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.

5. Indians or at least the middle class doesn’t spend much on planning the house, how do you sell yourself to them?
My charges are highly affordable and are also transparent (i.e. all our charges are available in www.HomePlanGuru.com/services.php ). For a 2D floor plan (Basic), I charge just Re.1/- per sq.ft. For 3D Plan (Basic), I charge just Rs.3/- per sq.ft.

Initially, I used to charge Rs.20/- per sq.ft for all the plans and it was a bit expensive for middle class. Now I’ve split that into these various ‘Basic’ plans so that if people want to do just 2D & 3D, they can pay just Rs.4/- (= Re1 for 2D + Rs.3 for 3D) per sq.ft. Thus it is highly affordable.

It is tough to sell a new concept to any customer. But by showing them the benefits of planning and making it highly affordable, I’m able to sell my services.

6. How are you different from other architects/civil engineers?

Many people ask the same question and for the same reason I’ve given the title of a book that I’m preparing now as “Architects don’t tell; Builders don’t do; Customers don’t get and Dream Home: still a Dream?” (see attached image for full title of the book). It will have a detailed answer to this question.

To make it short, HomePlanGuru.com provides Usability & Functional plans from a Customer perspective which (to my knowledge) is not provided by Architects / Civil Engineers. They provide plans that are ‘technical’ and ‘aesthetic’ in nature which is mostly useful for the builder and not for the customer (but for the aesthetic plan).

If your next question is “What are Usability & Functional Plans?”, then you have to read all the FAQs in our website (http://www.homeplanguru.com/faq.php) or wait for the book to be released. Again to be short, they are the plans that define usable and functional aspects of a home which is much more important than the aesthetic aspect of the home.

7. What do you want suggest to other starters?
I’m not that great to suggest. But this is what I think for myself:

• You should be extremely passionate about what you do.
• You should be first convinced about the fact that you are adding value to your customer through your product/service.
• You should first get your family support (especially from your spouse) if you are a first generation entrepreneur.
  Before you quit your regular day job, you should make yourself debt free and have enough savings to face any adversity in your life.
• The most important one that gives me energy is: “Never worry about what others will think about you if you fail. You are better than other people who never tried anything of their own. It is not the end result, but the journey that matters a lot not only in entrepreneurship but also in our life”

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

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

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.

Both of us were of the opinion that continuous learning (or so called upgrading) is part of culture you have grown up with. I am not just talking about the work related learning here. I am talking about learning in general.As kids we used to be very curious about the things surrounding us. We always wanted to know more about radio or pictures in TV. The motivation for learning new things was fun or simple curiosity. As we grew up the motivations changed. It was degree in college, job change or promotion when we started working. But the problem was the motivations like job, salary or promotion are not sustainable. Once you get the promotion you are free till the next season.

Simple curiosity or fun of tinkering with the stuff around never dies. Think of kid lost in toy shop. It just goes behind one after the other. Kid never loses interest because its having fun. When was the last time you learnt something new just for fun?

Ourselves to blame?
Mostly yes. Last year I started learning Spanish. My Spanish class mostly had university students, few working professionals. In the second class my Spanish teacher asked me “Are you going to get a promotion after you finish diploma?”. To her I said “yes” but in reality I just wanted to learn another language (one of my dream is to follow the path of Che in South America. Now you know the motivation…its Che). The point I wanted to make is we are mostly behind money than other things. I want to ask you again When was the last time you learnt something new just for fun?

Is it Indian education system to blame?
May be. Most of the parents have a very simple advice for their kids. If you don’t learn this you wont get good marks. If you don’t get good marks you won’t get a good job. That is where we set a wrong motivation to learn something new. Its not just parents, its teachers, professors, bosses and society. We all motivate people around us learn for money.

How about our work place/culture?
May be that too. We will wait till the recession to learn or to innovate. Its not just about the people I am talking here. I am talking about the organizations too. Organizations should also understand person who is not interested in how telephone works probably wont be interested in how internet works. So be careful when hiring the candidates. Motivation for learning is as important as learnability.

So how do we inculcate the culture of learning?
I really don’t know. I am looking forward for tips from you, my readers. All I can say is if you still have kids curiosity, You don’t have to learn anything special to beat the recession.

With IT boom in India, we got a new breed of managers. IT-Managers or so called PMs, SPMs etc. I am not going get into their job profile or their job description but all I want to say is they were different from previous managers we had seen in *technology* field.

In this setup, natural progression for every developer was to, turn into manager after x years. But there were anomalies in the system all the time. They were always confused..

Thejesh, Good morning, this is Sathya, I am a frequenter to your blog, well, i think i can pose you one question which has been boggling me from the past one year…of course don’t be particular about that one year. any way, my doubt is , while opting for a career, should we chose technology or domain.
hmm, let me make it clear, i have 4 + exp development related exp in Java platform, and basically i like technology, find pleasure in coding. But off late, i often hear people say, coding or technology can be laid hands by anyone, if u need to grow up , u need to learn the domain. And now i am confused, while opting for a job, should i focus on the domain or functional aspects of a job or the technology involved in it?
Hope u got my confusion…
awaiting ur reply
Sathya

Reading this message I went three years back in my life. I was exactly at the same position. I was not sure of what to do. But after few sleepless nights I decided to be an engineer of my father’s generation. I am not really sure from the career point of view if my decision was correct or wrong. But I am happy.

What makes it a successful career?
I equate success with happiness. Hence what makes you happy at work? Is it the money? growth? day today work? or the challenges you enjoy to face?
Just make sure you are clear on this. You might have to make compromises on some of them for your main objective. If you love technology then go for it but if you love people management then that’s the area for it. Where ever you are remember, happiness brings success. I was dead sure that my *day to day* work, means to me a lot than growth or money. So I choose my happiness – programming.

“technology can be laid hands by anyone”
That somebody is absolutely wrong here. Don’t listen to the view of the mob they are usually wrong. Programming just like any other skill can be practiced but to be the best, you need something more than practice. According to me programming is a mindset. How not everybody can become a musician? not every can become a programmer. So don’t worry about becoming irrelevant.

At the EOD choose the field were you will be happy on everyday basis. Success, money, growth, I am sure will follow it.

I guess this pretty much applies to any body in any area. What say?

Technical Details:
1. Uses windows API and .Net for client side technologies
2. Uses webservices to communicate with centralized service
3. Server side components are built in Java and Other open source components. It will bring down the deployment costs.

Business Model:
1. License fee for each of the deployment ( $1 for a machine)
2. Access fee to the centralized sever ( similar to Amazon Web Services) $1/1000req
3. Maintenance and support

Next step:
1. Now start coding…
2. Find MBA to write business proposal and to find a VC.
3. Find a KPO or IP lawyer for patenting the algo
4. Find a sales guy to market
5. Find a banker to go IPO
6 Make an Exit plan
7. Sell the company

PP: Patent Pending

Trigger :

Recession. It looks like every company on earth wants to increase the productivity by hook or crook. If products like this can find a market then why not RTPM?