Beds and Blowjobs…
In the travel area this news is already a few days old. But as I suspect that the ones who read my blog do not follow the major travel blogs I decided to post it here.
Ryanair Pressconference with CEO Michael O’Leary in Düsseldorf. A Journalist asks about the configuration of Ryanairs planned long haul fleet. It’s just 90 seconds - worth to listen….
Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part7
Ahhh 12 hours sleeping helped a lot. A really hot and looong night. I woke up a few times, switched on A/C for a couple of minutes and then felt asleep again.
I am really awake now 
This morning we left the Green Meadow Resort. Actually this Hotel was quite cheap - we paid for two persons, 5 nights, including room service (we ordered some food) around 360,- Euros. I would say this is really ok. Hotel was ok, Garden really nice and food was super.
Talking about the prices in india. Actually you can get anything very cheap. But if you search for a decent level of comfort (and this hotel I would say was ok but more low-level) then you will have to pay a lot more. So either you opt for low to mid level or if you want business hotel standard like Novotel, Accor etc. then you will have to pay around 90-180 Euros a night. This is valid for Chennai - I heard that in Bangalore it’s even worse. You won’t get a good international standard room there below 300,- Euro a night.
Food is the same - you can get some food on the streets for a few cents - and if you go to a good restaurant (like the ones we’ve kindly been invited to) then you won’t make it below 50 euros p.P. - but you get much better food and service then I would get for the same money in germany.
What I want to say is that there is no real mid-level available. At least it seems so to me after this week. Either low level - or high level. I’ve seen nothing between. I might be wrong. Next time I will try to search for something mid-level.
India is a country of extremes in any area. We have extrem poor people and extreme rich. Did you know that the most expensive home was build in india? Mukesh Ambani created his new home and spent 2 Billion $ on it. Impressive isn’t it? 27 floors!
Here are the facts:
- 27 floors at 173.12 sqm.
- 6 floors for parking, Mukesh’s family has 168 imported cars.
- Facilities for athletics and a swimming pool, and a health club.
- Helipad at rooftop
And still he can’t hinder people peeing on the pavement around the house. This is india. Extremes everywhere.
Talking about outsourcing. Let me give you an advise. For your first meeting you should always plan enough time. Just jetting to some place, rushing into meeting, negotiating and then flying home is not a good idea. Often american companies do this - plan a 2-3 days stay where I opted for a week. For sure you can negotiate the business terms in this time - but there is no time for the people behind the business. And this is important as this is the key to success. If there will problems pop up during the project - and there are always some - then it helps a lot if you have established a good and trustworthy relationship to the people you do work with. If not - you will have to pay extra attention. To make it short - these few additional days in advance will pay off during the project. Believe me - I experienced all sorts of problems in the past and having some sort of trust and relationship can make these problems simply disappear.
Today we went to our new hotel - the Fishermans Cove in Mahabalipuram It is a really nice hotel, 5 stars (indian standard not international) but still really really nice and worth to stay. I just had a quick bath in the sea - bay of bengalen - and it was really nice. Waves quite high, too dangerous to swim but still refreshing though the sea was warm. With our hosts we traveled to a nearby temple which unfortunately was already closed but we could see enough from the outside. This was followed by some shopping of handcrafted goods - having locals that supports you when you negotiate, bring down the price by a factor of 5-10. I can tell you that I am definitely too stupid to negotiate the right price.
Later we were again invited for a fabulous dinner directly at the beach. A star sprinkled sky, the waves on the sea and the nice temperature supported by ice-chilled beer (remember that I promised to support the local airline industries? I do!) created a extraordinary experience.
Wow!
I really felt in love with india. Colorful, loud, noisy, quiet, beautiful and ugly. Everything in full loads. I love it! It’s hot and a lot of weird people running around - but it is also colorful, emotional and simply make me feel well. And the people are so incredibly friendly and hospitable.
Talking about PHP - we will see. In three months I will know a lot more about the skills and availability of the people india. Give me some time then I will have answers for you.
Tonight we will head back to good old germany.
