Recollection of three incidents... one triggering the next :)

(1) - Better change to IT industry sir...

I had to rush to attend a talk. I crossed the road and wave at a couple of auto rickshaws before this auto driver stops. He seemed to know the particular auditorium and I hopped into it. The auto snaked it way through the Bangalore city traffic encountering traffic signals every now and then. In one such long red-signal, the driver started talking to me.

Are you basically from Karnataka sir?
- nopes, not really. I am from Tamil Nadu.
Oh, then you speak better kannada...good.
- actually I have lived here for close to five years.
hmmm, so what do you work on sir?
- well, I am an engineer, working on electronics.
oh, is it. My son also got into Bharat Electronics and will be into software. Why dont you also try to change into IT sir?
- why so?
If you are ten years experienced in SW, you can earn little less than a lakh rupees per month. You cannot be in any other industry
- hmmm yes, you are true, but I like it.
Its not what you like sir, its which work gets you the max money.
- ok sir, I will try.

I get down and pay the fare. Walking back from the auditorium after the talk, I was pondering on what the auto driver was telling couple of hours ago, that I remembered my communicator chat conversations with a freshman @ HCL and he was in fact asking me some difficult questions

(2) Pay, Onsite, Offers...

That I am into this electronics HW field now, what should I learn on?
- Its mostly applying what you have studied in college, you have to go understand the higher perspective on the go...
Oh, fine fine, can you suggest me any books?
- Read the 'High Speed - Black Magic' book. (In fact many of us have kept the book down after reading few pages).
Tell me which field in better - HW, Firmware or software applications?
- In terms of ?
In terms of pay, onsite and of course job opportunities.
- All are good.
You are in this field for six years, how much do you earn?
(I close the communicator chat - In fact my father asked me this only once in all this six years)

(3) Return paths can be anyway,

My hands feel the thick engravings of a fresh one-hundred rupee note. With a ruffling sound, I take the note from my wallet and paid my dinner bill. Smiling at Gandhi back, I was forced to recollect this young man with a smiling face whom I interviewed. It was my first experience of interviewing people for electronics HW job. The whole day, I was meeting people mostly from the power electronics background, a field that I had no hands-on experience. I was literally tired after 3-4 hours of this. Lastly came this resume came and came this guy. He was one year elder to me working in Bangalore for a French company. He was good in explaining the projects. Good.
Then came the time when I saw some specific eda tool in his resume which he claimed he knew. Probing a little in I figured out he has not worked in the tool at all...ok fine, he might have been good in analysing the results. So one final question on high-speed current return path and the reply left me completely aghast. I felt like kicking that guy. Politely I had to reject this candidate.

By first incident, I was surprised by the extent of brainwashing that IT has done to the society. By the second incident, I felt how much our system of education has trained people to focus on money alone. The third incident I felt how much our IT and education system combined has left people totally waste.

We all want to earn a better living and never yearn for one !!!

There is a mouse on my desk!

What is a mouse?…ask this question and I am sure that many will refer to the computer mouse. Today for a common man, whatever resembles a real mouse is a small rat and if it is a little bigger it is a rat The fact is that even taxonomists find it difficult to differentiate between the genus rattus and the genus mus just by its morphology; the reason being that both are from the same family of muroid / muridae which is very large and complex. (1)

The situation is worse if your workplace is inhabited by rats. A colleague of mine called upon the admin facility and told them that there is a mouse on her desk for which the janitor darted back saying that if there is an extra mouse, call the computer stores department. Disgusted by this response, she called upon the receptionist and told the situation; the receptionist added a bit of humor to the response claiming that there is a mouse in every other desk-space in the office. Hearing this, the real cause of confusion dawned and my colleague corrected the ‘mouse’ with a ‘rat’…

We have been using the word mouse over and over again in the computer’s context that the real ‘mouse’ has lost its real meaning. This is not only for ‘mouse’…we have been using certain phrases or doing certain actions so many times that the real part of the word/action has lost its purpose.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat

Bangalore...BURN IT

This is a news clipping from a leading weekly in India...a real thought provoking article I have read in the recent past. Do click on the image above for a readable image :)

Work More, Indian IT industry...!

I am amused by the Indian IT company’s decision to increase the working hours per day and also include Saturday as a half-working day, just to counter the increasing rupee. Everybody wants themselves to prosper and not the nation as a whole, that’s the reason, why India is still a developing nation. Click on this link to see what one of the leading newspaper has to say <Work more>. By the way did the companies let us relax when the Rupee was depreciating?

P.S. Many big names in the industry, allocates the work of 1 person to 10 person, thereby diluting the work, but billing them, so as to increase their revenue. Also, the fresh Indian minds out of college want money to spend but not work!