Onsite policy in Indian Outsourcing Companies (sucks)-Part-2

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Onsite policy in Indian Outsourcing Companies (sucks)

Indian companies which work on outsourcing model have a peculiar specialty; their employees work out of either offshore or onsite. Let me explain you this.

Indian outsourcing companies work for nonIndian companies (mostly US, japan or UK). I mean product oriented companies can give their part of work to service oriented companies (e.g. Wipro Infosys TCS Satyam etc.). Since employee of these company work for other company their employees are divided in two categories, one is onsite who are working based out of client location, other is offshore who based out of the native location.

Hmm let me make it simple, e.g. Microsoft has some work do be done (mostly some maintenance kinda work), it can outsource its work to companies like Wipro.
Now since Wipro has to co-ordinate with Microsoft to get the work done, Wipro will put some of its employees in US (Onsite) and rest of the employee will work based out of India (offshore).

In India, these companies hire huge amount of software engineers. Approximately every year they consume more that 80% of total produced engineers. Now in cities like Bangalore & Hyderabad, it’s like every second person is software engineer who work for some Indian outsourcing company

Now lets come to the point, the people who works onsite in-cash huge money, while the people who work offshore are starved. Actually the basic funda is that these companies make money only by hiring cheap labor (offshore people). So there is tough competition in offshore people to go onsite. The Onsite and offshore model itself can be criticized.
The worst thing which is about these companies is the way they send people onsite. It’s absolutely no way talent based, it’s purely based on the QUEUE model. Every one who joins the company will come in the queue of onsite waiting members, irrespective of how talented you are. This is one of the reason most of the time talented guys (not gals ;-) ) leaves the companies before availing onsite. So at any given time you will find that the person who is working onsite is absolutely dumb compared to the person who is working offshore. Consequently, Person who is dumb is getting more money than smart one.

Anyway things are getting done so these companies are still alive. But they are alive just like a bull in floor mill. Product companies always interfaced with the dumb people and hence they have an opinion of Indian companies as a company of dump people. So they only outsource the gibberish stuff to these companies.

Vodafone

Let me report that vodaphone WAP site in india called vodafone live is hosting nude images of pamela anderson. wtf
check on this link
http://202.87.41.147/hungamawap/hutch/4756/index.php3

Yahoo Hack Day India

Hi,

On 23rd and 24 Aug 2007, I was in IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2007. This was so boring.



Now on last Friday and Saturday, (5th and 6th Oct 2007): I was in Yahoo Open Hack Day (India) conference. This turned out a gr8 event of my life. Had lots of learning, fun and enjoyed hacking.



Even I met several very important personalities like David Filo (Yahoo co-founder),Christian Heilmann,Philip Tellis,Parashuram Narasimhan and many more.

Google Docs

It is really hard to say that Google docs can replace Microsoft office. There are several office products are available in the market like Open Office Org etc, all these are free but still Microsoft Office has more number of users compared to all these.

Now Google docs… Google docs is one of the office product which.. as of now has a very basic editing functionality.The only reason which attracts me is the web based editing, sharing and collaboration feature of Google Docs.

I love Google Docs because

· Has strong collaboration feature

· We can store and edit from any computer where we will find the Internet.

· Spreadsheet has additional function related to GoogleFinance and GoogleLookup.

· Presentation has functionality like online audience…which is really stunning.

PhotoSynth

Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live
Labs that will change forever the way you think about digital photos."
I think photosynth is really a technology that will change the world of digital computing.
Good Work Microsoft.

Nivio on attack

Here I am describing one of the hacking incidents that happened with me. On 15th June 2007, several news sites posted news that Nivio is going to launch first windows based online desktop.
The news was attractive so I rushed to the site and registered myself to its free service. But soon I got a mail that the service will be available to me in few weeks as there are lots of registered users.

Mail reads some like this

“Nivio is in beta and we have had thousands of applications waiting to be activated. We need to ensure that the performance you get is mind blowing and therefore are controlling the number of users we let onto the system at a given moment. This also allows us to fine tune the service.”


But see what happens this mail was set to a special group mail id nivians@nivio.com whose permission is open to all…

So First person named Lucas Fontes replied to all next was me to test the flaw. Then think what happens, whole lot of mails with reply to all.

This shows how technically sound Nivio People are.

I am surprised that what will happen when they will start windows based desktop. I think people will never excuse, they will try to exploit it also.

It’s a good future of Nivio.

