For some context on what sparked this, see this excellent post and discussion on Hacker News, (for those so inclined)
The reason I used to blog somewhat regularly is very simple - I found that I could take some half formed thought and flesh it out by writing about it. Sometimes this would result in something actually useful to people. Most often, I would just end up 'emptying my head' and think new thoughts.
And then something happened. I got an audience. And comments. And emails. And controversies, and flames.
All good, because I didn't (and don't) *mostly* care what people thought of anything I wrote (or what people think of me for that matter) . But there *is* a small element of reactivity and friction when you know persons X, Y and Z will be reading what you write.
"Hmm is this too harshly worded for friend X. After all he is a big Ruby fan and if I say Ruby is a particularly brain dead language, would this ruin his day?". And then I have to write stuff twice. First write down what I really want to write, and then go through it with and delete stuff or add more explanatory stuff and cautionary qualifiers and so forth.
I am not the only person facing this. People who are much better at writing than me apparently face this too.
Someone asked Paul Graham (he of the glowing essays fame) on Hacker News
"what's
it like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a
bunch of people? Esp. people that you end up having some form of contact
with.
It seems like it would be
difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think
about that much when you write?"
and PG replied to say
"It's pretty grim. I think that's one of the reasons I write fewer essays now.
After
I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything
I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in
comment threads. The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example. I
essentially anticipated all the "No, what I said was" type comments I'd
have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay."
If pg can't escape this fate, I sure can't.
but otoh I am less concerned than pg about whether someone mis-understands me etc because, I am (comparitively) not famous, and I am not writing essays just spewing out (comparitively) unpolished *blog posts*. I could deal with misunderstandings just fine.
What I found harder to deal with was -- Twitter.
Once I started tweeting regularly, I found I could just try to distill whatever I was thinking about and just tweet about it. 140 characters is pretty good as a constraint. And since I regularly purge my twitter following of idots and nutcases, I am fairly sure I can convey exactly what I want to, and most people following me would understand (and if not clarifications are just 1 < n < 3 * 140 character tweets away.
But as good as twitter is, 140 character tweets aren't as good as multi paragraph blog posts to *explore ideas* (vs expressing their seed forms concisely). My writing has suffered, though like riding a bicycle it should come back pretty fast, and then I'll go around improving it.
The goal of my writing remains the same. I write to explore thoughts and ideas and 'empty me head'. No more. No less.
One thing I am doing differently this time is to pay even less attention than usual to comments and reactions, and not bother clarifying what precise shade of meaning I intended to convey and so forth. This is just me writing a letter to a friend every other week or so. It just takes the form of a blog post other people can read.
And so here goes.
I'm back.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Monday, September 24, 2012
Renewal. Learning. Stuff
I haven't written anything here for more than a year.
That will now change.
I was too busy and twitter was interesting enough - 140 character limits are good training for conciseness - that I didn't miss blogging all that much.
But writing longer pieces have their own advantages, and I hope to write at least one entry a week for the next year or so.
Stay tuned.
PS: I hate the changes Google has brought to blogger. A change of platform is on the agenda. I just don't have the time right now.
That will now change.
I was too busy and twitter was interesting enough - 140 character limits are good training for conciseness - that I didn't miss blogging all that much.
But writing longer pieces have their own advantages, and I hope to write at least one entry a week for the next year or so.
Stay tuned.
PS: I hate the changes Google has brought to blogger. A change of platform is on the agenda. I just don't have the time right now.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
An unimportant person''s comment on Steve Jobs's death
Context: Everyone and his dog is hyperventilating on the internet about the death of Steve Jobs.
Here is my opinion (which like most opinions isn't worth very much, but hey this is my blog).
All men are mortal.
Steve Jobs was a man. (A great man, but still, a man.)
[Modus Ponens] Steve Jobs was mortal too.
Now he has died. The world endures. Life goes on.
Your (and my) time to depart will soon be here. The world will still endure. And life will still go on.
I read somewhere that the one regret most people have at the moment of death is about how they should have done X or Y instead of A or B.
Get back to work. Do X or Y instead of A or B. Die happy, when your time comes.
