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 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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It has only been 15 months since we moved out from our “software house” on Hali Road into a classy 5000 sq. ft uber-tech, architect designed space in Clifton. It took us over 10 months to build and by the end of it we were tired, went way over budget, and ended up with one of the best looking offices in the city. My partner and I congratulated ourselves and thought our new home would serve us for a good 3 years. We were so wrong!

Our office seats 60 people. Currently there are only 2 seats empty and they will be occupied in the coming week. We have 18 openings and are aggressively interviewing every day to fill these up. We anticipate a need for another 20 engineers in the next 2 quarters. If you do the math – you will see that we need more space for another 40 engineers.While some of you may be thinking how in the world are we going to find so many people – let me tell you that finding developers is the least of our worries. Here at Creative Chaos we’ve got ‘finding the right engineer’ down to a science. Its pretty simple actually – find the smartest software engineers in the country and hire them. No seriously – that’s it. I’ll repeat it again – find the smartest software engineers and hire them.In a class of 100 students, only 9% are smart, of which 4% are outstanding and 2% exceptional. The rest are just average. We do not hire average at Creative Chaos. That may sound discriminatory but that is the way things are here. Who would rather have as your heart surgeon, a top student from a high profile med-school or a doctor that is just good enough? When it comes to choosing a software engineer to design and develop your applications why would you ever choose an average engineer?Just like the best physicians and surgeons – the top 9% software engineers in the world can work anywhere they want. They are never desperately looking for jobs – and are usually busy working their way up the ladder. The average ones are busy zigzagging between different roles / responsibilities and organizations.It is much like applying to college. The best students apply to tier one schools, the above-average ones apply to tier two and the mediocre ones are stuck with tier three. Students with high SAT scores (1450+) and decent applications are pretty much guaranteed admission into any Ivy League institute. Why does one choose a tier one college? And aren’t these colleges discriminating? Well of course they are – they are targeting students that exhibit intellect and intelligence consistent with their ranking and profile. The students understand this and to them the name and reputation matters. They also know that good colleges invest money in creating state of the art facilities, hire the best professors and guarantee a rigorous and challenging program. And that’s not it – these colleges are also willing to give money (scholarships) just to have these top guns study at their institutes. It makes perfect sense for smart intelligent students to choose a tier one college.

For some reason people running software companies don’t understand this. I keep hearing from friends in the business that they are unable to find or hire good programmers. The problem is that they have not yet defined which tier their software company lies in. Their interviewing is not targeted which leads to frustration and hiring mistakes. I have only one thing to tell them – if you want to attract top talent, go fix up your office, create an environment that is fun and challenging and once you are able to bring some good folks on board – then empower them and treat them well.We think of ourselves as a tier one specialty institute and are absolutely discerning about who gets to be part of our family.

We spent a lot of money on our office – not to impress our customers but to provide our employees a great place to come in to work every day. We engaged an expensive architect; thought about lighting and ergonomics, installed RFID sliding doors, custom built our furniture and used European tiles.When these smart tier one candidates come to our office for interviews their faces light up. And while they are still admiring the interiors – we ask them if they would like to drink coke, mountain dew or coffee before we get started. We tell them we have a vending machine and all sodas are free, munchies and late night dinners are all expensed. We have contracted vans to pick and drop everyone at home so they don’t have to worry about commuting. And incase some one stays late to finish off work and misses the van – we happily expense their cab fare home. These smart engineers can work for any company they want – we want to show them that we have a top notch environment where coming to work is fun and challenging.Our vision is to create a model software company. We believe that we can only produce top quality software by employing top engineers and creating an exciting working environment that our people can cherish.

As the saying goes – a happy engineer is a productive engineer.In order to seat the 40 odd engineers that we plan to bring on board in the next couple of quarters we have taken up another 4000 square feet of office space in a building next door. We will once again engage an architect to help us out create a great facility, experiment with a few new ideas and overcome previous short-comings.Last time around – due to space constraints, we were not able to create a large enough kitchen. In the new office we are planning on setting up an in-house café with seating space for 20-30 people. We will have a waiter to serve coffee / tea, put in comfortable couches, a large screen TV, an Xbox 360 and if we have space – maybe a pool table as well.

Writing code is mentally exhausting and we want our engineers to have a place to de-stress without ever leaving the office.In our current office a lot of the developers sit in an open space planned in cubical style straight workstations. We thought this would work out great – everyone would be close to each other and would allow better communication. What we did not realize was that that when people would communicate they would disturb everyone in proximity. The space occasionally gets too loud and distracting. The project areas on the other hand (rooms to seat 5–7 engineers) worked out really well. We create agile teams to develop applications and seating the whole team together in a room not only gives developers a sense of privacy but also allows them to self-manage their conversations and noise-levels. The new facility will only have project space seating. We also plan to add more conference rooms, at least 2 discussion rooms (6 people) and 1 large conference for 16 people.We don’t have 10 months to build this time and our budgets are pretty tight. The plan is to have the site live by the 1st of May 2008. I know the next few months are going to be painful but the thought of providing another great facility to our engineers excites me.