Unix Or WindowsNT

Today I read a nearly 8 years old article about "which operating system is better?". The article was written by one of the famous and my favorite technologist, Mark Russinovich. Russinovich is the man behind the famous Sony Rootkit Controversy. He is the only man who wrote many tools for windows, which you can find on http://www.sysinternals.com/.
Even 8 years ago it was the fight that whether the Unix (Lets include Linux also here) or Windows is better operating system. Russinovich wrote in his article that the OS is all about the application availability, initial cost, cost of support and maintenance, compatibility with existing infrastructure, and ease of use. The things are clear now still today the windows has more than 60% of market penetration and now when Windows Vista has come into the market with better security and look & feel, there is no way that the *nix OS will come into the market in next 10 years.
I like to quote these two paragraph in this post which was written in the article…do not miss these

A major difference between UNIX's and NT's: architecture is that UNIX does not
incorporate its windowing system--the subsystem that manages GUI resources for
applications--into kernel mode, as does NT 4.0. Instead, the UNIX windowing
system is an add-on user-mode application that its developers wrote using
publicly defined UNIX APIs; consequently, third-party products can replace
UNIX's windowing system. However, the majority of the UNIX community has adopted
MIT's X-Windows as a de facto, if not official, graphical interface standard.
Before NT 4.0, the NT windowing system was a user-mode implementation, but
Microsoft found that the performance of graphics-intensive applications improved
when the windowing system operated in kernel mode.

Namespace and object management:In the NT object model, device drivers can easily implement
objects in the namespace that represent nonstandard resources. For example, a
device driver can create an object called \Proc that, after an application reads
it, returns information about the active processes in the system.

Vint Cerf

On fab 21 (this Wednesday) I went to attend a speech by Vint Cerf (Known as the father of internet), the speech was organized by Google. Its a great initiative by Google to organize a series of speeches. Vint Cerf spoke about the past , present and future of internet. The talk was absolutely nice and no where it was like Google advertisement, but I saw blog of many attendees that says that the Google is advertising itself by making use of Vint Cerf. I think these people are crazy, they don’t know the fact that Google does not need any advertisements, it is a passion of millions of people without putting a single image on its Home Page. Those who thinks that feedback form was to hire people were more crazy, because they are unaware of the fact that Google is one of the highest paying employer in the world, and its not Google who needs people, but its people who needs Google. The format of Feedback form is very common in all kinds of such speeches/conference.

Spark @ Wipro

Wipro Bangalore celebrated its annual cultural and sports event SPARKS-07 on 17Feb07.This grand celebration held at
Kanteerva Stadium.The mentionable personalities were Harsha Bhogale, Premji, Kapil Dev, Mandira Bedi and Sonu Nigam.
The event was stopped by the police at 10:40PM.

Orphanage

On 26th Jan 2006 (Republic day) I went to a missionary of orphan children. It was a nice Experience.

TechVista-07

Me and Dr. Rick Rashid, Senior VP, Microsoft Research

Yesterday (Tuesday 23rd Jan 2007) I was in TechVista Conf.

These were the speakers at the conf.

• Prof. Ken Perlin, Media Research Laboratory, Dept. of Computer
  Science, New York University and Academy award winner
• Prof. Mriganka Sur,
  Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience, and Head, Dept of Brain and
  Cognitive Science, MIT
• Prof. Jeannette Wing, President's Professor of
  Computer Science, Computer Science Department Head, CMU
• Prof. N Balakrishnan, Associate Director, IISc
• Dr. Rick Rashid, Senior VP, Microsoft Research
• Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research
  
  
  

Marketing the Operating System as a Product

[Integrating my blogs into one blog: This post is copied from my other blog]

Think about the scenario when Application Software does not require the
Operating System to run upon. Will any one purchase any operating system
for just shake of the viewing the file on his Hard Disk, for listing the
Hardware attached to his computer? In the desktop market no one will
spend even a single penny for software such as the Operating System
which only facilitates the Application software.

Now today Companies like Microsoft, Sun and Apple are fighting for
selling their Operating System in the market. I believe that the
marketing the operating system as a product requires different strategy.
It is not the same as you are selling other software in the market. But
the question is how we should market the Operating system as a product
in the market. Here I am listing some of the parameters that must be
taken care in designing and marketing Operating System.

1.Easy of Installing the Older Applications.
-----------------
Yes, I am talking about the backward compatibility of the Operating
System. When anyone is purchasing a new operating system he will look
for the compatibility of his older applications. No one will switch to a
new Operating System if new one is refusing to run the older and
existing Applications.

2.Conducive Development Environment
-----------------
The second most important stuff is the Development Environment on new
Operating system. The new Operating System must be able to cope up with
the new technological changes and must have the proper development
environment so that the developer can upgrade their Applications for new
features added in New Operating System. As well as the development of
new Applications must be easy and robust.
3.Non Irritating User Dialogs.
-----------------
Will anyone like to see frequent error messages and dialogs in new
operating system? By opinion about operating system is that its
underlying software and it should not communicate to the end user very
frequently. The user communication in New Operating System must be
minimized.

4.Other features
-----------------
Other features are obvious but not ignorable like Speed, Boot up Time,
Security, and Look and Feel.

Let's talk about the Microsoft's way of marketing the Operating System.
Microsoft is too rich in bringing the first 2 parameters. I mean the
Microsoft new Operating System is will backward compatible than anyone
in the market. Microsoft is also clever enough to bring the latest API
and development environment in the market. But due to some security
related concern of Microsoft the new OS is not good in avoiding the
Non-Irritating User Dialogs.