10 Oct, 2009
Judging Humility in an Interview
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (16) Comments
At Directi, one of the most important qualities we value in potential candidates is humility. Infact, in the constantly dynamic landscape that is our industry, the only way to keep up is to know that you don’t know [it all]. Infact I include humility as an important attribute in my document on Skills and attributes that a good developer must possess.
I never really got a handle on how one can judge humility of an individual, until it struck me recently. A technique that has actually effectively worked in the past, but I have never paid attention to it. Humble individuals are always respectful, and do not have an air about them. One of the ways I have been able to distinguish individuals who are not humble are those who feel specific interview questions are beneath them to answer. We have all seen this category. Often I will fire an extremely easy or fundamental or theoretical question in my interview to a candidate – and they will respond with a short answer – accompanied by negative body language or verbal cues or in some cases a direct rebuke that essentially states – “Are you kidding me? Why are you asking me such a question at my level. I am above this type of questioning.”
There are only two reasons (not mutually exclusive) for this type of a response – (1) Ignorance – the candidate does not know the answer to the question and instead of acknowledging it he prefers to go down the path of “this question is beneath me”, (2) Lack of Humility
At Directi -
- no question is ever beneath someone
- all of us know that we have a lot to learn
- none of us feel uncomfortable in acknowledging something we don’t know
- all of us are respectful
So if you want to judge the humility of an individual during an interview – ask a couple of really easy questions – and see how they respond 
Do you feel you would fit into our work culture? Apply at http://careers.directi.com
12 Jun, 2009
Directi Launches Designchef.com
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (0) Comments
After the tremendous success of CodeChef - a one-of-its-kind, non-commercial, multi-platform online coding competition – we have launched another community contest intiiative – DesignChef.com
DesignChef will feature ongoing community contests targetted to design professionals, usability experts, ux specialists, interaction designers, front-end developers and the likes.
Saunter by and check out our July contest at DesignChef – and win cash prizes. Like CodeChef, DesignChef is a non-profit initiative, currently managed and sponsored by Directi. We hope to grow it into a community of thousands of usability and design professionals worldwide.
3 May, 2009
Skills that make a good developer
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (3) Comments
Joel Spolsky captures the essence of a good (read: recruitment material) developer in his succint mantra – “Smart and Gets Things Done“. My own personal part-plagiarised part-modified version has always been – “Smart, Takes Initiative, Gets things done, Paranoid about Perfection and is a Nice Person”. I believe Joel’s shorter version does not capture all these aspects – for instance being Nice and being Smart are mutually exclusive.
Both versions (mine and Joel’s), in their brevity, have a quotable-charm, but fail to provide a more detailed perspective. As a parallel effort, I wanted to list down, in micro-detail, a significantly more extensive document, of skills that I find good developers possess.
The current work-in-progress version of it has been put up at - What skills doth a good developer possess? within our Wiki. Granted that all developers at Directi do not possess all the skills listed. However the document serves as a “skills-to-acquire” list for our existing team, as well as a reference list for aspiring applicants. As someone who wants to join our organization, you should have several of these mastered, and be prepared to tackle the rest.
Excerpt from the document - What skills doth a good developer possess?
- Algorithmic skills
- Understand and dissect complex problems quickly
- Understand trade-offs between space / time complexity
- Come up with solutions with minimal space / time complexity
- … <snip>
- Data Structures
- Basic Knowledge of data structures – Hashmaps, Binary tree, B-Tree, B+Tree, Linked Lists etc
- Understanding of trade-offs between various data structures etc
- … <snip>
- RDBMS
- Caching
- Networking
- … <snip>
For further details visit the complete document - What skills doth a good developer possess?
