How sending my job to India saved my job.
This past Summer, I had the opportunity to travel to India. Here is some quick background on how exactly that happened.
On January 2, 2008, I came to work to be greeted with a departmental meeting. Turned out that my company's corporate office had just purchased my product's biggest competitor. Their product had a benifit over ours in that they had a post-acute module for providers that spins off a very healthy amount of $cash$ for the company. No reason to keep 2 versions of the same product, so they decided to retire our product (though some active development continues).
The plan was to go hire a bunch of indian developers in Bangalore to maintain my product, while us developers moved onto the newly acquired product. I was chosen to get my passport/shots together and it didn't seem like long before I was on a plane for 26 hours from RDU to London to Bangalore.
Creating the team
Prior to arriving, we phone screened dozens of candidates. We worked with a contracting house to arrange interviews which I conducted over a desktop sharing tool called Microsoft SharedView.
The interview was challenging, sit down, open eclipse, write an app according to a spec that I give you. We sit there and watch their every keystroke. Once guy caved in and gave up under the pressure - he refused to continue! We got ourselves down to a shortlist of about 7 developers. We decided among ourselves down to 5, which is how many spots we had to fill. We made offers to 4 of them. All 4 accepted.
But will they all show up?
Plans were made that I'd travel to India to provide some on site training on our source code, development process and source control, development patterns, etc. When I arrived in India, for the first day I was totally sick. I got to stay in the corp apartments on Airport Rd in Bangalore and recover while I watched IPL Cricket. Barbara and Becky did introductions and the first training day was pretty light. The amazing thing was that the 4 developers and 2 QA all showed up to work.
I talked with Umesh, the CEO of the resource provider, and he said in this market competiton it was very common for developers to interview, be given an offer, accept - but never show up for work on the first day. The will take another job. Everyone was eager to take this job. Apparently, this happened because of 2 things. The candidates respected us because our interview was hard and our standards were high. Second, they respected that we treated them with respect - and talked with them as collegues. I can't emphasize these two points enough regarding successful interviewing in India.
The cast:
Angles. He is very quiet. Still waters run deep with this one. He's probably the most experienced of the bunch. Angles has a booming deep voice - even though his English is very good, his deep voice makes him hard to understand on a speaker phone.
Vinod. Vinod is a good guy. He is eager and appreciative when learning new things. He's not just trying to pad his resume with abbreviations. He takes pride in his work.
DeepaJ. She also is an excellent developer. She is not afraid to get into the code to learn how something works. The other developers tease her a bit because "the red comes when she talks to David" - she blushes :) It is certainly doesn't hurt my feelings at all.
Kalyan. Kalyan is also great. He has a good understanding of how things work, and picked up things very quickly in our training. He works hard helping us in the reporting area after we lost Philip and Nathan. The best thing about Kalyan is that he looks like he is smiling even when he isn't. He admits it gets him into trouble.
Visa & Ishita. These 2 gals are our QA contingent. Visa is a firecracker. Ishita is very determined. Just this week I was explaining how something worked, and Ishita hung in there and challenged me on it. I can appreciate that.
We are fortunate to have each one of them!
I got lucky on the last day
On the very last day, I hired our Java team lead. I really got a good one. He is cut from mentor cloth. He wants to "own" the team, but he wants to grow them. He wants them all to succeed. I'm fortunate to have someone with good character in this position.
Training
Training was pretty straightforward. They all got it. I couldn't believe how quick they took it all in. I had always been told that in Indian culture you have to be careful that they will claim to have understood something that they don't understand. They REALLY don't want to disappoint. We've seen this over and over again in a good way - in that they do not want to miss deadlines. They are happy to work all sorts of hours provided you simply appreciate it.
How are they working out?
Now we're a few months into using the team. We have a status call every day and go over what they are to be working on, and what they accomplished. We do this at 8:30 EST, which is 7PM Bangalore time. It takes about 30 minutes out over every day. It's a status call as well as a social outlet. We want them to continue to feel like part of the team. As of right now they are slightly ahead of schedule on our next release, so we'll be able to address a few additional things at the end extra.