To the degree one admires Jobs, emulating his virtues in your life is a more fitting tribute than another silly comment about how he was as influential as Plato and Aristotle (an idiot actually said this on HN).
Update: on Stallman's comment on Steve Jobs' death. People have different ideas on whether a person's achievements were good or bad. This affects their judgement of whether a person's death was "good for the world" or not.
Stallman thinks that the end of Steve's influence on computing (note: he clearly distinguished it from Steve's death itself) is a good thing. And said as much.
I don't agree.
I think, for all his faults (and like you, me and every human who ever lived, he had some) Steve's influence was beneficial (overall) and I wish he'd lived longer.
But I also think it is ok for people (including Stallman) to express their opinions, even when I find them not in agreement with my own.
I look forward to the day when everyone (including me) will shut up about how other people should think exactly like everyone else.(or else we'll all get all self righteous and puffed up and hyperventilative).
And now I'll go back to coding. (Thank You for reading this far.You really should be doing something useful instead!)
Here is my opinion (which like most opinions isn't worth very much, but hey this is my blog).
All men are mortal.
Steve Jobs was a man. (A great man, but still, a man.)
[Modus Ponens] Steve Jobs was mortal too.
Now he has died. The world endures. Life goes on.
Your (and my) time to depart will soon be here. The world will still endure. And life will still go on.
I read somewhere that the one regret most people have at the moment of death is about how they should have done X or Y instead of A or B.
Get back to work. Do X or Y instead of A or B. Die happy, when your time comes.
To the degree one admires Jobs, emulating his virtues in your life is a more fitting tribute than another silly comment about how he was as influential as Plato and Aristotle (an idiot actually said this on HN).
Update: on Stallman's comment on Steve Jobs' death. People have different ideas on whether a person's achievements were good or bad. This affects their judgement of whether a person's death was "good for the world" or not.
Stallman thinks that the end of Steve's influence on computing (note: he clearly distinguished it from Steve's death itself) is a good thing. And said as much.
I don't agree.
I think, for all his faults (and like you, me and every human who ever lived, he had some) Steve's influence was beneficial (overall) and I wish he'd lived longer.
But I also think it is ok for people (including Stallman) to express their opinions, even when I find them not in agreement with my own.
I look forward to the day when everyone (including me) will shut up about how other people should think exactly like everyone else.(or else we'll all get all self righteous and puffed up and hyperventilative).
And now I'll go back to coding. (Thank You for reading this far.You really should be doing something useful instead!)
Monday, August 15, 2011
On Owning a Kindle
I was gifted a Kindle a month or so ago. I like it for what it does.
Should you buy one? If you are a book lover, one of those people who always have a book on hand, or reach for one when you have an hour to spare, you definitely should. If you read mostly technical or math books (which require a lot of flipping back and forth and good rendering of code or equations)or research papers, you won't get as much benefit as you ought to.
I am well satisfied with the Kindle for allowing me to lug around about 300 books (I still have almost 3 GB left) so I can read on the bus, while waiting for someone, etc. I would have loved it if I could read math books and papers (pdf rendering on the (small) kindle is terrible) and also scribble notes (the kindle "make notes" functionality is awkward and unusable) but e-ink based readers are still in their early days. For what it does (enable you to carry around a few hundred fiction books it is awesome. For example, I have all the 20 Aubrey Maturin books and the dozen or so Jim Butcher books in a 6 inch device. (E-Paper blows away IPad's screen for reading.)
If I'd received the Kindle before the release of George Martin's utterly terrible "A Dance With Dragons" (I should write a blog entry one of these days on how terrible it is - suffice to say that the man has lost his touch) I could have spent 11$ on a kindle version instead of 54 $ (18 for the book, the rest for postage to India). The Kindle shines for fiction and light non fiction books. And you can avoid paying for the kindle editions by downloading "pirated" versions if you know where to look. I suspect it would work well for magazine subscriptions too ( at least for those in which the written word is more important than glossy pictures).
