Donald Trump on Experience VS Education

So, does education matter or experience? We have been going back and forth on this frequently recently.

Donald Trump says its experience, and most of the people that I meet concur.

Where you will be 2 years after you graduate does not depend on whether you spent $$$$ studying at LUMS or went to other univs here, but on how little you were willing to sleep and “have a life” in those early years of your careers.

20 years after you graduate no one would even care about your education — they will care about the type of dealmaker you are in a specific type of industry.

The thing to consider is this: Why would you want to depend on the brand of someone else (e.g. LUMS) to have people respect you? Why can’t your own worth by enough to turn heads?

The bottom line should be this: The key to becoming that glowing gem that everyone in the industry is desperate to know and associate with IS in how dependable you can become.

Can someone else put his credibility on the line to push your ideas forward, and then KNOW that you will be right there to catch the ball and execute?

If you can, you will not only have the elusive job satisfaction but will also make millions. You will have the credibility and the right to propose your ideas, and you will be able to do the types of things you want to do.

If you cannot, then all you are is a person who keeps complaining about letting him do what he wishes to do — no one backrolls, supports or puts their money on unreliable and undependable people.

That was my take — Donald’s take is more business oriented and you can read it here.

Islamabad Capital Police Rocks (i.e. what makes great teams)

Last night I was driving home and a wrong turn here and there and my car got stuck in the mud (literally).

Before I could even get out to assess the situation, however, a Capital Police car drove up, stopped, and the officer pushed and huffed and puffed to help me get out, at the expense of his clothes getting full of mud as well.

This is very impressive, and quite contrary to what a person would have expected a couple of years ago when the police stopped with your car offroad and in the mud. So Kudos to them.

It made me wonder though, why did this man cheerfully choose to help me or do his duty with so much interest? Generally, what makes fantastic teams that you can depend on?

Its not just people who are interested in the specific tasks at hand, but people that are passionate about what their profession stands for.

For the police, great team members are not those who get excited about getting mud on their clothes, or about the hope of getting a good monetary tip or payoff because of their efforts, but rather people who LOVE helping other people out.

In a similar way, If the profession means innovation, then almost everyone who believes in that will bring passion into whatever tasks and challenges he may be faced with. The people who are excited about some sort of monetary bonus or high salary as the basic intention for doing a good job will most likely never do that good job.

This is one of the things that keeps many of our grads from excelling — the fact that a lot of the graduating students are so focused only on the fact that good paying jobs exist in their chosen field and that that is the end-goal they seek. Since they are not trying to be passionate about something first, and then seeking appropriate returns, this makes them less prone to being successful.

Simple lesson, but it had to be told.

Why people are afraid of becoming Coders, and what companies need to do about it

Now this is going to be a very lengthy discussion, and I can only put in my two cents. I hope the community (YOU) can also add to this constructively, and we will keep posting more about this issue.

People, and fresh engineering grads, are becoming deathly afraid of becoming labelled as “coders” in Pakistan, and this is an Issue that I think needs resolution at large. Lets put a basic complaint aside: this issue isnt one of salary - it is with the mere act of actually having to write, read, or otherwise deal with source code.

I’ll be frank in saying this puzzles me. Why are more and more kids from Fast, Lums, Nust expecting to immediately get into higher end tech jobs without being willing to experience the entire SDLC? Why do they feel proud in thinking that “coding” jobs are more suited to people from other (and perhaps “lower”?) univs?

The question I want to ask today is, how did this general aura of misconception and fear regarding coding jobs develop in the first place, what is the impact this is having to the industry, and what are the ways of crossing this chasm?

Followup on LUMS…

Wow. This is a first for me.

I write a post with a few claims … people respond with attacks … but they all prove those claims.

Yesterday I wrote that I had heard from a number of reputable IT companies — whose names I will not disclose as a professional — that they had found the LUMS people they hired to be hotheaded, living in utopia about their worth, looking down at companies and refusing to fit into organizational goals.

The commenters gave a first hand demonstration of all of those traits!

It may be great to think that ‘I choose my own path’ and ‘I have vision, that’s why I dont stick into any company longer than 3 months’ and ‘no company can afford to sustain me’ but really, kids, the world doesn’t accept those types of professional ethics.

What’s more, most of the same companies that cannot afford to hire LUMS grads find a justification to hire people from Stanford. I wonder why….

