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The "Techies" of India.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

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We will talk about some of the myths about a certain breed of humans found predominantly in India and especially in Bangalore region who are called as "Software Engineers".

Now tell any layman that you are a SE and the first thing that comes to his mind is that you earning big money.
I read a news item in Times of India about the salaries of a software engineer in India. A couple of days before this article appeared in the paper we were having a chat about the salaries of freshers in our company and some of them were telling me about how grossly underpaid they are and that their take home salary is around Rs.12, 000.It is only after a couple of years of experience that a person starts earning a decent enough salary especially if his first job is in an Indian service provider company and that too if he switches jobs. Maybe that is one of the reasons for high attrition levels in this industry: low salary for entry-level positions, but we will talk about the topic of attrition and talent crunch in IT industry some other day.
The second myth is that every software engineer is a "software developer". Now nothing can be far from truth than this because SEs work at different levels of a Software Development Life Cycle and development is just another part of this process. If you are working for a large IT service provider then chances are that you might be working in a product support project where you just support the product developed earlier. For example: If the customer is using a software and he faces any issues with it then he logs a Trouble Ticket and you solve his issue; in another words you just troubleshoot the product.
Another strange myth, strange to the extent of being funny is that every SE has to go onsite and if it happens that the client he is working for is a domestic one or if he is working for a product company where there are very little or no chances of going abroad then he is not a good SE or not "techie" enough.
Well if I think about any more myths about our brethren I will come back with another post.
Till then Shalom.

Aftab Ahmed

The Indian Driving Habits

Saturday, June 30, 2007

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I wanted to write about our driving habits for a long time now but was feeling lazy. This video from You Tube solved my problem more than adequately. Sit back and enjoy the video.



Aftab Ahmed

The Great Indian Idiot Box - II

Monday, June 25, 2007

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Starting where we left off last time I had mentioned that too much is happening on our TV sets to cover it at one go.
Our discussion will not be complete without mentioning our 24x7 news channels especially the Hindi news channels where just about anything passes off as news. If there is no news then out of sheer desperation a non-existent story is cooked up like Dawood Ibrahim has shaved off his moustache or Saddam Hussain is still alive even after the US hanged him!I remember how the movie "Da Vinci Code" was hyped by the TV channels during its release time and we had numerous discussions about the validity of the protests and thinking about various such trends I almost forgot to mention the stand up comedy shows and the effect of the popularity of these shows is that even news channels started beaming them!
I can understand that the producers of these channels cannot "manufacture" news 24x7 so we started our own programs on the lines of Top Gear, Yes Minister (looks like originality is not our forte) then started a series of shows about food and now almost every channel has one show about food.
While concluding I would also like to talk about something that is very world class and that is our advertising which is most of the time very original, highly creative and imaginative. Our advertising is truly at par with the rest and best of the world.

Aftab Ahmed

The Great Indian Idiot Box

Sunday, June 24, 2007

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If you are just a channel surfer in India (you don't have to be an avid viewer) you would have observed a few trends that have taken place on our desi idiot box.
The most popular is the saas/bahu sagas which started I dont' remember when and I do not see an end to it in the far distant future. I think Ekta Kapoor should rename her serials as "Kayamat se Kayamat Tak".
Then came the KBC craze which took the whole country by storm. The Big B in his new avataar became a crorepati himself while helping others in becoming one.
The most recent TV shows are the singing competitions and this was started by the Indian idol talent hunt. The irony is after finding the Indian idol he has disappeared into oblivion after a very ordinary album.
Another such show was the one in which a TV channel was hunting for a child singing artist and the whole nation went wild sending SMS voting for different kids. God knows how I have suffered because of this (a friend of mine used to use all our gang's phones to vote for one of them).
A gang of few have beens were collected in a glass house and kept under observation to see how they react in front of a camera (because they had forgotten how it feels being in front of one) and the results were quite awful.
A few of my friends are huge fans of a program where a group of music directors chose a few singers and make them sing on stage and then fight among themselves to choose the best of them.
The most pitiable thing about all this is that none of these programs are original in idea.
The daily soaps were "inspired" by the daily soaps like The bold and the beautiful" and "Dynasty".
Indian idol is a copy of American idol, the idea of KBC was stolen from Who wants to be a millionaire so on and so forth...
There is so much to talk about what happens on our TV in our drawing rooms that I have to come back with another piece on it..
So long then.....

Aftab Ahmed