To apply for a tech position at Directi visit our Careers Portal
4 Feb, 2009
Introduction of New TLDs will NOT increase costs for Trademark Holders
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (4) Comments
As an ICANN accredited Registrar, a consultant to Registrars and Registries, and an erstwhile chair of the Registrars Constituency, I am very closely involved with the ICANN bottoms up consensus processes. Amongst the most interesting endeavors of ICANN, and a fundamental element of ICANN’s goal is the creation of new gTLDs. Some of the recent comments on the new gTLD applicant guidebook seem to suggest that creation of new gTLDs will result in a cost increase to existing trademark holders who will have to register their trademark in various TLDs as a defensive mechanism.
Paul Stahura published a great report demonstrating that trademark holders have historically not been blocking their names across multiple Top-Level Domains (TLDs). I have always been a fan of number crunching—”numbers never lie”.
Since Paul has already done a remarkable job of statistical analysis, I am going to wear my theorist hat and prove a reworded form of the Hypothesis using logical deduction and common sense.
Hypothesis – Introduction of new TLDs will not increase the sum total registration cost that trademark holders need to spend on domain names.
Methodology – Logical deduction.
Fact:
There are currently over 280 TLDs of which a little over 250 are ccTLDs in the IANA root zone.
Assumptions:
Individuals and companies spend money for economic gain. Therefore whether a registrant is an organization, a speculator, a cyber squatter, or a phisher, their purpose in registering a domain name is to derive economic gain that outweighs the cost of the domain name.
Description:
Let us start by analyzing why one would want to register a domain name in each additional TLD outside of the primary TLD that they use for their business. Lets take the example of a company—Extra Cautious Inc.—who uses the domain name extracautious.com. They now need to evaluate whether it makes sense for them to register the string extracautious in other TLDs. Here is the reasoning that the CFO of Extra Cautious Inc. would go through.
Traffic expectation:
It makes sense for the CFO to register extracautious.biz or extracautious.info in case an adequate number of people are expected to type in extracautious.biz in their browser directly. The number of type-ins needed to make it worthwhile to register this domain name is negligible given that .biz and .info domains cost substantially under $10 per year. If there is a clear traffic value to be derived, then as Paul has pointed out in his elaborate report, the registration of this additional domain name is not a cost but rather a revenue generation opportunity for Extra Cautious Inc, who otherwise would have missed out on the hits. Therefore in case of a Traffic Expectancy the hypothesis above holds true.
Source of traffic:
A typical website gets traffic in two ways. Either through direct type-ins, or via hyperlinks. Both the former and the latter are primarily a function of the domain name that an organization promotes. When Extra Cautious Inc. promotes extracautious.com as its website on its stationery, advertising etc., it expects people to type in that domain name to reach their website. It also expects search engines to index that domain name, and other directories and websites to link to that domain name. In other words traffic through type-ins and hyperlinks would directly end up on their website.
Next let’s explore the possibility of direct type-in traffic on other TLDs. Users on the Internet type-in a domain name directly if they expect to find the website or information they were looking for. The most common case of this is appending a .com to a company/product name. It is common behavior on the Internet to append a “.com” to the end of a company name to look for its website. In some cases people even append a .net or a .org. However, given Google magic, that is the limit of a user’s patience. One does not have to be Einstein to conclude that no users are trying out 280+ TLD combinations to get to a company’s website. It can therefore be assumed that if 50 new TLDs, each quite different sounding from the other, were to be launched, that users on the internet would not begin to iterate through those 50 TLDs to find a company.
ccTLDs type-ins:
In fact the only other type of domain that tends to get type-in traffic is ccTLD equivalents. This is based on two behavior patterns. Users seeking for a company that they know is based in India, could try to reach that company’s website by appending “.in” to the company name as a last resort after attempting a .com / .net / .org search. Similarly, users from India, who are used to seeing “.in” domains may append “.in” to a company name (e.g. dell.in) to find its local website. By this logic, many companies should ideally have registered their domain names in several ccTLDs, especially those of highly populated countries like India and China. Yet the TLD Zones of these ccTLDs have little overlap with the global trademark registry as well as with the .com zone, barring generics and some fortune 500 companies.
