Software People Stories

In this episode, K Nageswara Rao - known as KNR - shares his story and experiences related to:

• Four threads related to his career
• Individual contributor, team leader
• Connecting digital switches in the telecom industry; each switch being a digital exchange
• Traveling to locations that he is not supposed to talk about, due to security reasons
• Joining Tata Unisys and learning a lot in terms of working with teams 
• Working on the operating system : Unix SVr4
• Moving to the Solaris OS group with Sun microsystems
• Creating a community for Open Solaris, engaging with various stakeholders, including students
• Next thread: leading R&D and product teams in India for large multinational organizations
• Gaining ability to work with people 
• Fundamental challenges faced by him 20-25 years ago, still existing
• Third thread: driving innovation culture
• Fourth thread: influencing people’s lives: through processes and systems in companies or through coaching
• Quitting a corporate job to start - What is my North - a coaching company, continuing to help individuals grow
• How he combines or switches between working with people or with machines [embedded or systems software] using systems thinking
• How it helps when one abstracts specifics and infers patterns
• Asking open ended questions and helping people figure out the answers
• About the impact of not having direct customer connect and experience, when developing products and solutions
• Importance of the ability to pay attention to detail and not jump to conclusions
• How an articulated shared vision by the leaders enables every individual to rally around a larger cause
• The need to accept contrarian views
• How humility is a strong characteristic for a great leader
• Establishing genuine connections with people
• If humility a trainable skill
• How humility can co-exist with confidence
• If it was easier to connect computers, compared to connecting people
• Creating an environment where people want to help others
• The role of constructive or creative dissonance in nurturing great communities
• Compassion being the common theme between being line managers and being a coach
• Creating a startup culture within a large organization
• Aspects related to product leadership
• What he has enjoyed being in IT
• His career tips for people considering a career in IT or mid-career professionals

After 34 years of a strong leadership career in IT, KNR decided to pursue his passion for helping people achieve success. When he quit his job as VP of Engineering in Unisys last year he started “What’s My North?”, to help people achieve success through Personal Transformation.  Before Unisys, KNR has worked in Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Tata Unisys and ITI, primarily in Embedded Systems and Operating Systems.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayenarr/

[email protected]

In this episode, Karl Hughes, founder and CEO of Draft.dev, shares

• Starting his career, working with startups as a software engineer
• Taking on engineering management and CTO roles
• Covid triggering a shift to get into technical writing for developers
• How to think of documentation for developers, as an intentional activity
• His views on Agile approaches and documentation and the need to right size the documentation
• How the product maturity influences the need and depth of documentation
• Why writing is the most effective way to document and communicate
• His thoughts on effectiveness of visual communication
• Writing for a diverse audience and the role of video for communicating with developers
• Importance of reviews and feedback for greater effectiveness of written content
• How he got interested in writing 
• If writing is a teachable or learnable skill
• How he balances and manages his time between the maker and manager modes of working
• His experience with Shark Tank, when his company was invited to pitch at Shark Tank
• Working with a global, distributed team of software engineers
• Whether audio has a role to play as a medium for communicating with developers
• His career tips for getting into writing

Bio: Karl Hughes is a former software engineer and CTO in Chicago. He is now the Founder and CEO of Draft.dev, a specialized technical marketing agency that creates content designed to reach software engineers.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarlLHughes

Draft.dev writer application: https://draft.dev/write

In this second  part of the conversation with an IT industry veteran, Satyendra Kumar, he shares

• His perspective on Agile approaches
• Agile approaches are good for certain contexts such as: products, supported by DevOps and other techniques
• May still be reluctant for systems such as critical, real-time systems [nuclear, aircraft etc]
• For services work, need to be careful; unless there is a strong risk management approach, it may be risky to use Agile approaches
• Examples from his experiences in helping large organizations
• His approach to understanding an organization to enable change, by starting with a business problem
• His tips to address data quality and quantity, by looking at the metrics system and identifying the right lead indicators
• The need for the quality function to learn and evolve
• A sneak peek into his upcoming book on building excellence in organizations

