Punjabi By Nature

An India Educated

Universal education is indeed a laudable goal, but I think we can start with something simpler. One of the questions, organizations ask is that are we reaching the customers who really matter?
Similarily, one can ask - can we educate the people who really matter? That in turn can create a juggernaut and virtuous cycle that one hopes for. At Microsoft a lot of educational campaigns fell under the rubric of TTT (Train the Trainer) i.e. you train the trainer and then he/she will go out and train many others. So, from each one, teach one, you get to each one, teach many. I think there is a lesson to be learnt (no pun intended) from the marketing behemoth.

How much does it take to educate? According to one of the well known action groups for education (ASHA) http://www.ashanet.org/index.php?page=sac you can support a child in $10 per month. At $120 per year, if we have to educate say 20% (240 million) of the population, that will take roughly $30 billion every year. That is a tall oder indeed, so we need to be creative in our use of resources (time, money, and knowledge) Can technology build a highly scalable solution?

But there is a broader theme to education. Is education only available in schools? How is it that some executives who are extremely well educated display poor ethical and moral values, where as some illiterate people are steadfast honest and upright. I think we need to think beyond the classroom education to education that spreads better values.

Why is Connectivity So Expensive in India

Atanu Dey has a good article on "Why is connectivity so expensive in India"

Here are my little thoughts...

I am not sure if this has already been said, but I dont think there are enough broadband users (demand) in the country. Granted, the high cost may be a barrier, but then its a chicken and egg problem. I think what India is facing is the early market phase, where adoption is on the upswing but the early adopters pay a price for being so few in numbers. I believe that India with its very high tele-density cities and ability to leapfrog the old telecom infrastructure elsewhere in the world will eventually witness cheaper broadband access than most any part in the world. Just look at what happened to the cost of the cell phone calls!

One more thing to worry about here is the “quality” of the connection. Are we really getting world class quality broadband connections? If yes, then we are fine. If no, then we have to bring the quality bar up as well. I use Airtel in Delhi and their service is quite good and I have hardly ever faced a problem. However, one could do with higher speeds.. Ah.. Oliver asked for more!

Programmers of India

Someone posted a mail about Bangalore as a Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley… I couldn’t agree more…In the last few years I have met several programmers (more than the usual ones that I come across in MSDN/Techeds of the world)
They fell in 4 categories

(1) MSDN events
(2) Interview candidates
(3) ISV developers
(4) Embedded/Lifesciences developers working on Open Source

If you notice carefully, this is arranged in ascending order of my assessment of their skills. A lot of people have learnt how to drag ‘n’ drop, earned MCA/GNIIT or you name it degree here and come to the industry. They cram to pass exams. Of the 40 candidates I interviewed I asked them to write a program to reverse a string. Only 1 could write the right program, or even conceptualize it. We have created an army of programmers, who don’t understand why things are done a certain way, but are only interested in how things are done. I don’t blame them either! The real burden for this blame has to go to those companies in Bangalore etc which flip flop them from project to project without letting them acquire domain knowledge, or long term exposure and understanding of the technology.
A programmer who has been in the industry for a few years is quickly made a lead or manager and he loses his core skills of programming and becomes a people’s manager and does not do the work he was somewhat trained for. All compensations and rewards (including Microsoft India) are linked to how high a person is vertically. There is hardly any scope for horizontal growth. Architects are laughable entities in India.
Peter’s Principle: Every man rises to the level of his incompetency in an organization’s hierarchy.

The secondary blame goes to vendors like Microsoft which does not make a lot of effort to improve the quality of the programs being written by its partners. How many eLearning, ERP, CRM solutions do we need ? How good are they ? No wonder, they will get killed when Navision and Great Plains hit the market under MS brand. Because although MS makes a lot of effort in making sure that its developers are world class and so are its products, it has not shared that knowledge with the outside world.

And that is where the developers in the (4) category really impressed me. They may not have the “time to market” advantage that someone on MS platform has but they certainly have a better understanding of the system and how their software interacts with it and their coding is generally speaking a lot better. Yes, maybe when there are as large a number of developers in OSS as in the commercial vendor space, they might suck, but that remains to be seen..