Raghu Mohan

The 15th of September is celebrated as Engineer's Day in memory of India's engineering icon M. Visvesvaraya. A highly disciplined engineer, he was known for his sincerity, time management and unsurpassable devotion to a cause. He was a civil engineer and his work involved everything from building roadways, to dams and anti-flood systems.

In his life as an engineer, Visvesvaraya engineered many systems to reality. Here are some of his great achievements -

1. In 1895, he designed and carried out the water works of the Municipality of Sukkur in Sind
2. In 1903, he designed and constructed Automatic Gates, patented by him at Lake Fife Storage Reservoir, to at the Khadakvasla Reservoir near Pune. These gates were employed to raise the flood supply level of storage in the reservoir to the highest level likely to be attained by a flood without causing any damage to the dam.
3. Based on the success of these gates, the same system was installed at the Tigra Dam in Gwalior and the Krishna Raja Sagara (KRS) Dam in Mandya/ Mysore,Karnataka.
4. Introduced block irrigation system, which is still used in golf courses from around the world to maintain the quality of grass.
5. Designed and developed and anti-flooding system for the city of Hyderabad which was frequently tormented by floods caused by the river Musi.
6. He had a great stint working with the state of Mysore. He's regarded as the father of modern day Mysore and rightly so. He was responsible for the founding of the Mysore Soap Factory, the Parasitoide Laboratory, the Mysore Iron & Steel Works (now known as Visvesvaraya Iron and Steel Limited) in Bhadravathi, the Sri Jayachamarajendra Polytechnic Institute, the Bangalore Agricultural University, the State Bank of Mysore, The Century Club, Mysore Chambers of Commerce and numerous other industrial ventures. This was in 1909.
7. He was instrumental in the founding of the Government Engineering College at Bangalore in 1917, one of the first engineering institutes in India. This institution was later named the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE)

A consummate engineer, Visvesvaraya never stopped learning. He would often be sent to other countries, like China, Canada, USA, Russia, Egypt etc, where he would study various engineering practices and solve problems in India using the learnt technologies. He holds a unique distinction of obtaining Membership of London Institution of Civil Engineers for an unbroken 50 years. Post Independence, he was also awarded India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.Visvesvaraya died at a grand old age of 101, in the year 1962, and to this day, 15th September of every year in India has been celebrating a century of engineering brilliance.What Visvesvaraya stood for, was the spirit of problem solving, the unquenchable zeal to learn, passion towards a cause, unquestionable dedication and resolute discipline. The characteristics define the spirit of engineering.On this day, it is important to remember, that engineering is not an educational qualification. It is a way of thinking. A way of thinking that is in every problem solver in the world. It is a way of life.There is an engineer in everyone and today goes out to the problem solver in you.

Content source - Wikipedia

Mobile apps have well and truly arrived and the demand for mobile application developers is now higher than what it has ever been. India being the software development engine of the dot com era has smoothly transitioned into the mobile world as well and we're seeing some good mobile app development companies emerge in the recent past.

But back in the dot com days, India never saw too many software product companies. More emphasis was laid on the software services front. This was because distribution was complicated and most entrepreneurs stuck to getting paid for building software and not worrying about distribution and marketing of a software product.

That has changed now. The concept of the app store has made it a level playing field. Simply uploading an app on an app store now makes an app available to anyone in the world with an internet enabled smartphone. Furthermore, internet marketing has greatly evolved and monetisation is also reaching some sort of maturity.

All this has given rise to mobile product companies from India. If you're a mobile developer in India, here are 5 companies that you must try your chances with (in no particular order)

Zomato

When I first spoke to Pankaj Chaddha, one of the founders of Zomato, he told me that in the developer community, they're still considered a mobile app company from Mumbai. True, they have a very popular website that sees a lot of traffic, but over 70% of their usage in on their mobile client.

