Indian IT Forum
Freshers - Survival Guide
Last Updated (Sunday, 22 June 2008 04:36) Written by Balagopal Kannampallil Thursday, 19 June 2008 12:00
As a fresher, working in a software company is a dream come true and also a big challenge. After the boring, sleepy, funny training sessions gets over, many tend to land up in a soup called projects. I just wanted to share some quick tips as how to deal with things when you are in a s/w organization.
Document all your activities
The first and foremost thing is to document all that you have contributed. Whenever someone assigns you a task, just make it a habit to send out an email to the person who has assigned you that particular task and put the person who has helped you in CC when you have completed it. In this way you can keep track of all the things you have done for the company and in future can help you fight for your appraisals.
Identify the leeches
In an organization you may come across this category of people many a times. They will ask you to help them out and finally you end up doing the majority of their work who will advertise this as their own work in front of seniors. So please stay away from them, help them genuinely with some inputs and never cultivate the habit of doing their work. Don't turn out to be a Mother Teresa for them.
Stay away from time snatchers
There will always be lot of cubicle coterie engaged in murmuring and gossiping which is fine. But never take this as your job. Never entertain such people who come to your desk for time pass because they don't have any work. This will eat up your time and at the end of the day you will have to sit late to finish the task assigned to you. Just tell them politely that you have some serious work to do.
Enhance as much as you can
Never take this time as a honeymoon period enjoying the cool a/c and canteen food. This is the time when you will have the energy level to accomplish more tasks. If you are interested in upgrading your knowledge, go for it. Complete one or two certifications before you complete an year or two because at the later stage of the career you will have lot more things to worry about.
Bosses are not Gods
Never cultivate the habit of being a slave to your boss. There isn't any necessary for nodding an yes to whatever he/she says. If you find something going against you, put your foot down and talk about your problem.
Kill slogging
Just get out of the office once your days work is over. Never sit there to browse the internet or chat with your friends. Gradually this will turn out to be a habit and coming home earlier will become a distant dream.
Meaningful use of your software groceries
Try to use your official mail minimally for your personal purposes like mail forwarding, friendly gossips etc. Stay away from other IM's like gtalk or yahoo when you are in office because chatting can help you get the label of a useless resource.
Women write better and helpful code?
Last Updated (Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00) Written by Jini mathew Tuesday, 17 June 2008 03:58
Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.
The code becomes a type of “roadmap” for others who might want to alter it or add to it later, says McGrattan, a native of Ireland who has been with Ingres since 1992.
Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, “they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. “They try to obfuscate things in the code,” and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later. McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.
In an effort to make Ingres’s computer code more user-friendly and gender-neutral, McGrattan helped institute new coding standards at the company. They require programmers to include a detailed set of comments before each block of code explaining what the piece of code does and why; developers also must supply a detailed history of any changes they have made to the code. The rules apply to both Ingres employees and members of the open-source community who contribute code to Ingres’s products.
There’s a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres because only about 20% of the engineers are women, McGrattan says. (Most of them are in jobs involving quality assurance or adapting the product to a new locale, she says, and not the “heavy lifting” of writing code.) She’s on a mission to get more women interested in computer-programming careers. But “it’s proving very challenging,” she says.
Less salary hike in IT sector compared to previous year
Last Updated (Friday, 06 June 2008 16:36) Written by Rajesh Friday, 06 June 2008 16:32
What we predicted earlier this year is now coming true. Salary increments in IT companies are lower this year than it has been in previous years. In some cases, significantly so.
EDS is giving an average increment of only 8% to 10% this year, substantially lower than the 18-20% it gave last year. "In some cases last year, it even went up to 40-50%," said an employee of the company. That's the increment trend across the tech sector. "We have received lower increments this year," said an employee of Infosys Technologies. "Laterals got only some 8% hike. A company security policy e-mail has also asked us not to share such details with anyone outside."
Mohandas Pai, head of education & training in Infosys, said that inclusive of variable pay, the company's increments this year were in the range of 11% to 13%, against 13-15% last year. Senior HR executives at some large tech firms confided that their companies are not in a position to increase salaries "beyond single digits" at least for a couple of years, till the global markets stabilize.
"Companies are hit from all corners. Market downturn, increase in hiring cost and billing pressures are choking even large players. This has forced them to drastically revise their increment formula," says Mohan Lal Menon, managing director, Sentient Consulting, a corporate consulting firm.
Read more: Less salary hike in IT sector compared to previous year
The art of delegation
Last Updated (Tuesday, 27 May 2008 13:30) Written by sangeetha Tuesday, 27 May 2008 13:25
Do you feel stressed and overloaded? Or that your career seems stalled? If so, then you may need to brush up your delegation skills!If you work on your own, there’s only a limited amount that you can do, however hard you work. You can only work so many hours in a day. There are only so many tasks you can complete in these hours. There are only so many people you can help by doing these tasks. And, because the number of people you can help is limited, your success is limited.
However, if you’re good at your job, people will want much more than this from you.
This can lead to a real sense of pressure and work overload: You can’t do everything that everyone wants, and this can leave you stressed, unhappy, and feeling that you’re letting people down.
On the positive side, however, you’re being given a tremendous opportunity if you can find a way around this limitation. If you can realize this opportunity, you can be genuinely successful!
One of the most common ways of overcoming this limitation is to learn how to delegate your work to other people. If you do this well, you can quickly build a strong and successful team of people, well able to meet the demands that others place.
This is why delegation is such an important skill, and is one that you absolutely have to learn!
Why outsource to India?
Last Updated (Tuesday, 29 April 2008 15:08) Written by Ajay Monday, 12 April 2004 09:54
Why Outsource to India?
The world is discovering the fact that India is a super power when it comes to developing IT solutions. Swept by the current of the latest trend "IT outsourcing to India", we find many fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, Wal-Mart, AT&T, General Electric, Reebok, General Motors, Sony, Boeing, Coca-cola, Pepsi, Swissair, United Airlines, Philips, IBM, Lucas and British Aerospace beneficiaries.
A closer look at the factors fanning the potentials of IT outsourcing in India.
1. India's human resources
Being the world's second highly populated country, human resources are a boon by itself. Just as the Gulf is renowned for its natural resource of crude oil, and South Africa for its diamonds, India is proud of the abundance and easy availability of its highly qualified and technically skilled English speaking computer professionals; who are key to success in the field of IT outsourcing to India.
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