Random Musings
1 Oct, 2008
The Game of Business
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (3) Comments
I delivered a presentation titled the Game of Business at the Proto.in conference in 2008 and subsequently at IIT Kanpur’s Megabucks event.
Visit our wiki at http://wiki.directi.com/x/BwCK to view the video of this presentation and download the slides. At Directi, we believe that Business is like a game. This presentation covers principles that embrace this philosophy and that continue to be instrumental to the success of Directi.
I finally managed to obtain a copy of the video of the presentation and hence am posting this entry quite late. I believe this is by far one of the best presentations I have delivered in terms of value and the importance I personally attribute of the concepts I expound in the presentation to the success of our company.
Comments / feedback are solicited and welcome 
24 Sep, 2008
Time and Resources Analysis of a Recruitment Exercise
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (0) Comments
I got around to thinking about the amount of effort that goes behind a recruitment exercise at Directi and I thought to pen down an article which details out a recruitment scenario and the effort / resources involved. The purpose to pen this down was to get an idea of the time, cost and people involvement per candidate. This in turn will enable us to -
- Set expectations in terms of targets of the number of interviews one can conduct per week
- Determine direct cost of an interview process
- Determine the opportunity cost of an interview process
- Improvise our recruitment process and make it more efficient
The article turned out to be a 1600+ word count multi-page article which I have posted on our Directi Wiki under the Recruitment University
Anyone involved in recruitment should read it. The article is available at - http://wiki.directi.com/x/TwDK
PS: If you wish to apply for a job at Directi, visit our careers portal at http://careers.directi.com
11 Sep, 2008
Availability of Developers by City (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc) and Technology (Java, C++, C#, AIR, WPF etc)
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (11) Comments
An alltime favorite question amongst journalists who interview me as a “young entrepreneur” has been - “Tell us about some of the challenges you faced while growing Directi?” and my patent answer has always been that the only challenge we have faced and continue to face is finding good talent. In our bid for finding talent we are now expanding into other cities over the next few months.
In order to determine tech labor availability across the common metro cities in India I compiled a statistical comparison of the count of resumes available on common jobsites for common software development skillsets in the various cities in India, and the findings are very interesting. This blog post compiles these findings. If you are a tech company in India - these findings can help you make technology decisions concerning city selection and platform selection.
The findings
Below are findings from the comparison of the count of resumes of software developers with 0-4 yrs of experience from various cities in India as compiled from a jobsite -
1. Findings by City
- Bangalore has 2.5 times the number of Java resumes of Mumbai
- In terms of total resumes from each city the ranking is in the following order - Bangalore, Hyderabad, NCR, Chennai, Delhi, Pune, and lastly Mumbai
- As an example, here is the citywise count of Resumes that contained the keyword Java
- Bangalore - 123,205
- Hyderabad- 114,561
- NCR - 85,347
- Chennai - 82459
- Pune - 54,086
- Delhi - 53,256
- Mumbai - 43,672
- Every city in India has more available developers than Mumbai with the South taking the lead
- NCR has almost twice the number of developers as Delhi
2. Findings by Technology
- The total count of Resumes of developers with 0-4 yrs experience that contain the below keywords across all 7 cities was -
- C++ - 635,575
- Java - 556,586
- C# - 190,872
- Javascript - 162,343
- Ajax - 41,219
- Flex - 8,668
- Python - 3,429
- Ruby - 2,099
- WPF - 779
- Silverlight - 255
- As you can see Java and C++ are the predominant keywords in Software Developer Resumes
- Flex beats Python and Ruby
- Ajax and Javascript beat Flex/WPF/Silverlight by several magnitudes as keywords appearing in resumes
The results above remain similar in terms of ratio, for Resumes with 4+ yrs of experience.
Click here to download the raw excel sheets for all cities and technologies >>
The methodology
I had my team conduct independent searches for each permutation and combination of the following -
- Keywords - Java, C#, C++, Javascript, Flex, Silverlight, WPF, Ajax, Actionscript, Ruby, Python
- Cities - Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Delhi, NCR (Noida/Gurgaon), Chennai, Hyderabad
- Experience - 0 to 4 yrs , 4+ yrs
- Function - Software Development (or equivalent)
- Jobsites - Naukri, Timejobs, Monster
- Date - 3rd June 2008
The above totals upto a whopping 462 searches :). I then tabulated the count of Resumes for each search and put it in multiple excel spreadsheets. You can download the spreadsheets to crunch the numbers yourself.
Based on the above data, Directi and .pw clearly need a presence in the south. The data also demonstrates the lack of penetration of RIA, especially Flex/Silverlight/AIR/WPF, amongst Indian developers.
Hopefully this data can help others make similar decisions. Meanwhile lookout Bangalore/NCR - we are in the process of making an appearance shortly
PS: Interested in joining Directi? - check our openings at http://careers.directi.com
4 Aug, 2008
I recommend reading…
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (17) Comments
I have been planning to begin blogging about the books I read, atleast the good ones. I have always been an avid reader and used to devour 2-3 books every month in the days before Directi. Nowadays I do not have the luxury of time, but manage to read one book a month (thanks to my ever-increasing travel schedule and the fact that I am never going to be able to sleep on planes until the A380s with the wider fully flatbeds begin flying to NYC and SFO - which may not be too faraway considering that Emirates has ordered 50 of them ).
Back to the topic at hand - I strongly recommend the below two books which I read in the last few weeks -
Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (Hardcover) - Short and informative guide to recruiting tech talent. I read it cover to cover and enjoyed it thoroughly. While the book focuses on recruiting tech talent, most of the principles apply to any recruitment exercise. I would strongly recommend this to anyone involved in recruiting from functional heads to hiring managers
The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea (Hardcover) - An amazing business parable with a simple, yet profound lesson on how building a successful business is about focusing on giving and not getting - an obviously simple fact, that all of us forget while living in what we have been trained to [wrongly] believe is a dog-eats-dog world. (Directians: We are buying 200 copies of this one so you can get yours from the library pretty soon)
19 Jun, 2008
TechCamp Event: Mary and Tom Poppendieck in Mumbai
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (0) Comments
I havent had a chance to post about this before but we have started an initiative called TechCamp, wherein we plan to organize regular technology events, codefests, workshops, activity sessions, training sessions and much more. Given my constant bickering about the dearth of geek events in India, we decided to go ahead and do something about it. The events we organize under the TechCamp banner are open to public, and 100% techie.
Our second TechCamp event is organized in conjunction with ASCI on 28th June in Mumbai. Mary and Tom Poppendieck the proponents of Lean Software Development, and reknowned authors the award-winning book “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit” will be conducting a workshop on Lean Software Development atHotel Sea Princess.
Find out details at the TechCamp Wiki and sign up for the TechCamp Mailing list to be notified of future events. Feel free to invite friends and colleagues. Given the limited seating you will need to submit a position paper to attend.
14 May, 2008
Solid State Hard drives have poor random write performance
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (1) Comments
I just learned the hard way as to how *poor* the *poor random write performance* of Solid State Drives actually means. I recently bought a new Dell Latitude D430 and the laptop keeps freezing every now and then for a few seconds. It is fairly irritating and a quick look at my performance monitor shows ample available RAM and the CPU utilization is next to nothing. I figured the only possibility was some sort of I/O blocking.
Having spent a considerable amount of time on building large scale storage infrastructure, I am well aware of the limitations of solid state hard drives when it comes to random writes in large files. However I am facing a first-hand experience of actually witnessing the poor performance.
A quick google serach revealed that I am not the only one facing this issue -
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000927.html
Excerpt: I recently bought a dell d430 with an SSD and it was useless, reason: Poor random write performance. The user in question had a multi-GB outlook mailbox and the machine would constantly freeze for 5-50 seconds while the HD was doing IO blocking as it shifted blocks around. Had to replace with a standard technology 1.8″ drive now all is well. $500 out the window.
Other Links:
http://www.destinationip.com/index.php/C6/
http://office-outlook.com/outlook-forum/index.php?t=msg&th=75897/
5 May, 2008
The Paradox of choice
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (0) Comments
I just saw a profound video (a TED Talk) by Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice. Barry is an author of a book by the same name. The video is short and covers basic logical reasoning on how more choice can actually be detrimental to our welfare. His arguments are mostly compelling (with a few areas I may not necessarily agree with). The macro fundamentals however are something I can relate to.
As a part of running Directi, I have learnt this paradox the hard way. While there exist several anecdotes, one that comes to mind is ResellerClub’s (one of our many businesses) our strategy of selling hosting packages. I remember not too long ago, when Rclub used to offer a complicated configurator for purchasing hosting packages. While other companies had a set of fixed packages, we offered our customers the ability to choose each parameter on their own. One could select the exact amount of disk space, email accounts, bandwidth, number of databases, database space and so on. If memory serves me right each parameter had between 2 to 15 combinations totalling up to possibly well over half a million combinations.
RClub has since sacrificed that system in favor of a simpler set of 4 packages, but not until we went through some of the thought process expounded by Barry in his talk.In summary, excessive choice can -
- Overwhelm a consumer
- Confuse a consumer - especially in a scenario where the customer does not know all the variables
- cause Paralysis - inability to decide which way to go
- result in Procrastination - where one chooses to postponing the choice due to their inability to make one
- manifest Regret - should I have picked the other one?
13 Oct, 2007
And so it all began …
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (2) Comments
I am a prolific writer.
Actually - scratch that statement. At best it sounds immodest, at worst it is untrue in comparison with the existing active participants of the blogosphere. I do write a lot. I also admit I want to write more than I usually do. A lot of the content I create is for internal corporate training purposes at Directi. To me that is an investment well-made. The value of my time spent in penning down something, will likely be derived by several hundred individuals over the years. I consider the value of any creation, directly proportional to the number of people that can use it. That is probably over-simplifying it, but it is definitely one of the more important variables.
We use Confluence internally, as our knowledge management system, individual blogs, news feed, the Directi University (our internal training corpus) et al. Many a times I find myself penning down articles which I believe deserve greater visibility than the confines of our Intranet - not just for the sake of self-propaganda (and every blogger knows the importance of that) but also for the sake of eliciting greater participation in the ensuing debate.
Enter the blog. Maybe not my daily journal. Maybe not a repository for regular thoughts. Hopefully a collection of articles that will be read, by a larger circle. At the least an attempt.