In this first part of the conversation with an IT industry veteran, Satyendra Kumar, he shares

• Coming from a humble background and doing his initial education in a village
• Getting into Delhi University based on his good academic performance
• Having to take up a job, to meet some family needs
• How he chose a job in a defence agency and rising to a senior level
• Leaving his job and getting into consulting and quality
• Setting up the Tata Business Excellence Model for the group
• Working with different business units in different domains
• Switching to an IT organization before joining and spending 14 years at Infosys
• Continuing to work with different organizations post retirement from Infosys
• How learning came naturally to him, particularly in very new, challenging and different environments
• How he gains confidence about being able to do anything, amidst uncertainty
• The experience based on a major decision to switch from the comforts of a government jab, to a small apartment in a distant suburb
• How he thinks scale in conceiving and implementing organization wide initiatives, while making sure he has enough bandwidth to plan for the future and growing his team to 700
• His experience of recruiting people from non IT organizations
• How to get comfortable with delegation, with trust in the team
• His experience of creating an awareness and acceptance of processes among technical teams
• The tendency in quality professionals to become more of audit persons than having a direct connect with the senior leadership, to help them steer the business
• Why there should be shared goals for improvement between the quality function and the business units

In the next part, Kumar shares the answer to the question on his experience and perspectives related to Agile approaches and many more interesting points. Do not miss that..

Independent Advisor and Consultant to several large and medium scale institutions and enterprises since 2013. Was the Global Head and Senior Vice President– Productivity & Quality, Technology Tools & Software Reuse at Infosys Limited ( 2000 – 2013). Worked as Vice President at IMR Global, USA between 1998 and 2000. Worked as Deputy Chief Executive for Tata Quality Management Services – Tata Group between 1996 and 1998. Has consulted for over 50 national and multi-national clients in areas of Business Excellence, Operational Efficiencies, Customer Satisfaction Management, Business Continuity Management, Project and Program Management, and Quality Management. Had been Board member ( QuEST USA) , On the Panel of Judges - Wisconsin State Award ( USA) , Administrative Reforms Committee of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Chief Technical Advisor to the Confederation of Indian Industry – Institute of Quality.

Has been a recipient of IEEE-Software Engineering Institute ( Carnegie Mellon University) International award (2011) and honoured with the “ Life Time Achievement Award for Quality and Business Excellence “ by a IT Industry association

In this episode, Harish Achappa KM shares

• Choosing mechanical engineering as a subject of study and getting into TCS engineering services
• Working on valves and compressors
• Getting into programming as part if his work
• The experience of having a paid vacation in Italy!
• How his interest in programming developed after starting to use C, C++ as a hobby
• Noticing differences in projects done at client locations v/s in India
• Working directly with users and feeding off the energy based on common questions
• Getting quicker feedback
• Understanding that some of the work cannot be done remotely
• Avoiding assumptions and getting clarifications in context
• Requesting to work in a development project
• Getting an opportunity to work on a public infrastructure project
• Learning the value and benefit of parametrization while programming
• Taking some time to find his feet in a fully software coding role
• His experience of taking up a product manager role, enabled by his ability to ask a lot of clarifying questions
• On product thinking, even for an enterprise solution
• His career advice
• Curiosity and willingness to learn: drive
• Consolidating the learnings
• Taking the responsibility for one’s frustrations
• Are you motivated to build, generate ideas or both

Harish is a product manager with over 23 years of experience; he has been a developer, boot-strapped a firm and been a consultant. 

