Chronicles of Ravi Kumar

Disclaimer-I wrote this essay a long time ago so forgive me if some of the information does not really hold. Most of it does though.

Ravi Kumar was this software dude who as an engineering undergrad had always nurtured this dream of making it big in the Indian Software bandwagon. Fast forward 10 years down the line with 6 different companies including some elite companies who were not as great as their name on a resume,Ravi Kumar decided to quit.He wanted to become this entrepreneur geek boy soldier who would create a product as brilliant as facebook or google Ravi Kumar ended up creating a brilliant MVP of a product but before he could pitch it in,all hell broke loose. Douchebag Systems Pvt Ltd launched their own product which was identical in nature. Ravi Kumar's product revolved around content streaming in the entertainment space which anyways was not a viable business at all. So after several unsuccesful attempts at pivoting around the same MVP and at the behest of his bickering parents who had spent major portion of their lives as government servants and totally unknown to alien concepts like entrepreneurship asked him to take up a job ASAP,that Ravi Kumar came down to Bangalore

It is during the 2 months he spent looking for a suitable opportunity that he actually witnessed the funny side of Indian software industry.Ravi Kumar like any other individual updated his resume in monster,naukri,shine,timesjobs etc.He even modified his resume in the so called product of the season linkedin.He was ridiculed by sites like glassdoor which were transparent to the level that they revealed everything about a company to the candidates but even after that you'd still know crap.He was even introduced to portals like angellist which would connect individuals to founders who would never respond back after an initial hi/hello on the phone.He even applied in elite job portals like headhonchos/dice/ladder and they immediately shun him by saying they don't cater to people who can't afford their premium version.Anyway after successfully modifying his resume in these portals Ravi Kumar started applying for job positions in MNCs/startups/midtiers.

Now is the fun part.After juxtaposing his resume across the aforementioned portals Ravi Kumar started getting calls that turned him from a guy yearning for a job to a total retard.It all started with this frantic call from a Gurugram based bank called Royal bank of Monster Island and the HR asked Ravi Kumar if he is alright with the bank.Ravi Kumar had always heard fancy stories about bankers and their lavish lifestyles.He'd even seen documentaries like 'Inside Job' that showed how their greed screwed superpowers and made them bend on their knees.With these pictures in mind Ravi Kumar said a yes and that's when the horror started-The HR started asking him multiple choice questions and to Ravi Kumar's astonishment ended up asking almost 20 questions.Ravi Kumar confused and petrified answered whatever the crap came in his mind. In the end the HR informed Ravi Kumar he had flunked the test and he would not able to process his resume which relieved Ravi Kumar drastically.He did not want to be a part of an organization which ran a freak show called an 'interview process'.

Next came a glorified e-commerce vendor.Ravi Kumar had heard great stories about the founder who was so aggressive that he was called the greatest entrepreneur once Jobs died.But as soon as Ravi Kumar sent in his neat 2 page resume which is how long a resume should be according to global standards,he faced a brutal rejection which stated he was devoid of any managerial or technical competency.Heart broken Ravi Kumar opened his inbox and saw another mail from the same company asking him to apply through a different recruiter.This time he was careful to send in his loaded 15 page resume.Within an hour he got a call from the HR manager of the same company asking him to schedule interview dates.Within a week he was picked up by the development manager of the same company who was traversing through linkedin for another venture that involved the elite segment.The SDM seemed so impressed with his profile that he even welcomed him aboard before a formal interview could actually happen.He signed off saying he will ask his recruiters to be in touch with him.His recruiters never came back.Ravi Kumar kept on pinging him till the SDM stopped responding back.Till today Ravi Kumar is clueless about what actually transpired.May be some day he would employ private sleuths to figure out the truth.

He had barely tried to move on when he was approached by the biggest software company in the world to work for their research and development division. It was an honor to receive even an interview call from Macrosoft.Ravi Kumar sent in his resume to the HR who had expressed a profound desire to work with him.He even got a call from another HR who asked him to choose what type of team he would wish to work with.Ravi Kumar was elated.He chose a team and the HR hung up on him forever.He never heard from the HR or Macrosoft again.This again became an enigma.

