Read the 3 conversation below:

Conversation 1
Interviewer: “Why are you looking for a change?”
Respondent: “for better career growth!”
Interviewer: “What do you mean by that?”
Responded: “umm… better salary”

Conversation 2
Colleague 1: “I want to switch to Java?”
Colleague 2: “Why do you want to do that?”
Colleague 1: “The market is better for Java!”
Colleague 2: “What market?”
Colleague 1: “I mean salaries are higher”

Conversation 3
Manager: “Why are you leaving ‘Change the World?’ to join ‘Make another Widget’ “?
Employee: “They are paying me 3000 more”

Did you find anything wrong with the above three conversations? In case you didn’t then please read the next case below:

Conversation 4
You: “Why do you want to become a doctor?”
Doctor 1: “Because there is lot of money in being a doctor”
Doctor 2: “Because am interested in the subject and want to make lives better for people”

Which one of the two doctors will you hire? Will your answers change if you are running a hospital viz. if you are a patient? I bet that in both the cases you will hire or visit the 2^nd doctor. It’s strange to see that people are willing to make career decisions for money but they want to entrust their lives on people who are in their profession for something beyond money. Call it the height of double standards.

As an organization we feel it is critical not to focus on money alone, because of the simple reason: If money bought them in, money will take them out. Sometimes a difference of only 2000 or 3000 is all that is takes. It is important to hire people who have the right attitude and who are willing to contribute.

Too many times, I meet friends, MBA school grads, ex-employees, colleagues who seem to recklessly chasing the money regardless of what they are doing or like to do. They want to take up finance or switch to SAP because of the money is good. Once smart people, who could debate all day on various subjects, now know nothing beyond their narrow job profiles or worse, the dumb terminals which gawk and feed all day long.

If a job is not allowing to you explore your potential but still it is paying you more than fair market salary then soon it you will loose the critical skills that landed you in that job in the first place. Sitting there all day and doing what you don’t like will create a big void in your life which will keep getting bigger and bigger until every ounce of self-worth has been squeezed out and you become completely risk averse.

Money is important, I don’t question that, but your own sense of self worth is not derived from what you own but from what you are! Money as the primary content of job profile is not good. Customers will rely on the work that you do and if the job does not interests you then you will always do a lousy job.

Remember what someone said: “Do you what you like to do and you don’t have to work for a single day”

Date: 24th May 2007

Dear Sir

I would just like to say how pleased we are with your company.  The courteous and prompt service we have received is very refreshing and your ability to quickly adapt to our needs has proven invaluable.

The staff you have provided for us are highly skilled, excellent communicators and highly professional, over the last few months they have undertaken numerous Website builds and updates and have proven there worth time and time again.

We would be happy to act as a reference for your company and freely write this open recommendation

Simon Martin
Technical Director
Fearsome Engine Ltd

Abhishek - Thank you Simon for your open recommendation. I assure you of the same quality of service in days to come if not better. We are fortunate to have you as our customer, as a part of our family.

Today, Indus Net Technologies reached another milestone. We have reached 1000+ Reputation Number (Seller) at Paypal.

What are these Reputation Numbers?
Here is a mini guide directly from Paypal.com

Reputation Numbers are a new feature developed to help PayPal members better evaluate the person or business with whom they are transacting. The feature measures how active a member has been within the PayPal community by showing the number of unique Verified PayPal members with whom they have transacted.

Reputation Numbers are an indicator of trustworthiness because members who have completed transactions with many other Verified PayPal members over time are unlikely to have been participating in fraudulent transactions. This is because members who have completed transactions with lots of other Verified PayPal members over time are unlikely to have been participating in fraudulent transactions, as such activity would result in the member being removed from PayPal.

So why is this important to you as a customer or a prospective customer?

This simply means that you are dealing with a trustworthy IT partner who is not a fly-by-night operator and your money is safe here. We have build up this reputation by keeping a simple philosophy of “delivering value for our customers’ money”. We make our commitments, our policy known in advance and follow the same in a transparent way. If you do not get value from us as per our initial agreement, you get your money back!

Another thing. When we told several prospective customers that we have served more than thousand customers, they found it difficult to believe. I am sure this will not be the case anymore as our claim is backed up by a third party data who processes a part of our payment.

I understand, it is difficult to trust a company in a different country, especially when the relationship is entirely based on digital communication channels like email, voice and document exchanges. It is very easy to misrepresent and lie about one’s infrastructure, capabilities, resources and client base. This results in many companies been taken for a ride by several offshore outsourcing companies from hot outsourcing destinations like India, Brazil, etc. The problem multiplies for small businesses because they do not have means to verify credibility and capabilities of these outsourcing companies.

We are trying to solve it for our customers in our own way. We continue to host more and more clients in Kolkata to see them around our facilities, have them meet our team members, our vendors and show them our way of doing things. If you are interested in visiting our facility, please do not hesitate to contact your Account Manager at Indus Net Technologies.

Dear Customers - I will like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for showing your trust in a company which did not have this “credibility landmark” before today. You have helped us in building Indus Net Technologies. This landmark is dedicated to you all!

