We are inching closer

Commiting to deadlines is a bad thing. atleast in public. Once you commit to a deadline you have two options,

a. Ship your product no matter how sucky it is.

b. Add x days and proclaim new deadline. repeat n times. (Vista release schedule perfected this technique)

At CampusChai we are working on some really cool stuff. So we are not going to commit to any deadlines, it will be ready when its ready.

What do you folks think is the best code release technique?

a. Users love broken code and sites that don’t work.

b. Code it and throw it out there and let your users figure it out.

c. Make incremental improvements. Make sure it works 80%.

d. Develop an n-tier architecture and put it through a unit, functional,UAT, pre-alpha,pre-beta… testing.

btw, Here is a sneak preview of what’s coming your way.

Contest Update

Well, we are coming to an end of the PS2 contest and as in everything else in life, one can be #1 for only so long. Kamlesh Bharti has been our #1 promoter since day 1 until 3 days ago, our new #1 is Deepesh Shah. We still have about 25 days in the contest and a lot can still happen between now and then. Here are our top 3

1. Deepesh Shah – 868 points

2. Kamlesh Bharti  – 827 points

3. Rahul Basu         – 756 points

Thanks again everyone for participating.

Got my Degree, where’s my job???

The New York Times talks about getting your degree and still being umemployed and highlights the fact that most unemployed college graduates in India lack three essential skills,

• Bad English/Poor accent(Poor communication skills)
• Rote learning
• A general lack of soft skills( group interaction,body language etc)

While the overall message of the article is well conveyed, the author states that the development of the desired skills are only to be achieved by those attending IIM’s and IIT’s. (Quoted below)

But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.

Similar articles always seem to brand Indian educational institues into two categories. The IIT/IIM lot and the others( and usually ‘others’ stand for everything bad about the indian education system). I disagree on that aspect of the article, just because you went to IIT does not mean that your accent is impeccable and you are pitching creatives in madison ave to the fortune 500. I know a lot of folks who went to IIT and were brilliant analytically but had trouble with basic grammar. A lot of these articles tend to see the colleges as black and white and seem to miss the grey. The grey are those colleges where they accomplish 60%-80% of developing an employable graduate. For ex: A lot of colleges in the major metros fall in this category. The students speak great english have semi decent analytical skills and seem to do just fine finding jobs.

I do have to agree with Anand(the author of the article) on the fact that colleges in India do need to place emphasis on the soft skills. Academic capabilities carry far more importance and students generally seem to lack the back-slapping,personable natures usually needed to get ahead in the corporate world. Somebody needs to fill this gap. Aptech/NIIT are passe now, Language/personality schools are in. There is a huge market opportunity for somebody to step in and start offering courses with emphasis on the  communication and creative sciences.