How has an increase in system complexity affected new programmers?

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Adam asked:

As a 'new' programmer (I first wrote a line of code in 2009), I've noticed it's relatively easy to create a program that exhibits quite complex elements today with things like .NET framework, for example. Creating a visual interface or sorting a list can be done with very few commands now.

Desi startups doling out generous, creative perks to employees

Silicon Valley, home to some of the most storied startups, has been traditionally doling out ever-more generous and creative perks to employees. Twitter recently bought 19th century log cabins to serve as dining areas at its San Francisco headquarter while Google's New York office brings in beauticians to shape eyebrows. Taking a cue from these uber-cool workplaces, desi startups are also upping fringe benefits. 

From offering the services of in-house taichi instructors and marathon trainers who take care of your fitness needs and gourmet chefs who satiate your food cravings, working at an Indian startup has never been this rewarding. And while one is kept well-fed, well-groomed and physically fit during work hours, there are late-night poker sessions and disco nights in office to ensure that folks can party as hard as they work. 

These fledgling ventures admit the perks are not as extravagant as they are fun, and a good way to hook talent in a competitive market starved for talent. Pranay Chulet, founder & CEO of digital classifieds player Quikr, says the Indian market is different and so are the perks. "People seem to prefer samosas over salmon, and cricket over football so that's what we focus on. We want to celebrate our quirks," he says. 

While Indian startups are still a long way from reaching the lavish scale of the Bay area ventures, the attempt here is to give employees a chance to de-stress during the long hours at work. 

So, a typical work day in the life of a 25-year- old at Housing.com, a map-based realty portal, might end with an impromptu pizza party or at the office turned-night club. "The idea is to transform the office into the hippest disc in Mumbai," says Advitiya Sharma, cofounder of the two-year-old startup. "For us it's not about the occasional perk but the way we work every day. We always have fun in whatever we do even as the bigger corporates give out airline miles and free hotel stays," he says. 

InMobi, the Bangalore-based mobile ad network, doesn't have card-readers to scrupulously measure entry/exit times. Employees bring children and pets to office and a cool $800 is given to everyone annually to "develop" themselves any way they like be it through guitar or music classes. All of this inside an office which sports children's nursery colours on its walls. To add to the casual look, there are plenty of bean bags and hammocks and no cabins and cubicles. 

While on-the-house meals and flexi timings are commonplace even at Indian startups, online restaurant discovery guide Zomato has hired in-house chefs who can rig up anything from Pan-Asian fare to Thai cuisine. Deepinder Goyal, founder & CEO of Zomato, says food is a big part of keeping people happy at work, so it is an expense they can live with. But even for well-funded ventures such as ecommerce major Snapdeal, the constraint while providing these perks is not to increase costs too much. 

Kunal Bahl, co-founder & CEO of Snapdeal, where some team members are entitled to the services of a chauffeur, says the perk is aimed at helping employees avoid the driving stress in Delhi. "We're a retail business and don't have the margins of Google and Facebook to justify things like gourmet chefs, and free iPhones and iPads as a joining bonus. Here the most basic desires and needs have to be addressed first," the 31-year-old says. 

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Noida-based One97 Communication, a mobile internet company, says he is also the resident DJ of his organization where every evening there is music on all floors of the office building. "People who come for job interviews and see this invariably go away impressed. We create a spa-like fragrance in the office with different natural, scented herbs and oils and have a 24-hour food counter," says Sharma. 

Helping employees keep fit has been on top of the list for many companies. Raja Shanmugam, co-founder, Happiest Minds, which describes itself as a next generation IT service provider, offers the services of tai chi and yoga instructors for all its employees. "We live by the name of our company," he says. Bangalore-based Capillary Technologies' co-founder Aneesh Reddy, says they have a runners' programme, and the idea is to help staffers run marathons.

15.7 mn project management roles to be created by 2022

India has been experiencing a huge demand for project management professionals in recent years. According to a study conducted by PMI, by 2022 15.7 million new project management roles will be created globally across seven project intensive industries such as – Manufacturing, Business Services, Finance & Insurance, Oil & Gas, Information Services, Construction, and Utilities.

With Indian businesses gaining a foothold in foreign markets, and the kind of projects that they are taking up with quick delivery time lines, and the pace at which technology changes – it’s absolutely critical that project managers come with vast subject matter knowledge and gain advanced expertise while diving into projects.

Experts believe that employees often possess some level of competency as far as project management is concerned – but what they are particularly interested in is to find talent with the right mix of planning, controlling and monitoring abilities.

According to Techgig.com, there is demand for project management professionals at different experience levels. Some of the jobs available for project management professionals are associate project manager (1-3 years), system analyst (2-5 years), project engineer (3-5 years), project quality manager (5-8 years), technology project manager (6-8 years), etc.

Salaries will also be competitive across industries for project management professionals, suggests expert.