Next came the turn of a service based vendor InnoSys-the pride of India.The founder was called the poster boy of the Indian software industry and was hailed for jump starting the IT services industry in India.The recruiter called up Ravi Kumar several times and fixed an appointment date.Though Ravi Kumar was not very keen to work with a service based vendor he relented when he heard the opening was for their product development division.On the date of the interview he received a call on his mobile from the interviewer who asked him to call up a specific number and enter a keycode to enter a conference room.Ravi Kumar asked the interviewer if the number he'd call happens to be a toll free number to which he said no he will be charged.Ravi Kumar barely had 50 bucks left in his prepaid card so he asked the interviewer he can only survive as long as the 50 bucks are running.The interviewer was upset and he told Ravi Kumar he should have charged his card for 300 bucks when he knew there was an interview.Nothing was making sense and Ravi Kumar lost it.He called the HR and told him the entire saga.The HR rescheduled his interview which happened after 2 weeks of following. In this interview there were 2 gentleman who were hell bent on recruiting an architect for a product development division.They wanted to know more about Ravi Kumar's entrepreneurial journeys and Ravi Kumar did everything to tell them about his movie streaming product.Apparently a part of the product which was the recommendation algorithm was written by Ravi Kumar himself and he wanted to go for a potential IP.He explained the interviewer duo he would not be able to divulge details about the algorithm due to an IP,at which the interviewers started asking him more about the algorithm."You can at least tell us what you did special in the algorithm?" was one of the questions that he was asked which he politely declined to answer.Then there were more but on a similar note. At one stage Ravi Kumar felt he was taking a Pyschometric test for TCS. In the end when Ravi Kumar asked the interviewers about the product he got a reply that the product was also headed for an IP and they are not at liberty to discuss about it..:). No surprises there.

After a bunch of disasters Ravi Kumar was picked up by the country's youngest e-commerce vendor clipkart to take up an interview with them. They asked his interests and what kind of position he was potentially looking at. Ravi Kumar had an interest in technology management and opted for an engineering manager's position.After 2 phone screens and 2 in-person interviews which he believed went well it took clipkart just 24 hours to declare there was a competency mismatch or in crude words it meant "dude you're not the guy we are looking for". The only achievement was that during the interviews he had asked questions about the retail giant damazon taking over clipkart which made the interviewers uncomfortable and they started talking all type of crap about how in the past they had declined such an offer and they will survive. End of the day that's not the way industry works.Ravi Kumar knew that they were marching toward a potential merger or hostile takeover by the earlier mentioned e-commerce giant which too was launching in India despite of several FDI hurdles lobbying was geared on to resolve.

Ravi Kumar even interviewed with a new startup babong another online retailer.After following up with them for 2 months he finally got to discuss with their CTO who was presumably sick because of a khichdi gone wrong.Anyway the interview went well and he immediately got a response from the HR who sounded positive and told him they'd release the results the coming week.Even after a month he did not get any feedback and when Ravi Kumar sent a mail to the HR she sent back the template for rejection with his name on on it. As expected Ravi Kumar was quite clueless about the rejection.

Moving on Ravi Kumar even started receiving calls from sweat shops like the way it is in China.These guys would talk a lot,promise to make you a millionaire,sell you the American dream with assurance of H1B+Green Card+PR in one shot.They would make their VPs call you from US and tell you wonderful stories about how talented you are.Ravi Kumar never doubted his talent but had never heard anyone praising him to this level. He was quite used to self loathing.Anyway end of all the stints Ravi Kumar was still an Indian cititzen with no productive job in his hands and an Indian dream of poverty awaiting him.:) The sweat shops were never heard of again despite of the VP sending a mail or two expressing his desire to work with Ravi Kumar in the future which did not exist :)

