Thoughts From India

Airlines are many, but what about the Airports??

I was just reading an article in Rediff on how Jet Airways was aiming to grow to be a 3.5 billion USD company over the next 3-4 years.

I travelled on the new Newark-Mumbai route on Jet last month going to Chennai. The flight/service/food/entertainment were excellent, better than most other internation airlines I have travelled on. I would say it rivals or even beats Singapore airlines, one of my favorites.

Everything is fine if you are travelling to Mumbai. But if you are travelling to another destination as I was, you are in for a terrible time. The main problem is that almost all domestic flights in India fly only during the day and all international flights arrive in the night. So I had almost 7 hours at Mumbai. Getting to the domestic terminal was fine. But given that there are so few people travelling at night almost every place there was closed as was the airline lounges. Also the airport had too few chairs for the number of international travellers who were waiting for their domestic connections. So it turned out to be a horrifying 7 hours wait there.

On my return trip to the US the same happened when I had around 5 hours of wait at the international terminal and the lounge was so overflowing full due to the number of international flight (the airline industry is fireing on all cylinders in India), that it was hard to find even seating space there. Also there was so much confusion with gates being changed at the last minute resulting in hour long security queues. The flight was delayed by almost 1.5 hours due to non-availability of gates!!

So a lot more people are flying nowadays both domestically and on the international route. Airlines are improving to compete for these customers, but the airports are the same. Even after privatisation(the airports are much cleaner now though), the airports are not growing to keep up with the growth of passengers.

My future decisions on what flights I will take will depend on trying to eliminate connections inside India. So this maybe a stumbling block for the new Indian airlines trying to create international routes to India.

Have I run foul of the Weather God

With all the news about the climatic change and environment, actually made me think about some of the recent brushes I have had with the weather gods recently. It seems to be too much of a coincidence, but I happen to have been in two different places, exactly when they experienced some very bad weather.

I was in Seattle in the second week of December. After around 4-5 days there, I was getting ready to leave, when one of the worst storms in the past few years hit Seattle. Power was out the night I was supposed to fly out. I reach the airport nice and early in the morning, after packing my stuff using a torchlight (as the electricity was out through the night). I see a big queue at the Delta counter. Reached there to hear them announcing that all flights were delayed by over 4 hours or so. The reason, there was no power, so no computers, so no ticketing. The planes were actually standing there at the gates, but they could not print out our boarding passes to get us on to those planes. Of course, with that kind of a delay, there was not chance of me catching my flight. And worst of all, Air France, which is what I was connecting to had no flights the next day. So had to spend two extra days in Seattle before returning to Chennai.

Next, on a weeks trip to London, another bad storm hits London, UK and coastal Europe. Luckily there is no power cut in London, just traffic snarls and most of the underground running delayed or canceled.

So looks like the Weather gods are not pleased with me and follow me with storms whenever I go abroad..:)

IT as Career 4 - First Company

The next in my series on IT as Career - 1, 2, 3

So you made the choice and now having studied hard, looking to get your first job.

A big question at this stage is,  Whether it is good to join a big IT company (Infy, Wipro etc) or a small 10 people IT shop? It is always debatable. In the big IT shops you get to learn a lot on how big projects work, about quality and processes, how to do work in a methodical fashion etc. But in the small shop is where your contribution will stand out. Your code could make or break the whole company. This of course means, more pressure, longer work hours and mostly lesser pay. But then it is an experience that is very difficult to come by in the bigger firms. So my recommendation is to work in a small-medium sized company for starters and then move on to the bigger ones later in your career.

So learn the to handle stress and see the hard life in the smaller company, so that when you do move to a bigger company you are a mature person and then you can learn all about processes and how a mature business works.

But seeing the tremendous growth in IT outsourcing and the way most of the deals are stuck based on the size of the vendor, I doubt if those small IT companies (that depend on pure cost advantage, without any specific niche area) will survive very long. But take advantage of those when they are still there.

Bandhs, Strikes and the Common Man

I have been reading and listening to the news of all the problems surrounding the three days traders strke in Delhi.

From what I can make out of it, they are actually striking against a move to close down illegal businesses running out of residential areas.  So now you know, if you do something illegal and get caught just call for a strike of your group. So if you are programmer and you get caught over-speeding, you just go ahead and call for a strike of all programmers!!! (I suspect this would one day happen in West Bengal, now that they have a IT workers Union coming up there)

The person who is most affected by this is of course the normal man on the street and of course every tax-payer too, as buses got burnt and other public properties are destroyed. But the problem is that there is no common man union yet and no way to create a common respose to things that you don't like.

Wouldnt be cool, if we call for a three day strike against traders in Delhi? Everyone refuses to visit shops/buy anything for three days, then what happens to the trader's business? This sounds like a way to show disapproval and can be effective if enough people take part.

If we can take advantage of the power of Internet, I guess this should be possible. Maybe not now, but surely within a years time to create an infrastructure for common man to express his feelings of what is happneing out there.

If you think this will work, then spread the word, comment on this post, write to me, blog about this, write in your local newspaper and let us try to see if this idea will really work.

IT as Career - 3

I wrote two posts before on people who are looking at IT as a career option. So after a long time another post on the same topic.

You can find the previous two posts here – 1 and 2

One of the things that people always ask me is "What languages do I need to learn to be a good programmer?" . The other question is on technologies, Mainframes/.NET/Java,J2EE etc.

