 2 Rs. when he has 1Rs. in pocket will never have enough money even if he becomes a millionaire.

Karkala Joishy wrote:

Raja Bose wrote: On my trips to desh, I have noticed Indians living there have a complex of "look, even we have this, XYZ is available here also". I got that quite a bit. When I call to ask if I should get anything, I hear something of that nature.

Raja Bose wrote:Well Allah has been most merciful to this mujahid....despite all sorts of raakit-mard attacks, prey-e-dator drone bumbari and IED-mubaraks from supervisory committee, PhD defence went successfully. Perhaps the preparation requiring for posting on B-R Indian IT Industry 1 hour before defence made the difference between life and death!

Raja Bose wrote:Well Allah has been most merciful to this mujahid....despite all sorts of raakit-mard attacks, prey-e-dator drone bumbari and IED-mubaraks from supervisory committee, PhD defence went successfully. Perhaps the preparation requiring for posting on B-R Indian IT Industry 1 hour before defence made the difference between life and death!

Satya_anveshi wrote:Congratulations bose boss

Raja Bose wrote:

KarthikSan wrote:I work for the largest semicon company of all. We are still hiring PeeYechDees in droves. I feel that hiring has actually increased now because they have the chance to pick and choose among the best of the best!

aha....you see it is the PeeYechDee Hakims they are hiring not the lowly Masters/ustads ....birather mujahid was asking about MS people onlee. In fact the reason I got the job was becoz the position asked for Hakims onlee....so no droves of Ustads but still stiff competition. In fact I have my defence today in another 1 hour (....which reminds me what am I doing browsing thru B-R forum at this time.... Ya'Allah! )

Raja Bose wrote:Well Allah has been most merciful to this mujahid....despite all sorts of raakit-mard attacks, prey-e-dator drone bumbari and IED-mubaraks from supervisory committee, PhD defence went successfully. Perhaps the preparation requiring for posting on B-R Indian IT Industry 1 hour before defence made the difference between life and death!

Karkala Joishy wrote:On my trips to desh, I have noticed Indians living there have a complex of "look, even we have this, XYZ is available here also". I got that quite a bit. When I call to ask if I should get anything, I hear something of that nature.

Raja Bose wrote:Well Allah has been most merciful to this mujahid....despite all sorts of raakit-mard attacks, prey-e-dator drone bumbari and IED-mubaraks from supervisory committee, PhD defence went successfully. Perhaps the preparation requiring for posting on B-R Indian IT Industry 1 hour before defence made the difference between life and death!

IT firms increase work-hours for higher productivity

http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/49146

By siliconindia news bureau
Monday, November 24, 2008
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Bangalore: In order to offset the recessional setbacks, IT firms are resorting to the strategy of increasing the working hours. Many companies have also stepped up the monitoring of working hours to squeeze the maximum out of their employees, reports The Times of India.


Some firms are closely keeping an eye on even the recess time of their employees. An extra minute taken during lunch time or coffee break will have to be compensated.

Accenture India is perhaps the first MNC in India planning to increase the working hours from January 1, 2009. TCS had recently increased the working hours by an hour a day to 9 hours.

Wipro employees already put in 9.5 hours (8.30 am to 6 pm) a day including a brief lunch break, while it's 9.15 hours in Infosys. But these weren't implemented stringently, until now. "It's sort of mandatory for us now to put in 9.5 hours of work a day. Our HR seems to be monitoring it very closely these days and even a 15-minute shortage/delay is being noticed," said a Wipro employee who got a reminder for short-swiping a few days ago.

According to Infosys Technologies head (HR) T V Mohandas Pai, the company has stringent measures to make sure employees put in the required 9.15 hours every day. An increase in working hours will directly impact productivity and revenues.

One of the reasons for companies to extend their working hours is to increase productivity and revenues. For instance, by increasing work hours by an hour a day an employee works an additional 22 hours a month. If an hour of his/her work is billed at $20, the company makes an additional billing of $440 per employee. That means, in rupee terms, a single employee can bring in additional revenues of Rs 22,000 a month for the company. Such work time extension works well for projects that are on what is called the 'time & material' model. Around 70 percent of tech projects are currently under this model, while the rest are fixed price projects where the service providers may resort to pruning the size of teams to bring cost down.

