Advice for tough times

1.) Life is not about being liked. It is about being effective.

2.) Dont speak about who you are, but what you have can do and what you have achieved. Remember this when creating your resume...

The Gartner hype cycle

One very original concept from among the IT analyst firms is the "Hype Cycle" from Gartner. It maps out the distinct stages in the adoption of new technologies -
-- Technology trigger
-- Peak of expectations
-- Trough of disillusionment
-- Slope of enlightenment
-- Plateau of productivity

Mapped out spatially, the hype cycle would look like this...

In my opinion, the hype cycle is a sexed-up well-marketed version of the following Axiom -
"Any new concept is over-hyped in the short term and under-hyped in the long term"
(Keep this in mind when you want to plan your cross-sector career moves...)

Examples of over-hyped technologies that will be big in the future -
-- RFID
-- Nanotech
-- Software offshoring
-- The mobile phone as the sole computing device for most of the world
etc etc

Examples of over-hyped concepts that have started making a huge impact (good or bad)
-- Video streaming
etc etc

Every year, Gartner places the different emerging technologies into the graph based on their understanding of where the hype is leading. The 2006 hype cycle is here (Click on image for bigger picture etc etc)...


More about the hype cycle straight from the horse's mouth.

You won't throw away these business cards

Jeff Nolan has a photo of Steve Wozniak's incredible precision machined biz cards. Check them out on Jeff's blog.

If you want to order similar cards for yourself, go to PlasmaDesign. Prices are ~US$5/card for a batch of 100. My suggestion is not to worry about the cost and instead go with the "field of dreams" approach - If you get such cards, your clients will be so impressed that they will dump you with no-bid contracts.

Join us for the tandoori roti

A humble word of advice to all the firms in Singapore planning to shift their technology staff from the Central Biz District to the fertile welcoming heartlands of Changi, Jurong etc etc..

With the economy going gangbusters you will find that some of your best tech staff will simply seek employment elsewhere. The reason is simple - LUNCH. Nowhere else in Singapore other than the CBD do you have the choice of 100 different places to have lunch. And such great food as a bonus...

Like all good things in life, I had taken this for granted. But the realization hit me last week. I had lunch with an ex-colleague who's new firm is based quite outside the CBD. He happened to be in Shenton Way and I met him at the Pret sandwich shop (Tip: 2 full sandwiches there will still leave you hungry). The dude was wolfing down a chicken coronation sandwich with such a look of ecstasy on his face that if one of the banks there had offered him a position at less than his current salary, he would have immediately taken it.

So, in summary...
Employers - Respect Abraham Maslow
Recruiters - Exploit it

Human beings don't scale

One of my favorite quotes. From Hugh Macleod...
"Bill Gates may have a million times more money than me, but he isn’t going to live a million times longer than me, watch a million times more sunsets than me, make love to a million times more women than me, drink a million times more fine wines than me, listen to a million times more Beethoven String Quartets than me, nor sire a million times more children than me. Human beings don't scale."

Project management and teaching middle school

The NYT has a great article (free registration) on the challenges faced by middle-school teachers in the US. I can identify with the article as my mom is a high-school teacher in India and I have heard similar stories. Kids will be the same everywhere...

From the article, there was one particular characteristic of successful teachers that I can directly correlate to great project managers.

From the article... (emphasis is mine)
“You have to have a huge sense of humor and a small ego,” said Jason Levy, the principal of Intermediate School 339 in the Bronx. “There are some people who are born to do it and some who learn to do it, and there are some people who really shouldn’t do it.”

So lets look at this "small ego" aspect. The small ego here is not that you think less of yourself. Instead, it comes about when you know yourself fully well, and are aware of your abilities (and their limits). From this awareness comes a kind of calm confidence. This is the confidence that allows you to handle people with diametrically opposite viewpoints as you know fully well that you will be able to finally steer them to your point of view. This is the confidence that allows you to handle people with different behavior types because you realize that you really don't care about how they behave since you know that you will be able to get your point of view across and get something done your way. And this is the confidence that gives you the humility to accept that you might be wrong some of the time and acknowledge it when that happens.