This is one of the most debatable questions. Different people will tell you a different language, based on whichever is their favorite. One of the most commonly recommended one is C or C++ and recently Java, as people say these are base languages you need to know. I don't agree.

It is not very important what language you learn. Learn the basics of how a computer works and other basic computer programming structures including structured programming and object orientation. What language you use to learn this is immaterial.. I used COBOL for structured/modular programming and a combination of C++ and VB(4/5/6) for OOPs.

If you are a student, I would recommend learn all technologies and languages you can manage. Learn Windows, UNIX, Mainframes, Linux, Mac, whatever you can get your hands on (Most colleges will allow you access to at least to two of these, Windows and some flavor of Unix/Linux). Learn every language you can, including Java, .NET, Basic, COBOL, C, C++, Perl, anything you find. The idea is to see as much as you can see during the student years, so that you know what you are really interested in when you go to your first job. Mostly I find students making the decision on choice of technologies based on others advice. A friend who is working on Mainframes, so you choose Mainframes. You met a FOS enthusiast, and you choose FOS. You meet a MS enthusiast and you choose .NET. This is not always what you like. So unless you have seen parts of everything, you cannot choose what you like. So use the years of study well…

Next post of the first few years of work…

Games on Demand

Airtel has launched a new <a href="http://202.46.201.184/airtel/index.jsp">Games on Demand</a> service. The wonderful thing about this is that, it is quite affordable (Rs.199) and gives you legal access to quite a lot of games.

You use Airtel Broadband to download the install the games, as if from a CD and you are ready to go. Just had a quick look at the games and they seem to be quite good. A few of my favorites like AOE and Rise of Nations are there, though not the latest version.

Still this is a good beginning and I think will hopefully get more people to use legal versions of these games.

The only caveat is that this is currently available only for airtel broadband customers. So if you are using a competing broadband service, then you are out of luck.

Is teaching only FOS good?

Kerala, one of the neighboring states has just decided that it would move completely to Linux and Free software at all of its schools, according to a article in FT.

It is being hailed as a big win for the FOS movement and a blow to Microsoft. I can see advantages to the following groups:

1. Government - Saves a lot of cost, licensing software for the schools. I know that Microsoft offers huge discounts under its academic programs, but still there would be some money involved, which should logically go away. I don't know if all machines will switch to Linux, but I suspect there would be pirated copies of Windows now running, so that people can use Office..:)

2. The Hardware Vendors - It clearly states in the article that HW vendors get a better margin, selling Linux based hardware, as they do not have licensing cost.

Linux PC dealers are upbeat. “Offers of pre-loaded Linux operating system could fetch good hardware sales margins,” says PK Harikrishnan, president, Kerala Computer Manufacturers’ and Dealers’ Association. There are other reasons as well. A sting operation by Microsoft in October 2005 had not endeared the proprietary software to PC and peripherals dealers

But what about the students?? Currently if you see the software development industry a majority of the new development is evenly split between .NET and Java. Most of the Java development is usually done on Windows, though the target OS may be something else. So the students in Kerala schools are deprived of working on a platform that is used in more than 80% of the desktops.

At the student level, it is imperative to work with all major platforms so as to understand them and be more employable when you move out of college. They should learn Windows, Linux and even one of the major UNIX platforms if available, to get to understand how software work. It is not the time to decide on taking a stand on which is the best platform to work on, rather to understand every platform.

This decision of the Kerala government ignores the students' need of exposure to multiple platforms completely.

Education and Democracy

Usually when people talk about the ills of Indian democracy they usually always talk about how the lack of education has made Indian politicians corrupt and not responsible for their actions. Though I accept that the Indian political system is corrupt and is the single most important reason for the slow growth in the last 50 years, an article I read a few days back also makes me think if it is only the illiteracy to blame?

A recent survey in the US (one of the so called developed nations) came up with the astonishing results that more than 50% of the Americans now believe that Iraq had WMD and that it was part of the plot of 9/11. Surprisingly this was not the case a year or so ago and this was cited in the article as proof of the success of the current governments handling of media and how it is able to convince people that its going to war with Iraq was a correct decision.

So it actually does not make any difference if you are educated or not, if people are always gullible politicians will always take advantage of it. :(

ABC's report on India

I was sent this link a few days back, but never got around to seeing it. It was resent again today by my friend and I just saw it. It is the online clip of ABC's report on India titled The Rise of India. Interesting to see, that the way America looks in India change over time.

IT as a Career - 2

One of the common misconception that I always come against is that Programming is a soft job. You have flexible timing, which means you go to office when you want and then spend time inside an air conditioned room and then go home to enjoy the big salary that you are getting. So when someone fresh out of college gets a software job, this is what he/she expects.

In reality, there is no free lunch. Developing software is very hard work indeed. Though there is not much physical work involved (this is another problem, leading to many physical problems for people in this profession), developing software involves a lot of brain work. Take it from me, you can be physically drained after a hard day of coding. Also sometimes debugging can be so frustrating that you feel as if you just want to go home…J

And software is one of those rare jobs where you are expected to do overtime without extra pay. If your delivery date is near, you will find that most of the teams work all nights even sometimes. I have worked two continuous days before a particularly important delivery. Even though you officially are required to work around 8 hours in any company, you usually end up working more than 10 everyday anyway. And with most of your customers in different time zones, working at night is near inevitable.

Rule 2: It is not a easy and soft job