Shouldn't the service company fire the under performer?

The recent reports suggest that the firing is close to 10% in a big service company, most of them for low rating and technical irrelevance

Having been in the Indian IT services industry for close to 8 years, I can swear for sure the real under performer % would be less than 2

So what about the others? Weren't they rated low? Oh may be yes but do care to read the reasons below

1. The most critical criteria is the bell curve, invariably every service company exploits this design. irrespective of your performance, only a top 5 to 10% max of the employees are rated good, others are forced  fit into the lower ratings. This model proudly adopted by the employer helps him in two ways, 1.) reduces the count of people who should be paid more but gives an illusion to everyone that only performers are paid and pushing them next time. Again, dont miss the point, % of people rated top is forced fit which obviously might include partiality as one factor 2.) Force the employees to fight each other for every year consistently to fit at the top. Though it gives again an illusion of rewarding the meritocracy, understand who is evaluating ? how ? on what parameters? are these industry standards? across technology and complexity? there is no answer to any of the questions for there is a new technology every day

2. An inefficient Manager, his inefficiency could be due to n number of reasons, but finally the result impacts every single person who reports to him unfortunately. It is the managers duty to fight for pushing a good rating of the employee who reports under him if deserved and I have seen, how anyone under an inefficient manager gets rated low irrespective of the performance. People under aggressive and efficient managers are very lucky and  obviously they are rare.

3. Bias, partiality ....etc Thats something everyone understands, its a desi instinct. To my knowledge only in Infosys you can do fair fight if you are rated low, but most other companies forget about fights even in day dreams. Fight - i only mean speaking for what you deserve, yes 'fight' is the term for it here.

4. Individual's ability to understand , rate himself, and fight for the deserved rating. I know of people who consider it an ugly job to fight irrespective of the injustice. I have one sentence to these gentlemen, "you just not betraying yourself alone, you betray every person who made you what you are and who is dependent on you deserving the best from you.

5. I read in forums that female employees taking maternity leave are given low rating

May be there are more. you can add it

What about technical irrelevance, ok, so the company will put me under some dying technology for the business reasons irrespective of my potential and interest for as long as they want and finally tell me to get out, because of the reason i did not utilize the every day hrs i had to sleep and spend with family and weekends to update my skills, oh yes dint spend my money on certifying myself and learning future skills which company will reimburse on 100 criterias

I want to make it clear, no company, again no single service company knows the future, they dump people on work whichever they could bargain, have some inefficient manager estimate it, make some direction less employee drain his blood day and night and just move on to next. This worked until the companies had enough time to retrain employees when required and fool around, not any more. The only way to predict future is to create it, obviously thats not what the service companies are specialised in. They dont get it, they will die.

I infact challenge any service company CEO to predict the software or technology that would be hot after 3 years, oh yes 3 years and prove me wrong. If he cant even predict the future of IT themselves for 3 years how could you expect them to standardize. They all go by the wave, it was java yesterday, hadoop today and something else tomorrow. They are busy reading the tech trend on twitter rather than create one.

Hey there is official statement from the service company that layoffs are rumor, oh yeah, i heard that joke myself too!!!

Whatever I have written above fits the majority, there could be special cases, please dont bring them here to generalize, special is special. May be I exaggerated a bit here and there, I think thats ok, do read the disclaimer.

Disclaimer:
Please note that all I have written above are purely fictional and any resemblance to anyone or any company is purely coincidental.

The Big Language Debate

Had a very sincere debate with my friend today about the state of regional languages and adoption of Hindi as common 2nd language at every state.

These are the common questions:

1. Shouldn't we encourage Hindi as the 2nd language instead of a foreign language like English to be the lingua franca of the country? 

2. But would that kill the regional language?

3. Why don't we do something to protect the regional languages from dying?

To answer the first question,
Lets first understand that our regional languages, irrespective of the adoption of Hindi as a second language or not, are anyways dying a terrible death, infact the survival of Hindi in itself is a question.

Please understand, when the regional languages, inspite of being the first language, are facing an imminent death, how logical is it to promote Hindi to the 2nd language position in any state?

Lets face it, all our Indian languages are losing the war against English without even fighting!

So, why and how is it that an alien language winning the war so easily? is it all the conspiracy of the English?

To quote my own story, I studied English as my second language from LKG till Engineering, thats 18 long years and at the end of it, I still was not even an inch closer to talking a single sentence in English! But look at me now, not just speaking also have grown enough to communicate through blogs, fb, twitter...what not...keeping aside some grammar? how did it all happen?

