Where trilogy went wrong ...........
or may be i am just getting dumb?
or may be both. But this is my blog.
My internship at kosmix is going good. Kosmix is a company that has left the shell of startup and the chicken is out in the real world and trying to improve its footprint and growing strongly. Every day or week i see policy formulations , setting up of processes for communication, for vacation/sick leaves etc. I see many similarities between Kosmix and Trilogy but at the same time i see there are crucial differences. Somethings that i had felt right at trilogy but now i feel different. Mind you, Trilogy despite all this had very good points and still is one of the good companies to work for, atleast in India, besides they pay quite well.
And also before i begin, i am not going to highlight the trivial points like lack of communication, change in strategy to outsourcing etc. Those were the reasons but i am talking about where the practices went wrong.
1. During the training phase, we were told to stay away from patent website and not to browse patents files elsewhere. This is plain BS and i hate this to the core. The objective of browsing patent is to learn from other's inventions and share information. That is how information evolves and improves.
2. Career advisor: Every employee is assigned a career advisor who is responsible for that employee's career. Career advisor is the person whom you can talk to if you do not like your work, do not agree with your manager or anything that you are not willing to share freely in open. In the end, during evaluations, your career advisor is the one responsible for advocating on your behalf and depending on his appraisal, a person gets promoted etc. On the surface, it looks like a brilliant idea and gives employees another channel to vent themselves in an appropriate manner. I also thought like it when i was in trilogy. There were some problems like your performance evaluation depended on how good an orator your career adviser is and other things but no system is perfect. But i am not questioning this here. I am questioning the whole idea behind this. What this does is that people generally are not open to others on how they feel. It creates an environment where people speak behind other's backs. People do not trust each other, the team spirit is gone and work is affected considerably. I saw this and it happened. People used to talk about their managers behind their backs but never confronted the actual problem. It is against the practice of transparency. The open culture which Trilogy boasts about so much (and which is quite true to some extent ) is compromised due to this thing.
3. Non-transparent evaluations : On a personal note, i love horizontally structured companies but i acknowledge that when a company grows there is a need of some structure. The bands or levels in trilogy were a decent concept but the thing that reeked was that the evaluation was not transparent. They were done in a small room where the participants may have no idea on what you did or why you did what you did.
4. Trilogy is more like a Indian cricket or IPL to be precise. As Kumble cleverly says "Indian players need help to handle fame", it holds true for Trilogy as well. May be i am saying more than my stature but i think it is true. When trilogy entered indian markets in 2000, they offered salaries around 20L which was unheard off. 6 years later they were doubled and senior people were the top managers making the decisions of the company. Some people from that group were geniuses and they made some classic decisions but not all and the fame, the position was not matched to their capacity to handle it.
5. Trilogy had an high attrition rate and they did nothing to stop it. When asked they had no answer and were ok with it. This pained me the most as the company which boasts that its people are its biggest asset, does nothing to stop it, there is something seriously wrong somewhere. Microsoft ant Google also have huge number of attritions but look at their hiring spree and look at their size. But in a company of size 400, if 100+ leave in a year, you are obviously making some mistake.
One of my colleagues once remarked to me : The decision of Trilogy to move to India had back fired as we were not as capable as they thought we were and due to which things are getting worse. This is the reason why they are moving to outsourcing also.
Interesting, I was not the only one who realized the above mistakes, there were others too.
[Update] Thanks to Ankur for pointing it to me. I dont know how many ( but definitely Ankur), has setup alerts on blog search where they are notified whenever Kosmix is mentioned in any blog post. I did not knew about it. And that's how ankur came to know about this post and this blog. Two things go in my mind:
(a) I am impressed by this idea - to track yourself and see who all is talking about you.
(b) Now i would be careful while blogging about you-know-who in future :)) LOL
3 comments:
Having stayed in Trilogy more than an average trilogian, I would like to give my comments on this.