On January 2, 2008, I came to work to be greeted with a departmental meeting. Turned out that my company's corporate office had just purchased my product's biggest competitor. Their product had a benifit over ours in that they had a post-acute module for providers that spins off a very healthy amount of $cash$ for the company. No reason to keep 2 versions of the same product, so they decided to retire our product (though some active development continues).
The plan was to go hire a bunch of indian developers in Bangalore to maintain my product, while us developers moved onto the newly acquired product. I was chosen to get my passport/shots together and it didn't seem like long before I was on a plane for 26 hours from RDU to London to Bangalore.
Creating the team
Prior to arriving, we phone screened dozens of candidates. We worked with a contracting house to arrange interviews which I conducted over a desktop sharing tool called Microsoft SharedView.
The interview was challenging, sit down, open eclipse, write an app according to a spec that I give you. We sit there and watch their every keystroke. Once guy caved in and gave up under the pressure - he refused to continue! We got ourselves down to a shortlist of about 7 developers. We decided among ourselves down to 5, which is how many spots we had to fill. We made offers to 4 of them. All 4 accepted.
But will they all show up?
Plans were made that I'd travel to India to provide some on site training on our source code, development process and source control, development patterns, etc. When I arrived in India, for the first day I was totally sick. I got to stay in the corp apartments on Airport Rd in Bangalore and recover while I watched IPL Cricket. Barbara and Becky did introductions and the first training day was pretty light. The amazing thing was that the 4 developers and 2 QA all showed up to work.
I talked with Umesh, the CEO of the resource provider, and he said in this market competiton it was very common for developers to interview, be given an offer, accept - but never show up for work on the first day. The will take another job. Everyone was eager to take this job. Apparently, this happened because of 2 things. The candidates respected us because our interview was hard and our standards were high. Second, they respected that we treated them with respect - and talked with them as collegues. I can't emphasize these two points enough regarding successful interviewing in India.
The cast:
Angles. He is very quiet. Still waters run deep with this one. He's probably the most experienced of the bunch. Angles has a booming deep voice - even though his English is very good, his deep voice makes him hard to understand on a speaker phone.
Vinod. Vinod is a good guy. He is eager and appreciative when learning new things. He's not just trying to pad his resume with abbreviations. He takes pride in his work.
DeepaJ. She also is an excellent developer. She is not afraid to get into the code to learn how something works. The other developers tease her a bit because "the red comes when she talks to David" - she blushes :) It is certainly doesn't hurt my feelings at all.
Kalyan. Kalyan is also great. He has a good understanding of how things work, and picked up things very quickly in our training. He works hard helping us in the reporting area after we lost Philip and Nathan. The best thing about Kalyan is that he looks like he is smiling even when he isn't. He admits it gets him into trouble.
Visa & Ishita. These 2 gals are our QA contingent. Visa is a firecracker. Ishita is very determined. Just this week I was explaining how something worked, and Ishita hung in there and challenged me on it. I can appreciate that.
We are fortunate to have each one of them!
I got lucky on the last day
On the very last day, I hired our Java team lead. I really got a good one. He is cut from mentor cloth. He wants to "own" the team, but he wants to grow them. He wants them all to succeed. I'm fortunate to have someone with good character in this position.
Training
Training was pretty straightforward. They all got it. I couldn't believe how quick they took it all in. I had always been told that in Indian culture you have to be careful that they will claim to have understood something that they don't understand. They REALLY don't want to disappoint. We've seen this over and over again in a good way - in that they do not want to miss deadlines. They are happy to work all sorts of hours provided you simply appreciate it.
How are they working out?
Now we're a few months into using the team. We have a status call every day and go over what they are to be working on, and what they accomplished. We do this at 8:30 EST, which is 7PM Bangalore time. It takes about 30 minutes out over every day. It's a status call as well as a social outlet. We want them to continue to feel like part of the team. As of right now they are slightly ahead of schedule on our next release, so we'll be able to address a few additional things at the end extra.
But how did it save my job?
Going into the trip, I wanted to quit - I really wanted to quit. But I really like this team we've assembled. Not even the team, but every individual on it. I wish them all the success in the world.
posted by DavidVTHokie at 10:41 PM
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