"Companies, by and large, are targeting a per-employee productivity enhancement of 15 percent," said a strategist working with an MNC firm. The tech sector, he says, is given an essential services status - on par with water and electricity - in Karnataka, so companies here also need not pay overtime.

Wipro employees already put in 9.5 hours (8.30 am to 6 pm) a day including a brief lunch break, while it's 9.15 hours in Infosys. But these weren't implemented stringently, until now. "It's sort of mandatory for us now to put in 9.5 hours of work a day. Our HR seems to be monitoring it very closely these days and even a 15-minute shortage/delay is being noticed," said a Wipro employee who got a reminder for short-swiping a few days ago.

http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=14804781

Accenture staff to work longer hours
Shamik Paul & Vishwanath Kulkarni | Tuesday, 25 November , 2008, 10:09


Bangalore: In a bid to boost productivity levels at its India Delivery Centre, Accenture, management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, plans to increase its work hours by an hour daily from January 1.

The company, in an internal communication to employees, said that after much consultation with the leadership and a careful review of the market place, it has decided to extend the work hour for professionals at its India Delivery Centre for technology from 40 hours to 45 hours a week effective January 1, 2009.

The company told its employees that for the past few months it has been looking at how it can continue to best serve clients while enhancing its competitive positioning, and one of the areas it has been looking at is its work hours.

Recruiters headed for slow-growth phase

5-day week

However, Accenture would continue to have a five-day work week. “Doing this (increasing work hours) will enable us to be even more competitive in the market place,” Accenture told its employees.

The India-based competitors of Accenture such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro are now facing uncertain times as customers in the crisis-hit US delay or hold back their spending on deploying new technology, and these vendors are trying to be more competitive.

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Accenture officials did not comment on the development. The company employs over 37,000 people across development centres in cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and Gurgaon. Its Chairman, Bill Green, said in April that the company would increase India headcount to about 50,000 within a year.

It might be recalled that HCL Technologies Ltd had increased its work hours in October 2006 by 30 minutes from the existing eight-and-a-half hours a day (excluding a half-hour lunch break) to nine hours a day.

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The company had said increased work hours will aid employee training besides help the company follow the industry standard of a 45-hour week.

Re.this whole benching concept...do you still get paid at same rate? Moreover, since you have to sit there on bench do they atleast give you a cubicle to put bench in so that you can increase your knowledge of human anatomy by browsing forbidden texts...or do you have to sit outside with the chowkidaar having endless chai-biskoot?! Must be thoroughly frustrating.

negi wrote: also restructure their HR and Admin group ( I am amazed at unusually high packages drawn by the latter who actually contribute zilch to the revenue).

The New York Times
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November 25, 2008
H.P. Results Match Preliminary Numbers
By ASHLEE VANCE

When Mark V. Hurd took over as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard in 2005 and started looking at the company’s businesses, he found a neglected little unit called ProCurve that made networking gear used to connect computing systems on corporate campuses.

ProCurve had been stifled under H.P.’s former chief executive, Carleton S. Fiorina, who served on the board of Cisco Systems, the dominant player in the industry. Ms. Fiorina supported the traditional alliance between H.P. and Cisco, in which H.P. sold computers and Cisco sold network equipment to the same customers.

Mr. Hurd decided on a different approach. He championed the ProCurve business, helping nurture it from a few hundred million dollars in annual sales to about $1 billion. It is now H.P.’s second-most-profitable business and one of its fastest-growing.

Now H.P. is directly attacking Cisco in a bid to capture a larger chunk of the $20 billion market for local area network and wireless switches. “H.P. has declared war,” said Mark Fabbi, a networking analyst at the research firm Gartner. “H.P. has the potential to completely change the dynamics of the networking industry.”

Hewlett-Packard’s strategy with ProCurve — expand revenue and profit by biting into a leader’s lucrative franchise — is vintage Mark Hurd. And it offers some insights into how the company has outperformed its peers financially even as the technology industry faces a global slowdown.

On Monday, H.P., the largest maker of computers and printers, formally reported net income of $2.11 billion, or 84 cents a share, for its fiscal fourth quarter, about flat with the previous year. Revenue rose 19 percent to $33.6 billion. Laptops, compact servers and software were strong, as H.P. continued to pressure rivals like Dell and I.B.M.

Although the company did not break out figures for ProCurve, which was a tiny part of H.P.’s revenue of $118 billion for the 2008 fiscal year, Mr. Fabbi estimated the business had gross profit margins of about 50 percent — second only to the lucrative printer cartridges that are H.P.’s cash cow.

