On Programming, Culture and Little things that surround my life

Krishna Kumar posted a nice explanation in response to mine.

Krishna wrote

The simplest reason is: Indians have long resumes because they simply don’t know any better, i.e., they have not seen resumes prepared by the typical American programmer.

jetalone on flickr

Krishna might be right. But its hard to believe why Indians don’t know even though there are great resources like joelonsoftware.com available. Indians are the first one to know if there is a long distance subscription that is cheaper by half a cent than his current one.

So, just for the records, please do read Getting your Resume Read

When that article came out, I remember, there was some passing remarks about Indian’s use of punctuation marks. Joel took lot of heat on it (there were lot of livejournal blogs then talking about it) and took it out (I cannot find it on that article anymore). So Indian’s do read :-))

Technorati Tags:
resume, joelonsoftware, indianresume

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This is in response to piece of article by James McGovern. James made it to top 100 software blogs recently. {if you haven’t subscribed to any of them yet, please do as soon as possible.}

James asks

How come resumes from India suck?: “Ever see a resume from India? How come a person who has been in IT for only a few years has a resume that is larger than most CIOs? Do folks in India understand that the word resume is french for summary..”

Picture courtesy of ninadism on flickr

India is a land of 1 Billion people. Our grandfathers who were primarily agriculturists; had nothing to do for 6 months until the first wave of South-West Summer Monsoon hits. They spend their long hiatus humping their wives and chewing pan. Thus, we are now with a whooping population of one billion people. Hence all our day to day activities have become voluminous. Our weddings, our festivals, our churches, our temples, our train stations, our schools, our colleges, our parliment are all cramped with herds of people. Work places are not different either. In a Knol article, Priti Biaz makes this observation while evaluating MindTree, a consulting firm in India.

It had an active client base of 206 as of FY08 and billed about 2,560 employees. Thus, the average team size for a client works out to about 12. Hexaware, which is quite similar in size and client concentration to MindTree, manages a team of about 23 people per client on an average.

Picture courtesy of vlima.com on flickr

Indian software companies are notoriously famous for maintaining a large team for a project. The benefits are two fold. The companies, primarily doing business in service sector, get paid by head count. So larger the team size, more the profits. Further they can quickly throw in a fresh graduate at a lower salary into the mix and train them on the job. You can’t expect a pleasant experience when you work in a large team. You hardly can own anything, especially if its a maintenance project. Even if its a full blown development project, you need to struggle hard to claim a piece of pie that you can own. This struggle is many fold higher than what it takes to prove yourself in an american company. And over a period you develop a cloud of insecurity. More you stay at one place the cloud will turn into a fog if not a smog. At this point, if you ask us what you do ?, warned; you will spend next 20 minutes listening. VSBabu
wrote about an incident he had in 2004. Look at this conversation below. That is our insecurity in action.

him: Software?
me: Yes.
him: Me too. Electronic City?
me: No, International Technology Park.
him: Java?
me: No.
him: .NET?
me: No.
him: Then?
me: Then what?
him: Platform, platform.
me: Oracle, Zope, Python.
him: Python?
me: Never mind.
him: Oh. Ummmm… I’ve 5 years experience in Java. J2EE.
me: Good.
him: WebLogic only.
me: Good for you.
him: Now, these web services and all are popular.
me: Indeed.
him: You work in 2-tier? I work on n-tier systems only.
me: (annoyed) Does it matter?
him: What? (his mobile rings). Oh, I have to take this call.
me: Thank you.
him: Uh?

Picture courtesy of Pascal Bernard on flickr

Therefor when we step out of the boat at JFK, we check out this huge baggage of insecurity along with 60 kg of Masala, Pickles and Utensils our moms have packed for us. We haul it around for a long time until we have proven ourselves in our american work place. Even still, some of those old scars will rub into you rarely, just rarely.

Needless to say this insecurity reflects on our resume. So we tend to be verbal; and try to make a point how important our role was in that project.

I promise; If you can cut the crap and look through the resume, you will find real gems. Her marks, the school she went to, her academic projects. The company she worked for. The clients she had worked for etc; could be your criteria for judging the person.

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Heard about the 520 miles email story. Here it is, please do help yourself to read it (See below). Its a fine story. If you had been coding and debugging, you would have had similar stories to share.

The case of the 500-mile email: “‘We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.’

‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.

‘We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,’ the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. ‘Come again?’

‘We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,’ he repeated. ‘A
little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.’
“

I have one too …

In one of the gossiping sessions after our daily scrum on a friday, plans for the weekend came up.

Some one said that we should go and play basket ball at a local apartment ground. Plan was immediately agreed and we found ourselves discussing the travel arrangements. Suddenly Nick said,

“I can’t come at 9 am, it can be after 11 or before 8. ”

“Why”

“If I leave at 9 my garage won’t close”.

“WTF ?”

“For reals, It won’t close; the garage comes down but goes up right away”.

Suddenly the discussion turned into serious technical one. Some on pulled out a schematic of the garage door sensor circuitry from internet. Some one said the garage door springs should have a problem, and the time is irrelevant. We even heard a remark that Nick might be hallucinating. (Nick is a mormon and considers drinking coffee could get your a permanent spot in hell. So Nick high on crack, heroine were ruled out immediately).

Then came the million dollar question

“What way is your house facing; East or west ?”

Suddenly we knew the answer.

Nick’s house apparently faces east. During the later hours of the morning when the Central Valley summer sun of California hits right on, it blinds the sensors of the garage.

Nick solved the issue with a deflector made out of cardboard.

Share yours. I would love to hear them :-)

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