Y! is hiring & Where is the next YouTube going to come from
What a cliched title, Y! was always hiring ( Interested ? - See this ). In fact every firm in Bangalore is hiring ( right from Indian research labs of companies like Microsoft to the neighbourhood retail chain. Coming to think of it .. i am not so sure the new generation ( people who have been employed in the last half a decade ) has seen any down turns. This is kind of dangerous .. because a downturn if and when it happens will hit people really really hard.
Everything is on an up - salaries, real estate prices, dining out costs .. and if we follow a simple rule that what has gone up .. must come down .. then in a few years ..when we dont continue growing at unbelievable rates of 8-9 % ..It is going to be hard. Till then .. party hard folks .. live like there is no tomorrow.
On the topic of salaries, have actually heard of a few programmers who have been made offers to the tune of US $ 65000 ( Mind you .. convert that compensation into rupees .. that is salary in India. Heck … whats happening .
I see everything changing … but not a single facebook or youtube was engineered in Bangalore or Hyderabad or .. any other "wannabe" Indian, Silicon Valley. Drats .. that brings me to the topic .. Is it possible to build a killer consumer website or tool or s/w product that would be engineered entirely in India. My opinion is that engineering is no longer a bottleneck. A youtube could have so easily been engineered in bangalore and launched from bangalore .. Probably the bottleneck is somewhere else.
I think the bottleneck is closeness to the markets. Its difficult to come with something that caters to US/Europe markets b’coz our engineering talent doesn’t understand those markets. Next youtube/facebook/myspace can be something that developed for the Indian markets.
Comment by Tejas — October 13, 2006 @ 2:41 pm
A youtube could have so easily been engineered in bangalore and launched from bangalore
But perhaps not hosted anywhere close to Bangalore.
Comment by Adarsh Bhat — October 15, 2006 @ 1:55 pm
I think it is a little bit more than access to markets. I used to work for a startup called Strand genomics and they did have this model where there Sales function ( and to some extent - Marketing ) were based out of US( target market ) and the engineering was done out of Blore. We were successful but no where near where we wanted to be. It is something more than just access to markets. You have had a lot of Indian founded companies that have this Onsite ( marketing and Sales ) and Offshore model ( engineering and customer support ) and are doing well ( Though not on a scale where they become a consumer phenomenon like YouTube or Facebook or so on).
Wrt to Indian markets, i think a few concepts like YouTube would make sense only when the Indian broadband consumption has reached certain threshold levels. There are way too many Indians for whom a simple ajax interface itself doesnt work .. forget a video on the internet ( coming to think of it .. during diwali i will have to live off a dial up connection at my native place).
An idea’s time has to come. Coming to think of it .. what would be the next biggest idea … any thought’s anyone. A good topic for the next post.
Comment by What-a-kutty — October 16, 2006 @ 7:39 am
Adarsh,
coming to think of it .. Google was rumoured to have been planning a BIG sez in hyderabad where they wanted to set up a datacenter .. SO it might just happen that you have a large 200 acre campus betweem bangalore and Mysore which might house a big server farm dishing out www.google.com or www.live.com or www.yahoo.com.
cheers
Comment by What-a-kutty — October 16, 2006 @ 7:42 am