More new faces at FlatWorld

Three new engineers have joined the past one month or so. Santosh Murugan joined the first week of July. Ravi Tejas and Satish joined the first week of August. Santosh joined NoInk team as the first developer. Whereas Ravi and Satish joined the first week of August and will be the first members of Autobase team.

While hiring these three resources is encouraging, there is a need for another 3 resources and we are having a hard time getting these resources.

All the news that one reads about industry watchers complaining about the lack of skilled manpower and the majority of existing resource pool lacking the necessary skills seems broadly true. In a country that is supposedly a software power house with a seemingly unlimited supply of cheap software engineers, our experience hiring just 3 resources in the last 2 months is anything but smooth.

All the three resources have had excellent past experiences at product companies and will contribute to FlatWorld's skill set immensely.

While there has been good news on the hiring front, we had our share of our bad news too, we had to let go of one developer from Vontoo, for performance reasons. This is probably a result of our oversight in the hiring stage and the lesson learnt will hopefully will not be lost while hiring in the future.

New engineer for NoInk

Santhosh Murugan joined yesterday as a developer for NoInk. He will be working with me on the NoInk Product. He likes the background of FW company and wants to work on product development and NoInk fits the bill. It is good to see the team growing here slowly and steadily. In another few weeks, another resource Ravi Tejas should be joining.

The week starting June 12, 2006 - hiring and more..

This week has been the usual. Coding for Vontoo.com, updating the design document for Vontoo, fixing the local Vontoo.com app. Also talked to an interesting bunch of resources while recruiting for Vontoo.com. There was Babu who wanted close to a 45 % rise in salary, when i asked him why does he think he deserves it, said his programming services are excellent. He came down for a personal interview and i did not hire him - he obviously has outpriced himself.

There was Bhanu prakash with whom I had a phone call , was good but he had another offer that gave him more than a 100 % raise - though his current salary was low by industry standards a 100 % raise seemed too steep. He says he likes FW, but it makes sense for him to move to FW atleast if we had a matching offer.

There were a couple of more peope that I talked who seemed good, but all had offers in hand with 20-30 % raises.

I just wonder how long will the Indian IT industry will continue to keep giving raises like this.
I sometimes get a sadistic feeling of wanting to see a IT industry crash, so that salaries return to realistic levels.

One thing is clear from the last month half of hiring , is that though there are plenty of programmers in the market, it is HARD to find good people and they are a little pricey.And that it takes time. The best ones have already been placed in the big dozen companies. These biggies that came in early to india picked up all the low-hanging fruit.

The IT industry has not quite reached the level of maturity where talented and seasoned programmers and engineers start seeing small startup companies as places to enhance their careers. I did come across a few good resources that wanted to work at FW and do not have the big-company-is-the-place-to-be mindset, these are far and few but they exist.

We completed another photo session to send a photo to Bob. This time I made sure every body smiled, unlike the last time.

There were some friends of Suresh Murthy from Indianapolis visiting India. Suresh wanted them to meet the FW team and have a get together. We met up at the Taj Residency. There were Steve Beck and Scott Prince of Indiana Ventures and Ramesh Shah from ??. They had already travelled to new Delhi and Mumbai and have seen first hand the economic changes sweeping the country.

They were joined by Suresh Murthy and Myself of FlatWorld Technologies, Anand Mutalik and Ashok Doraswamy of Code Theatre Infotech and Sharad Ramanathan of MeghaMedia.com .

We had a good time, exchanging views of each others cultures , economies etc. Specifically Scott was curious about the Indian marriage process and wanted to know why I ( Krishna ) was not married yet!. He also had some very useful (and not so useful ) tips for me on getting a girl!.

Welcome To FlatWorld Technologies, Bangalore

This is Chandra From FlatWorld Technologies, Bangalore. The company ( www.flat-world-technologies.com ) started operations in India in May 2006. I was the first full time employee to join the company in India, on May 8, 2006. Another developer , Ganitha joined this week. Another employee Pallavi, works from home.
Hiring is going on for another resource for one of the products being developed at FW.

Being involved in a technology company from its inception is proving to be an interesting experience for me. This is different from a regular job, it teaches things that one would not come across in a typical job. You learn to be patient and persevere and know how to deal with people.

I thought having a blog will be an interesting way to share the experience of working at FlatWorld.

This is the team at FW . The photo includes resources that we are sharing from another company. (Krishna - in orange t-shirt, Suresh Murthy - blue t-shirt, Pallavi- ).





- Krishna