Separated

The New Year got off to a rough start for me. I returned from a month long vacation (half of it was unpaid and the rest was all the vacation days that I had shored up for this trip to India) to work to find that I have no work. My boss (the CTO) of the company told me that due to financial difficulties the company was going through another round of layoffs. Since they had decided to stop all IT initiatives they did not need someone to define and manage IT initiatives.

So, here I am looking for a new job. A recruiter that I talked to mentioned that I should not use "eliminated" or "layoff" as they have negative connotations. Instead, he suggested, I should use "separated." Well, "separated" it is even though it does not change the reality. Someone else told me that averaging 2 yrs at a job does not sit well. True. I would not hire someone who changes jobs every two years. And, in the first 8 years of my work I was a sucker for the newest technology. I changed jobs every two years to work on the latest thing. In the last 10 years it has been the economy and the companies who have been prompting my job changes. One company that I worked for kept laying off people every 3 months that I finally quit after being there for 6 rounds of layoffs; the other decided consulting was not for them; the next two failed (one of them managed to sell themselves before it went under)

Someone once asked me - "How long can a 'start-up' call itself a 'start-up'?" I had no answer for that one. My former employer has been in business for 3 years and is down by $35MM. In B-school they said investors look for 3x3 or 5x5 returns (i.e. 3x returns in 3 years etc...) I bet this is not what they had in mind. Anyway, what do you call a 'start-up' that is in this state? Wind-down.

Back to the job hunt.

High Rate of H-1B Visa Fraud says BusinessWeek

High Rate of H-1B Visa Fraud - BusinessWeek

So, where is the news? What is new? The article is written in such a way that it makes you think that the companies using the H1-B program the most (i.e. Indian companies) are the ones most responsible for fraud without making explicit claims or citing evidence.

The story for H1-B folks being paid less than market rate is often quoted but hard to substantiate. The market rate is not a single figure but a range and I bet every one of these H1-B folks fall within the range. The companies that employ H1-B folks benefit financially without having to resort to lower wages. Most H1-B folks tend to amass their vacation for one large vacation trip. That makes it easy for companies to plan for their absence. Quite often these vacations happen between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when majority of the companies do not have any major initiatives happening. Then, there is the wait for "green card" which makes these folks bonded laborers to these firms without having to sign such an employement contract. And, finally, there is the Social Security taxes that these folks contribute but may not see unless they become a citizen and Social Security program is still solvent.

So, who is being had, by whom?

Our Internet site will be available... intermittently

I have been trying to access the website of FirstandSecond.com, which bills itself as India's biggest bookstore over the last 24 hours. The darn site has been down for "Technical Upgradation." I have never seen a technical upgrade take an online business offline for a whole day. And, they have the chutzpah to suggest "...use this opportunity to take a break from net surfing..." I guess someone forgot to tell them that the reason they want people coming to their site is to buy (and, not just surf) and while their site may be down the rest of the Internet is available (and, that includes that of their competitor(s) like Landmarkonthenet). Imagine Amazon being down for 24hours back in 1995 or 1996. I bet it was unacceptable even then. I guess, even the Internet moves at the slow pace of Indian Stretchable Time.

I am no user experience expert but the quality of the user interface and content on most Indian sites is lamentable. It is as if their "must have" list consists of - scrolling text and flashing images. And, the "nice to haves" are fly-out images and pop-ups/pop-unders. Compare rediff.com with yahoo or msn, it is as if rediff is stuck in 1996. Someone once remarked "...India is an assault on your senses... all senses... all the time." The Indian websites seem to be an assault on your sensibilities when they are up.

Corporate websites of IT services providers seem to be the best of the lot. And, even here, there seems to be a correlation between the quality of the site and the amount of revenues earned from abroad. I am not saying that the site quality is allowing them to generate more revenues. The greater the interactions with firms and people in other geographies the greater the incentive to put something better out.

Why IT is not Customer Service ... and it should not be

After a number of years in consulting (the IT kind), I decided to try corporate IT in 2004. The immediate reason for my decision was the fact that I was going to school for a part time degree and did not want to miss classes due to travel. I had also become quite cyncial about consulting and the para dropping con-sultan-ts. I had started refering to me and my likes as con-sultan-t (sultan of con. the last t is silent).

In the last three plus years in corporate IT I have come to realize that corporate America deserves the con-sultan-ts. In my current role as the head of an IT organization in a startup I see the same behavior that I have seen in Fortune 500 companies (Sometimes I feel the list should be called Fortunate 500. Some of them are there in spite of themselves).

So, coming to the topic at hand. I have often heard executive in corporations including CIOs say IT is in customer service business. I say it is not. IT is in service business but to call it customer service is doing it a disservice. When you consider and treat IT as customer service you make IT act at the beck & call, whims of the rest of the organization. The customer is right/ keep customer happy attitude may win brownie points, it reduces the effectiveness of IT. The purpose of IT is total transformation of business (Ok, I borrowed that. The original went like this - "The purpose of religion is total transformation of man."). And, for it to do that IT must be ready to educate the rest of the organization on its work, question rest of the organization on their requirements, assumptions and challenge them to define financial metrics to measure success.