 Its so simple, I couldn't have earned my living had I not progressed in the language!

If tomorrow, there is a new Amazon or Google or Facebook or Samsung or Apple from Tamilnadu that uses a prog Lang like Java which works on Tamil instead of English, who is ready to pay >=$200K to an employee and has the interview conducted in Tamil, am sure even American and Chinese would run to learn Tamil, just like how ourselves run to learn German, French or Japanese! Applies to Hindi as well ofcourse, you got an Hindi speaking Apple competitor? then you sure could save yourself from injecting Hindi into my schools! I will go learn it on my own cost.

Please see it straight! Schools and Colleges wont help a language survive, its the survival instinct! Open your eyes to see the misplacement of your emotional attachment with the mother and father tongues!

Shout against social injustice!

Why should I support Gopi on Kathi story issue?

This should not be seen as an isolated incident, not even specific to cinema industry. I have personal experience of this in my software field as well.

Let me elaborate and generalize the question, the one who is in a higher position, if expects me to submit my intelligence/efforts to him, and either promises me to take care of my needs which he deems fit or veiling it completely from public instead of acknowledging my intelligence in the respective forum, what should I do?

if I submit before him, I am not just acknowledging myself a coward, but directly encouraging him to do it to many others, helping the creation of a social unwritten protocol, whereby so many others are exploited and looted.

The loss is not just for the victim, it is a loss and insult to everyone who actually moulded the individual with such intelligence, knowledge and skill. And it multiplies when it becomes a socially accepted protocol.
i hope it isnt difficult to understand that an individual could and would gain from so many around him including his parents, friends, relatives, teachers or any well wisher or even the society. Had the victim gained his rightful acknowledgement and credits he sure would have repaid everyone who helped him become who he is. So when you stand down against depriving yourself of the credits you deserve, you directly insult and do injustice to all these who built you. If not for yourself, you have to do stand tall at the least for them against these social harms!

Ok, what if Gopi was proved wrong? Again, its not the question of Gopi, its the question of the society!
Does the society stand for injustice? Does the society shout out loud enough to keep the evils in check?

Fate of the society is decided by its own answer to the above questions!

Let us get out of our comfort zones to help ourselves live in a better atmosphere!

What is a stock market? How is the value of a share calculated? What exactly do sensex and nifty values mean?

Note (Wrote it for Quora on 2nd Oct 2014)

As it literally mean, it is the market where you can buy the stock/share of a company, where stock means a small piece of ownership whose face value could be even a rupee or 10 (since question mentioned sensex and nifty, am taking the indian context). The buyer of the stock gets as much a ownership that much stock he buys, there by gets the right to future potential dividends on profit by the company. The seller of the stock, gets the money for more investment thereby expansion of the company. Thats the theory. 

But practically speaking, 99% of buyers or sellers (exaggerated %?) buy or sell the stock to benefit from capital gains. Capital gains actually mean the rise in the market price of the stock after you buy the stock, provided you would realize the gain only on selling at the higher price, unless you sell even if the price goes up for the stock you own, its only potential gain and not the actual, vice versa for loss.
So who decides the price? how does it go up or down? Basically the buy or sell of a stock happens by bidding at the market or exchange through broker. Lets say i have a stock of 100 units of company A that I bought for Rs. 10000 (Rs 100 each), and am placing a sell request in the market after say 3 months at Rs 150 each (Rs 15000 total for 100 stock units), if the company is doing really good with great quarterly results and future forecast, then there might be some buyer B to buy the stock at this price, and the buyer B's hope(based on his understanding and analysis) is that the stock price might further go up and he buys in the hope of that future capital gains that he could earn. For now, i have earned a capital gains of around Rs  5k, its not exact Rs 5k because have to pay the brokerage and transaction charges (approx .5% of total transaction) to the broker and exchange through which I sold, Also the buyer paid a little more than Rs 15k to accommodate the same charges. When this transaction is successful, and if it is the latest successfully traded price, then this price is mentioned as the 'market price' or 'last traded price' by the exchange, which is what is displayed in the TV news channels and other brokerage channel and all tickers.
After a week say, if there is a negative news of the company, then the buyer B who bought it from me at Rs 150 each might want to sell it at the earliest. So he might quote even Rs 120 after seeing that the last traded price is around Rs 120 in the stock market (or exchange). And there could be another buyer C who might think this as a potential low price and might buy it. Otherwise if there is no buyer at Rs 120, the request might expire after the day or the request could be submitted again by B with a further reduced price say Rs 100 (depends on the situation in the market). So now, if the last request at Rs 100 went through then that becomes the latest stock price of the company A and the person B who sold had incurred a capital loss of around Rs 5k, but he did sell it to avoid further loss. On the contrary, owner of the stock, B, could have instead opted to wait for the stock to go up in the future, say may be  after an year the stock price might go up, but that entirely depends on the current needs and situation of the owner of the stock and his understanding of the future growth of the stock.