During a recently organised Techgig.com webinar, Padmakumar Menon, program manager, Tata Elxsi, pointed out some of the elements which are crucial to be an effective project manager: effective project communication, ask for clear requirements, effective project staffing and allocation and good team management.

Common mistakes to avoid:

• Accepting poorly defined requirements as input
• Accepting changes without negotiating a new timeline
• Poor communication and accepting poorly communicated information
• Ineffective management of the team
• Poor planning and under estimation of work
• Absorbing delays attributable to suppliers/customers
• Ineffective escalations
• Accepting unrealistic expectations from stakeholders

Companies prefer hiring candidates via social media: Report

The social media has moved rapidly from being 'purely social' to a 'business tool' as more and more companies   are now using the platform to recruit the right people for specificjobs and this trend is expected to grow by about 50 per cent this year from 2013, according to experts. 

"In day-to-day busy schedules, people only get social media platform to know about what is happening in the industry and their social network and they also update about their own status and change of roles. This trends began almost in 2010, and is growing by 50 per cent every year," leading executive search firm GlobalHunt Managing Director Sunil Goel told PTI. 

Most of the updates, he opined, gives the recruiter an information link to reach to the right people for the specific job of for their client companies. "Mid and senior-level professionals do not want to project themselves as easily available resources but by putting up their resume in job portals or an agency makes them easily available resources, which affects their role and compensation negotiations," he added. Sectors like IT, ITES, banking and financial have been recruiting across levels using this platform, he said. 

However, even FMCG, manufacturing, power and energy, retail, automobile are also using the social media for mid to senior level hiring, he added. Career adviser firm Michael Page's India Regional Director Alf Harris said social media is obviously a much-talked about aspect of recruitment and it undoubtedly offers individuals an excellent opportunity to access opportunities and for companies to reach out to talent. 

"However, one must keep in mind that social media is part of the recruitment process. Once the recruitment process moves into the assessment cycle, there is limited impact from social media," he said. The advantage of social media is the ability to reach a significant number of people quickly and easily compared to traditional recruitment process, he said.

11 Android apps to make notifications more interesting

I love Android as much as the next non-Apple owning guy, but there are times when I get bored of using the same old operating system, and seeing the same boring old notifications. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of different ways to liven things up without having to root your phone, or in some cases, even spend a penny. Sure, Facebook’s chat-head style notifications set a trend for a bobble-headed approach, but that’s not the only way you can modify how you get informed about new events, and for older handsets that haven’t been gifted with features like lock screen widgets.

Hackers use heartbleed to attack 'major corporation'

SAN FRANCISCO: Within 24 hours of the Heartbleed bug's disclosure last week, an attacker used it to break into the network of a major corporation, security experts said Friday.

Using Heartbleed, the name for a flaw in security software that is used in a wide range of Web servers and Internet-connected devices, the attacker was able to break into an employee's encrypted virtual private network, or VPN, session.

From there, the hacker or hackers used the Heartbleed bug about 1,000 times, extracting information like passwords to gain broader access to the victim's network, researchers at Mandiant, an online security firm, said.

The targeted company noticed the attack only in its later stages. When the company analyzed what had happened, it realized that Heartbleed was used as the entry point, said Christopher Glyer, an investigator at Mandiant. 

The attack was one of the first confirmed cases of a hacker's using Heartbleed. Up till now, researchers say, they have seen widespread scanning of the Internet for vulnerable servers, and in some cases people have taken material from those servers using Heartbleed. But it has been nearly impossible, they say, to discern between the activities of security researchers and hackers, and there has been no evidence of actual harm. 

Investigators were still assessing whether damage had been done in this case, and because of nondisclosure agreements, the firm has not named the targeted company; Mandiant has said only that it is a "major corporation" with particularly sophisticated attack detection systems. 

"The main takeaway is that within 24 hours of Heartbleed's publication, we're seeing this taken advantage of," Glyer said. "And it's entirely likely lots of other companies are being affected and just don't know it yet."

On Tuesday, a 19-year-old man was arrested in Canada on charges that he had used Heartbleed to steal taxpayer data from the Canada Revenue Agency.

At the University of Michigan, computer scientists said the Heartbleed bug had been used 140 times to gain access to stashes of data that they had put on the Internet as a test. They could not say whether this was the work of attackers or other security researchers, but they did say that more than half the infiltrations originated in China. 

The University of Michigan researchers said this week that more than 1 million Web servers were still vulnerable. They are keeping an updated tally on the website of their project, called ZMap.

It was still unclear whether Heartbleed was exploited before its discovery by a Google researcher this month. 

For the past week, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center have been examining Internet traffic they recorded going in and out of their networks since the end of January, looking for exploitations of Heartbleed before its existence became public on April 7. 

Why Google isn't growing

Google CEO Larry Page can be forgiven for being in a bad mood this weekend. On his company's Q1 2014 earnings call, his people delivered what he thought would be good news: revenues of $15.4 billion, up 19%. Very, very few business can deliver 20% growth on billions in revenues. By any measure, Google is on fire as a company.

