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Showing posts from 2019

Experiences of Recruiting for a small Startup

Sometime back I posted following message on LinkedIn about Recruitment of juniors and freshers for D10X https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6588768606912372737 This post is about my experiences during this 'recruitment attempt'. Question I want to ask you.  Are these common experiences ? Interested applicants don't even read the full post/details before applying I updated post original post and asked everyone not to 'post' on LinkedIn Talent Search. Still people kept on posting on LinkedIn talent search.  I also asked for emailing the resume to contactme@d10x.io mail id.  Still  candidates kept posting "i am interested" comments in the LinkedIn thread, instead of emailing me. If you are applying for programming job, then you need to give a programming test. We sent applicants an email with 3 Code Kata problem statements and asked them to solve the problems in any programming language of their choice. I wanted to see if they h

8 Questions every founder must ask oneself:

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8 Questions every founder must ask oneself: If you are a founder of a start-up or a fairly established tech company, you need to ask yourself the following questions: 1. Are you satisfied with the speed at which the features and functionality is rolled out in production and in the hands of your customers / prospects? 2. Do you believe that you have selected the right tech stack to support your customer base now and in next 2-5 years? 3. Is your team able to make changes to the apps and deploy them frequently? 4. Are you happy with the quality of User Experience (UX), design, performance and quality of code? 5. Do you think with the number of changes and the evolution your app code is easily maintainable? 6. Do you think with the apps you have today are in line with what you envisaged in the beginning? 7. Do you think the security measures taken are adequate and minimize the risks of your business coming to stand-still? ...and most importantly, 8. How fast do you re

Technology Capability Evaluation Service - A new initiative of D10X

One key problem faced by Venture Capitalist and Angel investors goes like this. I/We have evaluated the business proposal and roadmap of this startup. It looks great. The concept is really promising. But how do we know that the technology developed is 'capable' of delivering the required Is the design/architecture/code ready for 'production' ? Will it scale as new users are added ? Is the development team capable of delivering the changes/features quickly while still maintaining the stability and quality ? If the startup is in-capable to deliver on the technology promise then we are wasting our money. A team that looks great on paper (or in power-point presentation) may turn out be really mediocre in delivering the results. A great business plan may not be backed by an equally good technology implementation and execution.  How to evaluate the technology capability (including the architecture, design, quality of source code, etc) and judge the probab

Perverse Incentives of Fixed Cost Software Projects

Last 25 years I have seen many customers asking for Fixed Cost project bids. However, I have not seen a single ‘successful’ fixed cost project. When I say, 'successful' I mean a project where customer and developer company, both, are proud and happy about that project.  I have not seen such a project. Main reason is ‘the concept of fixed cost’ results in perverse incentives to both customer and developer and invariably instead of ‘win-win’ the situation ends up ‘lose-lose’ with no possibility of recovery. This how a typical fixed cost project evolves from start to end. (If your experience has a consistently different outcome, I certainly like to know about it) Customer wants to get new software developed. He does not have an idea about what the total cost will be. Obviously, he wants to reduce/control his risk. He thinks that ‘fixed cost’ project will control his financial risk. He invites a ‘fixed cost bids’ to his project. Outsourcing companies know that fixed cost pro