Ultimately when you think about it, this confidence allows you to persuade rather than force other people into your point of view. Other people's perception of your ego is predominantly based on this factor and that's why people who are genuinely confident and secure in themselves appear to have small egos.

But this is not the only trait for great project managers. In addition to this, you need to -
-- Have a special insight in the field you are in. If not, you are simply a manager and not a leader
-- Be able to recognize and hire great people; Preferably people better than yourself
-- Be able to gain the respect of your team; Thru your insight and your "small ego"


Since the article might be archived behind NYT's walled gardens pretty soon, here is a short but relevant excerpt...
When a student at Seth Low Intermediate School loudly pronounced Corinne Kaufman a “fat lady” during a fire drill one recent day, Mrs. Kaufman, a 45-year-old math teacher, calmly turned around.

“Voluptuous,” she retorted, then proceeded to define the unfamiliar term, cutting off the laughter and offering a memorable vocabulary lesson in the process.

Such are the survival skills Mrs. Kaufman has acquired over 17 years at Seth Low, a large middle school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: How to snuff out brewing fistfights before the first punch is thrown, how to coax adolescents crippled by low self-esteem into raising their hands, how to turn every curveball, even the biting insult, into a teachable moment.

But not all middle school teachers can do it.

Faced with increasingly well-documented slumps in learning at a critical age, educators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute.

As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind.

The demands of teaching middle school show up in teacher retention rates. In New York City, the nation’s largest school system, middle school teachers account for 22 percent of the 41,291 teachers who have left the school system since 1999 even though they make up only 17 percent of the overall teaching force, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

In Philadelphia, researchers found that 34.2 percent of new middle school teachers in one representative year quit after their first year, compared with 21.1 percent of elementary school teachers and 26.3 percent of high school teachers.

“There was a lot more anger and outbursts,” Christian Clarke, 29, a Bronx high school teacher, recalled of the students he encountered during his four years teaching middle school. “Twice as much time was spent on putting out fires; twice as much time was spent getting the class quiet. Twice as much time was spent on defusing anger in the kids.”

A good middle school teacher needs to know how to channel such anger into class work, and whether inappropriate questions like “Are you gay?” (as a Seth Low student recently asked her math teacher) merit serious discussion or feigned deafness.

“You have to have a huge sense of humor and a small ego,” said Jason Levy, the principal of Intermediate School 339 in the Bronx. “There are some people who are born to do it and some who learn to do it, and there are some people who really shouldn’t do it.
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Rest of the article here

Samuel Jackson's Pulp Fiction shooting scene in true type

Watch this with the sound cranked up...
Awesome! Pulp Fiction is one of my favs.

When I think about it, if I were running an interface-design or interaction-design firm, these are the people I would want to hire. Font type designers for whom type design is not just a job; but a calling.

Defining the real meaning of a corporate role

Via this great guest essay by Lance Glasser on Sramana Mitra's blog.

"Indeed, I have often thought that asking what you should get fired for in a job is a great way to clarify your thinking about what is really important."

"The CFO is not responsible for making revenue every quarter, but if there is a big surprise, fire him. The CTO is not responsible for delivering products every quarter, but if you miss the internet or a similar technical inflection point, fire him.”

Salary information for pay negotiations

It's a bit too late to be put to much use this year, but the NYT has an interesting article on online tools for salary negotiations. Link here (Free registration required).

To summarise, the article talks about the websites that provide information on standard compensation packages for your position and role. Using this information, it should be easier to negotiate your pay with a fact-based approach rather than "feelings-based" approach. The sites profiled are -
Salary.com (Available only in US)
Payscale.com (International)


I have used Payscale.com, but not salary.com. My views on this are as follows...

Salary.com collects its data from surveys of HR divisions.
-- So the figures it quotes would be very much from the HR point-of-view. I have a feeling that there will be too much importance given to some useless benefits that you will never use.
-- From a business-model point-of-view, the Salary.com approach is not easily scalable to other international locations, as they will need to build up strong relationships with the HR divisions of the companies in every location they want to enter.