Unfortunately my mobile phone died - the high humidity was probably too much for it. I still hope that I can make it work again, otherwise I won’t have any pictures for you ;(
I hope you enjoyed my diary
Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part6
Tired, I am so tired. The game was great but now I have to survive the day.
This morning we had a lot of contractual discussion and finally agreed on the conditions. I think that we have achieved good conditions which are quite ok for us and on the other hand do not demand to much from our partner.
If you opt for a long term relationship like we do, it is quite important that everybody feels and __IS__ a winner. Otherwise there will be a certain point where any partner have to decide how to go on - and this is not useful as there is always a lot of investment in terms of time and energy in creating such partnerships.
So we went for lunch to 601 - a quite impressive place. I was totally enthusiastic about the food, the interieur and even the restrooms. But finally I am done - I can’t take any food any more - I feel soooo stuffed up. For sure I gained 2 kilos or even more. And finally I found the right things for my wife - if you make such a journey then it is very wise to bring something nice back. At least if you care about your wife
Then we left Tidel Park and head back to the hotel.
A few words about Tidel Park. This is the building where our company resides. It is a 12 floor, huge and impressive office building stuffed mostly with developers. Did I say 12 floors ? Oh yes and each floor has 1000 developers so in this building here there are 12.000 developers. During lunch time in cafeteria downstairs there are 8000 people waiting for food. We got delivered some sandwiches all the days - better than to join the crowd downstairs.
Today I feel very tired so I will go to bed quite early - 21:00 is not my usual time but I feel that I need the sleep. So today no long posting - sorry for that.
Let me close todays diary with some indian wisdom:
Age is a matter of mind and if you don’t mind it doesn’t matter.
(c) Praf
Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part5
From yesterday I want to share this live ASCII stream from Chennai/India:
schalalalaal dem de issum her de issum ooohaaa
de issum
chaka chakk boom chaka chak boom
ill fort me uh oohhh de aahhaaaaa
il like me dal uh fort me da ahahahhhh
na mek dehurt ahaaa
This is what I streamed yesterday evening from my balkonee to Marco. A live indian concert. There was a performance at my hotel and I tried to let him ‘hear’ it.
Unfortunately my eee went mad. After continuing transmitting the text the keyboard had failures and inserted additional keystrokes. The result looked like this:
LKET’s b]ikg set da LAAAAA
sikt me b]ik.]ik.k]ik da de ]ikssum
da de de ]issum !
come ‘okn
da de ]ikssum
So I had to stop my ASCII concert - and went to bed.
Today is the day. finally we will meet possible candidates and have the chance to talk to them - and test them. First I tought about executing the ZEND tests ( you know the demo tests ) but we finally decided to write our own test. Unfortunately I can’t post it here as there are many questions which I use also for new employees in lithuania and germany. They could cheat. So we will stay a bit vague - but hey - life is boring without our little secrets.
Half the day passed taking executing the tests and gathering the results. Today we tested only a few junior developers. The results here were not so good but this simply means that these people which we tested have not much know how about PHP and mySQL (but please take into account that we’ve tested junior developers - not seniors). I do believe that they can learn and catch up fast.
That you can get an impression what we’ve tested I let you lurk into some of the questions. What do you think? Too difficult? For juniors definitely. Maybe we expected to much?
Feel free to answer them in a comment
1.What will be printed?
$a = array(false => 'a', true => 'b', 0=> 'c'); print_r($a);
2.What will be printed?
print count(2);
3.What will be printed?
print count(null);
4.What will be printed?
$fruits = array('lemon', 'orange'); foreach ($fruits as $k => $v) { $v .= ' is good'; } print_r($fruits);
5.What will be printed?
$a = array(1, true, null); print isset($a[2]) ? 'element is set' : 'element is not set';
6.What will be printed?
$a = "abcde"; print $a[2] . $a{2};
7.What will be printed?
class Car { protected $color = 'transparent'; public function getColor() { return $this->color; } } class Jaguar extends Car { private $color = 'green'; } $car = new Jaguar(); print $car->getColor();
Post me the answers please
And let me share some indian wisdom:
“Really good, really good - Questions where easy only the answers were difficult”
Later we went to another fabulous dinner - Indian food offers a great variety of many different tastes and kitchens. Don’t forget that india is as large as whole europe and only with this you can compare it.
