Talent crunch is here

Part of my new job in Bangalore is conducting technical interviews to hire more people. I'm no expert having done at most 5 face-to-face interviews and a around 10-12 telephonic interviews (these don't actually count as I was doing it for a position which required skills that were not even part of my skill-set!!).

That apart I was interviewing candidates with 2+ years of experience for a software engineering position. I think I've interviewed close to 25 or more telephonic and face-to-face together (with the larger chunk now going to face-to-face interviews). I was looking for a programmer who had a good grasp of the concepts and technologies he/she was using and be able to leverage development tools and the internet to get the job done.

I thought it was going to be a walk in the park with Bangalore being the 'Silicon Valley' of the east. I had done a little bit of research as to what sort of questions a 2+ years of experienced guy (like me) would find challenging. I was in for a rude shock. I can fill up numerous blog entries with the wtf answers and antics of the candidates. Slowly I was asking more and more basic questions till I had to finally resort to asking the candidates to write a program for string reversal. Sadly, I have not seen a single implementation of the string reversal program that would either do the job or compile (I've resigned myself not expect both).

I've learnt a lot about resumes in the process especially technical ones, they are a joke. Usually a technical resume will contain a table containing a list of the languages/databases/platforms/web servers/application servers/what not that the candidate has experience in (some cases the experience in months or years may even be mentioned) the only criteria for a candidate needs to add a new item to that list is simply whether or not he/she knows that expansion of that particular acronym.

One of my roommates is an HR executive in a well known multinational software company and I asked him if they were facing the same problem and he they have lots of vacancies open and were not finding the right persons too. Market research has also found that even though there is a surplus of qualified persons there are just not enough of them who are employable. This does not bode well for India's plans of becoming a software hub. How do we solve it? Well, I don't know. But, people realizing that they need to become more competent in whatever they are currently doing might help, I think.

Changing lanes

It has been 2 months since my last blog and a lot has happened meanwhile. I quit the first company that cared to hire me some 2 years ago sometime in April 2004 (how they did it is a nice story which I will share sometime later).

I've moved from Chennai to Bangalore and have to deal with staying away from home, washing my own clothes, post job-switch dissonance, bed bugs etc. I moved to get away from my comfort-zone which, is when inhabited for too long can lead to stagnation according to people with more intelligence than I.

2 months later I seemed to have found my comfort-zone again in a slightly different sense. I think I'm doing the same things professionally the only difference being that I'm staying in a different city. I still go late to work, I still wear casuals 4 days a week (it was 5 earlier), I still never start real work until after lunch, I'm usually one of the last persons to leave office etc. Which leaves me wondering as to what I should change next?