Taking a decision of when to Sell and when to Buy is where the whole game is....

And in India, to my knowledge, we have 2 exchanges where we could buy or sell a stock, they are Bombay stock Exchange(BSE) and National Stock Exchange (NSE). And every exchange around the world, picks top 50(may be not exact number) performing stocks in general and also specific to industry like telecom or IT which are called as indexes that gives aggregated price in points. This index gives the representation of overall growth or decline of the stocks listed at exchange through the selected stocks at any point of time. Sensex is the index of top stocks at BSE and Nifty (NSE Fifty) at NSE.

And sample stock brokers are ICICI Direct, Axis Direct, Share Khan, Ventura One, ....etc, These brokers do the trading on behalf of us(buyer/seller) taking the commission for each transaction

Ok, havent said anything about day trading, that deserves a separate post and I havent anyways got any in depth knowledge on that.

Please do correct me had i mentioned anything wrong

In search of a 2BHK @ Chennai

I went around Madambakkam (East Tambaram) last week in search of a Builder Floor Apartment, before this i also searched on magicbricks for a week. Printed a selected list of apts to see with contact details from online and roamed a day and finalised a couple by the end of the day. Closed the deal next day after showing it to my parents. 
The range starts around 3400 and goes to 4600 per sq ft even (may be more). online search gives only the numbers, but the real valuable information comes only when you see things in person. At 3400 per sqft, usually either the construction quality isnt good enough or the location of the construction. Any good location and decent construction costed atleast 3700 per sq ft. Over 4000 had lifts too in addition to other amenities like wood work. I had a constraint of 'only Ground floor' clause. so had limited options only. But, if you dont have that constraint then you have so many options to choose from, so many buildings (as of mid of sep 2014) constructed, ready to move and waiting to be sold, so you can bargain as well. Real estate mood is flat. And mind you i just looked around Madambakkam only. 
Finally i made a deal for a Gnd Flr 2 BHK of 878 sqft at 37L, this includes car park, registration, marble flooring, all teak doors (internal doors as well) . Was impressed with the construction quality. Have to pay the 20% of 37 and the rest will be home loan.
My suggestion : make sure to look out for location, water, construction quality, legal document verification ...etc when choosing one for you.

Can social network save India?

Irrespective of the technology advance that gives so much of potential through social network, the result is only governed by the intelligence and awareness of the society that uses it. In simple, the story of a knife depends on whether it is handled by the doctor or the butcher!

Though i did see the potential, I failed to see the handler of the social network in India until the Indian elections. The primary purpose of majority has been in fighting for the victory or supremacy of their belief irrespective of the reality.

I stopped sharing politics on social network. Am surprised we Indians have survived this far, neither we, the majority, learn or care to be aware nor do we encourage anyone whomever does.

Its a Miracle indeed!

My comments on Lok Satta's JP's interview

JP Email Interview Link

Thats a very healthy and informative discussion. Have my disagreements on some of them though:

1. JP supports GM crops and claims ppl who are against are emotional activists, thats not true to my knowledge. For Eg., Vandana Shiva, Devinder Sharma(Journalist) are not plain emotional ppl. Also so many articles there on how GM crops failed and failing

2. PM and CBI should not come under Lokpal: JP's argument that no single institution be given extreme powers makes sense,but how does it work in Singapore where CPIB (Lokpal of singapore) though comes under PMO can infact investigate its prime minister on consent from President?
(You can google to know more on CPIB singapore)

3. "NREGA has also distorted labour markets and destroyed the work ethic. " - Appreciate his view on NREGA

4. Supports FDI in retail : AAP opposes only because FDI is possible only when there is level playing field for all players and in Retail it is not the case. I dont think it is comparable to computerisation of banks

5. "The absence of Uniform Civil Code is not the greatest problem India is facing." - Thank God he understands

6. "the notion that an accused person continues to stay eligible for public office until he is convicted is nonsensical. Holding public office and the right to remain outside prison are not on the same footing." - Wow

7. Disagrees with Dharna - "A free society cannot survive unless people, citizen’s groups and parties exercise restraint and discipline." - This is unfair, when the system doesnt work that is when you are forced disrupt. How else do you handle the police himself committing a crime. Ambedkar's statement I respect, but thats applicable when you infact have a working system.

