Weird/immoral companies – Part I

1. I had mentioned earlier (in one of my posts below) that I am going to write about a CFD company that gave me a bad deal.

The name of the company is: Zeus Numerix. Essentially, what they did was to promise to pay me money verbally. (The promise came from Prof. Gopal Shevare, in front of several of his company engineers.) It would be for one month of work. Later on, one of them (Mr. Irshad Khan) thought that the assignment itself was not worth paying any money for. Accordingly, they paid me nothing. That is, absolutely, nothing. Zero. Simple.

If this is the understanding of trade and capitalism as IITians and IIT Bombay spin-offs keep, one would want the rest of the world to at least take notice of it.

But then, how about the rest of them? That brings us to the next episode of the weird/immoral companies…

2. Last week, I received an email receipt stating that Mr. Ashutosh Parasnis of PTC (the current MD of their Pune operations and a V/P of their USA company, I gather), had deleted without reading one of the emails that I had written to him—hold your breath—in April 2004. This is the only correspondence that I guess I have ever received from his desk.

The email in question that I wrote was an informative one, telling several respectable names from the IT industry in Pune, that I had thought (may be prematurely) that I might have found out a way to approach the P =? NP problem of computer science. I still am not sure how sound or unsound my logic is, because none ever responded to me. 

Mr. Parasnis was then, and still is, listed as one of the office-bearers/committee-members of Computer Society of India, Pune chapter. See http://www.csi-pune.org/web/csi/management. He is also supposed to be active in US-India trade facilitating groups and all.

Here, I must wonder what relation he might have with anything to do in the CS field if he can’t make out that an email with P == NP? in its subject is something he ought to have read and responded to.

There are two BTWs to this point:

2.1 BTW, PTC of course has never responded to my resumes. One of their HR executives, one Mr. Chandak, was outright rude to me, in those times: 2003/2004. It has been fashionable for CAE software companies to keep harping that I am too old to be employed in a technical programming position and that I have no experience in CAE programming. If I point out that I have implemented an FEM solver (albeit a toy one—but enough powerful that all the pics on my home site were done up with it: http://www.JadhavResearch.info), they say that this doesn’t count, because I have not been paid for CAE software development before. Now, here is a twist to this story: One of my past colleagues (and a nice man himself), Mr. Ajay Deshpande, was hired by PTC, Pune, even if: (i) he too was not 30-minus and (ii) he too had 8+ years of experience—not just 5-7 years’, and (iii), and he too had no experience in CAE software development beforehand. (In fact, he was in QA.) What might explain this difference of treatment? That brings us to the BTW # 2.

2.2 BTW, if you are familiar with Maharashtrian surnames, please have a look at the CSI Pune chapter management, and count the number of Brahmins in it. Is my being a non-Brahmin an issue that comes in the way of my finding a job, in the IT field, in Pune?

In case you don’t know already. I myself do not believe in things like casteism or racism. (Many in Pune know this much about me. Drop a line and I will put in touch with one of them if you are interested.) The reason I don’t believe in these things is because I don’t believe in collectivism in any form. (For more on this, refer to Ayn Rand’s writings.)

3. Nope, weird/immoral things do not stop here. Just today, I got an email from ANSYS, telling me that: “This is your last chance to provide feedback regarding ANSYS Advantage magazine.” I had not been receiving any email from them for the past six eight months or so. Then how come I get this one so suddenly? It seems that someone must have noticed that I have mentioned ANSYS in my slides in my previous post (below). Now, what is so objectionable or weird about it? It’s just this: I have sent my resumes to ANSYS at least 3 times in the last 6 years—each time, in response to one of their marketing emails. (The first time I received one such an email from them was after one of those ISTAM conferences I had attended.) Fine. Nothing wrong in sending someone marketing or informative emails. I have been a marketing guy too. But then, I have also hired other people in my past experience. Accordingly, I also fail to understand what happens to my resumes. Both, to ANSYS, to Fluent India (right since the time that it was a separate company) and to Fluent as a part of ANSYS. Any answers, Amit Agrawal, Dr. Shane Moeykens?

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Apart from it all. If you think I am making my case worse for being hired in any job, ask yourself a simple question—And how much more time do you think should I have waited? Is 6.5 years of unemployment out of the recent 7 years, for a competent engineer like me, not enough? If so, what are your standards? Let me at least get your answer on the sort of standards you keep. In practice, that is.