Many new TLDs have a specific purpose:
Add to this the fact that many of the proposed new TLDs have varying creative purposes. We have heard of business models such as .wiki, .blog etc. which have such specific purposes. Type-in traffic on those TLDs for a specific trademark such as Extra Cautious Inc, is highly unlikely, since users would not expect Extra Cautious’ website to be available at extracautious.wiki.
No traffic expectation:
Going back to our first point—in case no one is expected to type in extracautious.newTLD, it makes little sense for Extra Cautious Inc. themselves to register extracautious.newTLD. This for instance applies to specific TLDs like .aero. Since extracautious is in the business of making fireworks 
… they do not expect any of their existing or potential customers to type in extracautious.aero. Similarly since Extra Cautious Inc. largely operates in the US, it may block extracautious.us but chooses not to block extracautious.in. The likelihood of individuals typing in extracautious.biz and extracautious.info ad-hoc is ZERO so they do not need to block those domains. If there is a traffic expectancy on any TLD option, it is a no brainer to block those domains since the potential revenue would outweigh the cost.
What about cybersquatters:
The next argument typically made by IP constituencies is that if a speculator / cybersquatter / phisher were to register extracautious.newTLD then they could create nuisance value and the company may be prompted to block their domain name (defensive registrations) to prevent this nuisance value.
It is important to understand that CyberSquatters / Speculators / Phishers register non-generic trademark domain names for specific economic reasons. Let’s explore these.
Type-in traffic on trademark names:
If a trademarked domain gets type-in traffic, a speculator maybe prompted to register this domain to monetize the traffic. However in this case, as we have discussed before, a trademark holder themselves would wish to register it prior to a speculator since the revenue outweighs the cost. If a speculator can earn more than the cost of the domain name by simply monetizing traffic to that domain name, then it is assumed that the actual trademark holder can earn significantly higher revenue and therefore is not bearing any cost by registering his domain name in that TLD. Therefore Extra Cautious Inc. chooses to register extracautious.au since it has an office in Australia and expects type-in traffic from Australia. This is not an extra cost for them since through this additional domain they get traffic that they would have otherwise not received.
Defensive domain registrations to prevent misrepresentation or blackmail:
Some folks argue that even if a domain name has no traffic potential, speculators can choose to register the same to either fraudulently pretend to be the trademark holder (phishing etc.) or otherwise to try and sell the domain name to the trademark holder for a premium. Let’s analyze both these arguments.
Mr Scrupulous registers extracautious.info and puts up a website on it to sell fireworks. He intends to spam thousands of users, pretending to be Extra Cautious Inc. and leverage on the advertising campaign of Extra Cautious Inc. to earn money. It can be argued that if Extra Cautious Inc. had registered their .info domain name this could have been prevented. However this argument is flawed, since Mr. Scrupulous could have registered extracautiousweb.com, extracautiousonline.com, extracautiousfireworks.com, extracautiouscrackers.com, extracautiousoffers.com, extracautiousshop.com and a gazillion other variants within the .com space itself. By this logic the CFO of Extra Cautious Inc. would need to register every combination of extracautious in the .com and .net and .org TLD spaces. Therefore new TLDs are no more expensive than existing TLDs when it comes to protecting one’s trademark from identity theft/phishing. In fact I would go so far as to submit that phishers and spammers would rather register <company&rt;online.com or <company&rt;web.com or some such variant in the .com TLD space in order to commit identity theft, than to register a .info / .biz domain name, since .com domain names are easier to relate to for users. While I have conducted no statistical analysis, gut feeling tells me that one will find more variants of Fortune 500 company brand names in the .com TLD than defensive registrations of those trademarks in all other TLDs.
