Saturday, February 17, 2007

What have you learnt in the last 100 days ?

Last month a couple of us spent a good part of our working hours ( or waking hours in some cases ) trying to hire a few good software engineers who want to , and can work on a product. Incidentally this product is based a very famous industry standard for enterprise middleware, so much so , that there are walls in small towns in India plastered with advertisement for courses that claim to teach you that standard.

We could not hire all the engineers we wanted to hire.

I was speaking to a cousin of mine who works for one of "the-company-to-be-in" MNCs, and I started ranting about how difficult it is to hire. He simply cut me short with a "Tell me about it! , I know , we go through this process all the time" .

So what went wrong ? Nothing, we just did not find enough reasons to hire some of the people we interviewed, in fact , with most of the people we interviewed. Were we choosy ? Not, unless if you think expecting a person to answer questions based on what is in his/her resume , is being choosy.

A normal expectation is , that when you are scheduled for an interview, you would spend some time reading up on what you have been working on, what you have worked on and possibly something more. Most of the interviewers understand this and factor in some prepration time. I am not sure of all the people know this, but if you are well prepared , or at least appear well prepared the chances of you getting through are higher. Coming back to our experience , this was one major issues with most of the candidates that we interviewed. Most of them could not answer questions on areas which they had worked on more than a year ago, and some folks did not have the breadth that was expected of them in their area of work.

So that brings me to the title of this blog : What have you learnt in the last 100 days ? Did you get a chance to learn something beyond your area of work ? If you work on frameworks , did you attempt to learn the basis of the frameworks , like Java or C++.

I would have loved to ask these candidates that question. If the answer was a yes, I would have gone ahead ! Maybe that what I would do the next time over.Maybe, I should try and put this question to myself !

A lot of us spend so much money trying to buy mobiles, MP3 players and cameras, but how much of this money do we spend in buying books, that enhance our breadth or the depth in the area we work in ? We spend a lot of time on Orkut, Yahoo! and possibly other distractions on the internet, how much time do we spend to read up a book or write up a small program? Maybe we expect the IT boom to last forever, or expect the "Chinese are never going to be good in English" or we just do not care.

Would it help if Mr. Chidambaram gave a tax break on books and courses ?

1 comment:

Dave Freireich said...

Hi. I specialize in delivering the types of developers you are trying to find. It is a very difficult and tedious process but we are very passionate about it.

Let me know if you would like assistance. The greatest software engineers aren't interviewing. They are working. Our method is to learn all about what you require and why, then go find the people you need and help them understand why your company is a place they whould learn more about.

We don't sell. We facilitate.

Here is our blog for more:
www.coresearchgroup.blogspot.com

Thank you,

DAVE