Some sort of Barbecue - very soft meat - amazing! And again I tried to support local Airline Industry as good as I could.
After rushing home we watched the game. They bring EM in public TV as there are many people interested in it. At least I tried. Actually always when it was really interesting the picture disappeared. Heard that this happend in germany also. Luckily there is internet radio so I did not miss something.
I do believe that austrians did this intentionally as a revenge. Could be or?
I feel a bit dizzy today, Game was over 02:20 in the morning. And sleeping is not so easy when you have between 26 and 30 degrees in your room.
Let met close with a bit of multimedia. This ad is not a joke - it’s serious. And it describes the spirit of india very well. Have a look it’s worth it.
Have fun
Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part4
Another day in paradise chaos. Did I tell you that they do have people for everything? Washing your clothes with a machine? Nooo way this can be done by hand and you create a working place. Entering an elevator you have a guy pressing the knob for you. In the garage there are people guiding you to your parking place. Even in the office at the restroom there is a guy cleaning up directly after you - It is a bit scary when he is standing behind you when you… ah enough off that.
In the morning I managed to get up early and took a swim in the pool. Sounds refreshing? It was not. The pool still had nearly 30 degrees in the morning. And guess what? I had no breakfast after yesterdays best dinner in my life.
Till lunch we had more talks to check that the company understands what we want them todo. BTW they are really really professional. For everything exists a process - must be heaven for any ISO/CMMI professionals. We introduced our framework and showed them more details and source code about the tasks. This was followed by methodology and setup of our partnership. Everything need to be defined. The main difference here is that the people don’t count - just the process. Everything need to be defined and documented then the people behind the tasks can be exchanged easily. Totally different to the companies I know where single employees are sometimes quite important and even worse you might be depend on them. I am not sure that the indian way is the better - people simply don’t count much here.
After lunch we talked about the money. To make it short - india is not cheap at all. Costs are around 20-30% less then salaries in germany, but they include everything whereas in Germany you need to add office, administration, taxes etc. For sure you get cheaper employees but it is like everywhere - if you want quality you need to pay for it.
On the other hand if you have a clear defined task and you need to scale people fast - there is simply no other option then to offshore in india. Here you can get new employees in two weeks of time. Tomorrow we will test the technical skills - we will see.
This evening I won’t do anything. Staying in the hotel is enough after yesterdays dinner. And tomorrow germany will play in the semi-final - I really will try to watch the game. Let’s see if I can make it - they start around 00:15 here. Luckily all the indians here are also mad about european football so no one will blame me for staying up - they do the same.
Hey if you wait for pictures you need to wait a bit longer. I only have my eee with me, and there I can’t upload the pics from my mobile. So I will deliver them only when I am back - promised.
Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part3
This morning we had a nice breakfast on the balkone, looking on palm trees and I’ve enjoyed black coffee white tea (I ordered black coffee and got tea… also I’ve ordered toast and got an omelett - but hey - it’s india…)
At 9:00 we went to the company at Tidal Park. It’s a very huge building with many offices, shops and restaurants. Surprisingly we started on time.
Ah btw, if you wonder why I don’t name the company - actually not everybody must know with whom swoodoo is working. If you are interested just drop me a mail and I will let you know - probably 
They introduced themselve as a SGO - second generation outsourcing. Quite good idea, actually it means they act as a proxy between us and the developers. They take care about communication, management and quality. If this works it could help a lot. I can tell you that this overhead is really really nasty - you need people on site whom you trust. Otherwise the project is doomed.
Our Lead Consultant (the ‘proxy’) seems to be a bright guy - the first impression is quite good. We spent the full day talking about our business, explaining our needs and listening to their offer. I’ve furthermore explained our technical infrastructure, showed our cruisecontrol and codesniffer etc. (remember the continuous integration thingie?) Tomorrow we will hand over a small development VMWare and then our Tech. Lead Manager will explain everything. They offered us that we can test them and should give them a serious piece of work and within two days they plan to show results. They are really confident that they can deliver something impressive in two days. Let’s see - I am not so confident but we will know soon.
