This is one of the case where the person tried his hand in DIY project and made it his job after wards. Viru wanted to re-plan his fathers house, which he did as a DIY project, but then he thought he can do it for others too. Thats how HomePlanGuru started. Go ahead and read the interview I did with this outfoscion.
1. How come you came with the idea of HomePlanGuru?
HomePlanGuru is now HomePlanGuru.com (since I’m doing it online completely & that is how I’ve registered my company name also).

When I was in Infosys, I renovated my father’s house and constructed few new rooms. Since I was very good in Engineering Drawing, I used that trait to plan every inch of my my house. I was inspired by US buildings (when I worked there) and Infosys’ building quality. I used the same concept for my house. After building it, I realized that to build such a good quality house, it is not that expensive and by proper planning, we could get almost all the functional features that are needed for the house. Since the Indian Customers are not aware of many things about quality, I thought of sharing my experience with them through HomePlanGuru.com and make Indian homes on par with developed countries homes.

2. Are you an architect/civil engineer?
Fortunately, NO. (Had it been yes, then the concept of HomePlanGuru.com wouldn’t have come)

3. Did you plan your own house? Did HomePlanGuru came out of it?
Yes!

4. How do you use your past experience in your present work?
My IT Knowledge & experience helps me a lot in my venture. This is how it is:

• I use IT processes for everything starting from ‘Requirements gathering’.
• I use technology (free softwares like OpenOffice, Google Sketchup, etc) for planning and Email & Online Chat for communication.
• I developed my own website which wouldn’t have been possible had I not been in IT.
• I’m in the process of developing a product for Builders & Customers for which I’m using my IT skills.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, now before you question my intentions, let me make it clear. It’s not about women, I think they are very capable (much more than men most of the time), it’s about where we work and work culture.

Also this is not based my experiences inside Infy alone (some kind of disclosure is required isn’t it?). I have spoken to many who work in TOP5 IT companies in India.

Lets be practical. Even if we talk loudly about equal rights/opportunities in India. 90% (good enough to generalize) of the working women has to work in two shifts. One at office and one at home. If you are a young mother then its 3.

The general working hours are around 9hrs/day. Even if I take the least amount of time to reach office it would be 2 hrs per day. Which makes it 11hrs. Remember, it doesn’t include time to reach bus stand, waiting for bus etc. That would make it 12hrs.

So you are left with 12hrs, out of which you obviously will spend around 6 hours ( again 8 is recommended) sleeping. So you are left with 6 hours, to take care of kids, home, parents (all of these are shared by both husband and wife. But be practical in 90% of the homes, only women do it) takes more than 6 hours.

Now you are in an IT industry, your work wont end at 5pm. You have onsite calls, customer calls, appraisal calls, firefight calls, status calls etc..etc. So you are taking break from your actual job (like spending time with child) to attend them.

If you are unlucky, you will be in a **development** project, with tight schedules (I haven’t seen one which doesn’t have tight schedule, yet), then you will end up spending your Saturdays in office too. That is another day lost, for your kid.

So whats the point?
Take a break for 4/5 years. None of the IT companies care for young mothers. You don’t fit into their business model.

This is what I suggested to my friend who is going to be a mother next month. Am I wrong?

PS: I would say even fathers should take a break for a year or two. There is nothing bigger than your family. Save enough to be a good parent later :)

Update:
Gartner study concludes the same:
“Women represent nearly 50% of the labor force and are improving their financial status. Many women will not wait for the traditional corporate ladder to come to them. “Paying their dues” is unappealing. Moreover, women are adamant about balancing their work, personal and family needs. If they must leave IT organizations to do so, while creating their own businesses and moving into other professions, they will.”
-© 2007 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates

Recently I completed seven years in IT industry. My career started with Siemens and as of now I am working with Infy. Along with Infy and Siemens, my professional life has been greatly influenced by people whom I met at various events, online and open source communities. This is a small note where I want to share what I learnt in this seven years. There are many things to write about, I just wanted to use number seven.

