pekru

> Actually a free Windows OS would actually be great. Here in India, Pirated Windows OS are like as common as mosquitoes. No one but Microsoft was losing in all this.

Actually, MS knew all along that piracy is rampant and they let it work for them quite well. With everyone familiarizing themselves with nothing other than MS products, MS knew for a fact that money would eventually come, in sacks that too. It wasn't a loss in the long term.

Markets like China and India are different wherein enforcement is not that easy. Heck, proper enforcement would even make people opt for a hassle free and priceless option like *nix. So MS chose not to bother too much about piracy in domestic installations and thus sorta sent a message like "go on, use it, we don't care" and fueled piracy to an extent, if I may say.

For an average consumer in India, computers are synonymous with Windows products. It's not a choice for them at all, they do not have a choice!

Even the local coke/hash peddler would give out stuff for free to get one hooked. ;)

> accusing him of, first, racism, then favoring only crony capitalism

Well, am quite sure all of us here are quite reasonable folks who do not harbour racist feelings towards another fellow man. The very fact that Yummyfajitas chose to come here and run a company stands testament to the fact that he isn't racist at all and is a very reasonable person. And if I sounded like I was trying to load a bundle of (unreasonable) guilt onto yummyfajitas, I humbly beg for forgiveness.

The only question was about "modern business practices" and "oriental (right word!?)/third world business practices". Even before we discuss this, we might have to consider the concept of success from angles, 'modern' and otherwise. If the definition/concept/understanding of 'success' differs, then most certainly the guidelines to be followed to achieve 'success' would differ, don't they?

Modern economics states "free market", "profit", "shareholder value" and people who pursue these and achieve them are termed successful. These might work for the modern and fully developed societies where 'scarcity' takes a totally different meaning. But these same things will have a totally different impact in third world countries when adopted without changing them to suit the socio-economic needs locally.

Treating low skill commodity workers as human beings on the same social level as yourself is such a good practice.

Yes. Can we summarize this as "do not expect others to be obligated to be subservient to you, irrespective of their designation/background/abilities"? If so, can we extend the same to the context where a developed nation forces a developing nation to sign a treaty (and threatening sanctions if otherwise), expecting the developing nation to act subservient to the powerful one? If this is wrong, then the 'practice' is nothing but 'anything that suits us based on the situation'. (well, this would become a totally different post altogether, let me not digress too further)

> blaming them for the East India Company

Well, that is past. I would not hold accountable/accuse the present day westerners for the Raj and all of our present day miseries here. It would be incredibly foolish of me. At the same time, I would find it difficult to believe the idea that everything that's worked elsewhere will work here as well and bring upliftment and social development. That is all.

> I mean both western companies and local companies like Reliance/Infosys...

Just adding another note, on the firms you mentioned.

Reliance, is a known to be a crooked player that uses non-ethical business practices and is a major crony-capitalist player. Modern business practice followed: profit at any cost.

Infosys, on the other hand, isn't ethically/morally corrupt and is actually known for setting standards in corporate governance. But these days, it seems to have lost the game and run into troubles by fanatically adhering to the "maximize shareholder value while minimizing risk" rule. Modern business practice followed: keep shareholders happy no matter what.

Both followed 'modern business practices' too much to the word, or so it seems.

> you'd clearly see that I don't believe every local firm does this

Yes. I clearly see the original comment seems to infer that most of the (or almost every!?) local firms in India does that.

> Do you claim I'm wrong on this point?

To an extent, yes. India and Indian industry/economy is not just IT and not just big cities. There's a lot more to it. I would be most honored if I get a chance to show some of it first hand, if at all our paths cross in life and we get to meet in the real world, outside of these digital confines.

> I'm not asserting some sort of vague cultural/moral/racial superiority.

Pardon me, but the original comment indeed seems to mention that the "western style management and work culture" is morally superior to the local one.

> I'm claiming that certain modern business practices are not widely used here, but are common in the west[1]. And I'm claiming India will be a better (i.e. richer, happier) place when it adopts them more widely.

Yes, agreed. But one can rest assured that better practices are being adopted at a much better pace here, because developing economies are already resource constrained and thus they are forced to come up with best practices to maximize value extraction from a given set of resources. ISRO and recent Mars mission was big news already. I believe business practices always have locality as a dimensional factor associated with them for their applicability and relevance. (HSBC ad about local knowledge comes to my mind)

> So is hiring a stranger with a great github rather than your brother in law, hiring a woman if she is the most qualified, etc.

Oh, such wonderful news. So height is not a requirement for positions of power now! Someone should change the wiki page. And well, it might just be sheer coincidence that many big names in India have women CXOs. The western style management has ensured that women in the west are very well empowered to reach positions of power without any gender bias troubling them.