You can reach him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hachappa/

In this episode, Brij Sethi, a Principal Consultant at PM Power, shares

• His growing up days in Pantnagar, near NainiTal
• His passion for reading books
• His liking for mathematics and wanting to be an engineer
• Being bitten by the electronics bug and electronics engineering in college
• Joining a masters in management in systems in IIM Ahmedabad
• Learning Transactional Analysis 
• Getting into a project to make ECG machines as an engineer, forgetting his MBA
• Joining WIPRO in 1993 and working on many challenging projects
• His strong feeling in 1998 to be a facilitator, including facilitating 6 sigma projects
• Taking up the CTO role with HP, and enabling filing a record number of patents across teams
• Wanting to teach and getting back to Wipro
• Creating education related media and starting a company
• How he connects various ideas picked up from books and other sources, by letting go
• Be simple in what he has to share
• Using Obsidian to keep connected points 
• Making conscious efforts to digest what he reads
• Applying TA in business contexts
• Transitions across different ways or states of thinking
• Consciously spending time in capturing his state of mind before switching states
• Being low on J orientation, can accept contradictions and unresolved stuff
• Tip from his mentor: Need to wear a facilitator hat and outcome hat
• His experience of working in a social sector context
• A story on the approach of influencing with PowerPoint slides
• Why, Who and What - three questions for a facilitation session
• Creating an empty space for ownership
• The experience of a father-son founding team
• The trigger and satisfaction on launching his podcast
• His career advice
• Leave yourself open, take some risks

Brij is a Principal Consultant with PM Power. He has worked for Wipro and HP for many years and more recently founded a Media Studio to make educational content. He facilitated deep expertise in HP during his tenure as CTO. The number of patents filed in 1 year went up from 6 to 184.

Brij is a trained in group facilitation. He helps agile practitioners do personal action planning, undo team dysfunctions by themselves and dream a future by tinkering to a customer context. He also talks about career readiness in his podcast - Ready to work - on brijsethi.com.

In this episode, Thyagarajan, known as Raja - a Senior Management Executive and Chief Operating Officer with nearly 4 decades of experience in the IT industry involving International and multi-cultural environments, shares his story including points related to:

• How his uncle and brother were influential in getting into software after doing an MS in management
• Being part of a team that started a company, and being an entrepreneur without knowing it
• Being a pioneer in the Indian IT industry, by having an approach of creating tools to improve development productivity or products to solve customer problems
• Innovating techniques to create solutions, long before others, when there were no standards to do some things
• Challenges of running a company that offered professional services as well as products
• Transitioning from a developer to more managerial roles
• Some of the lessons learned in being an entrepreneur
• Applying technology based thinking to create generic solutions
• Testing in a development environment versus running in a production environment and related lessons learnt
• Balancing and prioritizing requests from various users and having a process to build the solution in an evolutionary manner
• The ways in which software development has changed over the years
• What it takes for someone to shift from a service / project mindset to a product mindset

Raja is a Senior Management Executive and Chief Operating Officer with nearly 4 decades of experience in the IT industry involving International and multi-cultural environments.

His experience includes:

Managing operations of an IT company, with its offshore center in India and marketing/sales offices in the US, that has over 200 employees.

Handling IT projects and product development hands-on combined with heading the operations, ensures understanding of the operations in Toto.

All round leadership experience of managing all aspects of the business - S&M, Technology, Delivery, HR and Finance.

Innovatively creating products and services and delivering through hands on leadership

In this episode, Muktesh Murthy, a practice head in the information security space, shares his story and touches upon

• Doing his schooling in many places, as his father was in the Army 
• His interest in accounts, commerce and economics and hospitality management
• Starting his career in hotel management and then getting into a computer course, as he wanted to get into roles where he can directly influence the results
• Doing some development work, then managing an account and later on becoming an information security professional
• His motivation to acquire various certifications and desire to learn from everyone
• How he expanded his knowledge around standards, as new specializations were introduced in the areas of information security, business continuity etc
• His style of working where he prefers to sit with teams and help them create relevant documents, so that they are confident of doing it themselves in the future
• How he balances the need to be objectively critical and at the same time, nurture positive relationships with people
• The importance of getting and sharing the big picture with the entire team
• How the SHE policy has been incorporated into every meeting
• Outthinking the attackers
• Career tips to become an infosec professional

An MBA, PMP and ITIL certified professional with over 29 years of overall experience of which over 26 years has been in the Information Technology field and 3 years in the Hospitality Industry. Presently working as Practice Head in Tech Mahindra, Bangalore.

