India down, Europe up?

"The hype over increasing services offshoring to India notwithstanding, the number of investments in R&D/services projects in India actually registered a significant decline last year. India attracted 204 such investments in 2005, as compared to 256 in 2004 — a decrease of close to 20%."

At first I was intrigued so I went on to read - it could mean afterall that R&D is not going well in India or China. On the other hand, the large services providers of India are fairing very well, so what is going on?

"As a result, Europe regained from Asia its top position in 2005, attracting 39% of all projects. Asia attracted 31% of all projects. In 2004, both regions tied at 35%."

I was even more surprised by this one - Europe of all places gaining projects from Asia. Reading further it becomes obvious that there is a lot of growth in Europe, in countries like Romania, Poland etc. This explains Europe's numbers. This also points to something that makes a lot of sense, that R&D projects are very much at home in countries where the engineering background is strong, and Romania surely fits the bill there.

Passion

A follow up on Hiring - some organizations will have the best process to select the candidates based on technical skills, only to realize  fallouts on other fronts. One front that I believe we typically lack formal review during the interviews is how passionate is the interviewee. A candidate can be a good fit technically, but organizations like ours need go-getters, or people going beyond what they are asked to do. Problem solving questions will not help you much identify passion in your candidates, they will help you assess the raw talent/intelligence. Erik Sink
wrote a great essay along the same lines. In his equation I would replace the L(learning) variable for P(passion), which to me represent better the successful candidates at Macadamian. The calculus equation is now:

Successful candidate = G + Pt

• G = gift out of the factory, how intelligent one is, the raw talent
• P = drive, desire to make things happen, look beyond, learn, take on challenges
• t = time

Initially our interview process must really assess G, but over time (t), the amount of P one has is more and more important, this is what the first derivative tells us. So assessing P is very important to finding good long term candidates for our oragnization.

How does one go about assessing Passion? A lot of it is in the unsaid, the reaction of a candidate to a question they can't answer, or one they got wrong, are they willing to dig more, fight it out - it's the job of the interviewer to dig, a wrong answer or no answer can tell you a lot about someone. Understanding how does one go about finding out what he/she doesn't know, and how bad they want it is where the questioning must be taking place. Doing full circle to my initial post on hiring - Bringing the candidate and your interviewer on the same playing field is key to find a good fit, whether it is talking about warcraft or monopoly!

Some more reading for you - coming from Macadamian

I just want to take the opportunity to share some tid-bits from Macadamian. First you can read more about our positioning in the outsourcing game in the sd-times. It's more about what makes Canada special and well positioned in the product creation outsourcing. Second is the lastest of Dr Dobb's posting an article of ours as well on the coding conventions. We're very proud of this because it puts us front and center on a very topic important aspect in making code more maintainable with higher quality. Lastly I would like to point you to the critical path, our monthly news letter about software management, the latest issue is just out, I invite you to subscribe for some good insight from the trenches. Happy reading!

VC state of affairs in India

"Given that a typical start-up in India would require $9 million during the first three years (i.e., $3 million per year) and even assuming that the start-up survives for three years, investing $2.2 billion during 2007-2010 would imply investing in 150 to 180 start-ups every year during this period, which simply does not seem practical if the VCs continue to focus only on their current favourite sectors." India is a big country, 1B people afterall - the model of figuring out if the investment market is overheating may be different. When I look at 150Investments/year for such a country I don't think it's too many. "Taking Indian Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) into consideration, this would be equivalent to $22 billion worth of investment in the US. Since about $1.75 billion (or approximately 40% of $4.4 billion) has been already raised, even if only $2.2 billion is raised by December 2006, Evalueserve cautions that there will be a glut of VC money for early-stage investments in India." This is when it hits home - the equivalent of $22B worth of investment in the US. This is 1B shy of the all time record in the US software industry of 2000(IT is a larger category). Last year number was 11.96B down 4% from the year before, so this could indicate over heating in the VC world of India. Numbers are from USA Today and ZDNet

Hiring the right people

It seems everybody is talking about hiring, Joel has had a serie on the topic, and now just yesterday I was reading Make, and Time O'reilly was also talking about it. Selecting candidates is always a challenge. At Yahoo,
as O'reilly points out looks for candidates that are great world of warcraft players. The beliefs being that to be successful in that game, you have to have great leadership skills, etc. I think the moral of the story in selecting candidates is to bring the candidates onto a common playing field - one which both the interviewer and the interviewee understands well. In the case of Yahoo - I think the world of warcraft is just an example of interviewers speaking the same language of the interviewee in an effective matter, so that you can judge quickly the fit. For others - in our case for example it's the old problem solving game - we through code problems at our interviewee and we look at how elegant the solution is and the time it took to resolve them - we find it works well, and it weeds out the a good chunk of potential candidates. No method is fool proof, but it's about getting the process right and understood by all - so that everyone is on the same wavelength so that you zero in on the candidates that are the best fit.