1. Patents:
a.Domain: I feel patent is a work of a lawyer rather than an engineer. I mean, a lawyer is more important in getting a patent rather than an engineer. The entire patent is in the vocabulary of a lawyer and not of an engineer. By reading more patents, one will understand more of legal aspects, interpretation, differences in very similar things, and writing the same thing in different way etc. I don't think one can learn that many technical details by reading a patent.
b.Usefullness: 99.99% of the patents are absolutely useless for software engineers. But, they are useful for lawyers, and top management for suing other companies. These lawyers file all the useless patents, very obvious things, and requirements. I never understood how can somebody file a patent for a requirement. For example, double click is patented. Ideally, you cannot develop an application which uses double click unless you pay royalty to the patent holder. Single click checkout is patented. You cannot design a system where someone can checkout with a single click. [Recently, patent for single click checkout was taken back because of few very big players.] The useless patent officers in US gives patents for each and every useless thing, and now most of the patents are useless only. Even if there is someone who files an important technical patent, at the end, the patent will contain very abstract technical details, and a technical person will not get anything out of it.
c.Legal (and the most important): Most of the lawsuites are because of patent violation only. If company A proves that company B violated it's patents, then they will have to pay some penalty. If company A proves that, company B violated it knowingly, then they will get three times more penalty. Knowing a patent has very broad definition. If the patent document is there in any of the machines of company B, or any of the machines of the employees of company B (including personal machines), or if there is any log that one of the employees of company B visited the corresponding patent doc, or if company B or any of its employees have a printed/written doc of this patent, it means Company B is aware of this patent. If it is aware of this patent, then it has to pay three times more penalty. That's why all the companies tell their employees to do not visit patent website, and do not read any patents of other companies.
For your information, trilogy sued few companies, and it was sued by few others in patent violations.
2. Career Advisor:
Trilogy as a company was always open to hear everything including all criticisms. Most of the managers, and all directors were ready to discuss everything openly. Once, I directly talked to CEO about few things that I did not like, and he solved the problems in no time. It may be a problem with the people who were not ready to tell the problems openly to their managers.
Probably, we can discuss more over email.
3. Non-transparent evaluations:
Initially (till 2004 or so), it was non-transparent evaluation. But, after that, it became very transparent. Probably, they did not explain the process of the evaluation.
Depending upon your project feedback form, they will prepare one slide (Yes. Exactly one slide, and not too much info in that). Few Career Advisors share the slide with the employee, and few others do not. Based on the project feedback form, they will decide on one of the exceeds, meets, and below. If the employee gets two consecutive exceeds, they may also recommend for promotion. They take the main points from the project feedback form, and puts it in the slide. In the evaluation meeting, they will tell that, this person has done this and this, so he/she should get this. If there is any objection from any other CAs, they will raise the point, and after some discussion, they will conclude with one decision. As you said in your second point, it mainly depends upon the communication skills of the career advisor more than anything else. If the Career Advisor has good communication skills, then whatever he recommends will be final.
5. Probably, they may not want that many employees. If their business decision is to reduce the team size, then whatever they are doing is correct. An employees do not have right to question the vision of the company. The vision of the company is decided by the board members, and whatever they decide is final, and we don't have any right to question that.
Trilogy says, its people are biggest asset to them. But, if you do not go with them in their direction, then they will not like it, and in that case, if you leave the company, they will not mind. It still cares all the people who are ready to help in the vision of Trilogy. It is just that, people who left the company are not ready to go with the company in their direction.
@satish
Thanks for stopping by and reading my eccentricities.
I respect your comments but still believe that my points are correct as well.
Initially, i wanted to debate you, but then i realized that your view points are also correct in your place and mine too are in my place.
There is no harm in writing what i feel particularly when it is my blog :)
I don't say that, trilogy does not have any bad points at all. The same problems are almost everywhere. I hear almost the same problems from my friends from other companies. Probably, I know most of the points that you intend to debate. But, those problems are there in most of the companies. That's why I stopped bothering about those.
By the way, if you want to debate on patents, I am more than happy to debate.
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