Saturday, December 18, 2004

Indian IT industry growth, in numbers!

From the following BBC article, these numbers caught my fancy:

BBC NEWS | Business | Earning IT money the Indian way:

1991: 56,000
1997: 160,000
2000: 284,000
2003: 650,000

These numbers (source: Nascom) shows the rapid explosion of IT industry as a major field of employment in India. I still remember the hype of H1B jobs and over-night recruitment agencies who would base themselves in a plush hotel and interview hundreds of candidates over a weekend - most of them were pure body-shopping brockers who would get someone from India to some place in the USA and score their recruitment fee of USD $10,000 or more with an average cost of 2500 per head.

Before 2000, everything to do with IT was always outside India. There were raving discussions about how someone I knew or someone I used to share a room with is earning thousands of rupees per hour and driving Honda and enjoying skiing!

These figures shows how it has changed. There's still a healthy compitition between candidates to find a job outside India, as they could really use some time out, saving some money, but more so, enjoying a different (mostly very comfortable) life style too. However, with about 15 time more chances of finding a decent role and a more than enough salary in India itself, I am the IT-gold-run-to-west is losing its charm.

Good news for anyone who left India anyway - For someone like me, who have lost everything that used to close to heart (food, culture, friends), there is hope to come back and integrate to the new India once again! Absolutely brilliant!!

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Google Suggest Dissected!

Chris Justus - Server Side Guy: Google Suggest Dissected...

A decent explanation of how GoogleSuggest works, by Chris Justus, who calls himself the 'serverside guy'!

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

A pavement stall from India?


A pavement stall from India?
Originally uploaded by chunangadan.
Can you guess where I took this snap? Nope, not India, but this is from Grafton st, Dublin, Ireland!
Google Suggest

I am sure you have already tried out Google's new beta tool, Google Suggest and if you were a programmer or someone who knows how computer stuff works, must have been wondering how on earth they bring back search results from the server that quick - its absolutely real time and there's almost no delay between a keydown and populating the list with possible search strings!

Searching over the web to find Google's technology behind GoogleSuggest, I came across this weblog, which explains how they are doing it - now I know they use XMLHttpRequest calls to their server and bringing back the responses at lightening speed (and of course, display them in a div using some usual DOM manipulation)

LiveSearch - Bitflux Blog Wiki

I must look into this, sounds very very promising!

Friday, December 03, 2004

Destination Brussels

Preparations are on for the trip to Brussels, Belgium. Its a shame I have more than a weeks work crammed into my three day business visit, and I am pretty certain all of Brussels that I would get to see would be neon lights on a frozen mornings and evenings through the frozen window of a cab (almost always around zero degree Celsius)!

Well, I am back for Christmas, and I can drown all my sorrows, and then I will have nothing to complain about! :)