Somewhat tangentially, someone should write a piece of software that works like LaTex for math but generates flowable text. Tex is (print) page oriented.If you could just take a LaTex file and generate a kindle readable document out of it,I suspect a lot of math/tech papers would find their way on to e-readers very fast.
After having used the kindle for a while I am not surprised that Amazon sells more e-books now than paper books. I suspect the Kindle is a very potent weapon in Amazon's arsenal, that its competitors underestimate. If they make it work in the Indian context, (Amazon plans to launch in India in 2012 - I have no idea how much of a role they plan for the Kindle here), their competitors will get swatted aside like so many flies. (Hmmm I should write a post on how I see the Amazon-Flipkart battle shaping up in India. Interesting times we live in).
Meanwhile, if you are a reader and can afford to buy a Kindle, you should. It (or something like it) is the future of reading.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Two Roads Diverge - Machine Learning or IOS Dev?
Now that my latest project (for those interested in such things - 30 k lines of Haskell, 200 k lines of (mostly legacy) C/C++ code, a few thousand lines of Lua, signal processing, some NLP ish things) is "done done"[1] I have to choose [2] a new project.
Choosing a new project is always an exciting time, but also a mildly stressful one. For every choice made, a half dozen equally worthy alternatives have to be rejected. And I do a lot of agonizing over what is the 'right' project to take up.
One way to maintain a sense of continuity among projects is to examine what could have been done better on the finished project and see if you can build a project around fixing those deficiencies.
Working on the last project exposed some flaws in my dev chops - I know nothing about Network Programming and this caused me to take longer than usual to fix a few nasty bugs that cropped up. So I'd like to take a couple of months off and work through Stevens's books and close this gap and then build some customized network monitoring tools which I could have used when my hair was on fire. Our visualization and rendering subsystem used an Open Source renderer that fell down on large datasets. NLP algorithms in Haskell had to be painfully built one by one. The Computer Vision library we used (Open CV) is a friggin mess that needs serious surgery. And so on. Doing all that would multiply the existing codebase's power by a factor of 10. And also make good building blocks for new projects.
And many ML projects have the strange property that completing them successfully opens up even more ambitious projects. The folks who sponsored the last project want me to do more stuff for them.
Another way to choose a new project to work on is to find great people you'd like to work with and build a project around what they are doing or are interested in. My stubborn refusal to move to the USA somewhat limits my choice in this regard - Not many people or companies in Bangalore are doing anything interesting in Machine Learning. But otoh a few people have bounced really (really really) interesting IOS projects (and start up plans) to me. On the one hand, this means I have to go over to the Dark Side and sell my soul to the evil but competent folks at Apple and learn Objective C and overpay for a MacBook and the annually renewed right to put software I write on hardware I already paid for and so on. Being a storm trooper for Darth Steve is a proposition that requires some thought. But on the other hand, I would be working with ultra competent devs again (Working alone, or as the only dev on a team is the only negative - and it is a small one - in my 'lifestyle'. Fixing that would rock).
A third choice - I actually thought of sitting down and writing a book, just for a change of pace. I have a few ideas for some tech books I think are missing from thes shelves and every dev I pitched reacted with a variant of "I'd buy that RIGHT now - please please write it". What stops me is that people who have written successful tech books say that it is a pretty thankless task, and with some exceptions, financially unrewarding (though your "prestige" goes up- something I don't care a rat's ass about). If I had to choose between spending a thousand hours writing a book and a thousand hours writing code, it is somewhat hard to choose the former.
Hence the "two roads diverge" tone that permeates my thoughts. I could dive deeper into Machine Learning(and allied areas) or go do mobile app stuff. Choosing promises to be interesting.
Two Roads Diverge and all that jazz[3]
But first, before I have to make a choice, clear the backlog of people to meet (I thank you all for your patience and suffering my erratic schedules), places to visit, things to do. (Metaphorically) lie on a beach somewhere with no computers in sight. Relax, refresh. Then decide.
[1] Most projects have an official "done " date and then a later "done done" date. In this case the project was 'done' some time ago and then a rookie dev wiped out the source control repo while simultaneously trying to alter the Haskell code (vs writing a minor script in Lua, which is what the situation called for), bringing the whole cluster down, causing the (non dev) owners of the project to send an SOS to me to get on a plane pronto and put out the fire.
Some fences have been built to avoid this kind of FUBAR situation from happening again so now I am "done done"
[2] One significant milestone in one's evolution as a developer is when you realize that you have more ideas than you can implement in your lifetime. You are even luckier when people pay you to implement them (vs being assigned to some Godawful Leasing System dev in some enterprise dev body shop say)
[3] - From Frost's poem, of course
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
...................................
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Choosing a new project is always an exciting time, but also a mildly stressful one. For every choice made, a half dozen equally worthy alternatives have to be rejected. And I do a lot of agonizing over what is the 'right' project to take up.
One way to maintain a sense of continuity among projects is to examine what could have been done better on the finished project and see if you can build a project around fixing those deficiencies.
Working on the last project exposed some flaws in my dev chops - I know nothing about Network Programming and this caused me to take longer than usual to fix a few nasty bugs that cropped up. So I'd like to take a couple of months off and work through Stevens's books and close this gap and then build some customized network monitoring tools which I could have used when my hair was on fire. Our visualization and rendering subsystem used an Open Source renderer that fell down on large datasets. NLP algorithms in Haskell had to be painfully built one by one. The Computer Vision library we used (Open CV) is a friggin mess that needs serious surgery. And so on. Doing all that would multiply the existing codebase's power by a factor of 10. And also make good building blocks for new projects.
And many ML projects have the strange property that completing them successfully opens up even more ambitious projects. The folks who sponsored the last project want me to do more stuff for them.
Another way to choose a new project to work on is to find great people you'd like to work with and build a project around what they are doing or are interested in. My stubborn refusal to move to the USA somewhat limits my choice in this regard - Not many people or companies in Bangalore are doing anything interesting in Machine Learning. But otoh a few people have bounced really (really really) interesting IOS projects (and start up plans) to me. On the one hand, this means I have to go over to the Dark Side and sell my soul to the evil but competent folks at Apple and learn Objective C and overpay for a MacBook and the annually renewed right to put software I write on hardware I already paid for and so on. Being a storm trooper for Darth Steve is a proposition that requires some thought. But on the other hand, I would be working with ultra competent devs again (Working alone, or as the only dev on a team is the only negative - and it is a small one - in my 'lifestyle'. Fixing that would rock).
A third choice - I actually thought of sitting down and writing a book, just for a change of pace. I have a few ideas for some tech books I think are missing from thes shelves and every dev I pitched reacted with a variant of "I'd buy that RIGHT now - please please write it". What stops me is that people who have written successful tech books say that it is a pretty thankless task, and with some exceptions, financially unrewarding (though your "prestige" goes up- something I don't care a rat's ass about). If I had to choose between spending a thousand hours writing a book and a thousand hours writing code, it is somewhat hard to choose the former.
Hence the "two roads diverge" tone that permeates my thoughts. I could dive deeper into Machine Learning(and allied areas) or go do mobile app stuff. Choosing promises to be interesting.
Two Roads Diverge and all that jazz[3]
But first, before I have to make a choice, clear the backlog of people to meet (I thank you all for your patience and suffering my erratic schedules), places to visit, things to do. (Metaphorically) lie on a beach somewhere with no computers in sight. Relax, refresh. Then decide.
[1] Most projects have an official "done " date and then a later "done done" date. In this case the project was 'done' some time ago and then a rookie dev wiped out the source control repo while simultaneously trying to alter the Haskell code (vs writing a minor script in Lua, which is what the situation called for), bringing the whole cluster down, causing the (non dev) owners of the project to send an SOS to me to get on a plane pronto and put out the fire.
Some fences have been built to avoid this kind of FUBAR situation from happening again so now I am "done done"
[2] One significant milestone in one's evolution as a developer is when you realize that you have more ideas than you can implement in your lifetime. You are even luckier when people pay you to implement them (vs being assigned to some Godawful Leasing System dev in some enterprise dev body shop say)
[3] - From Frost's poem, of course
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
...................................