Yet investors hated it.

They sold the stock, and it declined 5% immediately after the call. In 24 hours the price had lost $9, from $544 per share to $536.

Google is growing, for sure. But, counterintuitively, it is not growing at the same time, as the following charts show.

From a macro perspective, Google is boxed in by two factors: The available population on the Internet and the population on the mobile portion of the Internet.

Google - according to numbers from Asymco, the quant-y tech analysts - may not be growing so much as it is merely floating in place on a rising tide of humanity.

Unfortunately for Google, that tide is about to go out.

Internet growth is slowing - and Google is the Internet Google handles about 80% of all search queries, and hundreds of millions of people use Gmail and YouTube, its most famous brands. Google is so dominant that its economics are, in many ways, a proxy for the Web as a whole. How grows the Internet, grows Google.

But growth of the Internet won't go on forever.

Already there are signs of an upcoming "inflection" in 2016, when the level of Internet penetration across the planet gets well past 50% of all humans - and the Internet itself enters a period of rapidly declining growth.

Here's Asymco's chart of Internet penetration by geographic area:





The chart shows the portion of the population that has yet to connect to the Web. It's in decline all over. Don't worry about the detail or the numbers, it's important to simply note that the Web's "house-on-fire" period will be behind us by about 2016.

We're already in that phase in the US and Western Europe - there just aren't that many more non-connected humans to bring online.

This will hurt Google because Google's revenues are highly correlated with the number of humans online.

Here's the Asymco data showing the correlation between Google revenues and the total Internet population:



Google doesn't operate in China. You can see that Google's revenues run in parallel to the number of humans on the Web.



Chart shows a measure of how closely correlated the growth in Google's revenues is to the growth of the internet population as a whole.

That parallel is very closely correlated, as this Asymco chart of the same data shows: That correlation has a real effect on Google's actual dollar numbers.

Asymco has also broken down Google's revenue by geography, next to the world Internet population, if you want more detail on that.

But broadly, the lines look similar because they are similar.

Shown another way, Google's monetization per user shows that all its growth is in the developed countries, where it is already fully penetrated.

If it is to grow meaningfully in the future (all things being equal) it must do the same in the poorer nations.

But that shows no sign of happening:



Asymco's blog states this succinctly:

The disparity is enormous. US/UK revenue is on average $86/user/yr (2012) and rising. The rest of the world only manages $12/user/yr. That Rest Of World includes many wealthy countries such as all of Europe and Japan. So the problem for Google is that it has an order of magnitude less income per user in the part of the Internet which remains unpenetrated and the trends show that they are not narrowing the gap.

One might also add that the developed world has been waiting for more than 200 years for the undeveloped world to "catch up" and become rich - but it never happens. So don't hold your breath for growth on those yellow bars.

The overall effect of this is that Google's net income per user is relatively stagnant:



Google gets about $1.20 per user in profit - see the blue section of the chart - and the rate doesn't change very much over time.

OK, you might say. So Internet population growth is slowing. Google is still killing it: You cannot ignore 20% growth per quarter.

That's true. But there is another way of looking at it - and Wall Street's reaction to the Q1 numbers may be an indication of that: For investors, "growth" isn't defined merely as an increase. It's defined as the growth over and above the background growth you'd get from the general market as a whole. Usually, those background rates are the risk-free interest rates at the bank or an index fund of the S&P 500 stocks.

But at tech companies, growth is often even more dramatic than that. And the Asymco data suggests that the background growth in Google's business is the Web population as a whole. So Google's challenge is that it must eke out greater growth than the Web itself, because if it does not then it will actually be moving backward - certainly in terms of market share.

What if mobile becomes a ghost town for Google? There is also the continued weakness in Google's ability to get higher prices on clicks. Cost-per-click is in decline, and the growth of total paid clicks is slowing. You can see Google's growth as a whole is slowing as a result:



Part of that is to do with the growth of mobile devices. More and more businesses - Amazon, LinkedIn, Apple, Facebook - have apps with their own internal search functions. And apps generally are invisible to Google's traditional Web search. But a majority of people's time in mobile is spent inside apps.

Some massive businesses like Facebook and Pandora (and Business Insider, although we're much smaller) have majority mobile audiences. Those are audiences that, increasingly, Google can't see.

That is a long-term structural growth problem for Google. The Web is growing, but not in a way that Google can meaningfully get search ad revenue from it. More than 90% of Google's revenue comes from search ads and related services.

"Google's growth is ultimately limited" Asymco concludes:

If the company does not alter its business model then the future potential of the business could be measured as a function of Internet (ex. China) population growth.

And there is a benchmark to watch for in terms of whether Google can figure this out. It's 2016, Asymco says:

... the inflection point will come in 2016. Essentially the argument is that Google's growth is ultimately limited by the population of users and that itself is a predictable number.