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.