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
"Civil-Society Hacker" barcamp at Google Gurgaon
Without extra comment, an email I received. If you are interested in this kind of thing and/or live near Gurgaon, maybe you should take a look.
From:
"Laina Emmanuel" < lemmanuel@accountabilityindia.org >
Dear Ravi,
I came across your blog while looking for hackers in India. I am looking for civil-society hackers who would like to use their programming skills to develop innovative solutions for governance. To facilitate a conversation between programmers and policy-makers, I am organizing (if it can be called organizing) a bar-camp at the Google Campus in Gurgaon, on "Technology, Transparency and Accountability" on the 5th of June.
This bar-camp is being held by Accountability Initiative. Founded in 2008, Accountability Initiative is a research initiative that aims to improve the quality of public services in India by promoting informed and accountable governance. To this end, one of AI's key efforts is to develop innovative models for tracking government led social sector programs in India. The Centre for Policy Research, an independent and non-partisan research institute and think-tank, is the institutional anchor for this initiative.
We have a wide variety of participants for the bar-camp ranging from policy-makers to technology-enthusiasts. We would be honored if you could also join us at this bar-camp and help show how hackers can contribute to governance. Also, we would really appreciate it if you could forward this invitation to others who would be interested.
Thanks and regards
Laina Emmanuel
I have no affiliation with any of the organizations mentioned in the email. Write to Laina for details.
From:
"Laina Emmanuel" < lemmanuel@accountabilityindia.org >
Dear Ravi,
I came across your blog while looking for hackers in India. I am looking for civil-society hackers who would like to use their programming skills to develop innovative solutions for governance. To facilitate a conversation between programmers and policy-makers, I am organizing (if it can be called organizing) a bar-camp at the Google Campus in Gurgaon, on "Technology, Transparency and Accountability" on the 5th of June.
This bar-camp is being held by Accountability Initiative. Founded in 2008, Accountability Initiative is a research initiative that aims to improve the quality of public services in India by promoting informed and accountable governance. To this end, one of AI's key efforts is to develop innovative models for tracking government led social sector programs in India. The Centre for Policy Research, an independent and non-partisan research institute and think-tank, is the institutional anchor for this initiative.
We have a wide variety of participants for the bar-camp ranging from policy-makers to technology-enthusiasts. We would be honored if you could also join us at this bar-camp and help show how hackers can contribute to governance. Also, we would really appreciate it if you could forward this invitation to others who would be interested.
Thanks and regards
Laina Emmanuel
I have no affiliation with any of the organizations mentioned in the email. Write to Laina for details.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Why startups in India find it hard to hire devs
Mayank Sharma wrote an interesting blog post about hiring difficulties for startups in India. He says the reasons are
(1) The very good devs can work for multinationals (Google,Microsoft etc) and local startups can't match the compensation.
(2) Indian services companies have lock in contracts
(3) No real history of non founders making lots of money from a startup
(4) Those who do want to work for startups have "unreasonable expectations" (quotes mine, not his)
Manoj Govindan (who works for (startup) Perfios - due disclosure - I reccomended him to Perfios - guilty as charged! :-) ) responded with four reasons why these startups don't hold any allure for good devs
(1) very few Indian startups offer significant equity to early hires.
(2) Many Indian startups give employees little say in strategic decision making. In the end, you are still a "coding body".
(3) Signal/Noise ratio - too many "social this" "cloud that" clone startups out there than innovative ones. Noise attracts noise.
(4) "Very good guys" like to make own technical decisions. Here they find them already made and locked in before they join. Often tech stacks are in place even before people actually decide what to do.
I have some sympathy for both view points. Is the question such a complicated one though?
There is a simpler explanation. All the points above can be subsumed under "Whenever there is a demand and supply gap, and some kind of free market mediating the two, prices rise". That is it.
Good devs, those with the combination of tech chops, communication skills, attitude and *ambition* (iow the exact type you want for your startup) are a scarce resource generally and particularly so in today's market. Demand is very high (this fluctuates) and supply is very low (this is constant). In such a scenario, the price varies from very high to high. Right now it is very high. And that is it.
