Waqas Sadiq

I had an invitation to attend the Cuban Jazz   Band’s concert at Radio Pakistan, Islamabad. But till evening I wasn’t sure that I would go. But the appeal of the Jazz music forced me to attend the concert. I went to the concert straight from the office. I wasn’t expecting much crowd there because it’s not the popular genre of the music here in Pakistan or in other words it’s not for everyone just like Gazal.
  

I have been in software industry of Pakistan for more than eight years now.  I have the experience of working with many people and companies.  Today my focus is on HR system in these organizations. My Experience and analysis is not only based on the companies I have worked in but also the companies whom I know personally due to some interaction and also there are some companies whom I know with the reference of my colleagues.


My focus of discussion would be software companies, HR departments and software developers.
Mostly HR people have no direction for their job and other people in company also remain confuse regarding their role in the company. Normally their job is to posts job on job portals; send the received CVs to technical people for analysis and then arranging an interview. After that sending a offer letter based on interview.


Other than that they have no focus on employees, their job related issue, issue with management, interaction with team, identifying behaviors of individuals, employees skill development policies and judging the relationship b/w teams, two employees, relationship of manager and team member etc.

HR people are supposed to come to conclusions to such problems within the organization and take actions. But unfortunately as they are not trained to do any of such thing, they talk what they are told be senior management and are blind of facts most of time. They just know English and calling and arranging interviews.
Some HR people in a few companies have developed a systematic approach to handle the employees issue within team, with managers and with the company by introducing some senior people (sharing some of HR responsibilities) from that department. So that employee can frankly talk about their issues. On papers it’s a good effort and must be appreciated, but in my experience it’s has no significant role but letting oneself being the target. It hurts the person who follows it and the end result is worse than to just moving to another company silently. The seniors make sure you are learn your lesson well and off course HR people are there to help and obey seniors.

One other area which is neglected by HR department is dress code.  Most women are fashion symbol and dress to party while men are just opposite. Majority of men dress up very casually and they are not presentable and can’t attend any format meeting. Means both approaches are wrong. Office should look like an office. Banks are good example for maintaining the dress code.

Nobody wants to pay and appreciate the software developer but wants him to work like a donkey 24 hours a day.  In software companies, software developers have longest working hours and HR people have shortest.  There is always question for coming late but no appreciation for going late. The extra hours invested by the software developer are not paid and are not appreciated and also forced to do so. It hurts software developers personal, social and work life, which eventually affect the company but here people are not mature enough to understand it. That’s why software engineering career is on decline in Pakistan.

One last thing, there is no solution for abusive management like owner, CEO etc. HR people who can’t handle mid level managers, it’s beyond their ability.  The feudal psyche that the person who works for me is my slave is not changed yet in Pakistani owners, CEOs etc. And it doesn’t seem to go away very soon.  This point may or may not be part of HR debarment. But it surely is related to human resources of the company.

Feel free to share your experience and point of view with me.

Hi,

Recently there are lots of blogger users who are complaining about disappearing of their pages from their Blogger blog. Same was the case with me.

Because of recent changes in Blogger, once anyone goes to dashboard and saves it's changes in layout, pages start to disappear.

Solution to this issue is simple.

1. Go to dashboard.
2. Click on Pages on right hand side panel
3. There would be a drop down selection box with caption "Don't show, Now select either "Top Tab" or "Side Links". 
4. Click on "Save Arrangement"
5. Visit your blog, you would be able to see the pages (There would be a possibility that pages wouldn't show on the same place as before disappearing).
6. Go to dashboard and click on "Layout" on right panel
7. Drag Drop your pages widget to place where you want it to be
8. Enjoy Blogger's blog with pages :)

I'll start by saying that I'm not a massive GWT fan, but yes there are many who are. That’s why I come up with some solutions to some common problems associated with GWT.

Problem: Long compile times, as your project grows so does the amount of time it takes to compile it. I've heard of reports of 20 minute compiles, but mine are on average about 1 minute.

Solution: Split your code into separate modules, and tell ant to only build it when it's changed. Also while developing, you can massively speed up compile times by only building for one browser. You can do this by putting this into your .gwt.xml file:

<set-property name="user.agent" value="gecko1_8" />

Where gecko1_8 is Firefox 2+, ie6 is IE, etc.

Problem: Hosted mode is very slow (on OS X at least) and does not come close to matching the 'live' changes you get when you edit things like JSPs or Rails pages and hit refresh in your browser.

Solution: You can give the hosted mode more memory (I generally got for 512M) but it's still slow, I've found once you get good enough with GWT you stop using this. You make a large chunk of changes, then compile for just one browser (generally 20s worth of compile) and then just hit refresh in your browser.

Update: With GWT 2.0+ this is no longer an issue, because you use the new 'Development Mode'. It basically means you can run code directly in your browser of choice, so no loss of speed, plus you can firebug/inspect it, etc.

http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/wiki/UsingOOPHM

Problem: GWT code is java, and has a different mentality to laying out a HTML page, which makes taking a HTML design and turning it into GWT harder

Solution: Again you get used to this, but unfortunately converting a HTML design to a GWT design is always going to be slower than doing something like converting a HTML design to a JSP page.

Problem: GWT takes a bit of getting your head around, and is not yet mainstream. Meaning that most developers that join your team or maintain your code will have to learn it from scratch

Solution: It remains to be seen if GWT will take off, but if you're a company in control of who you hire, then you can always choose people that either know GWT or want to learn it.

Problem: GWT is a sledgehammer compared to something like jquery or just plain javascript. It takes a lot more setup to get it happening than just including a JS file.

Solution: Use libraries like jquery for smaller, simple tasks that are suited to those. Use GWT when you want to build something truly complex in AJAX, or where you need to pass your data back and forth via the RPC mechanism.

Problem: Sometimes in order to populate your GWT page, you need to make a server call when the page first loads. It can be annoying for the user to sit there and watch a loading symbol while you fetch the data you need.

Solution: In the case of a JSP page, your page was already rendered by the server before becoming HTML, so you can actually make all your GWT calls then, and pre-load them onto the page, for an instant load. See here for details: