The story so far.. (Part 2)

[As posted by Aayush on the UiversityHiring blog]

So when the 4 of us decided that we are going to build such a placement office management software, the design discussions started to take place over GTalk :-) Initially we were pretty ambitious of the functionalities that we would be putting into the system. And you can't blame us...estimation is still a difficult problem in software engineering!
Apart from having design discussions we were thinking on the lines of how are we going to coordinate among ourselves while actually programming the functionalities. The best option seemed to be buying some hosting space and a domain name. After a long email thread of the possible names which included relevant names like placementhelper.com, placementholder.com as well as geeks names (and now seemingly stupid names) like technomaniacs.com and geekyfreaky.com, we selected eatbits.com to be a good enough website domain. We were yet to decide a name of our product...first let there be any product and then we would think of names!
The next 4-5 months (Dec 2005 - April 2006) were kind of event less considering the development of the software that we had conceived:

• Coordinating over GTalk every alternate day.
  
• No weekends. My Counter Strike practice had certainly taken a beating :-)
• Coding, debugging...coding, debugging
  

But during this whole development work we realized one very important thing - What they taught in software engineering lectures is actually true:

• Many a times under pressure of time and exhaustion after office, we started coding even before having a rough design in our mind. A typical code like helldesign is important. scenario talked about in many software engineering books. Almost always turned out to be extremely bad! So
• After coding like hell for days together, we later found out that there was a functionality that we had missed. And now to correct this required another brave programming effort. Not only it re-iterated the previous point, but also emphasized that changes at design level are the ones that require the most effort to implement.
• Very early we realized that we should put some customization into our system so if this software gets developed we can make it easily adaptable to many placement offices. And while putting in such generalizations another software engineering principle struck our minds - you almost always sacrifice performance when implementing generalizations.
  
• As we missed our self proposed deadlines one after another, we realized that surely estimation even in terms of time is not that easy.
• Initially we had taken up features and functionalities which didn't quite overlap so that the cost of integration was the least. But till a month back the only way we used to integrate the overlapping code was through taking a diff of the code files. And surely many a times we overwrote code, introduced new bugs and kept us wondering why is this not working now! So here comes another good old advice - always use a code management system like a CVS.
  

Though we learnt some lessons the hard way, we still had some good points to look back to and on which we never made any compromise:

• Proper 3-tiered architecture (which later on allowed us to make our software with MySQL)
• Using some design patterns efficiently
• Using good coding principles - so that we can easily understand our own code many months down the line (in this effort I read through many books like Code Complete and Writing Solid Code).
  

In the midst of all this chaos came April and Pango told us that IIM Bangalore is in need of such a software and that we need to give a demo of whatever exists in the name of placement automation software soon as their summer vacations are approaching soon.

The story of our first demo is a story for the next time...

How the story began

[As posted by Aayush in UniversityHiring blog]

It had been a couple of months since we all joined our jobs after graduating from IIT Kanpur in 2005. The first couple of months after joining a job are almost the same of all - you seem to be earning way too much (specially comparing yourself with the spending power you used to have during the student days). The first month you are generally skeptic with your spending, but with money pouring in your account at the end of every month and watching how everyone else's spending habit, you slowly start to give in.
This honeymoon period lasted for about 3-4 months after which I realized that my brain was starting to wear out. The tiny miny bits of what I had put into my brain at IITK started becoming difficult to recall. With ample of time to kill after company, my fingers were itching for some coding. No business plans, no entrepreneurship, no extra money...just some coding practice.
Around the same time Pango (Pankaj Goyal), who was then in his first semester at IIM Bangalore, contacted me with kind of the same request that he had made to me 3-4 times during the final year at IITK - we need to start something. At IITK, none of our plans went beyond the idea stage and my laziness and wing bazi were the primary reasons for that. But this time I was also somewhat serious. We discussed many ideas over phone/email and finally we pin pointed to developing a placement office automation software. Actually Pango was quite aghast with the paper work involved in one of the most premier B-schools in India. So a rough plan was rolled out to automate that. At this point we didn't have any short/long term plans of what to do after we developed such kind of a software. Atleast my short term plan was fulfilled - I was once again slouching on my chair and hitting the keyboard hard.
As I remember best, within a month Pankaj visited Hyderabad and explained this idea to his wingmates - Kapil and Mr. X. They instantly bought this idea for almost the same reasons as mine :-)
So this was how the team got together!

To be continued...stay tuned :-)

-Aayush

UniversityHiring Launched

We have recently launched the UniversityHiring website. Let me take a few minutes of yours to tell you about what we do at UniversityHiring. Our aim in starting this service is to help build a better eco-system for campus placements in the country. India a producing more and more engineers and managers each year. As this article mentions, the number of engineering colleges is increasing at the rate of 20% per year, and the management schools at 60% per year. These numbers tell us that we have a growing talent pool in our country. But are the recruiters able to visit all these colleges for placement activities?

Of the 4.5 Lakh engineers that graduate every year, how many of them secure a job through their campus placements? I don't have an exact figure, but I am pretty sure it would be lot less. So what happens to the rest of the engineers? There are many companies that do not want 'only IITians' or only IIM grads. Think of any 'Yet Another Services Company'. Do they need the best brains? No. All they need are people who have basic level of understanding. Yes, its true that IITs and IIMs, just by the virtue of their name and a well renowned pool of talent, attract a lot more companies than any other institute in the country. However, inspite of that, there are recruiters (a very large number of them) that are interested in having students from the lower tier colleges too. But, there are so many low tier colleges, how are they able to access all of them??

This is where we come in. We aim to build a platform for the educational institutes and the recruiters to come together, and conduct their placement activities in a very smooth manner. Our first step towards achieving this goal is our Online Campus Recruitment Portal. We have named it as ERGO (its a Greek name for 'Job'). ERGO provides the placement offices of the educational institutes to manage their campus placements in a better manner, and also makes their life simpler by removing a lot of manual book-keeping work required during the process. You can know more about the product by visiting our website.

[Shameless-plug]
If you have any queries regarding our software, or if you wish to register your institute with UniversityHiring then please mail us at sales[AT]universityhiring.com
[/Shameless-plug]

ERGO was recently introduced in our alma-mater, IIT Kanpur. We are helping the student placement office to carry out their processes in an automated manner. If you are a student of IITK and using ERGO, then please do let us know what is your feedback about it. We would love to hear from you! If you want to have any useful features introduced in ERGO, then please leave a comment here or send us a feedback.

If you are a final year student and are preparing for your campus job interviews, then please visit our discussion forums, where you can discuss with your seniors about general interview tips, and the commonly asked questions and puzzles. We have also started a few career counseling services through our forums. You can participate there and get any of your queries answered. One of these is the Resume Mentorship Programme. You can login into the forum to know more about it.

Who is your role model?

Huh!! (scratching my head?) I am pretty confused!! My role models seem to change frequently!

This was a question which I was lately asked by a friend, but I got confused, and I couldn’t really answer it well (as I was playing a rapid-fire-Q&A game). But started really thinking about it. Many things come into my mind - is it so that I don’t have a role model, is it so tht I am confused and not having a purpose in life, is it so that I will be disrespecting the Father of our Nation by not giving him this most coveted position (coz there was once a time when I would have taken his name as an answer to this question)………… So, to answer this question (and not lose points in the rapid-fire game), all I said that my role models keep changing, and currently that position is not taken by a particular person, but an idea of a personality – who is entrepreneurial and dynamic in nature.

But I am a great fan of Blink (by Malcolm Gladwell – I really recommend it for serious thinkers out there)! And from the lessons I have learnt from there, it seems like my subconscious ended up giving the correct answer in the blink of an eye, without me doing complex calculations. Truly speaking, the idea of a role model changes. The more it changes the better for you! Because a role model is someone who makes you do whatever you do. A role model is the kind of person we want to become. A role model is responsible for the actions that you take, and in life we do not keep doing the same kind of things again and again. We do not keep thinking along the same lines of thought all through our lives. Times change and so do our thoughts, our beliefs and our standings. Changing of role models is an indication of evolution of your thoughts. The more flexible you are the more your role models will change; the more fundamentalist you are, the lesser time you are going to take in a rapid-fire-Q&A session.

As I look back in time, I have seen my role models changing from a person to an idea of a person. There was a time when on being asked this question I would have pointed to one of my teachers (partly because he had a great fan-following among girls). But today I don’t really have a clear answer for that. And what about Mr. Gandhi? To tell you frankly I respect him a lot for his experiments with truth, but cant make him a role model (I seriously tried it once, but failed terribly). Actually I realized pretty late, that he is not my type!

So what do you think about your role models? Are there any?

Last Day@DESIS

DeShaw India Software Pvt Ltd. - that is the place I started my career with! I must say an extremely wonderful place, full of great people! I started out on 6th of June, 2005, and since then the last 16 months have been extremely fulfilling. Really the first organization one joins always stays very near to the heart, and so is DESIS. One of the things that I really appreciate about the management at DESIS is that they take a very good care of their employees. In short it was great to have association with one of the best companies to work with!

So where am I going next??
A question that many people have asked me. I along with a few of my friends will be bootstrapping for some time to build our startup. We shall be working in the corporate hiring domain, and will focus mostly on the niche market of campus recruitment.

So what exactly is the problem that we have set out to solve??
We set out our journey with the following proposition - We will build an application that will help the educational institutes to run their placement process efficiently. We experienced a lot of glitches in the placement office @ IIT Kanpur (our Alma Mater), and thought of building a Placement Office Automation tool. 6 months of part-time development effort gave birth to ERGO (our flagship product). ERGO is an automation tool that the placement offices of various educational institutes can make use of to streamline the placement procedure and conduct the campus placements more efficiently.
Later, our business model changed a little and we are now planning to build a full-fledged recruitment portal to bring the educational institutions and the companies in touch with each other and to manage their campus recruitment efficiently, and at the same time access a large pool of recruiters/applicants in one go!
Not that we have sabotaged ERGO - we are actively marketting it in various educational institutes, and have already deployed it at IIT Kanpur. The new campus-recruitment portal that we will build will be based upon ERGO.

Are we same as Naukri.com or other conventional jobsite in india??
No we are not! We have focussed ourselves on one vertical of corporate recruitments i.e. Campus Placements. Our objective is to help the educational institutes to carry on their campus placement activities efficiently and also to come in touch with a large pool of recruiters. This will help them in increasing their campus-placement record and also help the companies to reduce their campus recruitment costs.

So, this is what I am going to do next. Its getting increasingly difficult to manage a day job and focus on the startup idea, so took the decision of quitting the job! I definitely am a little apprehensive, but I had to take this step. If I dont do it today, I shall never be able to do it. This is the correct time for me to pursue my dreams. I hope it works out well!

What have I been upto

Its been roughly three months since I blogged last. Well, I haven't been really that free to think of something to blog - and when some idea came to my head, I was generally too preoccupied to build up on it. So what have I been upto in the last three months?

Well, let me think over it! There was pretty much of work load, plus a few of my trips outside Hyderabad, and two releases of MM in DEShaw (for those who dont know me pretty well, I am presently working in DEShaw in the proprietary team, and MM is the proprietary application I am working on - and as you guessed it right, since its all proprietary I wont even tell you what MM stands for :-)) took almost all of my time that I could not think of updating my blog.

Although I didnt blog about many ideas that did come to my mind, let me re-iterate through them and put them here itself, so that later when I get some ideas on them, or feel very strongly about some of them, I would write a full fledged blog.

1. The scarcity of professors and academic staff in the field of Computer Science in India (well I wont take the full credit for it - a friend of mine actually suggested this to me. I guess he was trying to find out some meaning out of his MS/PhD program in UNC)

2. The pathetic act of Indian Govt blocking some blogging sites

3. Well, a few days back I was also planning of writing about user-generated content and its impact on our lives. Infact some time back I also came to know this interesting stat (though dont take it for true as I cant prove it) - that 20% of things that we read are generated by our peers!! Thats a very very strong indication if its really true!

4. I was also planning to do a review of 'The Tipping Point'. And this I am sure I will do in a few days to come in one of my blogs. I am about to complete the book, and so far I have simply loved the way Malcolm Gladwell analyzes. After this I will begin reading Blink by the same author.

So, Blogosphere, here I am!! Would be blogging more frequently, and definitely not go for a hibernation of 3months :-)

We could be Angels!

I just had a chat with a friend of mine, and we discussed on a nice and interesting idea which excited me a lot. And before the excitement dies out (which I am pretty sure will die out before I wake up tommorrw morning), I just wanted to discuss it here.

We invest at a lot of places. The real motivation for investment is returns. Do we invest in people? Well we dont, but our parents have (and even we will do so, when we have kids whom we will have to feed, and educate, and make them better human beings). Do our parents get returns? Yes they do in some cases. But mostly their motivation is not ROI, its a sense of duty. Anyways, the idea is to actually have an institution which will "invest" in small kids (mostly poor kids whose parents cant afford to educate them well) and make them study, and make them live a proper life. Nobody can deny that there are many kids in this country who do not get the proper education, and then the society they live in, moulds them into an 'anti-social' element. However, if they are taken care of, put in some good school, given proper education, they can do well. So we invest in them, and later when they are ready to pay back, we get some returns back. Yes the returns may not be BIG enough. They may not be as big as what a VC gets when the company he funded goes big, but I somehow have a feeling that when people will get the benefit of doing good to others by investing in them and get the same returns as they got in when they invested in their PF, they would go for investing in needy people. Moreover, today people do not give money to the NGOs (like CRY) because people generally dont want to give their money for free. They say NO to sponsorship - but investment is okay. Everybody likes to make money. Just imagine, if a CRY volunteer comes to your door, and says:
'Sir, please donate something for the kids. This money will be exempted from your taxable salary.',
however another person from some other NGO comes, and says:
'Sir please invest in our NGO. We will help the kids, and make them study. But we will give you back the returns on your investment after such-and-such period, and with such-and-such interest rate'.
My bet is that people will go for the second guy!