Its play time at Indus Net Technologies. 

We have got our cricket team competing in the 6th Corporate Indoor Cricket Tournament organized by Space Circle Club in Kolkata. The contest will take place between 6th August till 22nd September and 64 corporate teams will be participating in the event to make it the biggest corporate tournament of its kind.

We are all excited and keeping our fingers crossed!

Look out news about our journey in this tournament and some wonderful photographs.

Abhishek

I have often seen people struggling with their business plan. I have a bit unconventional take on the subject. May be, because it has worked well for me till now. So here is what I sugget:

A business plan does help. However a business plan should be proportionate with the size of investment you are making or seeking.

So, if you are starting small and testing the waters, I will suggest you to have a “paper napkin business plan”. A plan which reminds you of –

1. Your target audience, 
2. Your product range and 
3. Highlight the reasons why someone will buy the product / service from you. And, how will you achieve this?

I feel that this can be a mini-strategy document which will help you and these three things must be “thought upon” before venturing into anything.

You shall also put down in that paper –

1. Your cash-flow statement (Expected revenues & expenses – both pessimistically an optimistically). You can use this to verify if you are on the right path or not?
2. Your sales pitch! This is very important. If you are not convinced from your own sales pitch, no-one will be! Try to verify your sales pitch with friends you trust and take their feedback.
3. Risks to your business and how you will mitigate them.
4. Possible sources of acquiring business and how you want to prioritize and execute them.
5. Possible sources of funds, if you really need them at one point of time.
6. Some time bound goals!

That’s it!  

I think one can kick start a business from this “paper napkin business plan”. You can comfortably make it while you chew upon your favorite sandwich in the coffee shop.

Best of luck with your venture!

100 Websites You Should Know and Use

The Web is constantly turning out new and extraordinary services many of us are unfamiliar with. During TED University at this spring’s TED2007 in Monterey, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, offered an ultra-fast-moving ride through sites in many different areas, from art, design and illustration, to daily news, blogs and curiosity.

Beautiful Illustrations from Sara Torres

Aged Aesthetic
This article was posted long back but still very fresh and helpful for those who love retro/aged/old styled designs.

Swap Meat
Great business idea of playing with creative stuffs, get promoted and of course making money without too much of production effort!

Off The Grid
Rethinking about structured design process.

Perhaps the first company on the planet to think about the effects on employee turnover was the Ford Motor Company. Early 1900s were a turbulent time and employee turnover was killing the company. At around $2.25 a day, each worker was expected to work for around 9 hours. The attrition rate was nearly 300% and they had to hire 52000 employees to maintain a steady workforce of 14000 on the assembly line. It was then Henry Ford, took the unprecedented step of doubling the wage from $2.25 to $5 a day. The wage rate increase was not just about giving more money but it was a sort of first ever profit sharing plan.

Working overtime is dangerous, I feel work related stress may be the #1 reason of attrition is software companies and meaningless overtime is the #1 cause of stress. However, still it’s not very hard to find instances of scheduled overtime when the project plan deliberately requires the team members to slog more-than-required hours each day on the project. Here is what you should know about overtime:

1. Programming is a mental work. The more time you spend doing it, the more tired you become. The more fatigued you are, the lesser you will be to concentrate. As the concentration down, the more bugs the system will contain. The more bugs the system contain, more money will be spent fixing it. So, the project will end up costing more.

2. People have a life outside work too. They talk to friends, pay their bills, eat out, do their laundry, sleep and do host of other things when they are not working. The more time they spend in office, the more overlap you will notice between their work life and social life. Now, you surely want people to keep out their social lives when they come for work, but at the same time you want them to work longer. That’s an amazing contradiction.

3. It’s not unheard of that top executives or entrepreneurs spend 80 hours work week. However, there is an important difference between motivations of executives and programmers. As expectancy theory states, there should be a positive correlation between effort (hours spent) and performance (output) and moreover, improved performance should lead to desirable reward.  So, although long hours of work will not stress the executive because they can link effort with rewards, but if the people in production workforce cannot find that link, overwork will simply stress them more. So, if you want to encourage voluntary overtime, then the employees must feel that it will reward them in desirable ways. 

4. Finally, overtime reduces employment. If 4 people are doing 2 hours of overtime every day, it means they are doing one extra person’s job. Given the point is made about more defects and social life, there is no point in saving that cost of one more person because you are not saving it anyway.

Its rather a practice that you will find in most of the organizations. This is a form of management in which you just hit a developer with a command and then run away without looking back at what the consequences of the decision has been.

Normally senior managers are too busy to micro-manage every employee and that’s good. It’s hard to know or remember the details of every project or what every employee is doing specially in scenarios where you have hundreds of developers doing lot of different projects of varying sizes.

Then, all of a sudden something changes and you stop by at the developer’s cubicle and start a discussion about whatever work they are doing. You get into micro level detail of a project which you were completely unaware of approximately 10 minutes earlier. 3 minutes into the discussion, you find yourself completing sentences for the developer. Fascinatingly, within 5 minutes (sometimes 2), you presume that you know all about that given task or project and then give your verdict of what needs to be done and by when. The developer simply have to follow that without questioning.

