Career Mantra’s Official Blog

In the June09 issue of Har­vard Busi­ness Review, Mr Robert I. Sut­ton writes about How to Be a Good Boss in a Bad Econ­omy. His reme­dies for the Boss were pre­dictabil­ity, under­stand­ing, con­trol and com­pas­sion. He gives exam­ples to fur­ther his argu­ment about his reme­dies. While his expla­na­tion fol­lowed his rem­edy — it was pre­dictable – his exam­ple on com­pas­sion had me bris­tled.

First, a lit­tle digres­sion on com­pas­sion. These days we are bandy­ing around com­pas­sion as a skill. As if it were some­thing that one learns at the blacksmith’s or at the carpenter’s. It is our very innate nature, for God’s sake. It has noth­ing to do with man­agers or employ­ees or with roy­alty; it is mine because of being a human being. It is our sev­enth sense. Don’t ever call it a soft skill. Com­pas­sion is not a good thing to have. It is the right thing to have.

Now, for that exam­ple on com­pas­sion. Let me quote Mr Sut­ton:

Quote

Jer­ald Green­berg, a man­age­ment pro­fes­sor at The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity, pro­vides com­pelling evi­dence that com­pas­sion affects the bot­tom line in tough times. Green­berg stud­ied three nearly iden­ti­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing plants in the Mid­west that were all part of the same com­pany; two of them (which man­age­ment chose at ran­dom) insti­tuted a tem­po­rary 10-week pay cut of 15% after the firm had lost a major con­tract. At one of the two, the exec­u­tive who con­veyed the news did so curtly, announc­ing, “I’ll answer one or two ques­tions, but then I have to catch a plane for another meet­ing.” At the other one, the exec­u­tive who broke the news gave a detailed and com­pas­sion­ate expla­na­tion, along with apolo­gies and mul­ti­ple expres­sions of remorse. He also spent a full hour answer­ing ques­tions about why the cost cut­ting was nec­es­sary, who would be affected, and what steps work­ers could take to help them­selves and the plant. Green­berg found fas­ci­nat­ing effects on employee theft rates. At the plant where the curt expla­na­tion was given, the rate rose to more than 9%. But at the plant where management’s expla­na­tion was detailed and com­pas­sion­ate, it rose only to 6%. (At the third plant, where no pay cuts were made, the rate held steady at about 4% dur­ing the 10-week period.)

Unquote

It is unfor­tu­nate that he gives thiev­ing of employ­ees as an exam­ple to but­tress his idea about com­pas­sion for employ­ees. It would appear that researchers such as Mr Green­berg — as quoted by Mr Sut­ton - think that employ­ees by nature are prone to thiev­ing. Why else would one do such a gra­tu­itous research?
I would imag­ine that Mr Greenberg’s research hypoth­e­sis read:
This research estab­lishes a cor­re­la­tion between increase of theft by employ­ees and the abrupt­ness of lan­guage used by CEOs con­vey­ing salary reduc­tion news.
And from this research Mr Sut­ton got com­pelling evi­dence that com­pas­sion begets less thiev­ing!
I think this is absolutely unfair to employ­ees.

I have been asked this ques­tion as many num­ber of times as the world pop­u­la­tion. And of course, some peo­ple have asked it more than once. My answer is sim­ple: “Doesn’t Mat­ter”. You will get (or not get) a job either way.

Let me clar­ify that a com­pany basi­cally does not look for a Java pro­gram­mar or a .NET pro­gram­mer. First of all you need to be a pro­gram­mar. That is where most of the fresh­ers lack in the cur­rent world. If your com­puter sci­ence fun­da­men­tals are strong and apti­tude is good, pick­ing up either of these is a two months job. I have reit­er­ated this in many seminars/articles/talks.

Assum­ing you have strong fun­da­men­tals, which one you would pre­fer to take as a pro­gram­ming lan­guage of your choice?

As of now, there are more jobs in Java than in .NET but inci­den­tally the com­pe­ti­tion is a lot less in .NET .

Choose one…any one. And stick to it for quite some time. Does not mat­ter if you are not able to attend walkins/tests in the other stream. There will always be good num­ber of jobs in your own stream. And remem­ber, strong fun­da­men­tals would always be pre­ferred over syn­tac­ti­cal knowl­edge of either lan­guage.

Just out of col­lege or pack­ing your bag­gage to get out soon. We talked to var­i­ous fresh­ers and digged out some very com­mon myths or mis­con­cep­tion they have regard­ing IT job inter­view process. Though there are mil­lions (okay…thousands..or even hundreds..no less) of them we are only putting the most com­mon ones here. This might be dif­fi­cult for for a 10+ yrs expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sional to digest, but this how fresh­ers (or most of them) think. Can we help their thinking…yes..may be.