A part of my mind says this comment is sarcastic. If that is the case, well, I guess us culturally inferior workers should be thankful that someone took the burden of teaching us the ways of western style management and enlightening us.

> If you want to do voluntourism, I suggest something different: start a business ... You'll definitely have a positive effect on people by teaching them about western business practices.

Yeah right. Unfortunately, it might have been too much of positivity for this kid from Bhopal (http://media2.intoday.in/indiatoday/images/Photo_gallery/060...) to handle.

Am very sure the above comment would get downvoted. Well, the West is always right, cause they have got the money!

> Treating low skill commodity workers as human beings on the same social level as yourself is such a destructive western practice. So is hiring a stranger with a great github rather than your brother in law, hiring a woman if she is the most qualified, etc. Or there is that destructive western practice of managing by output - the boss is working until 8pm but you can go home as soon as you hit your quota.

I really don't know what to say. If it is your assumption that every firm/organization in India follows nepotism and doesn't value true merit, it would be simply a wrong assumption, IMHO. Aren't we all aware as to how Wall Street or any big business in the West hires? cough "Business Networking" cough I guess a good read in this regard would be 'Liar's Poker' or 'The Big Short' by Michael Lewis. [1] There have been corporations(might not be in the truest sense, but a collective of skilled workers with a common directive nonetheless) in India which have achieved amazing feats in the past. One could even say that few of the harmful practices of the West (reckless crony-capitalism for one, or the practice of prioritizing the aim of maximizing shareholders' investment over general public/social responsibility) was an unknown thing but now, it is gaining good traction in India unfortunately. One might find it surprising that India didn't face a subprime/financial crisis when US was neck deep in it. 'Managing by output' isn't really a copyright of the West. In fact, the concept of measuring butt-in-seat time or shifts was totally alien till folks from the West brought it here. (And later pushed further by Adam Smith's Labour theory) Prior to that, it was pure ownership of a task and responsibility. Kautilya's Arthashastra specifically deals with labour theory and even flexi-time to an extent, by taking into account productivity and quality of throughput and not just rote effort/time spent. [1] The skilled artisans/craftsmen never worked by the clock, and thus were able to achieve great things. For them, it was all art. There wasn't even a clear line between art and sciences, but everything was art, including science/maths/engineering.

Off note, I wonder if the mother of that kid that died in Bhopal on that fateful night might have wondered, how the world would have been now if the white man hadn't embarked on the noble enterprise of burdening himself to civilize the non-white people.

Also, am quite sure that the affluent and middle class folks in the West are terribly happy treating low skill commodity workers (who might be immigrants) as human beings on the same social level as themselves.

I really would want to write a long post. Will certainly do so once time permits.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short [2] http://userwww.sfsu.edu/mbar/ECON605/Arthashastra.pdf

> HyperVM guy may have had a family history of suicide.

Seems so. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/lxlabs_funder_death/

But more than that, in his own words, he was a "man of excesses." Here is his archived blog (http://echoreply.us/ligesh.com/ligesh.com/about/index.html)

Just elaborating. The 'basic pay' part of the salary paid by tech companies in India is usually very less. (And it isn't due to sinister motives but rather to maximize the non-taxable chunk in salary).

This 'basic pay' will usually be 1/5 or 1/7 of monthly net/gross pay. So, for an average worker (say 3+ yrs) in IBM India, the monthly gross would be around INR60K => severance would be around INR20K, which is really a paltry sum.

>> That's not bad - probably more than most people would get here in the UK.

It isn't a huge chunk of money in India, just decent enough to get by barely for a month, considering that much of these folks might be having loans/EMIs to pay for.

If the news (that thousands of Indian IBMers from STG losing a job) is for real, they would have a hard time indeed; since there isn't much of IBM-STG kinda stuff happening around (except for shops like redhat/intel/VMWare which might be interested in few folks with sysprog background). People who had entire careers built on and around AIX (not programming, but maintenance/config/admin etc) probably will have a really tough time. Managers, well, guess they just had it coming.

> Again, like you say, it is probably not the India and China people's fault,

> their level of english is terrible

Indians'/Chinese'

Exactly.

Cloud is not the silver bullet. But at the same time, there is not much merit in choosing to be a luddite and not use the capabilities of cloud where there's a genuine need. I feel IBM, to an extent is guilty of not pursuing things on the cloud front and is now paying for it.

You owe me a new monitor, I washed it with my coffee!

Really, hilarious comments in this thread. Thanks, y'all!

So there goes my tax money. And am still struggling (for the past two years) to save up some chunk for a phone.

Just another point to prove that salaried class Indians are the most abused bunch in India.