I must say I am sorely disappointed with the professionalism and constructive behavior demonstrated in the comments. Rather than denying and challenging the basic fact — why not sit down over coffee to figure out a plan? That too with someone who’s been an Operations Consultant with IT firms and could probably influence them more than rants would?

Why not find out who this coffee person is in the first place — maybe he is the decision maker in the hiring process of 3 companies?! [companies that have not yet banned LUMS]

I personally really had higher standards from the professional graduates from LUMS.

All of you is what our industry is looking towards to be the visionaries that bring social welfare and change to our society. Taking that responsibility should be your utmost priority.

I sincerely hope you take this advice, that a good mentor gave me a long time ago:

Dont live your life assuming the world owes you a favor. Nay, it is you — with your superior education and privileged experiences — you owe the world and your society your dedication to the betterment of their lives.

IT Companies banning LUMS … does LUMS breed instabiltiy?

I keep hearing about more and more that IT companies now starting to outright ban job applicants from LUMS. These companies include many notable firms, and while this is not a well coordinated effort between them (maybe it should be?) they are all independently saying they do this to put some pressure on the university to shape up.

What is the list of grievances these companies hold which results in this ban? Here is the top three.

#3 : LUMS graduates are no better at their work than any other university… but they expect 2 times the salary — (in other words, the LUMS brand is not worth its weight in gold)

#2 : LUMS graduates carry too much baggage with them — their egos prevent them from fitting in and actually being constructive in a firm

#1 : LUMS graduates are highly unstable.

This instability ranks at the top of grievances. They say LUMS grads never stick in any company longer than 4-5 months, and often feel that they are inherently better than the company that they work for.

Now, I haven’t met too many LUMS grads, but I do feel that LUMS as a university talks too much about some things and too little about others.

E.g., I suspect that LUMS and LUMS staff will emphasize too much the importance of being a LUMS graduate, rather than emphasizing the importance of being an engineer / MBA / etc. There is too little clarity on how business or IT careers work.

They emphasize too much that the grads should persue whatever “interests them” rather than emphasizing the importance of realizing one’s place in the global business ecosystem, and that it is a noble thing that the industry doesn’t take risks on “interesting things”.

The resulting instability is because (I think in my humble opinion) the typical LUMS graduate will think it is OK to make an impromptu decision that greatly impacts their company / business, and decide that the world will accept them anyway even if they do. The typical graduate will think mostly of himself, and not enough about growing together with the industry. The typical graduate will not be afraid of changing his career on just a few days or weeks’ worth of thinking, rather than realizing that change is always a phased out process.

I hope LUMS takes a good serious notice of this shift before it becomes an avalanche.

On a side note: I have also had the pleasure of meeting a few IBA graudates recently and I have been most impressed by the level of professional ethics demonstrated by them.

More Product Management

An interesting Day in the Life of a Product Manager

How to evangelise software 2: What do product managers do?

In continuation of CDF’s search for Product Managers who actually know something about that field, I thought I would post this fantastic writeup on the role of Product Management.

I would encourage everyone to go through this, because it is a very clear description.

This is what I would add to this:

• They need to be quick learners. Product Managers will also need to perform quick business analysis to measure industry trends and adjust their approach accordingly. Thus they should be able to effectively observe people and companies, identify new trends or business ethics, and use them in their day to day approach
• They need to keep up to date with the state of the art of modern business and marketing trends. Long Tail economics, Prosumer marketing, Permission Marketing, Edge-Centric Marketing and Product Design, Network Effect, etc…. each of these is a distinctive unique marketing and business model that is emerging and implemented by cutting-edge business leaders today. Any good Product Manager will be forward thinking enough to be able to learn these. It doesn’t matter if the company is doing business in Pakistan or elsewhere — cutting-edge business practice knowledge is essential. If a Product Manager today doubts that blogs are an effective communication medium just because they are on the edge of the industry, they are very seriously in the wrong career.
• They should not be afraid of disrupting industries. Although this is a very rare and very gradual incident, each highly effective product has the potential of disrupting industries, or changing the way people live or work. While this is not a day-to-day requirement of product managers, it helps to have a feverish urge to do that, as that certainly helps the Product Manager check his plans 3-4 times more carefully.
• They live, breathe and dream about the Company. It is just not possible to be a Product Manager if you look at work as a means of personal well being (i.e. if “the package” is how you define the work). If you are that person, you’re in the wrong path of life, and should consider Sales as a good profession to drive you. All Product Managers need to believe in their work over and above all else, and should consider their package as a compensation for the dedication they bring to their firm.
• They must be Multi-Dimensional Employees. This is almost a core requirement. You can read more here.