Myth #10: Low­er­ing Your Salary Demands Will Increase your chances of selec­tion.

When you are strug­gling for a job, some­times you may be tempted to lower your demand and grab the offer let­ter imme­di­ately. Unfor­tu­nately or for­tu­nately an IT com­pany does not think in the same way. It is more inter­ested in get­ting value from you (I mean your work..) rather than sav­ing money on your salary. While ask­ing for a much higher salary may show you a greedy, low­er­ing expec­ta­tion may lower the value per­cep­tion. If you know what the com­pany offers for a sim­i­lar skillset and expe­ri­ence, try to be in +/- 20% range.

Myth #9: A tie is a must for an entry level job inter­view.

While it is impor­tant to be neatly dressed in for­mals, wear­ing a tie will not add any point to your score.Only if you feel com­fort­able with a tie, wear it.

Myth #8: Entry level salaries are fixed and can­not be nego­ti­ated.

While most of the big com­pa­nies adver­tise their entry level salaries, it does vary based on your col­lege, past expe­ri­ence, marks and your per­for­mance in the inter­view process. If you are being asked your salary expec­ta­tion you may have some room to nego­ti­ate.

Myth #7: Only the best per­son gets hired.

Hir­ing a large num­ber of fresh­ers (from an even larger num­ber of fresh­ers) is so stren­u­ous that most peo­ple resort to selec­tion by elim­i­na­tion. It may be on the basis of your marks, degree, FCFS (first come first serve) or any­thing. Do you really think that get­ting a 69% guy is in any way infe­rior to a 71% guy. As long as you have done full prepa­ra­tion you should not get unnec­es­sary com­plexes. If you have not done any prepa­ra­tion for job then any per­son get­ting selected is bet­ter (in fact much bet­ter) than you.

Myth #6: If I write many projects in CV it will catch their atten­tion.

No, It will get you more trou­ble than you can han­dle. High­light only big­ger projects (rather than every term papers you would have done in every alter­nate course). And, be fully pre­pared to answer every ques­tion about these projects.

Myth #5: Writ­ing both C#.NET and Java/J2EE will boost my chances of CV get­ting selected.

Half of the world is .NET and the other half is Java. If I write both skills in my CV I have the full uni­verse (super­set) with me. It is going to exactly dou­ble my chances of selec­tion…Wrong. It would reduce your prob­a­bil­ity to exactly half if not less. The only con­clu­sion a sane (read expe­ri­ence IT pro­fes­sional) per­son would draw is that you do not know any of these. Write (and also pre­pare) only one of them. Which one ? I will answer in a future post. So keep com­ing to my blog.

Myth #4: A flashy resume is more likely to get atten­tion than a sim­pler one.

Unfor­tu­nately the flash in only lim­ited to pan. A per­son who is fil­ter­ing has played it enough.Keep it sim­ple and do not promise that you are going to change the face of the com­pany. More tips on Resume Writ­ing later.

Myth #3: If a com­pany is not cur­rently hir­ing I do not stand a chance.

Though it may look very con­tra­dic­tory, but only 20 – 25% of over­all IT jobs are pub­li­cized in adver­tise­ment or oth­er­wise. Rest all is filled through ref­er­ences, unso­licited CVs and job por­tals. Now you know what to do.

Myth #2: If I have poten­tial, it will get rec­og­nized in inter­view.

If you do NOT have poten­tial, it will def­i­nitely get rec­og­nized in inter­view but if you have poten­tial there is no guar­an­tee of recog­ni­tion. Confusing..okay let me put it very sim­ply. What if you have very good tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and you also have good (inter­est­ing) hob­bies and your extra cur­ric­u­lar record is shin­ing. There is a def­i­nite chance of dis­cus­sion lead­ing to some other path and you not being able to tell the inter­viewer that you have it (what it takes to make a good soft­ware engi­neer). If needed inter­rupt him and try to take the dis­cus­sion to your strong areas. In the worst case sim­ply ask for it by specif­i­cally telling him your strengths.

Myth #1: IT com­pa­nies are more inclined towards stu­dents who have advance knowl­edge of C#.NET or Java/J2EE

This one is the most com­mon (and the bad one too). Kindly under­t­sand that tech­nolo­gies will change com­pletely at least 4 – 5 times in your soft­ware career. What is impor­tant for you is in-depth under­stand­ing of pro­gram­ming fun­da­men­tals and ana­lyt­i­cal skills. IT com­pa­nies real­ize that once your fun­da­men­tals are at right place you can quickly learn new emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and be pro­duc­tive very fast. Take my word, you are def­i­nitely not going to end you career with any of these two. It is impor­tant for you to spend suf­fi­cient time on your ana­lyt­i­cal skills and pro­gram­ming fun­da­men­tals which will serve as a base for your entire career.