And, BTW, these are not the only companies that have treated me in a weird or immoral way. (I do regard the treatment I received from Zeus Numerix as outright immoral.) That’s why, I have named this post as “Part I.”

Incidentally, despite CSI Pune management and the Pune IT industry (esp. that for s/w dev. in CAE, graphics, 3D rendering, etc.) being what it is, I still oppose reservations by caste in private industry in India—as a matter of principle. … I wish someone from them knew better—i.e. at least as well as I do. If you wanted to know the kind of standards I keep, well, this is one of them. (And, please spare me the question: “How.” Not that I don’t know it, but it’s just that I remember that I have been told in my last job by an associate degree holding American that I write too much in my e-Correspondences… Every Indian supported him. Even when I was giving just 3 line summaries to every email I wrote on the job. Anyway, let me stop. This can get long.)

More companies, and their unbelievable hiring practices, some time later.

High-Performance Cluster-Based Computing for Engineering Design

A small two-day conference arranged by SAE India (Western Section) just got over in Pune today… The conference was arranged as a part of the annual (or so) auto industry/trade exhibition called “AutoDesign”. The trade exhibition itself was held at the ICC (International Convention Center) in Pune, on the 16th and 17th of February, whereas the more specialized or technically oriented conference to go with it was held later on, on the 18th and 19th of February, at the ARAI (Automotive Research Association of India), Pune. 

I was invited to deliver a talk in this conference, and I gave an introductory one on the title topic. (This is precisely the conference that I had mentioned I was preparing for, in one of my earlier posts below.)

I had thought that the title topic would be relevant for this year’s “AutoDesign.” I thought that the news of Tata Sons’ “Eka” being the 4th fastest supercomputer in the world, would have generated some excitement even among the automobile engineering student community. But, once at the conference, I found out that I was somewhat off the mark in keeping that anticipation. The audience was not so well-geared towards hearing much about mega-flops and giga-flops. My talk did not quite go flat as such… But still, there wasn’t much excitement about what a faster computer could do for them—the very subject matter itself….

There seems to be this gap or disconnect between the three kinds of people involved: the automobile styling professionals, the mechanical design engineers, and the recent advancements in computers field. This was a bit surprising to me for a city like Pune. In a way, of course, that kind of a disconnect precisely highlights the relevance and the necessity of the events like AutoDesign.

Anyway, I am now attaching the .PDF slides of my own talk here:  AjitJadhav_SAE_AutoDesign2008.PDF (219 kB). This PowerPoint presentation contains some introductory remarks as well as some preliminary but honest data about how the ordinary PC desktops would actually fare when they are used as individual nodes in an HPC cluster. That is, for real-life sized data (i.e. for larger matrices)…. Feel free to download the PDF file of the slides, and do leave a comment if you think that I am making a mistake somewhere in them.

iMechanica is inaccessible—actually, forbidden

Just a real-time posting that http://www.iMechanica.org has been inaccessible from Pune, India, from late morning today onwards. (Right now, it’s evening about 6 PM here in Pune.)

Note that the HTTP error code the site has been returning is 403 (forbidden), but not any other more “normal” ones such as 400 (bad request), 404 (not found) 408 (request timeout) or 500 (internal server error)! One wonders why…

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Update on February 19, 2008 evening: The iMechanica Web site has once again become visible from Pune, but there are no explanations or discussions about its blackout for days together on iMechanica itself…. Hmmm… That is enough to make you wonder where to put sites like iMechanica. I mean, there is this whole spectrum available today: blog(s) (like this), your own Web site, the much more formal arxiv.org, the exclusively online kind of e-journals, and finally, the traditional journals like Nature and Science… Earlier, I used to think that iMechanica was reliable enough for expressing your evolving thoughts too, without any of the usual fears of disclosing the nascent thoughts, because both the things: the immutability of the time-stamps, and the 24 X 7 availability of the service could be assumed. Now, this seems no longer the case… So, I think, at least for technical papers—their kernels—it would be better to prepare a complete version first, say, in the .PDF format, even if it’s only a rough draft, and only then post it, rather than evolve the thinking through a series of individual posts. Given the blackout, I think iMechanica is better relied on, through this .PDF mode….