Why is this so bad?

1. The manager ventured into the project for reasons that are important to him rather than project itself. So, any decision taken will be biased towards their own interest.

2. Are you a trained Programmer ? Designer ? Database architect ? Project manager ? If not, you need to recognize your limitations and be aware of the fact that your decision will cause unwanted consequences. You might even don’t understand what’s involved in getting that piece of work done.

3. You are telling the developers that they are not smart enough, which in the long term will have negative effects. Pygmalion effect kicks in and the motivation goes down.

4. The developer gets a false perception from that point onwards, that you are controlling or watching the project. They will avoid taking decisions (because they feel that you will change it later!) while you are too busy with your actual job to follow-up with that project. The project will tail-spin and you will end up blaming the developer.

So what do to?

The fact from the other side of the table is that you definitely have been tipped-off  or something has caught your attention or fancy, for which you are deciding to take the matters in your own hands. You don’t want to do this but it seems you have no other choice. Here is what you can do:

1. Try to empathize with the employee and understand the conditions under which they are working.

2. Try adopting a consultative approach rather than a dictatorial approach. Help the employee arrive at the decision rather than making it for them.

3. Make sure you communicate the parameters you are considering while making the decision. This will set the right context when the person faces the same situation next time.

4. Communicate the degree of your involvement. Make sure that you tell the employee exactly what you are expecting and when will you monitor the progress again.

5. Follow-up your decisions, to see if it worked. If it has, give the employee the credit for making the right decision.

6. Avoid on-the-spot decisions when you are not sure, involve people who can give you broader perspective on what’s involved.

Amazon has officially launched its must awaited payment gateway service. Unlike Google Checkout, this is not a copy of Ebay owned PayPal.

There are very bright chances that Amazon will make Ebay a bit uncomfortable as it has got a powerful incentive for merchants to signup for its service. PayPal basically charges its merchants the same transaction fees for processing credit card transactions as well direct bank debits. Now, direct bank debit charges that PayPal has to pay in turn to the banks are not as high as the charges that are required to be paid to VISA or MasterCard when a credit card is charged. Thus, PayPal makes much profit with Direct Bank debits which consequentially is has made the default method. Amazon wants to charge its merchants a seperate transaction fees based by the type of transaction they do, this will make it more profitable for the merchants to sign-up with Amazon as they will pay lower fees for bank debits and Amazon balance transfers.

Here is what Amazon has said:

Additionally, Amazon FPS exposes a different fee structure for each of the underlying payment methods enabled: credit cards, bank account debits, and Amazon Payments balance transfers. Amazon’s cost to process a payment through a bank account debit is less than our cost via credit card. Our cost for processing an Amazon Payments balance transfer is less still. By exposing different fees for each of these three methods, we can pass on savings from bank account debits and balance transfers, allowing developers to save money. In each case, we take on the complexity of managing security and fraud protection.

Thus, there is a big advantage for merchants to use Amazon FPS. This is why Amazon has highlighted this several times in their FPS page. Here are some other things:

1. Amazon customers can use their in-built profiles for accessing its service. So, there is for re-enter card, shipping information.
2. It’s a pure webservice that has been targeted at developers rather than being a web-front. There is a strong incentive to leverage it as a platform to build innovative new applications.

Will it be more profitable than PayPal?

No Likely! Hold on to your eBay stocks, the markets show no change in its trading price by Amazon’s announcement and there is a good reason why. Let me explain:

The money in Payment Gateway business does not lie in membership fees but in transaction fees. This is the money that you as merchant as to pay to the payment gateway on every transaction.

PayPal allows funding of account and storing of money in that account. This money pressumably lies in PayPal’s bank account where is generates interest for PayPal but, a Merchant is loosing interest if it keeps money in PayPal account vs keeping it in a savings/checking account. In case of a PayPal to PayPal transaction i.e. one merchant is using its funded account  to pay another merchant, Paypal charges the transaction fees again to the merchant who is receiving the money but guess what ?, its an internal transaction so all of that money is pure profit. So PayPal has two extra channels of making money!

That’s a secret that will keep PayPal ahead of both Amazon and Google for many more days. Lets wait and see if PayPal starts to offer flexible transaction fees. As one of the biggest customers of PayPal in India, I guess we will be very happy. We cannot shift to Amazon immediately becuase of one major shortcoming as listed here:

Credit cards currently accepted by Amazon Payments are Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and Diners Club.

You may also use a bank account to make payments using Amazon Payments. Only U.S. bank accounts may be used and a verification process must be completed before the bank account can be used as a payment method.

We simply have too many customers outside US who pay us via PayPal.

Yahoo Developer Network has featured a article on speeding up your website by following 13 simple rules. Seems to be very simple and effective.

   1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
   2. Use a Content Delivery Network
   3. Add an Expires Header
   4. Gzip Components
   5. Put CSS at the Top
   6. Move Scripts to the Bottom
   7. Avoid CSS Expressions
   8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
   9. Reduce DNS Lookups
  10. Minify JavaScript
  11. Avoid Redirects
  12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
  13. Configure ETags

Read the full article here.