You just can't buy gold for peanuts (speaking metaphorically. In reality you can trade a few truckloads for some gold). I can't. You can't. It is a value neutral statement - just the way the market works. You can sometimes marginally route around the Iron Law of supply and demand - Zoho trains people who wouldn't be considered for normal dev jobs for e.g - in effect, creating their own supply - but you can't escape it.
Even then, the argument goes, the "price" for good devs isn't necessarily all about money. True enough.
Look at how Silicon Valley's startups (or even more narrowly, YC funded companies) hire good devs - If you can't match (or exceed) market price in terms of compensation you need to make it up with (a) significant equity and/or (b) advanced tech and/or (c) a compelling business model with some traction and/or (d) a "change the world" product (think SpaceX) or (e) credible, proven founders. This is true *everywhere*, not just in the valley, though details and leeway differ. If you are a company trying to hire the very best developers, you have to pay the price somehow.
The typical Indian "lean startup" fails on all counts - it is often doing some whacky buzzword heavy, content lite, mobile/social mini app, works on PHP and MySQL, has no money (and so offers bare minimum salaries), is often run by clueless MBA/undistinguished engineer types and will give a prospective employee 1% equity in a doomed product for an endless 18 hour working day.
Why the hell would anyone half way technically good want to work with such outfits?
Devs are sometimes economically stupid but they aren't *that* stupid.
If they want to do interesting tech stuff they can go work for Google (Mountain View, not Bangalore!), start their own "great tech" companies, work on Open Source projects, work from home for US based startups doing interesting things or wait for Indian startups with cutting edge tech to proliferate, meanwhile drawing a steady salary and honing their skills.
If you must stay in Bangalore, but want great tech and a small company, go work for Gluster. All the tech and Open Source you want. Or apply to Tachyon. Or Notion Ink. There are a *lot* of companies attempting technically interesting things in Bangalore these days. And there is space for many many more, if you have founder dreams.
If you want to do services web dev, and work with small teams of bright people in a great office atmosphere, they should go work for someone like C42. Good company I vouch for.
If you just want to get out of that crappy enterprise services bodyshop, but don't want to get stressed about whether your children will starve, *and* want to do something "like a startup, but stable",go work for (a) someone with traction and funding, but aren't quite a startup any more (say SlideShare or Inmobi or Flipkart) (b) work with one of the many offshore centres of product companies, who have plenty of money. (say Intuit,or Zynga).
If you choose to be an employee (and it is an honourable choice), always make sure you are getting what you are worth - be that in terms of money, equity or technical challenge or whatever your individual preference is. This is just plain common sense.
If you want to be entrepreneurial and don't mind the stress, be a (co)founder, not an employee. That way you can still work on the latest social/mobile ripoff idea in PHP (or the blue sky idea in your own custom language!) and scrounge around for money, but you'll be in control of your destiny and won't have to factor in crazy bosses. ;-)
Nutshell : The law of demand and supply explains all phenomena in a free market. If you are any good at programming, you have more options now than you ever did. If you want to hire such people, create a compelling value proposition. If you aren't getting enough applications from qualified devs your "offer" isn't good enough.
The End.
EDIT: someone asked about good startups in Pune. The only Pune based startup I know of is Infinitely Beta (who have no problems recruiting afaik). But I am no expert on Indian startups.Do your research!
EDIT 2: I dashed this off while waiting for a build to complete. Apologies in advance for any typos/flaws.
(1) The very good devs can work for multinationals (Google,Microsoft etc) and local startups can't match the compensation.
(2) Indian services companies have lock in contracts
(3) No real history of non founders making lots of money from a startup
(4) Those who do want to work for startups have "unreasonable expectations" (quotes mine, not his)
Manoj Govindan (who works for (startup) Perfios - due disclosure - I reccomended him to Perfios - guilty as charged! :-) ) responded with four reasons why these startups don't hold any allure for good devs
(1) very few Indian startups offer significant equity to early hires.
(2) Many Indian startups give employees little say in strategic decision making. In the end, you are still a "coding body".
(3) Signal/Noise ratio - too many "social this" "cloud that" clone startups out there than innovative ones. Noise attracts noise.