8. on AK: Glad that you see the quest for ethics in politics by AK but you fail to see that he has no sense for the "senseless and failed" institutions thats not actually functioning harmoniously. Its a loss in a sense for the nation that JP and AK are not standing together.
Dr. JP, with all due respect to your knowledge and intentions, you do have something to learn from AK 

Finally, i would love to see a healthy debate of AK and JP in the very near future for the country's Prime Ministerial role

Social Media Impact

Forget Tunisia, forget Egypt, when so much of money and effort spent in social media campaigns by indian politicians, if you still think FB posts and discussions not worth a paisa, you are living in 1990s. 

Drive faster to catch up!

Leader and Dictator

Leader leads by example and serves the followers.

Dictator only demands the followers

There could be good and bad leader, but a dictator is always BAD!

Morally confused Indians!

Today morning, I had to take the empty cooking gas cylinder from my apartment to the distributor for refill. Went for an auto. The distance is around 2.5 Kms. One way cost usually is Rs. 40/50 , no meter. And for return on the same auto it should be max double, Auto driver asked me Rs. 150 for return. I bargained for Rs. 100 and he only settled for Rs. 110. Meanwhile he did try some other couple standing a lil far if they needed the ride. I finally boarded the auto since he dint get them. Within minutes i got the refill cylinder at the gas agency. And when i searched for the driver after resting the cylinder in the empty auto, the driver was having chai and signaled me to join him from a tea stall opposite of the road. I did. I offered to pay but he stopped and paid for my chai as well. While returning i thought to myself that i should pay him Rs. 120 mainly because I wasnt comfortable letting him pay for my chai.

After returning home, when i offered him Rs. 120, he politely rejected and took only Rs. 110 since that was what agreed!

If you see what am trying to say, he actually wants to do honest business, when he asked for Rs. 150 which obviously is not right , he convinced himself then because of some compulsion which only he knows. But given a honest and comfortable situation, ie if he gets out of the compulsions, he will surely do the right ever.

Now after reaching home i checked the weight of the cylinder, it has its empty weight mentioned as 15.8 which means the weight now should be 29.8 including the 14 Kg of LPG but it was only 25 KG. and When i got the cylinder from the gas agency i dint even ask for a receipt because i was happy that I finally got the Cylinder before my wife comes for a week vacation tomorrow!

Leaving it to you to connect the dots!

Can we afford another election of 5k crores?

I was once a supporter of NaMo. I still will not take away any good he did in Gujarat. I dont deny his wave. But he can't take advantage of that to field 48% criminals and ask for vote. In fact its a golden opportunity for him to utilize his wave now to only put up clean candidates. Why didn't he do it? 

All I want now is to send him and any other party including AAP, a message, that only clean candidates will be voted. 

When some argue that India can't afford another election worth 5000 cr, I ask now, then how can India afford even one corrupt MP who can do 1.76 lakh crore scam?

Whether BJP and INC like it or not or even you like it or not, we are in transition. Its gonna get double difficult in future for the corrupt to come back. Every citizen is empowered by technology irrespective of his financial status. And the MPs that you gonna elect already know this. So when they know that its their last term and if they don't have clean mind, its real scary to imagine next 5 years!

Do think of it at least now.

Dharna

Dharna:

Only those,
Whose house bulldozed by builder mafia 
Whose land grabbed by land mafia 
Whose water stolen by tanker mafia 
Whose family member face human Rights issue 

Will understand the dharna when the elected govt shut their eyes and ears

It is also those people who did dharnas brought in RTI

Above all, if not for M K Gandhi's dharnas we would probably be saluting David Cameron today!

My Pre Poll Prediction for AAP

Date : Apr-05-2014

My Pre Poll Prediction for AAP out of curiosity and interest :


State Total
Andhra Pradesh 1
Arunachal 1
Assam 3
Bihar 5
Chandigarh 1
Chhattisgarh 2
Dadra and Nagar Haveli 0
Daman & Diu 0
Delhi 7
Goa 2
Gujarat 1
Haryana 10
HP 1
J&K 0
Jharkhand 4
Karnataka 9
Kerala 9
Maharashtra 14
Manipur 0
Mizoram 0
MP 5
Odisha 4
Puducherry 0
Punjab 2
Rajasthan 5
Sikkim 0
Tamil Nadu 4
Tripura 0
UP 7
Uttarakhand 2
WB 1

Grand Total 100

You can call it a gut belief of an AAP well wisher, based on limited online resources that i have access to

The Gap!

