Techno m’lounge – Where technology meets human senses.

Well those who know me will not believe their eyes when they see the title of this post. Probably some of you will have your eye balls popped out.

But don’t get me wrong, Iam not criticizing my own company, yes my own company which I have built with lots of khoon(blood) and pasina(sweat). I was reading a blog post from an MIT researcher whom I regularly follow, he said people like to read negative stories about brands. His post was so engrossing that he grabbed my attention for almost 20 minutes on this post. (Now his blog is a secret since I draw a lot of marketing ideas from this guy, and I know a lot of my competitors follow me, so I wont reveal him publicly here, but if you are someone whom I like/know, just comment and I shall reply you via email.)

So, this is my idea to bring some good press to Globussoft and spread word about it. The apt title about this post shall be decided after the entire post has been written since I myself don’t know now what should be the very apt title for this post.

I have so many things in my head right now and I want to jot them down at one go.

Here I start,

Globussoft as you all know is NOT yet another IT services start up or a freelancing oriented body shop which many people have started percieving us.

We are an end to end consumer product company with major product releases slated by end of 2010.

We have already released 2 products – TwtZilla and Gamebibo which have been huge successes so far and are being liked a lot in their respective consumer communities.

Also, why we are not trying to be another company in  Axis of Evil as correctly mentioned by Vishal Gondal, there are several reasons -

1. These stupid IT Services companies, or so called largest IT companies of India produce hordes of Autobots each year.  Although Vishal calls them outbots I would like to change the nomenclature, I call them Autobots. Read more about my post on Autobots in next few weeks.We don’t want to join the league, we want to create a group of creative people who can create unique softwares which have very high appeal to mass market and end consumers.

2. I personally am part of the group which thinks that the Axis of Evil of IT Industry has created a very wrong brand of Indian Engineering Talent.  Engineers are asked to do ticket solving, or maintain year old systems or document code written ages ago by some freaky American company which makes 10 times the money by selling the shelved product of the very code which we Indians working in these IT companies maintain. FYI, this work can be done by even B.Com. or B.Sc. graduates and I have heard that they have started hiring B.Sc. graduates since they are not able to get enough engineers for these so called challenging tasks.

What we are trying to do is not create autobots but smart people who do justice with the degree they have earned in their 4 years of education.

A lot of people who work with me @Globussoft do follow my vision and buy my idea of creating a difference and not be part of the millions of autobots who do hamali at the IT Industry.

But ya I would gladly accept that there are quite a few do not subscribe to my vision and like to hop jobs which is a trend in the Indian IT industry, again created by the Axis of Evil.

Ideally I would like, as many of my Start-up friends feel, they should be stopped from Hiring Engineering Students from Any Engineering college in India. They have already been banned in IITs and the top premier engineering colleges due to the low work quality they offer that IITians consider as bullshit and instead prefer to work with start-ups or go for higher education.

This would be a great move to boost up the start-up space in India where we find lack of talented people who are willing to work with start-ups and be creative and be part of an organization trying to create a difference.

There are several reasons why one should be working with a start-up-

1. A start-up can give you some real food for thought, where you can flow your brain juices and effectively utilize your grey matter.

2. You get a chance of making a large impact and get recognized for your feat. Just imagine with 200 engineers facebook is able to handle 500 million consumers, that’s 1 engineer to 40,00,000 Users. What an impact a single engineer is making to the user community worldwide.

In our company, myself and another engineer built a product called TwtZilla and today its being consumed by over 20,000 people. Just imagine how much impact that engineer is able to make and what sort of challenges we face daily and solve while building such systems.

Dont you think its more challenging than solving tickets ?

3. Some start-ups like ours, offer you equities . Working with these shitty Indian IT biggies you can never reach those luxuries which every Indian dreams of. But if even a single product of the start-up you are working with clicks and strikes gold, you are a rich man and worth millions if not billions within no time. Do I need to give examples here? There are plenty I guess….

4. A start-up culture is the most favorable culture for proper career growth both personally and professionally. You get to play multiple roles in a start-up and everyone does everything. It helps you to grow yourself via multiple epicenters of your personality. Apart from that, you work as a small team with zero bureaucracy and feel pleased to actually get rewarded for your own hard-work, where nobody can steal your credit for his own benefits.

This list can go endless, and I can keep on adding the benefits of working with a product start-up rather than just another body shop.

However, I feel I have written enough on why Globussoft rocks! and does not suck .

It qualifies with all the qualities of a great and a successful start-up to be a part of.

