Parveen Kumar’s Blog

I was having a discussion with a friend about recruitment market. He mentioned that all you need to become a recruiter is a cell phone and naukri account. This is so true. And there seems to be more recruiters than candidates. Slowly some of these candidates will also become recruiters. That will again reduce candidate/talent pool and increase the recruitment market size. I don’t know how long will it go on.Recruitment is a tough job and slowly many high profile people (MBA from IIMs) are joining this market. This is so strange. Imagine the plight of a manager who is not able to hire people. What option does he have? Well he can become a recruiter himself.

I am an Ex-Yahoo who still follows what is going on in Yahoo!. Yahoo is in news for couple of reasons. First the Brad Garlinghouse memo leak and now a shake up in management. I think Yahoo is such a mature company and it know how to come out of such situations. Yahoo has made some mistakes but probably it is the only company which knows how to fix the mistakes. They have done it many times. Credit goes to the open and transparent culture at yahoo.I still hold Yahoo! stocks and have great respect for Yahoo!. What you learn at Yahoo, you cannot learn anywhere. Some of the smartest people on earth are in Yahoo. I wish Yahoo all the best for coming years!

Anything which is simple is initially criticized by people. Take the example of google search interface. Poeple tried with many complex interfaces but all came to same conclusion that the world just need a simple text box for search. I think the reason is human mind does not like complexities. It is easy to extend and share something which is simple.Another example is TCP/IP. It does not provide any QoS like ATM. But I think that shortcoming became its biggest advantage.

Same thing can be said about php. Some people says PHP is too simple and only focusses on views. The data gets mixed with the display logic. There is a lot of talk about MVC programming paradigm. I feel good programmers do not really need an MVC model to code good. Bad programmers will code bad anyway. I have been coding using MVC for quite some time without knowing that it was MVC. PHP gives you flexibilty to code anyway you want. That is what makes it a very popular programming language.

Many times when I interview people they want to be backend engineers and don’t want to learn DHTML/AJAX. Traditionally web development has been considered a field for pseodo-techies and not many people wanted to learn it.
Many think that it is a less paying job or less challenging work. General perception is that less challenging means less paying. This is not always true. Its the demand-supply which govern these things.This has changed with the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Now we need people who can do both web development and backend development. The whole gmail is build using this paradigm. I found is strange that many Indian programmers are still reluctant to leann web 2.0 stuff. I think they seriously lack vision. When I wan in US, I never noticed this problem. Probably that is why America is America.

The good news is some people are changing the image of web 2.0 development. The new sites which are coming up, are slowly educating people on what will be needed in future. We Indians need to learn how to move up fast in value change and think more and more about building products rather than just learning few programming languages. Again my only hope is new generation which has not yet been spoiled.