Finally today, Aamir Khan had tried to explain the people of India on why and how the corruption in India impacts every citizen irrespective of their caste, religion and financial status through his satyamevjayate program. Many in the audience thought they do not pay taxes to government, in their understanding  tax means, the tax that you pay on your monthly income/salary. But he explained with an expert that the govt collects taxes from every single person in the country indirectly when they buy anything like a mobile, tooth paste, toothbrush, mobile bill payments ...etc. This indirect tax accounts for 67% of the total tax that the government collects! and the rest is the direct tax which includes the income tax. It is this tax money that the government spends in the name of budget every year to run the country. Basically every citizen is paying the government for it to run. This is how the government becomes servant and the citizen becomes master who pays.
But how many people would it reach? in fact Kejriwal had tried the same through his road shows even 10 years back.
Why is the people of India not aware on any of them in the first place? Be it on tax, economy, government, policy...etc. Why do we need Kejriwal or Aamir Khan? Isnt it all basic expected knowledge just like the knowledge to use our limbs and senses for survival?
Fact is, neither Kejriwal nor Aamir Khan can educate the whole India on everything. But, this is better than nothing though. We should acknowledge the beginning! So what should be the next step? It is very natural to say the next step is our education system, it is terribly bad that our education system ends up leaving us all handicapped understanding on all important fields of the nation that directly impact every one of us. Neither many realize that the scams unearthed play the major role for their suffering nor they understand the contribution of so many social activists who sacrifice their life for all the ignorance of the general public
Education system revolves around  getting the marks, but not really on education. I personally had one aim when i  was in school, that was to get a good score and find a great job to get my family out of debts. The majority of the population i believe falls in this category. Another section which is wealthy enough do not worry even on that. There is also another section which is not even fed enough to think about anything other than their basic survival. Meanwhile politicians get smarter every day in looting, they have evolved so much from giving 100/500 rupees to giving freebies like, TV, mixie, fan..etc once in a 5 year to loot the public every day and every minute for the whole five years! Yes, public gives them the license to loot! The loots evolved as well from mere thousands/lakhs to lakhs of crores.
The welcome change is that, as you see i have already started talking about all these. Thanks to the social media! but i still see that the reach of social media is not good enough to trigger a revolution that our country needs so badly at this hour. There is still a major percentage of people whose minds are insulated thickly by ignorance that they do not realize where the country stands today and why they should change their course in top gear.
With the nature of the insulation which the mind of the society has today, even a complete revamp in the education system will fail to have any impact unless the insulation is broken.
In these times when an year of governance by a bad party could sink the whole country forever, we should all realize the sense of urgency in our transformation. It is very important we see revolutionary changes both in the education system and the mindset of the society to understand the functioning of the nation. Corruption, riots, injustice, rapes, murders, theft ...etc everything reflect the functioning quality of a government and the government will respond only to the quality of awareness of the public!

To give a simple example of how a scam had it been prevented would have helped the people, just imagine the 1.76 lakh crore from 2G scam, had it been used to subsidize the price or reduce the tax on the petrol/diesel , the country would have seen a lesser inflation, for the fuel cost directly impacts the price rise of all commodities especially food. Mind you subsidies are neither always harmful nor always beneficial. The cooking gas has been subsidized already for more than Rs. 300 every cylinder. Decision on subsidy should be taken ofcourse taking into account its impact on the economy. And the tamilnadu freebies have already put the state at 1.7 lakh crore debt!

Every citizen should start giving same or better importance to the politics and functioning of government like we do for the cinema or cricket stars. Similar to tracking the number of centuries of cricket stars, we should track/debate the policies and laws brought in by the netas. People who already understand the impact of the politics should encourage and initiate discussions to help others who fail to do so.

There is already a beginning which I hope everyone acknowledges, I only wish  it shapes itself to a revolution the country has been waiting for

Intelligence

Intelligence is not limited to intellect or thought. There is more intelligence in the air around you than in your brain. ~Sadhguru

When twitter thumbnail images blocked on home wifi

Finally after a month or two found the answer to be the DNS configuration for my wifi router. it was such a big pain in the a.. till then :-)

Tried all NAT port forwarding even but later through some forum which hinted on the configured dns i changed the value from 0.0.0.0 to 8.8.8.8 (which is a google one). Got the setting under DHCP Server tab under :LAN. to reflect disconnect and connect your laptop/mobile to the wifi.

No better sin!

There cannot be a better sin than exploiting and taking advantage of someone who is generous and willing to help!