So in the most crude form the idea is: We collect money from people, and invest it in students who need them. Mostly invest in poor kids who dont have enough resources. With this money, we can put them in schools, take care of they living expenses, their food etc. Later when these kids are big enough (i.e. begin to earn enough) to pay back, they pay the money back (in installments). We dont sponsor them, but we invest in them. Yes, we generate money from salaried people (like us) and give some kind of 'soft loan' to needy students with some condition of paying back to us. We get a method of making investment (and get returns), and the needful students get the help they need to study well.

We could be Angels!

Fooze Control !!

I really don't know to spell it!! I guess we call it 'Fooze Ball'. By the way it currently has the biggest fan-following on the 4th floor of G.Pulla Reddy Building (the place where the cafeteria of DEShaw India resides) . It came in our cafeteria as a part of the renovation process going on. Now that Polaris (the company which used to share a floor of the building some time back) has totally shifted to some don't-know-where land, the radius and span of our cafeteria suddenly doubled and we, the fooze-controllers, happen to make the best use of it.

By the way, its a very very addictive game. When I was new to it, right after a fooze-ball-session it was really tough working on my workstation. I somehow used to move my left hand to shift the mouse cursor from the right to the left on the screen :-). Now that I have had a hell lot of sessions (thanks to raza - the most enthusiastic fooze-controller of DESIS), these paranoid experiences have stopped happening to me. But yes, the presence of a fooze-ball table has made our visits to the cafeteria pretty frequent, and now I come to my machine (code-named 'porcupine') only to take breaks between two consecutive sessions :-)

Ideas on e-globalization

I have been reading articles on something called as "We-Media", and really it seems a great revelation to my small little mind that how is the media changing today. I guess that media keeps undergoing constant changes from generation to generation - just that we are not really 'globalized' to realize it. We are living in a society and society is affected a lot by media. There is a tight coupling, whether we realize or not. But they are coupled very tightly.

We can have a debate on what we consider as media. Some skeptics believe that today with the invasion of web, absolutely anything can be considered as media. Well, as far as a formal definition is concerned, I believe media is some thing which has a lot of people (or fans) following it. Be it newspapers, be it TV channels, be it Hollywood/Bollywood industry, be it sport-stars, be it any damn thing that has the potential to attract thousands of people to it! Media is something which people see everyday, and get affected by everyday. If you view your favorite sport-star struggling with a rape case, it does have an effect on you. Some of your believes are shattered, some new ones are made - and you, while undergoing a change in your belief system, make an infinitesimal change to the social structure in which you thrive. When you watch killer Katrina waves washing away thousands of houses, or the deadly Tsunami affecting several cultures on this globe at the same point in time on a TV channel, it again does affect you. Again some of your beliefs are shattered, and new ones are made, you either begin to curse GOD/Nature, or pro-actively begin to volunteer for help. Once again changes in you - though this time they didn't stay confined to you, but directly affected people near you - have induced changes in the society. Just imagine, if people in Indonesia never came to know what the same waves have done to Chennai, how different the world would have been.

Today, we don't exist if we are not connected! News has become an important part of our lives. Information used to be power in times of Steve Jobs, today its the life-line! Thanks to web and the blogging culture that has given a new shape to the media. And this is what I term as 'E-Globalization'. Where the communication between the different cultures of the world would result in them merging in one another; when there will be only one e-culture, and the things like 'We are becoming very western', or 'stop the invasion from western culture' would be no more existent in our country. And I see that coming in the near future. We are embracing the west and the west is embracing us. We do go to disco theques, and the western people do yoga everyday :-) Its not that we are becoming them and they are becoming us; its just this that we are all becoming one.

The rationality behind double K's on Indian soaps

I was supposed to write about the 'double K' serials which we happen to see on TV... But seems like I don't really want to... They are really crappy :)

They really show how powerful and how good/bad fan-following be. Well the culture of soaps on TV, I guess started off with a serial called as Hum-Log. Well all the 'double K' serials are nothing but Hum-Log 2.0 :-)

As a young lad, when I had nothing to do after returning from school, I used to watch these serials. More so, they were aired by doordarhan, and those were the days when cable channel didn't penetrate into our house (thanks to my dad :-)). Well, Hum-Log really gave a clear picture of a middle class family, something which forms the maximum fraction of our population. But today these double-K serials really start with the middle class families, and then strech into the dreams of the middle class families. They show one person who can clear a debt of some thing like 100's of crores, and people in the middle class of our country actually finding resemblance with them... This really indicates that we have become avid dreamers :-)

Well, I really feel crappy writing about these serials. So lemme jus stop!