With close to 5 million downloads, Zomato is used in many countries and as a mobile developer, gives rise to a lot of exciting work. Furthermore, the mobile app itself is undergoing constant change on the front end, which will give developers a unique experience of getting to understand behaviour mobile users from around the world.

All this awesomeness and it's made with love in India.

Newshunt

When you have any internet property that records a billion page views a month, anyone would sit up and take notice. Verse Innovation's mobile app Newshunt is exactly that. This app serves news from hundreds of english and local language newspapers on a simple, readable mobile app.

The mobile app is available across platforms and records massive usage and is growing at breakneck speeds. Across all platforms, the app has close to 67 million downloads and the company is looking to add another 100 million users in the coming year. All the right signs for a mobile developer to board this rocket ship.

Probably the most 'indian' app out there, in a vernacular sense.

Flipkart

In a recent press interaction, Flipkart revealed that over 50% of their sales revenues are coming from their mobile app. That's close to 500 million dollars USD from their mobile app, so you can be rest assured that a lot of work is going into it. Flipkart will give you vantage point as a developer in the incredibly rapidly evolving m-commerce market.

Furthermore, this is again an app that is used by millions of users in India, which comes with it's set of learning benefits from a developer's point of view. Furthermore, it's a large engineering team and there will be a lot of handshakes between web and mobile technologies that a mobile developer will be exposed to.

If you can make it to Flipkart as a mobile engineer, you're in for some serious learning.

SignEasy

This is a controversial choice, as it's not in the same league as the aforementioned apps, in terms of downloads and usage. However, this is one of the few independent enterprise facing apps in India, let alone the world. This app allows you to sign documents digitally. It is a very basic problem in the corporate world and is beginning to see some good traction.

The app is available across all platforms and it was even featured on the Apple app store. There are some niche technologies that a developer will be exposed to while working with this company and also will give a developer an understand of the enterprise user. With a maturing consumer mobile app space, the next space to go to is the enterprise space.

Choose SignEasy for some exciting tech work and insight into a new consumer segment.

Hike

Bharti SoftBank is home to one of India's most widely used mobile apps - Hike Messenger. The app, on Android alone has over 20 million downloads and is available across iOS, Windows Phone, and even Symbian. There's a lot of ad money that's going into marketing the app, so you can only expect the user count to go up.

The mobile messenger market itself is very hot. Apart from Hike, there's Line and WeChat that are also growing rapidly in the same region. This sort of competition will usher new innovation and the people at the helm of this development will be the mobile app developer. Need more reason to join?

Choose Hike simple because of the amazing traction the instant messaging market is seeing.

In other news, the 10th edition of Google's prestigious Google Summer of Code program is about to kick off and India will be represented by 401 students — a record in the history of GSoC.

With 401 students from India selected to the prestigious GSoC program, it has outpaced every other country in contention, including the USA, which is at a more modest 167. So what exactly have these students signed up for?

They are going to spend the next 3 months or so working with one of the participating organizations of Google on a project that they submitted a proposal for and, at the end of their tenure, they return home with a neat paycheck. In fact, this paycheck has been the biggest incentive for computer science students from all around the world — 5,500 USD for 3 months of work.

Now you may wonder why this number is so significant. Well for starters, every project listed as a part of the GSoC is an open source project, so it exposes the participants to the way open source development works. Hopefully, there would be a lasting impact of the culture of open source in the minds of the people.

However, Sayan Chowdhury, my colleague and former GSoC-er, believes otherwise. He says, "In India, 5,500 USD is a lot of money and most students seem to apply for GSoC for this monetary gain. Furthermore, it's a good thing to put on your resume as it carries a lot of importance at jobs and post-graduate college admissions. A lot of my fellow GSoCer's don't contribute to open source projects after their 3 months."

Cumulatively, since the inception of GSoC, over 800 Indian students have taken part. But try and think of popular open source projects like say, Fedora or Mozilla and you can't think of a single name of this stature to have come from India. Or try and name 100 top open source contributors from India?

Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the popular operating system Linux, said this about India's contribution to open source —

This is not to say that there aren't enough open source contributors from India, but a mix of a lack of social infrastructure and too few people who write software for the joy of writing software has resulted in India's mediocre participation in the world of open source. Even the fat paycheck isn't enough to bring the Indian developer back to work on the projects that they spent the better part of their summer on.

Also, 401 students in the context of half a million engineers that graduate out of Indian colleges is a small number. For the most part, there's a huge amount of ignorance on the Indian students' part when it comes to open source.

This puts the onus on those 401 kids. Your predecessors really haven't done the best of jobs in promoting the open source culture in India and it is up to you to bring back the passion that will be infused into you in your tenure with the GSoC. Blog about it, speak about it — make it a point to get at least 10 more developers to take up open source contribution. And most importantly, continue the work on the projects that you take up.

It is beyond awesome to see so many inductees into this year's GSoC from India.

Let's make it count.

Late last year and early this year, there was a huge campaign by code.org, which brought together the biggest names in the field of computer sciences, encouraging everyone to take the hour of code. Names like Gates and Zuckerberg dedicated some time to provide support to some instructional videos. You can check it out at Code.Org.

The content in the code.org courses are really simple and I can assure you that anyone willing to invest some time can learn how to code. The idea of introducing simple and popular things in the context of programming appeals to the masses and if you stick with the course for long enough, they slowly wane you off these gimmicks and you will find yourself coding.

But, is learning how to code and being a programmer the same thing?



There are quite a few StackOverflow answers on the subject. One of them says -

"Learning how to program is very different from actually being able to be a valuable programmer. Programming is very simple for the most part. Read spec, implement accordingly. Test. Repeat. Yes, everyone can be a programmer. Not everyone can be a valuable programmer. Especially certain tasks require much more thinking and experimentation than others. Such things are best left for people who actually enjoy doing it. An example could be implementing low-level constructs, counting clock cycles, bits, and bytes without any modern programming tools or anything. Not everyone can handle that."

Another answer on the cplusplus forum says -

"Nope - I think that you've got to have certain traits to be a professional programmer (or even want to become one?). The kind of person who likes to solve puzzles, who is interested in technology, can be focused, ...

But I do think that everyone is capable of writing simple programs and could, therefore, become a programmer in the looser sense."

This blog post by Robert Smith has another perspective to it -

"Quite simply, programming is not for everyone. It is not an absolutely fun and delightful task as it’s portrayed to be in videos like the aforementioned or movies like “The Social Network”. It is rarely an invigorating social activity. A lot of time, it’s sitting in front of a computer screen, looking at a colorful text document, and thinking, and thinking, and typing, getting angry, and wondering why the hell you’re living a life sitting down."

After seeing all these answers, I can liken this to the value of degrees. An engineering degree from a reputed institution puts a candidate above their compatriots who don't have it. Having this degree is no bearing on his/her technical aptitude. In fact, technicians with on hand experiences are better most engineering skills.

The reason for this value to an engineering degree is not because of the skills that it teaches; it's the attitude. The attitude of solving problems; the ability to think differently, systematically and concisely. 4 years of being around peers who have the aptitude to adopt this kind of thought; 4 years of studying about problem solvers and problem-solving techniques changes the way you think. Hence the added value.

Programming is the engineering derivative of computer sciences and the same applies here. Programming is for you, only if you have coding skills and the engineering mindset.

Agree? Disagree? Tell us either way.

No matter what kind of company you're running today, the use of technology is inevitable. You're either using some kind of technology product or service to run your business. Furthermore, as your business scales, the requirement to build your technology becomes more and more pressing.

Enter the awesome developer. The answer to all of your scaling problem. The wizard who can will your ideas into working products.

Every company needs this kind of developers. But developers, at the end of the day, are people. They're people with emotions and they too have limits. You often hear of companies with high attrition rates. Yes, a large part of it could be the availability of another offer. But a lot of times, developers leave companies because they are angry.