1. You can’t learn programming in 7 years
   Yes, Plain and simple. Read Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig
2. Care about people than process
   Most of you would have heard “People are the center of every problem” quoted mainly by managers, HRs etc. But for me, People are the center of every solution. None of the **greatest** process can solve any problem with out right people. In fact all great projects/events in the history of the world are remembered, by remembering the people who were involved rather than process they followed. So give importance to people, break the process but don’t break a human.
3. Be the worst team member
   At the risk of sounding very controversial, Yes, you should be the worst team member in your team. I believe in learning from team members. You have better chance to learn when everybody is better than you. Where you can learn from every contact, every conversation and every minute. Its good to lead a team. You might get promoted if you lead a team. But you should realize that you are losing on learning. Its very important to be lead by a leader/thinker early in your career and also to work with a great team. Remember: Its good to lead but its best to be lead by a good leader. They also make you better future leaders.
4. Have personal projects
   Many would have written about it. If your employer supports your personal project then nothing like it. If not make sure to have some personal project. You can start from writing simple tools/scripting. Once you feel better try to contribute to a open source project. Later you can have your own big project. There is nothing like self learning, your personal projects will give you a chance to learn what you want. It also gives a chance to escape from **ordinary regular work**. Updated: You should read Scott Berkun’s post on 20% time.
5. Use tools or use Unix
   Few days back, my friend was wanted to know why I am not interested in solving sudoku. According to him, its the most famous games amongst geeks just like rubik’s cube. For me I want to solve the problem for ever (I know how stupid I sound). I would probably write a program to solve the sudoku/cube than solving it manual. Now coming back to the point, use tools at work. Even if it is a very boring manual work. Try to automate it, make it a programming problem. Learn different tools. (I met this guy who was working on excel sheet to make some reports. Now it sounded like a very boring stuff. But actually he could have programmed in vb script to completely automate the reporting. Now it sounds better right?) While learning tools..Learn the mother of all tools: Unix commands.
6. Attend conferences and meet people
   I cant stress enough on this. Every time I talk to somebody at office who comes for advice, this is what I give them. None of the communities in the world is as disjoint as Indian IT (developers) community. Please do go out, attend meets, conferences. You will learn as well as your professional circle gets bigger. Even volunteering at conferences like foss.in or barcamp will give you a great opportunity to learn.
7. You don’t have to learn to knot a tie
   You know what I mean. Sometimes you need to follow the rules but programmers have their own way of satisfying their own ego! No. I don’t know how to knot a tie and I am not willing to learn in near future.

I hope it helps to somebody at least.

Picture Credit: Wikipedia and FOSS.in

Quoting TOI “With IT firms buffeted by today’s turbulent times, the government has reached out a helping hand. Reciprocating their needs, it has exempted IT/ITES and software establishments from the provisions of Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946 (Central Act 20 of 1946)”

I am not sure what is the rational behind suspending a rule. Labor laws are “rights of working class” (all of us). Suspending rights for any amount of period means we are in the state of emergency.

The rules are suspended only for IT/ITES and software establishments to help them sustain during recession. Why suspend laws to help fight recession? No other country in the world has suspended laws to help industry to fight the recession? Who took this decision? Who were part of this decision making? Did they have discussion before taking this step? If yes, did it include all the concerned parties and people? Who represented us^*, people who actually are effected by this suspension?

According to me, you cant suspend a law by the request of a sector of Industry with out public discussion. If you need any labor rule reforms. It should be done after full public discussion and by the recommendation of a committee which represents all the concerned parties. The present decision is completely irrational. Not sure what do you think. I, personally feel my^* rights have been violated.

I also see that none of the mainstream media wrote anything *big* on this, not very surprising.

^*Me and Us as in middle class IT engineer.

Recently I have seen number of users reading my feed on outlook. Its been increasing month by month. So I thought there could be many more users who will be interested in reading feeds in outlook. The recent version of outlook, i.e outlook 2007 has feed reader built into it. Using which you can read the posts just like mails.

This is useful as most of us, corporate users have outlook installed by default. You don’t have to fight with your IS/ITS department for a new software or you don’t have to keep your browser always open.
Your browser should recognize outlook 2007 as a feed reader when you access a feed. You can easily subscribe from there. Read the rest of this entry »