That would be before taxes. The reason why good Indian developers command a 20-25 lakh INR per annum in salary is in part due to the income tax. Indian income tax mandate swallows upto 30% of income from people who have an income exceeding 10 lakh INR pa. (=> effectively, it's only around 70-80% of whatever salary they get would be available to them).

I did not know that salaries in Mexico are in the range of 18K-27K USD pa; that sounds like a better deal for US based companies.

BTW, one should note that the major Indian outsourcing service providers (a.k.a the big three - TCS, Infy, Wipro) are already in Mexico.

Obligatory quote (and a simple TL:DR): paying peanuts would only get you monkeys.

My friend, it's not that easy. The guys who have already made it big (those in top management) have a great deal of financial security built up for themselves. The unfortunate ones would be the 'supposedly' good folks who have only been slogging while making those fat fellows richer. Now, again, much of the wealth and means of production is with the erstwhile PHBs. And now, they would have even better control on things as they won't have an organization to report to but can call shots by starting their own companies. And the 'good folks' will have nowhere to go but those firms, casue the other bigger/better ones are all gone by now. In such a situation, who do you think would still get jacked?

I'll join you in the prayer too. But be very aware of the fact that once the investors and companies are off, even the bright ones around will have a tough time. IT(sic) would take a lot of time to stabilize in India.

This. But if one still does it 'off the books' sort, it should still work (though there is risk of breaching the terms in employment contract with the gubment)

A shortened list

#0. Force usage of shitty/hopeless tools/frameworks at work.

#1. Pay late

#2. Ask for TPS reports

#3. Recruit a bunch of abusive retards for middle/senior management

These four, for sure!

>> should rather spend the space telling me more specifically about what the job entails.

hmm. based on my experience, I can say that not every team/firm that is hiring would know for the fact as to what is the exact thing the recruit would be doing once on the job. In smaller organizations, there would anyway be lots of confusion on this. Bigger organization, it would be HR drones adding to the incoherence and drama.

So, said simply, "We need folks who are smart and who could get things done. Prior knowledge of alphabus-betabus-gammabus-deltabus --- zettabus would be a definite advantage but is no way a mandatory requirement. Look us up, get to know what we do and if interested, write back so we can talk!" could be one simple template that could be used by just about anyone. Isn't it?

Sample test data for joblint.

    A team comprising of few Python superstars, vim gurus, emacs superstars is now looking for a software crafts(wo)man who would be interested in being part of the team to juggle a pool of challenging problems and use cutting edge tech to find solutions that are of top quality and guarantee a win over competiton.

    We pay better than competition, fail fast to learn early. We provide catered lunches from the best restuarants around. And inspite of tight deadlines, we would encourage a healthy work-life balance and not promise hollow benefits like beer/pingpong/nerf/dart/pool etc.

Being a citizen of a third world country (India), this sounds all too surprising to me. Looks like banking in the US is pretty shitty for the poor.

Out here, banking works like a charm. At least, most of the nationalized banks. Nobody pays the banks anything, and they get a little interest on savings/deposits accounts. OD is not outrageously charged. Internet banking and ATMs are very friendly and totally inexpensive. Almost everyone has easy access to banks; with co-op banks and urban banks offering accounts with minimum limits of 500 INR (~9 USD), everyone can make use of banking institutions. Only those people with lots of black money would want to keep much of their stash away from banks to avoid tax authorities.

I am happy that at least our folks got basic stuff like banking right.

Try organizing a seminar on programming in some womens only college. Not more than a handful would land up.

Bangalore/Chennai/India, same story throughout.

Lucky! Well, you should be glad you aren't in India! You would be in jail if that was the case.

Indian police's track record in handling cybercrime is unparalleled. http://www.rediff.in/news/2008/jan/21inter.htm

And the ISPs stupidity too adds to it, most of the times.

*in the lines of Four Yorkshiremen.

Surprised nobody came up with a Yahಠ_ಠ!

This one seemed classy enough and modern ...http://media.tumblr.com/bd2439f8e2fc7a08ce923374af8f3758/tum...

Think of a place like Tiger's Nest Monastery[1] or some remote place on a hill in India/China/Vietnam/Cambodia.

A monastery like environment, complete with places like dojos where there would be practice and sparring sessions, prayer and contemplation halls where the young and old from various schools of thoughts (Mac/*nix/MS, anything) mingle and discuss their ideas. A place where rank/wealth/ethnicity/gender doesn't matter; and where judgements would be of the work and not of people. A truly jedi-esque order of programmers, helping younger and able programmers realise their true potentials. The place would have volunteers who teach for free and those who truly want to learn. The Internet bandwidth, though limited, would be used judiciously. The gates of the monastery would be open for all those who wish to learn. And not just for programmers. The place would be open for the curious from any background.

Wouldn't such a thing be wonderful!

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paro_Taktsang

Came here to say this.

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