They could be angry about a host of things, from the way the company is run, to the way they're treated or because of their insensitive boss barking meaningless orders at them. Having worked with some of the brightest developers from the world, we've compiled a list of four things that will piss off your developers -

Restricting Rules

Given that we're talking about good developers who are passionate about the work that they do, and are really good at what they do, restricting rules are a definite no-no. Developers thrive on freedom and like working on their terms. Of course, there are rules and regulations that every developer adheres to, but if it gets in the way of their creativity, or their need to experiment, you're pissing your developer off.

The best retention strategy for a developer is providing them with an environment of freedom. Of course, there are constraints set by the nature of the business that you're running, but within them, you've got to give your best developers as much time as possible. Most developers are productive in spurts and some of their best work comes in short periods of time and they appreciate the freedom to work like that.

Expectation without consultation

The non-techies in an organisation look up to a developer as a magician who can will things into reality. However, as game changing as these ideas can be, non-techies often overlook the intricate details of building such a product. And often, these intricate details would actually make bringing the idea to reality a really difficult task. And if you don't consult a developer about an idea's feasibility and expect the job to be completed, you can sure well expect a pissed off the developer.

Most good developers have the uncanny ability to explain complex concepts in layman terms. Before seriously pursuing a development project, it might be a good idea to talk to your developer; be absolutely sure about what you want to build and see if it's possible in the first place, before committing developer hours to it. While this might seem quite obvious, you'd be surprised by the number of developers who actually have this complaint.

Insensitive leaders

This will piss off any good employee of a company. In the case of a good developer, the last thing you want to do is to put that person under an insensitive leader. This will weigh down on the developer and before you know it, your developer will be well on his way to another company.

Everyone needs good leaders to look up to; a leader who takes a subordinate's personal goals and aspirations into account. More companies should start factoring in attrition as a way to measure the performance of a leader. The number of employees complaining about their boss is very high and a good developer will be no different. The only way to avoid this is to make it a company mandate to get managers to understand the importance of being sensitive to their developers' personal needs and aspirations too.

Lack of a good peer group

This one is quite tough to avoid, especially if your company is not a technology company. A good developer wants to be surrounded by other developers. Birds of a feather flock together and developers yearn the same as well. Every developer wants an inner circle of colleagues who can understand their deep geek jokes. Every developer wants to see the same kind of excitement towards a technology problem in their peers' eyes as well.

If you're building a company that needs great developers to build, make sure you never compromise on the quality of the people you're hiring. Hire the absolute best and build a team of really good developers. Of course, an argument could be made that good developer are expensive, but the fact that one good developer is also as good as 10 average ones is also true. A good techie among a bunch of average ones might be good for the average ones, but the good one will leave for places that will give him/her a better peer group to work with. Never compromise on hiring.

If you're a developer, feel free to use the comments section to tell us what else pisses you off

No company is flawless. As the promoter of a company, you can never keep everyone happy. There will always be something that you do in your company that can be done better or even something that just isn't right about it. This happens to the best of the companies as well, including the ones that people have a cult following.

From an engineering standpoint, companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple will look at one of the best places in the world to work for. And they are. However, we've found out some interesting, some even shocking things about these companies, straight from the employees.

Google

One-half of the world's largest internet companies, Google is notorious for its unforgivingly high bars for recruitment. They hire nothing but the best. However, Google is also an organisation. And like with every other organisation, there will be mundane things to do as well. And mundane things, isn't something that you expect the brightest minds to indulge in, right?

Well, unfortunately, that's exactly what happens at Google. Here's what an ex-Google employee had to say -

"The worst part of working at Google, for many people, is that they're overqualified for their job. Google has a very high hiring bar due to the strength of the brand name, the pay & perks, and the very positive work culture. As a result, they have their pick of bright candidates, even for the most low-level roles."