He said H.P.’s network hardware revenue had grown 40 percent over the last two quarters, cementing the company’s position as the No. 2 player in the market. H.P., based in Palo Alto, Calif., now accounts for 7 percent market share by revenue, compared with Cisco’s 77 percent.

In June, Mr. Hurd made his ambitions for ProCurve clear by selecting a senior vice president of H.P., Marius Haas, as the new chief of the networking business. Mr. Haas had spent the previous five years as the head of H.P.’s strategy and corporate development team, overseeing more than 25 mergers and acquisitions. The last deal cleared by Mr. Haas was the $13.9 billion purchase of Electronic Data Systems, a computer services giant that H.P. is using to challenge I.B.M., the leader in that business.

This month, H.P. placed the ProCurve line under its Technology Solutions Group, the $38 billion business run by an executive vice president, Ann Livermore. “This was one of our best-kept secrets for a long time,” Mr. Haas said. “Now, everybody knows about it.”

Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif., declined to directly discuss H.P.’s push into its core business. Ish Limkakeng, a vice president in Cisco’s switching group, said the company “takes all competitors very seriously.”

But while Cisco plays down the changing competitive situation, customers have taken notice.

Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., has switched to H.P. as a supplier. “A lot of people in the industry say that Cisco has a certain arrogance,” said Scott Lowe, the college’s chief information officer. “With real competition in the marketplace, I think you will see there is a desire for people to get away from that arrogance.”

Some of Cisco’s strongest critics are hardware resellers. They are hoping that a muscular competitor like H.P. will place pressure on Cisco to give them more favorable sales and services terms. Although Cisco itself makes about 70 percent gross profit margins on its LAN switching gear, the resellers “can’t make any money on Cisco,” said Brad Reese, who sells refurbished Cisco equipment.

Under Ms. Fiorina, H.P. and Cisco had an unusually close partnership. H.P. actually rewarded sales representatives for selling Cisco’s network hardware without offering similar compensation for H.P.’s own products.Despite its stepchild status, the ProCurve business grew during Ms. Fiorina’s tenure. H.P. became a trusted supplier of switch equipment used by small and midsize companies, outflanking suppliers like Nortel Networks and 3Com.

Upon his arrival, Mr. Hurd changed the way H.P. sold its network hardware. Rather than being encouraged to sell Cisco products, H.P. sales representatives were rewarded for selling H.P. equipment.

“You should be assured that Mark is a very pragmatic guy and wants people incented to sell H.P.,” Mr. Haas said. “Cisco has had such a dominant position, but the doors are opening.”

Cisco continues to receive high marks for the breadth and quality of its products. Still, it has largely been able to operate in this part of the market without facing a competitor of its size or stature.

Analysts also say that H.P.’s networking plans may receive a lift from the addition of E.D.S., which assembles and manages computer systems for corporate customers and has done a lot of business with Cisco, possibly even doubling sales of its network products in less than two years.

“H.P. is a much more formidable challenger to Cisco, and it has sent an obvious message,” said Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst at UBS Securities.

tsriram wrote:All this talk about the semicon industry is making this grad student wonder if he'd have been better of tending to goats in tora bora mountain caves than study kufy vlsi. Two years is a long time and hopefully things will turn around enough for decent job opps. Else its back to goat or cow grazing in the village

sum wrote:Hello Tsriram, are you doing your masters in the US or IITM(since ur location shows Chennai and Chennai to me means IITM )?
What do the "students" feel about the scene, esp the VLSI guys?

Raja Bose wrote:Well Allah has been most merciful to this mujahid....despite all sorts of raakit-mard attacks, prey-e-dator drone bumbari and IED-mubaraks from supervisory committee, PhD defence went successfully. Perhaps the preparation requiring for posting on B-R Indian IT Industry 1 hour before defence made the difference between life and death!

Raja Bose wrote:Its amazing to the extent which Carly Fiorina screwed up HP when she was the big boss. OTH Reading her book one might think she was some sort of martyr who was pest-e-shaheed'ed by big bad patriachal board. Good to see HP bouncing back (runs aways from Singha).

Advice from friends is that, if you're not able to find a job pick your fav area and do phd. nothing like it. sure two years more and a slightly difficult married life with 1.5 person salary but then better in the long run hopefully.