Hehe furthermore we will test the guys - we brought some small test with us to see what skills they have, can’t wait for this.
Ah btw if you ever go to india bring warm clothes. They are nuts about A/C - actually I needed to wear my jacket inside as otherwise it w1uld be too cold. Outside we have 37 degrees but inside a maximum of 20… if at all. A friend of mine who work at an israelic company (no, not zend) told me the same about them. They even had only 17 degrees n the office…
The most impressive for me in india are the differences. Really incredible. I mean the meeting took place in a very well build 12 floors of IT building. Could be anywhere on the planet - and outside you see people living on the street, chaos, unbelievable mad traffic etc. and between all this chaos you can see many adds for ‘c++,j2ee and .net’ - huh. Looks like the guys living on the street at night develop .net during the day. Could explain a lot, or ?
Just kidding.
After work they invited us to the best Chennai Style food available - in the Sheraton Parkhotel - a relly amazing place. Live indian (classical) music, nicely dressed waiters and the best indian food I had ever in my life.
Only the amount was tough - I think I never ever in my life was so full. The guys told me that indians eat a lot for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner and now I definitly believe this. I think I gained 2 kilograms just at this evening. And finally I got there my ice-chilled beer which was really good. It is called Kingfisher and the fun part is that the guy owning the brewery started a lot of other business where one is one of the best and largest cheap Airlines in india - which fits swoodoo perfectly. So - I did not hesitate and tried to support the Airline the best I could
For those of you who think they can eat alot I can recommend this dinner. Actually I took the time to write down all what we have eaten - here we go:
starters:
banana pancake and kuzhi paniharam
first course:
masala vada - fried crispy rice flake
ceylon parota - bread with dips
idiappam - thin rice noodles (white)
with the following Dips (the ones I can remember):
- Dal
- Tomato thokku ( thick tomata gravy)
- More Koyambu ( light yello coloured butter milk)
-Spinach gravy spiced ( mint)
- Beans with coconut
second course:
- Chicken pepper dry
and a nice soup:
- Rasam ( Tomato coriander soup)
and more courses:
some Chicken I don’t remember the name
Mutton Sukka
Appam ( white steam cooked bowl shaped dosa)
and finally the dessert:
Dessert - Kulfi ( milk, saffron and honey)
The drinks where:
Golden Eagle draft beer
KingFisher bottle
Macallan whisky
1 meter coffee
and some really really nasty spicy fried peperoni…
For my records and also for you if you want to try indian food - you can find all the dishes at khanakhazana.com
Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part2
Sunday bloody relaxing Sunday… Sleeping with 30 degrees in the room is not so easy - at least for me. And the A/C is too loud to leave it running. But i survived the night and now I feel quite well.
The resort where we stay is quite small and kosy. On the website it looks like it is on the beach what is not true - it’s 150 meters to walk but ohh well.. this beach is not what you want to have for your holiday. From one horizon to the other horizon you have high waves, dirty water, cows, nasty dogs, fisher boats and some people nevertheless jumping around in the waves.
After one hour in the pool (when the water has 30+ degrees you can stay looong) we had a first snack (Chicken Masala and Chicken Curry). Did I mention that I love indian food ? I do! Oh man and I tell you it was hot…
People are incredibly friendly - everything is fine, no problem and smiling a lot even if they have no clue what you want from then. Let me give you an example.
Yesterday I witnessed a nice conversation which Iris (our personal care taker - yes here you get such a thing) had with the guy from the hotel:
Guy: Smiling. “you need to change room, A/C is not working”
Iris: “But I like this room. Can you fix it tomorrow then it will be ok for one night.”
Guy: Smiling. “yes sure”
Iris: “Promised?”
Guy: even more smiling. “yes”
Iris: “But tomorrow is sunday, will it then still be possible to fix?”
Guy: Smiling a lot. “yes yes no problem”
Iris: “Promised?”
Guy: Smiling. “no”
Iris: “So you won’t fix it tomorrow?”