"There are students from top 10 colleges who are providing tech support for Google's ads products, or manually taking down flagged content from YouTube, or writing basic code to A|B test the colour of a button on a site."

Google staff are so outstanding that there's an internal joke about it.

"I used to joke with my colleagues that Larry & Sergey go out on their yachts - tie them together, sit back on the same recliners you'll find on their jumbo jet, each on his own yacht/set of yachts, smoke cigars, and put up pictures of Googlers with little snippets like, Was a GM at multi-national telecoms company, got a Harvard MBA and is now answering Orkut tickets and then they would erupt in laughter and clink their cigars & Scotch together in celebration. This, of course, is highly unlikely given neither of them would ever smoke a cigar or drink Scotch. The remainder is plausible."

Apple

Apple's obsession with quality is unparalleled, and it shows in their brilliant products. But spare a thought for the obsessive ones; the people who work at Apple. And obsession isn't always a good thing. It takes a toll on every other aspect of your life and demands all your focus on a singular activity.

So does the same happen at Apple? Well, this ex-Apple employee surely thinks so -

"I hardly (hardly meaning never) saw my daughter during the week because the hours were so inflexible. I had also taken a substantial pay cut, but I figured I was making a long-term career investment by working for such a prestigious company. Onboarding was super bumpy, and they had so many passwords, accounts, and logins that it took nearly a month just for me to get on the server. There were meetings all the time which were disruptive to everyone's productivity, but they seemed to be a necessary evil in a company that's so large with such high-quality products."

"... coworkers that stood their ground and set boundaries seemed to end up on a shit list of sorts and were out of the inner circle of people that kissed the producer's ass. I started to become one of those people that desperately wanted Friday evening to arrive, and I dreaded Sunday nights."

Facebook

The company that has captured the dreams of every entrepreneur and every engineer. This 200 billion dollars social enigma, is home to the personal communication of at least 1/7th of the entire world's population. And when you're serving over a billion people, you're bound to face some problems. Take this Facebook engineer for example, who had to go through 6 weeks of 24-hour duty -

"The worst thing about working at Facebook for me has been on call duty. Most engineering teams run complex, frequently modified software in production. Since things have a way of going wrong, teams have a rotating responsibility for responding to unanticipated emergencies. Since these can happen anytime, day or night, and are of unknowable scope and severity, being on call is a serious responsibility; many millions of users are affected every minute the site is broken."

"My current team’s rotation lasts for two weeks, and rolls around two to three times per year. For those two weeks, I don’t leave town on the weekend; make especially sure not to have “one too many” at any social gatherings I attend; and most importantly, carry and immediately respond to a charged phone where I can be reached 24/7, including leaving the ringer on on the nightstand as I sleep. And yes, once or twice a year that phone does go off at some bizarre hour to rouse you from your slumber and go fight a fire in production."

"While it can be satisfying to help get the site back in order when it’s sick, it really is not for everyone. This part of the job just isn’t fun for me; I find debugging under time pressure through a 3am haze stressful."

He also had some nice things to say about the company too. Read the full account here

Twitter

After recently going public, Twitter garnered a lot of media attention and a lot of engineers wanted to join the tech giant. Sure, Twitter has been an effective medium in the voice of change over the internet, and has a really interesting technology stack to work with; you would think that this is a company that would be an engineer's paradise, right?

Well, not quite. Engineers often complain of the disparity between them and the non-technical folks in the company. Here's what some disgruntled twitter engineers have said -

A staff software engineer says, "Lots of engineering managers for a company of this size. Most of the engineering managers are non-technical and add little value (but do create a lot of noise). An alarming amount of internal politics for a company so small (of ~2000 people)! Feels like a company with 10x the number of people."

A data scientist says, "Manager inflation, and hierarchy, unfair and very nonuniform compensation."

And a software engineer adds: "Hiring has been heavy, but where the new workers fit into the picture is somewhat of a mystery in many groups."

Well, no company is perfect.