Another blog at Macadamian - welcome Didier!

I invite you to read Didier's blog - he will be writing about software management. You will see very quickly that he is a very good thinker.

User Experts

I haven't blogged about it yet, early in August Macadamian has acquired Maskery, you can read more about the news here. I wanted the dust to settle a little bit before writing about it. For Macadamian it's a very important strategic move and one we're very excited about. It's strategic because UE Consulting brings us closer to the time when our potential customers realize they have a prodcut to create. I choose the term create, as opposed to build, one implies participating in the ideation activity, while the other is more about execution of someone's else idea.  As I wrote several times here - product environment understanding is key to be able to innovate. Our acquisition is to help us make this transition, and plant our stake in the ground about why one wants to get Macadamian in a project with them. Macadamian is now about participating very early on, in the boardroom table of our clients to flesh out the idea, and helping innovate the prototypes, advanced concepts, pilot projects, that will become the next revenue stream of our clients. With Maskery, Macadamian now brings the business and science knowlege to make product innovation simpler and faster. In other words we take our clients from a napkin sketch to market ready!

Liquid Computing - an Ottawa based Company

Interesting news - and it made Cnet's headline - Sun's even though they are going through tough time still has this highend feel to it.

Public company woes

"Since this comes close on the heels of a modest four per cent growth in revenues and a six per cent rise in post-tax earnings clocked by Aztec in the fourth quarter, its second quarter will be watched closely. Clearly, project volumes that have slowed in the past two quarters will have to pick up in the coming quarters. With good client addition and a step up in sales efforts blended with Disha (its testing arm) in the first quarter, Aztec expects the benefits of higher volumes and better service to kick in, in the coming quarters." Things are not rosy everywhere, disapointing quarter for Aztech still they are trading at 15x their trailing 12months. A public company has so much more scrutinity and to some extent distractions. All analysts covering the company are scrutinizing everything/anything - reverse engineering it for the next quarter. From my standpoint though the more I know about who they deal with and how they position themselves, the better.

Music playlists

Over the weekend I tried to find startups and companies doing interesting stuff around Music. I found two interesting candidates Webjay and Songbird. They do have some pretty interesting features and concepts. Webjay with its playlist publishing aspects - and songbirds from the music playing standpoint. I still haven't found what I'm looking for as U2 so amazingly sing. I'm looking for a service that would allow me given my mp3 music collection and various keywords(tags they are called in Web 2.0), to find good playlists to listen to the music I own. The results could be sorted from closest match regarding the tunes I own, to the playlist for which I have the least tunes. For the tunes I don't own it would have a mechanism to acquire them on the spot, and off I start listening, or just discard the tunes I don't own and play the rest of the playlist. It would be sort of a playlist exchange for people who are creative on the playlist side, and a way for me to listen to more than albums - I have never been able to make the perfect tape anyway. Webjay is a way for people to put up playlist - but it falls short for me as a consumer of playlists.

how big is Tata (TCS)

Tata Consultancy Services would this year recruit over 30,000 Engineering graduates worldwide, a senior company official has said.
I'd like to put this number in the perspective of the Canadian industry. Thirty thousands engineers is about 20times what Canada is going to crank out in new grads in Computer Engineering and Computer Sciences in 2007. With those numbers it just reinforces my thinking that we're not out there to compete on raw numbers - we're here to compete in niches. After all by our Canadian standards, how many company in Canada have 30,000 people - not that many. In a way the fact that our environment is not encouraging the creating and growth of behemoth the size of TCS, must be turned into a strength - ablity to focus on niches.

Second life bis

I thought the idea of assiting to a concert in second life was pretty amusing. Now get this Duran Duran is actually doing concerts in Second life. This means there is crowd who finds it convenient and enjoyable to assist to a concert and interact with the people at the concert. Now Telus
has a store front in second life. Are they going to start selling virtual phones? Just like american apparels sells virtual clothes. So weird and interesting phenom.