Ravi Kumar was even approached by startups that would call him and disappear after that never to be heard of again. He'd even interviewed with some and they were ready to hire him at 50% of what he was making earlier which did not sound like a good deal.Anyway most of these startups themselves were confused about what they wanted when it came to recruiting people.He was asked technical questions.Questions on DS+Algo were part of such interviews.He was even asked architectural questions. Careercup and glassdoor did help with some of these questions asked at a program/product/engineering manager's level at hot companies like racebook/boogle/damazon/macrosoft. End of the day Ravi Kumar realized there was widespread chaos in the startup space about recruitment. He was surprised to find startups going down to IITs/IIMs of the country and recruiting relative freshmen for product manager/program manager position than choose somebody from the market who has had sufficient exposure to these roles earlier in his/her career.But on the other end there would be nonplussed discussions on career forums about this widespread talent crunch Indian Software industry is grappling with. HR heads of different companies would talk about how they end up spending a huge budget on the training and development of the candidates only to have them leave you 2 years down the line for a better pay package.

Ravi Kumar had earlier flown to California a couple of times and seen and met the technology community across the SF bay area.The technology culture out there was entirely different than what we have here in India.He had met sophomores and freshmen who were programming from age 5 and had created amazing products. The technology community out there was creating mind blowing products in silicon valley and VCs were getting anxious to invest in these future boogles/racebooks.The guys out there were absolute techies and management came quite naturally to them.There was nothing called people management.Ravi Kumar had read blogs by Joel Sposky and understood that in the technology market in America mediocrity did not stand a chance.People were recruited after sufficient scrutiny and were delegated tasks from day one which was a rare practice in India.The companies knew what kind of people they were looking for and the interview processes were quite gruesome.

Even at the other end candidates were quite clear on what type of companies they wanted to work for not because they were glorious companies but because the work those companies did were mostly in a field that they specialized during their undergrads.Ravi Kumar understood this is not the scene in india where graduates were absolutely clueless about what they wanted to do.The American market was way too mature and trivial factors like gap in your professional career/the fact that you are single/married/divorced did not quite matter.He has had cases back in India where people would judge his stability based on his marital status. A single guy would not survive the drill long enough if he has switched couple of times in the past.

It was then that wisdom came to Ravi Kumar.He recalled the famous scene from the movie 3 idiots where the protagonist says "

Tarakki ke piche mat bhaago,excellence ke piche bhaago.Tarakki jhak maarke piche aayegi"

He went back to working on his recommendation algorithm. He read every literature pertaining to recommendation engines and found it to be one of the most intriguing problems in human history.He even found that companies that were in the business of retail or search or social network were constantly optimizing their algorithms in order to figure out the choice of it's subscribers.Ravi Kumar tested his algorithm and found he still needed to do a lot of work in terms of improvising his algorithm and testing it with a user base of at least 1000 people to see how good it works as opposed to the ones the companies were using right now.He took machine learning and NLP courses through codeacademy/coursera.Wrote a lot of python code to test his knowledge on the various aspects of NLP/ML.He read the existing algorithms and techniques which were used in today's market.Consulted many developers and professors who were so called pioneers in recommendation.After 6 months of hardwork he was able to create an amazing recommendation algorithm which worked at an accuracy rate of 20% better than what the current algorithms that were running on the web.Once he filed for IP and let the international scientific community aware of his endeavor,is when he started getting calls from CTOs/CEOs of every single technology company on the planet who were either interested in either buying out his patent or absorbing him in the company.Ravi Kumar did not fall for these fancy jobs this time but registered his own company and started work on providing solution to anybody who ever wanted to optimize their recommendation engine charging a decent royalty and implementation fee.