Cogilent Systems launches brilliant white labelled hiring product in the US

The number of Pakistan based companies vying for success in the online US market is increasing. This supports my ongoing thesis that nowadays it is possible to do so with a few catches.

Brightspyre is an interesting corporate hiring portal that companies can rebrand for their own websites. It is an interesting model, and Cogilent has racked up an impressive client list, especially because of their delicate focus on business relationships over technology.

Recently, however, they have lauched something in the US that I feel is even better.

www.personforce.com is a completely white labeled online hiring product that allows any company to host their own little version of monster.com for themselves.

You can see what that means here: http://stanforddaily.personforce.com . If you want candidates from Stanford, then post a job there (you know our telecos could afford them too).

This comes at the right time, when fully monetizing web traffic is becoming realizable — some notable ones include www.techcrunch.com, blog.guykawasaki.com, www.gigaom.com and others, who are actively run job postings on their blogs.

Why is this interesting? Because it has the potential of breaking out into the edge — if all types of event managers in Austin, Texas visit austin.citysearch.com in their to day to day work, then citysearch.com can put up a job board just for them. Then companies who want event managers know the best place to look for those people.

Another interesting thing about this is that Cogilent removes the burden of creating a brand for the board from itself — most of the website owners themselves will actively promote and expand their brand, and Cogilent should benefit from providing the platform.

Now all Cogilent has to do is figure out how to make their sales and business management automated as well — unleash an army of niche-focused resellers or managing partners and they can just sit back and enjoy their sales rack up.

Ideally, make a web-enabled portal to let the average Joe home-worker run “sales and business management” for his white-labelled HR portal business that he can promote in his specific communities — wow that would be something. Imagine the small Joe in a small town in Ohio running around selling personforce to local churches, high schools or community colleges.

Good product Cogilent, and good luck with it.

Should we have an industry wide blacklist to better evaluate job applicants?

Call this the evil post of the day.

Every company has its share of horror stories with regards to hiring and professional employees. We provide training solutions on professionalism so we know the kind of painful unprofessional employees our IT industry deals with.

Despite following structured interviewing techniques, we have still stacked up our list of people to just not consider again.

The question is: Shouldn’t there be a way for the entire IT industry to “post” their blacklists into a common pool so all of the HR departments can share within themselves?

Think about the benefits for a second: I can goto a website, enter an NIC and get an immediate history of the candidate and his comments from other employers. For candidates, they could only swindle a company once or twice, because after that we would just know he wouldn’t be able to do anything.

There are other types of issues they can solve as well. Currently, the way companies opt to build some insurance for their hiring is to (1) ask for transcripts / job letters from previous employers and (2) check references. The basic reasons this is not an effective method is (1) Most Work Experience letters are too general (2) If I need someone desperately, I may not care too much about whether his basic credentials hold up

However, if some applicant burned me, wasted my time, worked for a week and stole things (that has actually happened with colleagues), then I would certainly ensure that I write this into the central blacklist so that atleast other companies dont have to suffer this fate.

I think there would be two different ways of approaching this:

1- Make it community driven
I may not want to know what company XYZ thought about a candidate because I could be in an unrelated field (e.g. Call Centers to Product Dev). But I would care who my trusted circle of colleagues have come across and are warning me about.

So perhaps we can have a way for groups of companies to form small networks where they can share their lists. This could make the system self balancing and protect companies from vandalism — if I invite someone into the group, then I am somewhat responsible for that person’s actions..

2- Make it completely anonymous.
Dont give me the company names, or the candidate names. Let me search on an NIC number, and give me completely anonymous comments from other companies. Then give my company a password to the system only if I register on PSEB.

There are some issues with things like this, where evil HR Managers could vandalise the system by, e.g. putting up their boss in the blacklist in case they’re having a bad day (yes, that has happened!)

But I think if the system is decentralized (as in #1 above), and you let people only maintain blacklists with small trusted groups, then this can be solved. See I would be able to detect any anomalies in the system much better than the system or service provider (e.g. PSEB) could, since I would know the other people in the group.