Guy: Looking sad but smiling. “no”
… Incredible India
BTW Iris is an old friend of mine who helps european companies to outsource to india. She will find the right partner and furthermore trainsyou also about cultural differences - and there are tons of them.
The company she made contact to for us seems to be very professional. They even asked her (she is german) to come with us and take care about us instead of hiring some indian people. Quite impressive. For us this is very convinient as we do not have to care about anything. But hey - even if there would be something to care about - it would be “no problem…”
In the evening we went to a really nice restaurant called ‘Amethyst‘. Incredibly nice place, sitting in the middle of the jungle tough it’s in the center of the city. This place is frequented by the new middle class of india so there were not much tourists around - unfortunately this means that they don’t offer indian food instead we had italian food. So I enjoyed a tomato basil soup and some basil chicken which I considered ok but I had definitly better ones. But this is india taking this into account the food was quite good.
Interesting is that they also do not offer alcohol, it seems not to be accepted here. We went to buy a few bottles of beer and it turned out to be quite complex - you need to find a liquor store which is hidden somewhere, in the back of a large shopping mall. But we made it and so finally I enyoed one bottle of beer before going to bed. I did plan to watch the game (Italy-Spain in EM 2008) but I did not make it - felt to sleep at around 23:00 local time and had a really relaxed night.
So now I am ready for all the interesting things coming up tomorrow.
Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part1
As you might know (at least the ones who know me personally) I do work with outsourced IT since more then 10 years. During the .com bubble I’ve created a company in prague together with my friend Matthew. There we had around 20 developer working for us. Later Matthew decided to focus on XML and browser related tools so I decided to move on and landed in lithuania. There we do have now (together with Wolfgang) around 60 developers working for various clients including the ones I’ve cofounded like OXID eSales and for sure my latest project swoodoo - a really good and impressiv flight search engine. During these years I’ve also tried to work with indian companies.
The results where not so promising for two reasons:
- we were doing project business in a quite agile way so there was no clear project description from beginning, therefore the communication overhead was tremeandous.
- second the cultural differences really disturbed a lot. Nobody of us was ready to move to india so the project did not work out.
But this is nearly 10 years ago and now we do have different times - and different technologies. I don’t know if there are any other companies trying to get PHP skills in india - for me for sure it’s the first time. n’uff said let’s fly to india. Finding the cheapest flight was easy with swoodoo - no dumb advertising here, it really helped me a lot.
Long distance flights are not the most comfortable thing the world. Especially when you have to fly economy. But this is live
Lufthansa Flight FRA-MAA (Frankfurt-Chennai) was much better then expected. Nice On-Seat Entertainment with many good movies (I’ve always planned to watch ‘the bucket list’ but never managed), and really friendly personell. 10 hours later and 3.30 hours difference we arrived in Chennai.
Local time is around 0:00 and the temperature is still 30 degress plus. Customs was not a problem actually many things changed since I’ve visited India the last time. Still the people behave the same. The company we are visiting sent us a driver to pick as up at the airport and bring us to the hotel. After driving for 10 minutes he stopped and proudly presented his DVD Entertainment so we had the ‘pleasure’ to watch the brand new second part of Narnia while driving. A lof of talking and laughing follows and finally we continue the journey. After 10 more minutes we figure out that the driver is a really nice guy but he has no clue where he should bring us to. Funny thing as the transport was ordered. So he called his company and guess what? They also had no clue where we should go. Booting up the laptop, and checking the hotel reservation helped a bit, but just a bit - the driver had to call the hotel and ask for the directions. Nearly there he again lost track and quite interesting - he stopped and asked the police for the directions. Can you imagine a german taxi driver doing this? I can’t. Finally we arrived in the hotel - it’s 2 in the night, damn hot and no cold beer available (from what I could understand they don’t have a licence for alcohol.) What a pity. I need to sleep. Sunday we will have the day off to adopt. Monday then the work starts. I will keep you updated.
Tramitz - Wuiduarra
Just as a reminder for me - I searched for this video now the third time. It’s in german and more or less from my home area. Who can understand it ?