Let’s take a look at the second argument, wherein Mr. Scrupulous registers extracautious.info with the sole purpose of reselling it to Extra Cautious Inc. for a profit. This has already been covered in our previous assertion. The CFO of Extra Cautious Inc. would only buy extracautious.info at a certain price if the expected profit from the purchase was higher, in which case the purchase does not result in a cost increase. Additionally, Extra Cautious always has the option of filing a dispute, instead of purchasing the domain from Mr. Scrupulous, and this knowledge is by itself sufficient to prevent widespread blackmail of this form. If extracautious.info is getting no traffic, then Extra Cautious Inc. has no reason to purchase extracautious.info either directly or from Mr. Scrupulous
Conclusions:
- Trademark holders have no reason to register a domain name in a newTLD if the domain name is not going to get any traffic
- Speculators have no reason to register a domain name in a newTLD if the domain name is not going to get any traffic, since they will be unable to generate revenue from it or sell it to the trademark holder
- Spammers and phishers have adequate options for registering similar sounding domain names in existing TLDs without having to bother with new TLDs
- Thus, it can be concluded that the Introduction of new TLDs is not increasing the sum total registration cost that trademark holders need to spend on domain names
1 Oct, 2008
The Game of Business
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (5) 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 | (1) 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
4 Sep, 2008
Ethics in journalism and the Metcalfe law
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (2) Comments
I, alongwith my team, have spent the last two full days in fire-fighting, false and inaccurate, libelous and defamatory claims against Directi by a certain Garth Bruen at Knujon and Jart Armin and James Mcquad at Hostexploit, compounded multifold thanks to the Network effect of the Internet.
For the full story check out our post on the Directi blog – Our official response to inaccurate reports which falsely implicate the Directi Group
In short, Knujon and HostExploit published two independent online reports incorrectly linking Directi to certain miscreants responsible for fraudulent activities on the Internet. Their research was entirely flawed and their reports filled with factual inaccuracies.
Within record time, these posts were picked up by over 15 other news sites and reported as if accurate with additional conclusions left to the imagination of the respective journalists. What shocked me personally is neither the original posters (Garth / Jart / James) nor any of the journalists responsible for the follow-up aftermath extended a basic common courtesy of contacting us for comments, let alone for validating any of the claims. The whole episode has caused considerable irreversible damage to our reputation, ended up wasting significant resources within our organization, and left several misconceptions in the minds of thousands of readers worldwide concerning abuse on the Internet.
Journalism has existed way before the Internet, and a common ethical code of responsible reporting is assumed in this profession. With the Internet however the responsibility is significantly compounded, given the fact that any published story is now re-published multiple times, blogged about, indexed, archived, forwarded, shared, favorited, bookmarked, dugg, twitterred within moments of publication, repeatedly, by netizens worldwide, and all this information continues to exist in the cyberspace, google cache, browser cache, proxies, web archives, offline stores and many other sources – ad infinitum.
Anyone making any public claims / statements on the Internet now has significant power, and, in the words of Peter Parker – “With great power comes great responsibility”. I can only hope that the various reporters / news agencies who we have been in touch with, learn from this experience, and do not, in their haste to churn out the next sensational news story, ignore the fundamental tenets of responsible and ethical reporting.
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.
5 Jan, 2008
Directi wins the Times Ascent Pinkslip award
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (1) Comments
Directi won the ‘PinkSlip Choice’ Award for the “most innovative recruitment advertisement”. The ad was our third recruitment ad for Times Ascent.
Spearheaded and executed by our in-house marketing and design team, the ad reflects one of our fundamental principles – which is – “We like to stand out in everything we do”. At Directi creativity is expected in every task. Directi is the only company so far (I think) that has won this award without outsourcing the ad to an Advertising agency.
26 Nov, 2007
Lucky 13: Our rank in the Deloitte and Touche Fast 50 list
Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (8) Comments
Directi was ranked in the Deloitte and Touche Technology Fast 50 list for the 3rd consecutive year (2006-2007). This time we improved upon last year, garnering 13th position (as compared to 17th last year) with a compounded annual growth rate of 547%. The title is somewhat of a misnomer given that luck had nothing to do with this. Credit goes to the relentless effort of our amazing team.
Directi was the only company in the Top 15 to have won this award 3 years in a row, a commendable feat, considering that each year becomes the baseline for the next year.
(Divyank collecting the award – Looking smart as ever )
As I always say … this is just the beginning, and there are many more to come
