Why Do you Leave a Company?

Let’s take a look into this interesting question which almost all us go through, any or many number of times. So, in your career if you have moved from one company to another then you would also have seen one of the many possibilities of moving from a company. I looked into it from satisfaction and role perspective of an employee and a company. Satisfaction – It means different to different people but typically it can be put into a few categories like – Work Satisfaction, Growth Satisfaction (growing within the org) and the Butter part – your cheque.

Get your people involved with interesting and challenging work. Since this is not possible for everybody and every time hence encourage them to look into new technologies and come up with some demo, paper etc which can later be presented and rewarded on merit basis. Growth satisfaction in terms of ladder or whatever you call it is another important area which affects an employee since it gives you recognition. There are quite a lot cross arguments on this too and I too can write negatives about it but still it affects the majority. Give the right people deserving growth – as simple as that. Third area to look at is you cheque or compensation. This depends on the previous two areas too. An employee’s growth should be aligned to company’s growth and hence compensation should be set such that the negative point shouldn’t come to a persons mind.

So, do people change jobs because of getting a salary hike only? I think it’s not the case most of the time because people want to do good work and if they do good work then they expect growth in all terms. So the reasons could fall under any of just said two things. Sometimes you get pissed off sitting on bench and find yourself handicapped as far as working knowledge is concerned. This makes you look for a change. These days Services companies are hiring like anything without giving due joining date to the prospective employee. This helps them to show more strength and hence helping themselves either with new projects or lease land or even SEZs etc. Once the objective is met sometimes a lot of shedding are seen which we have found to be increased in past one year. This creates some sort of fear in fellow colleagues and then an employee might rush for a safer place.

There’s one more perspective which is very important here to look at and which affects to all of us. THE COMPANY means your manager most of the time. Hence the kind of support you get from your manager, the kind of interest you find in him\her for your career plays a significant role in making you stay longer or shorter in a company. The interpersonal skills of a manager needs to be really great and should put employee’s growth as one of the important priority too.

Your best output comes only when you love your work and if you feel emotionally attached with the company and its growth then you reach the height of what people say ‘giving more than 100%’. Once you find a person in this mode then as a manager you need to be very careful because then this mode should not break or the attachment should not go down otherwise it badly affects the performance and might result into a change of job for your employee. In this case the employee needs to be properly rewarded and encouraged for the good work done. Keep the motivation level up of yourself and your employees.

So, In the end I would like to say both an employee and company needs to understand one others requirements and then compliment each others growth because company is nothing but its people and it can grow only when its most important assets – its employees grow.

BarCamp7 – Computation on Cloud 9 (SaaS, PaaS, Virtualization and more…)

Seventh in the series of BarCamp – BarCamp7 was hosted by Amazon Dev Center, Hyderabad on 30th Aug 2008. The theme of BarCamp this time was Computation on Cloud 9 (SaaS, PaaS, Virtualization and more…). There were more than 180 registrations and around 100 participants with 10 sessions including presentations, demos and talks. It was informative in a few sessions but some of the presentations were not so interesting and hence I saw 40% of the crowd moving out by mid event. Anyways, let’s look into the sessions individually –

1) Introduction Session and Cloud Computing by Ramesh Loganathan – Since the event start a bit late hence all sessions were cut down to 20mins. This session was quick and looked into what Saas\PaaS\Virtualization is and what is Cloud. I found this as a good start to BarCamp.

2) Grid Computing and Hadoop by Jyoti from Yahoo Research – This session too went well, a bit longer but informative (at least for a few like me ). This was about Grid computing and what a Map Reduce is, which can be found with Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org ).

3) Demo on Google app engine SDK – This was a quick Demo session from Googlers about writing small app using Google App Engine SDK for development and Google Infrastructure for deployment. Google App Engine come under PaaS (Platform as a Service).

4) Progress – Salesforce introduction – This session was taken by Salesforce to take the audience to a deeper level into the DB changes which they can make.

5) Amloc from 3i Infotech – This was all theoretical session on why 3i infotech chose multi tenancy for their banking solution for their client banks.

6) Demo on EC2 and EBS by a Hyderad based startup – This was all practical and demo based session showing how you actually use an image on EC2 and was one of the best sessions. This was though hit by low internet speed which again was unexpected at Amazon.

This was the last session I attended and then came out. I found Grid computing as most interesting more because it looked into making Grids and looking into search space. Cloud computing is spreading very rapidly because of its core strength – cloud. It can reduce the actual infrastructure cost to minimal in a few scenarios, one of the examples could be testing space where you need large chunk of test machines\server but for less amount of time and once the work is complete the machines are dump and then are required again when some other test pass comes. Here cloud based solutions could be helpful.