Ravi Kumar's journey shows how immature our job market is. There is widespread chaos among recruiters/project managers as far as recruiting talent is concerned. People are totally oblivious to the roles and responsibilities pertaining to a specific job posting.Attrition is a small factor of organizational loss which I believe is taken way too seriously.Funny part is it has nothing to do with a candidate's marital status so judging him on the basis of his marital status is a grave mistake.It's equally surprising that HR managers who pretend they are way too serious about the well being of people in their companies never give a crap about the exit interviews that people take when they are leaving an organization.Not even one organization in the Indian subcontinent has ever looked in their trash bin containing exit interview documents and tried to make sense out of what reasons the employees are stating which made them leave.Why is only brand equity worshipped in this nation?There are some real dumb guys hailing from these so called premier institutes of the country who get absorbed based on the brand equity of their colleges .There might be talent in some tier-2 city in some tier-2 college but they'd never get that chance to show their creative brilliance because some buffoon from some premier institute has taken that place and is leaking exponential degrees of mediocrity in the air.Steve Jobs said "you should not be doing someone else's job".Does the technology community in our country see the wisdom behind those words or it is just a mad race to acquire people that things like quality of recruitment take a backseat and mostly forgotten.End of the day as long as revenue is pouring in from the menial jobs that people are made to do here in India,the company does not give crap about the individual. It is the individual's prerogative to upgrade his skills in the technology sector. People still seem to be working on obsolete technology clinging on to legacy projects.Recruitment which some decades back was a holistic process has become sort of a the mad race to acquire resources for service based vendors for revenue based reasons.These guys end up becoming the guys who always tend to face the midlife crisis or end up relinquishing completely to the ways and norms of the corporate utopia which treat them as bots meant to do specific jobs and not digress away to things like innovative thinking etc etc.Bono says we have lost the art of thinking 2000 years back but seeing the current state of the software industry it seems there was never any thought process attached to it.

People are clueless about what type of roles they fit into. You'd find non technical people taking up technical responsibilities and vice versa. This blog does not condemn the Indian software industry but points out the several redundancies and bottlenecks that is slowly eroding talent from Indian software companies. It is a known fact you cannot run your company on marketing.Somewhere down the line you'll have to be innovative.If innovation has to be carried out you'd have to have the right set of people.

Back in the industrial age Henry Ford carved out a position for supervisors who would head a team of semi skilled workers to see if they are doing their jobs right or not.That was the advent of project management. In today's world manager's tend to do the same work.However the point to notice is that there is a lot of emphasis on the words 'people management'.What actually is people management. It is to manage people on a specific project,delegating work,tracking the metrics of a project etc, In India however people management boils down to micro management which are filled with a lot of one-to-ones where your people managers would scold an employee about their reckless attitude,their irresponsibility,the impact that is having on the project,the way they are violating the company's policies by opening a social media site etc.But who'd explain what value are the people managers bringing to the organization.Who'd care to explain the endless coffee/sutta breaks that are part of their norm on a daily basis.Who would tap into their productivity and ask them what tangible value are they bringing to the organization other than generating reports using spreadsheet macros.Did they even try to dabble with code to understand the codeline.I mean in some hot technology companies every employee be it a manager or a developer is made to go through an intensive dev bootcamp to understand the technical aspect of the product. In Europe and in America everyone takes part in the product development process be it a manager or a director etc.Why don't we have the same model replicated here?

How different are these so called people managers from those innumerable guys and girls that could also speak in English absorbed mostly by the BPO industry as language skills are preferred mostly over analytical skills.How much of project management tasks are actually carried out in Indian software companies.Half of the sub continent does not know the job responsibilities of a product manager/a project manager/a program manager.Why is it so imperative for everyone to become managers preferably people managers in this country.What kind of pride is associated with the term manager.I mean on a creativity scale that translates to zero.What is the tangible benefit the company gets out by paying such hefty salaries to these managers.These are questions that might stir a controversy but truth is always bitter and hard to handle.

The organizational pyramid in Indian software industry is filled with a lot of positions emanating from a junior engineer to a senior VP. In the middle of which you'd have some 9 hierarchies.The obvious question is what do those people do.There have been major observation that more than half of that mass is complacent and reticent about their work details.End of the day a major part of the organizational money is flowing towards maintaining their extravagant life styles and foreign trips.Giving it a thought can't you recruit some really talented rockstar developers that could revolutionize the product or the service and make easy and quick bucks for the company.

So may be it would take ages before professionals in the Indian software industry would start taking recruitment seriously. As of now it is a ridiculous process segregating talented people from the mass of untalented workforce on the basis of trivial factors like a broken marriage,a sabbatical,attempts at starting a company etc. It's time the recruitment community and the Indian HR space starts taking creativity quite seriously before we are left with a workforce of bots to manage.