(4) "Very good guys" like to make own technical decisions. Here they find them already made and locked in before they join. Often tech stacks are in place even before people actually decide what to do.
I have some sympathy for both view points. Is the question such a complicated one though?
There is a simpler explanation. All the points above can be subsumed under "Whenever there is a demand and supply gap, and some kind of free market mediating the two, prices rise". That is it.
Good devs, those with the combination of tech chops, communication skills, attitude and *ambition* (iow the exact type you want for your startup) are a scarce resource generally and particularly so in today's market. Demand is very high (this fluctuates) and supply is very low (this is constant). In such a scenario, the price varies from very high to high. Right now it is very high. And that is it.
You just can't buy gold for peanuts (speaking metaphorically. In reality you can trade a few truckloads for some gold). I can't. You can't. It is a value neutral statement - just the way the market works. You can sometimes marginally route around the Iron Law of supply and demand - Zoho trains people who wouldn't be considered for normal dev jobs for e.g - in effect, creating their own supply - but you can't escape it.
Even then, the argument goes, the "price" for good devs isn't necessarily all about money. True enough.
Look at how Silicon Valley's startups (or even more narrowly, YC funded companies) hire good devs - If you can't match (or exceed) market price in terms of compensation you need to make it up with (a) significant equity and/or (b) advanced tech and/or (c) a compelling business model with some traction and/or (d) a "change the world" product (think SpaceX) or (e) credible, proven founders. This is true *everywhere*, not just in the valley, though details and leeway differ. If you are a company trying to hire the very best developers, you have to pay the price somehow.
The typical Indian "lean startup" fails on all counts - it is often doing some whacky buzzword heavy, content lite, mobile/social mini app, works on PHP and MySQL, has no money (and so offers bare minimum salaries), is often run by clueless MBA/undistinguished engineer types and will give a prospective employee 1% equity in a doomed product for an endless 18 hour working day.
Why the hell would anyone half way technically good want to work with such outfits?
Devs are sometimes economically stupid but they aren't *that* stupid.
If they want to do interesting tech stuff they can go work for Google (Mountain View, not Bangalore!), start their own "great tech" companies, work on Open Source projects, work from home for US based startups doing interesting things or wait for Indian startups with cutting edge tech to proliferate, meanwhile drawing a steady salary and honing their skills.
If you must stay in Bangalore, but want great tech and a small company, go work for Gluster. All the tech and Open Source you want. Or apply to Tachyon. Or Notion Ink. There are a *lot* of companies attempting technically interesting things in Bangalore these days. And there is space for many many more, if you have founder dreams.
If you want to do services web dev, and work with small teams of bright people in a great office atmosphere, they should go work for someone like C42. Good company I vouch for.
If you just want to get out of that crappy enterprise services bodyshop, but don't want to get stressed about whether your children will starve, *and* want to do something "like a startup, but stable",go work for (a) someone with traction and funding, but aren't quite a startup any more (say SlideShare or Inmobi or Flipkart) (b) work with one of the many offshore centres of product companies, who have plenty of money. (say Intuit,or Zynga).
If you choose to be an employee (and it is an honourable choice), always make sure you are getting what you are worth - be that in terms of money, equity or technical challenge or whatever your individual preference is. This is just plain common sense.
If you want to be entrepreneurial and don't mind the stress, be a (co)founder, not an employee. That way you can still work on the latest social/mobile ripoff idea in PHP (or the blue sky idea in your own custom language!) and scrounge around for money, but you'll be in control of your destiny and won't have to factor in crazy bosses. ;-)
Nutshell : The law of demand and supply explains all phenomena in a free market. If you are any good at programming, you have more options now than you ever did. If you want to hire such people, create a compelling value proposition. If you aren't getting enough applications from qualified devs your "offer" isn't good enough.
The End.
EDIT: someone asked about good startups in Pune. The only Pune based startup I know of is Infinitely Beta (who have no problems recruiting afaik). But I am no expert on Indian startups.Do your research!
EDIT 2: I dashed this off while waiting for a build to complete. Apologies in advance for any typos/flaws.
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