Umair Aziz

My partner Shakir talks to CIO Pakistan. Lots of insightful nuggets about the software industry and the business of software outsourcing in here.

Steal: to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force.

Thief: a person who steals, esp. secretly or without open force.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the verb (Steal) and how it is used to describe the spiteful act of the noun (Thief). I’m here to talk about a thief who stole from my company, directly attacked our employees and has tarnished the image of the offshore outsourcing software industry in Pakistan.

Custom application development firms like ours are usually engaged in providing software development services through a fixed time fixed cost contract. These are typically 3-6 month long projects after which support and maintenance services are provided as mandated by the SLA. Projects that require more than 6 months of development, or where the customer wants the offshore team to work with the onshore (local) development team often choose to go the ‘Dedicated Resource’ route. With the dedicated resource arrangement the development team works exclusively for the customer on their project. The Project Manager is responsible for being the bridge between the customer and these dedicated resources. His job is to make sure the work gets done according to the satisfaction of the customer. This model works very well for both the customer and the offshore company. Until you hire a rotten apple – a thief who after establishing a rapport with the client decides to steal your customer.

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I was invited by the faculty and student body at FAST NU to judge the Procom.Net 2008 Software Competition. Most of you may not know – FAST NU is one of the best engineering schools we have here in Pakistan. Think Stanford of Pakistan. I’ll let GIKI be MIT and LUMS be Harvard.

Anyways Procom has become an annual tradition at FAST NU where student engineers from all over the country come down to Karachi for a few days and compete in various competitions in programming, software, network design, hardware, circuit design and hacking. The event is conducted in association with a student branch of IEEE.

Some of the smartest people at Creative Chaos participated at Procom in their college days and most of them won or were runner ups. Therefore I’ve always held the institution and the competition in very high regard. When I was asked if I would be interested in coming to the event and judging the software competition – I immediately accepted the offer. It was like winning free backstage passes to a software lollapalooza.

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I never went to business school and never learnt management. I was a software engineer and was entrusted to manage people in 2002 when I took over the family travel business. We were a small team of 15 people and I ended up doing everything – including sales, marketing, operations, hr, accounts and admin. For one – I enjoyed the problems these verticals presented. They were challenging and I was learning new things. Two – I found that I couldn’t trust anyone to do them right – people were either incompetent or lazy. I felt I could do them better, faster than anyone and get better results. Between 2002 and 2005 I worked 18-20 hours a day. In the process I became a control freak. I tasted success – the company grew to 70+ people. I started a bunch of other businesses, took up a position at Creative Chaos and ended up having about 140 people reporting to me. Soon afterwards I became a victim of my own success. Nothing was getting done because everyone expected me to do them. Surely I couldn’t do everything. It was impossible! I ended up spending 2 hours a day at each of my 4 offices – firefighting and delegating problems to people who had little confidence in themselves! We lost a lot of business opportunities, clients and money.2005 was the roughest year I had as an entrepreneur.

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OK – so i’ve met them all – software engineers, developers, coders, geeks, gurus, script kiddies, hackers, crackers, slackers and smooth talkers. I conduct between 35 and 50 interviews every month (about 2-3 every day). That’s an average of 500 interviews every year and would equate to 3 months of straight interviewing (each interview is an hour long). This is roughly 25% of the total time I spend at work. I take interviewing very seriously. Hiring mistakes are costly and difficult to fix.

My intense interviewing schedule has nothing to do with attrition. We are fortunate enough to have customers who like our work, have confidence in our teams, capability and infrastructure and are always looking at increasing their offshore resources. This has all been possible because of the fantastic team we have and continue to build here at Creative Chaos.

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