If you are reading this post as a soon-to-be employee of Globussoft, I hope your stay with us will be equally challenging and enjoyable as I have promised here.

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I have been thinking of writing this post for quite some time now, but never got time to an extent to put down my thoughts and express it out all together into my post.

Whenever I write a blog post, I try to make myself as comfortable as possible, away from any disturbance, I close all messengers to stay away from some pissed off customers and get ready to write.

Now you must be wondering whats so special about this post that I’m taking so much time to lay down a “bhoomika” for it . Well this is probably the first post am writing about myself as an employer who sits on a chair and dismisses everyone who comes to him, without caring what he or she has done (atleast some people think so).

The day I started this company, the very first building block on which I wanted to build my company was zero bureaucracy. I never wanted any multiple tiered reporting organizational structure where people with bureaucratic attitude eat up all the credits of hardworking employees (which is a hard fact of all top Indian IT services companies). I wanted to implement a very flat organization with pretty much a startup culture where everyone is a colleague and there is no management or employee tussle. Everyone working with each other with equal respect to their colleagues. I hope I have been able to implement this largely in my company and I’m directly reachable to anyone for any issues and we discuss it face to face.

Now there is a typical dis-advantage of such a wonderful system. While on one hand it helps you to evaluate each of your people directly and tell them where they need improvement and how they can improve their skill sets for a better career, on the other hand if you are a hard person like me (which I think I have become), and you like to stick to your evaluations and tell your colleague that boss this is my evaluation about your results and its very POOR, chances are most of the times people may take it personally rather than professionally.

The results can be many – The guy/girl might resign with immediate effect, or he/she can take an offense on you and as a result you will have to face their aftermath at a later stage where they take an un-needed/un-wanted leave at the time of project delivery and doom your project and the client, or he/she can start creating negative propaganda about you and your company in various forums/blog/twitter/facebook etc, or or or .. this list can be endless.

There can be multiple repercussions of my kinda hard stay on attitude, where I want to be fair with myself and well as with someone who is performing well and vice versa.

Now I have my own reasons for this -

1. If I start following a bureaucratic approach where I announce that everyone is performing equal even if he/she is not, it will kill competition. We all know the reason why Corporate America is America today and what has happened to USSR/West Bengal due to communism/socialism. I want a competitive environment to prevail at Globussoft where people give their best and try to improve themselves as well as the company.

2. I don’t want a Job@Globussoft to be treated as a “sarkari naukri”, where your hard-work is not valued. People go to rest in govt. offices, since they know that it doesn’t matter if they work or not, they gonna get paid every month, and we can very well see what’s the plight of the country. Give me a single case where you have to get some work done at a govt. office and you have returned with a happy face without frustration? I guess there is none. I don’t want our customers to be frustrated when they deal with Globussians.

3. A fair review policy always helps someone with an open mind to improve his/her skills and grow in life. If your so called hard work is dismissed by someone, there has to be a reason for that.

Just because you as an employee are sitting 10 hrs in front of a comp at office, doesn’t mean your performance is very high. You can be facebooking, orkutting, chatting, roaming about or just passing time.

Performance is measured by the value of work you have delivered. A simple analogy is a school kid who sits 10 hrs with his book on table but is thinking of something else. When exam results are out he fails, same as your projects fail. Now if he cries to his mom saying paper was hard or he wrote everything correct or whatever xyz, how fair do you think he is? He should write a blog entry about the bad teacher who gave him a big zero since he failed the poor guy or should he quit the school itself?

Well whatever I have written above was as an employer, who likes his employees a lot. I try to be as friendly as possible with my pupil since I want this company to be one BIG family like a huge tree with many leaves.

But considering myself as a neutral person, I feel its wrong to grumble in public about your failures. If you have failed and some body has dismissed you, he must have a reason for that. If he doesn’t have any reason and he is dismissing everyone’s hard-work without any reason then you have no reason to be bullied by him everyday. Better find greener pastures for you.

However if you feel from bottom of your heart there is a reason, then in future one should learn to avoid those reasons, rather than failing and then grumbling.

As a person, as an employer and mentor I always want to use – “Well done, good job dude, excellent job man” more than I need to use – “what the f**k”.

What comes out from me is solely dependent on how someone performs. I have appreciated a lot of people personally for their hard work and I do it daily from the bottom of my heart since I really love people who are like me! Hard working and focused.

nuf said, time will teach the rest!

Do love your job and not your company! But at least learn, or try to appreciate someone who is working hard to create a difference! – Sumit Ghosh

Watch this video (with audio) if you have time, to understand what I mean to say above –

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