Payscale.com is a Seattle-based startup that tackles the issue from a different angle. They collect salary information from actual employees who come to the site looking for salary information themselves.
-- For those of you who are very dubious as to the quality of the data; I have used it, and it works very well. When I go to Payscale.com looking for the standard comp. packages for project delivery managers, I am asked to fill out my current compensation package. After this is done, Payscale.com will provide me with the weighted/min/max packages for my position and also a comparison to my current package. This ensures that I have every incentive to fill out my data correctly.
-- From a business-model point-of-view, Payscale.com is highly salable to other locations, as all they need are employees in those locations to go to their sites and fill out the survey

I would recommend Payscale, after having used it. Their comp. figures are also indicative of the general trend.


Joe Neitham, a recruiter with the search firm Charterhouse Singapore provides the average tech compensation figures in Singapore and India based on data from Payscale.com. For those in Singapore, I would recommend subscribing to Joe's blog to keep abreast of the trends.

Previous related blog posts:
Pay checks in Indian IT, Finance and Manufacturing

Pay checks in Indian IT, Finance and Manufacturing

Via Gautam Ghosh's blog
You can check the salaries in India at this site - PayCheck India

Some indicative figures:
Vice-President: Rs. 5,355,105.58
Project Manager: Rs. 1,710,159.99
Senior Engineer: Rs. 994,350.35
Fresh Grad: Rs. 300,000 - 400,000

I have checked with a few friends in India, and the weighted salaries on the site are very representative for IT. For Finance, it doesn't quote iBanking salaries, only insurance salaries. I have no friends who are insurance salesmen...

Some things to note
-- Most of the companies tend to quote Cost-To-Company (CTC) as the package. While in Singapore and US, the quoted package is usually your basic salary.
CTC includes [Basic + Allowances + Loan opportunity costs + Retirement benefits + Variable pay (!!!)]

-- Having said that, the allowances are a core part of the salary which will ALWAYS be given. They are just a structured way to give the employee more money outside the basic salary.
So if there is a taxi allowance of Rs. 50k as part of the package, the employee will always get 50k. Plus extra taxi reimbursement every time a taxi is taken after 9 PM. This is different to Singapore where the taxi claim is an actual reimbursement.
Rationale: Basic salary is kept low by shifting more salary to allowances. So retirement benefits paid are low, as they are a % of the basic.

-- Tax rate in India is 33% at the high end. But the tax code was formulated long long long before the IT boom, when a Rs. 300,000 package was considered for CEO's. Anything over Rs. 250,000 is taxed at 30%.
(Source: finance@Indiamart)
110,000 = NIL
100,001 - 1,50,000 = 10%
150,001 - 2,50,000 = 20%
250,001 upwards = 30%
1,000,000 upwards = 33%

Compare this to Singapore:

(Source: Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore)

	Chargeable Income ($)	Rate (%)	Gross Tax Payable ($)
On the first On the next	20 000 10 000	0 3.50	0.00 350.00
On the first On the next	30 000 10 000	5.50	350.00 550.00
On the first On the next	40 000 40 000	8.50	900.00 3 400.00
On the first On the next	80 000 80 000	14	4 300.00 11 200.00
On the first On the next	160 000 160 000	17	15 500.00 27 200.00
On the first Above	320 000 320 000	20	42 700.00

So, if you have a package of S$ 100,000 = Rs. 28 lakh
Income tax in Singapore = S$7100 = Rs. 1,98,800
Income tax in India would have been Rs. 8,66,500 for same salary


How to Compare

-- Trying to understand the Indian CTC structure on the above website is a total waste of your time. You will get it wrong.
-- So better to modify your overseas package to suit the CTC structure without the loan component. There is a [Total Remuneration - Loans] CTC figure on the PayCheck site.
The corresponding overseas package is your [Basic + Always-paid allowances + Average bonus + Retirement benefits - Income tax]. Do not count medical benefits etc as the overseas and Indian benefits cannot be easily compared. Also, these are a very very small part of the Indian CTC package.
-- After this you might want to compare the retirement benefits alone. This will give an understanding of the take-home pay


Special Cases
MSFT starting salary:: ~ Rs. 1,000,000
Google India starting salary:: ~ Rs. 1,300,000


Reading is fundamental
Salary "survey" at In Hyderebad blog
Salary figures at R2I blog