February 2009 – Problems

Investment “experts”

admin February 25, 2009

Harvard’s declining endowment funds – shows that most investment bankers are grossly overpaid, just because they handle the money, they get very high salaries and bonuses. Few have the judgement or foresight to take the correct decisions. A comment is even more interesting (the best part of Rediff are the comments)

The worst fall-out of last few years frenzy was, making money out of thin air became an addiction. A wasted generation of brilliant minds led away from hard-core engineering. Any proposal to raise money from the public was padded up to make it a dream.

95% of the best engineers who graduated in the last two decades did not do engineering – they either worked in software companies or did an MBA and became “financial experts” . That is the real tragedy, working as a engineer teaches you to be practical and you design for the long term. Something you design for a refinery or a power plant will be in operation for at least two or three decades, with very little downtime, you cannot afford to make mistakes.

MBAs , especially in the financial sector are about dress code and slick talk to gullible investors. Unfortunately, due to media hype, students still want to waste 2 years of their life doing an MBA. If you value your money, listen to all investment “experts” , but take your own decisions.

IT firms

admin February 16, 2009

IT firms and the Indian market – I come from a non IT and internet background and have been very surprised how arrogant most IT and internet companies in India are. In engineering, even if you worked for the largest company in the industry and your customer was a very small company, you always tried to be flexible, listen to the customers requirement and make changes wherever possible. I remember going to every hardware store in Ajmer searching for a particular type of cable for wiring, after a customer had made a last minute change in location and the cable reel the vendor had bought from Mumbai was not enough. After all, the customer ultimately paid your salaries.

Looks like I am not alone, many other Indian companies face a similar problem. That is why I don’t feel work experience in the biggest IT firms or internet companies helps, the Indian market is very different.

Productivity

admin February 9, 2009

In a few years, India will have the largest population in the world, so most companies don’t pay much attention to productivity. If you look at the revenues of major Indian internet companies , the revenue per employee is not very high. They seem to spend a lot of resources on marketing. So focussing on the world market is better at present.

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