The overall question is: Is it fair on these poor candidates trying to make a living, to not give them another chance and stop their entire career based on minor mistakes?

From my perspective, yes. As much as we would like we are not charitable organizations — business is business, and I would rather protect the business of my partners because of someone who disrupts mine. Ofcourse, there would also need to be some good way of adding positive feedback about that employee as well to add the element of “giving another chance”

What do you think? Should companies seriously get together to attempt this? It would be good to get some thoughts from PSEB on this as well

Rozee firing on all engines and getting better every day

My love / hate relationship with Rozee continues, but the company is on a roll…

Rozee has been successfully unleashing a slew of highly focused products for companies that all seem to target a vision of having Rozee provide complete HRM / Workflow solutions to HR Managers on Rozee. From what I hear, there are ways of conducting HR Tests and evaluations even before your company receives a single email.

Their Sales teams have been tacking up the (expensive) “Top Employer” advertising spot, and now attracting some great employers, including Pepsi and McDonalds into their fray. Their specific marketing product includes an “interview with HR Managers” series where company reps give interviewing tips to candidates.

Finally, they are in the middle of a massive branding campaign, where you see them sponsoring events, conferences and speeches all around, radio ads, and strategic partnerships to get premium advertising space in mainstream areas.

In short, the company doesnt want to rest quietly.

I sat down with CEO Monis Rehman recently and am impressed by his vision and most the strategy he uses to pragmatically grow the consumer base in the system. These product, marketing and sales activies are orchestrated with an almost theatrical sense of timing.

Here is our observations from CDF’s hiring frenzy (which continues to this day…)

- The Rozee premium products are not giving us much value beyond being an advertisement channel. The trouble is, it is an advertisement channel that actually increases your costs (instead of revenue) because your HR staff will be hard pressed in filtering through the CVs

- There is still too little “signal-to-noise” in the quality of candidates. The premium products may give out 400 resumes a month or more, but my observation is that this will only increase noise. In our month as “Top Employer” next to Mobilink back in October, we were unable to close any one post from that channel.

- Just as any good product sells itself, any good working environment will sell itself through word of mouth. Focusing on building that environment, and then focusing actually on the text of the ad can be much more effective in attracting talent. We now use Rozee’s free channel (those text ads at the bottom) — but those ads let us choose job titles that can shown much better conversions than a well placed ad does.

- A lot of candidates visit rozee, then visit our website and apply from there. This seems to suggest that a lot of applicants in Rozee do not prefer to hand over control to an automated system.

- Most of the candidates who DO use the system (Rozee’s) for automatic job applications are never serious to begin with. We get applications for our “Product Manager” post, “Mechatronics Engineer” post, and “Linux Kernel Developers” post all by the same person! A lot of the candidates are just testing their worth in the market.

- Most of the candidates who we prefer hiring still dont use online job management systems. Word of mouth awareness is key, and we have found some of our best talent simply by asking our candidates for two referrals (pardon me if that is evil).

My top 5 pieces of free advice for Rozee

1- Help the candidates and companies carry conversations with themselves, instead of participating in workflows. I suggest(ed) letting Companies post a short 10-minute presentation about themselves to show to candidates on Rozee as a flash slideshow. (Or heck atleast give us Rich Text job descriptions with pictures!)

2- Rozee should slice deeper from one big “Job Fair” event into more focused and relevant events based on specific types of people, and make them a continuous process. Create a product for companies where they each pay a portion of the sponsorship of an event that Rozee creates and organizes for them — e.g. a special “day at the campus” in popular colleges. Allow companies to either attend in person or send you guys some series of videos that you all can play.

3- Rozee should focus on creating self-balancing communities. Fix the rating system so that encourages both companies and candidates to rate each other during the hiring process. This would be based on my participation in the common community created by Rozee (where I have discussions with candidates in the pre-hire phase) and thus based on my overall vision and merit as perceived by them. Think of this as a Virtual Job Fair.

4- Give candidates a series of tough interview questions to ask companies during the evaluation phase — complement with a series of horror stories of people who applied to posts not suited for them. In other words, perhaps it is just too easy to apply to posts, and the candidates need to be sobered down before they do.

5- Give companies offline tools. As much as we try to love your interfaces and try to shift our entire process away from our IT tools, we just like our tools better. If we can integrate ours with yours, and if making someone “rejected” in our internal software automatically updates the candidates’ ratings on Rozee? Hmm…