The 26+ years in IT has seen rich and diverse experience in Information Security, Risk and Compliance, Process Consulting, Delivery Management, Program and Project Management, Operations Management, Vendor Management, Account Management and Quality management to name a few. Have extensive experience in domains like Insurance, Logistics, Manufacturing, Health Care, Education etc.

Presently the past president at the Project Management Institute (PMI) Bangalore Chapter from Jan 2022 to Dec 2021. Served as the President of PMI Bangalore from April 2020 to Dec 2021 and on the board since 2015.

His certifications include

* Project Management: PMP, Prince2Agile Practitioner, SAFe Agilist

* Service Management: ITIL Intermediate, ITIL Foundation, ISO 20000-1

* Compliance: PCI-DSS, COBIT, ISO 27001, ISO 22301, ISO 27701, ISO 9001

* MBA: IT and Marketing

In this episode Cynthia Swarnalatha Vice President – Engineering, SW CoE, Compute Business Group & HPE India Site R&D leader, is in conversation with Chitra Gurjar on a variety of stories and matters that that span 3 decades and include 

• Choosing to study computer science with her love of math, being the 2nd batch of CompSc graduates from her college
• Having a “give-it-my-best” approach and curiosity to learn attitude starting with a role in customer tech support
• Navigating learning, delivering and communication by reaching out to people, asking questions and consciously looking at “What I can do differently”?
• Plunging into new roles and a 3 yr self-checkpoint rhythm to see where she is
• Transition from IC to manager roles and embracing the decision making challenge
• Being a “customer first” person in all roles she has played
• Keeping focus on the problem space - an approach to customer driven innovation
• Her view on “iterative development” and agile in large organizations
• Managing transformations
• Managing global teams
• 4 point message for aspirants in tech - anticipate change, adaptability, curiosity and passion

A global engineering leader with over 3 decades of experience spanning various technology domains. Cynthia’s diverse career includes roles with many enterprise organizations like Wipro, Motorola, Cisco, NetApp, [24]7.ai, Intuit, Pega Systems and now at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She has led diverse functional teams in Product Development, Quality Assurance, Engineering tools & infrastructure, Solutions Delivery and Operations.

She has also led global engineering charters out of India and has been recognized for organizational transformation, institutionalizing processes, building high performing teams and creating an exemplary work culture within the teams I led. She’s passionate about driving value through strategic growth, ownership and delivery of key product development and innovation.

She is a strong champion of Diversity & Inclusion and has been the executive sponsor for the Technical Women’s community in her previous companies. She has served on the NASSCOM Regional Product Council for Karnataka, and has been part of ABI’s Grace Hopper India Conference advisory council.

In this episode, Scott Schober, the president and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems shares his experiences related to:

• Getting into the family business years ago, in niche areas solutions in wireless and security / cyber security
• Starting in 6th grade to learn about electronics
• Pivoted from wireless test equipment, shifted more towards security
• Being surrounded by electronics, computer etc in the home-based enterprise
• Playing on the Atari as a kid and getting interested
• How he always encourages people when they're looking for a career to not  look for something that's just going to make you a lot of money  or it's flashy or this or that, or it is the trend, but find something that one would love to do because when one wakes up every morning one will  get excited because one is  challenged. 
• How one can learn by identifying bugs in other people’s code
• How some requests from customers triggered the idea of using cell phones to locate people that led to the development of a product Wolfhound Pro
• How satisfying it was to know that this product helped locate a person who was buried under 2.5 meters of snow
• How being a hardware / firmware company creating niche solutions and leveraging software has led to many innovations
• How another of their technologies help prevent railroad accidents caused by texting while driving a train
• How he strongly feels that using technology for good to make a difference is very important. 
• Using firmware based solutions to thwart cybersecurity threats
• How he gets targeted, as he educates people on handling cyberthreats
• Why one needs to get into the mind of a cyber criminal to develop solutions to stop them
• How they came up with a unique solution to detect mobile phones, even when they are switched off, in prison environments
• How an innovative device to detect phone activity has been successfully applied to prevent exam fraud by students
• His career advice for people aspiring to get into cybersecurity
• His brilliant tip on putting out misinformation on social media about oneself.. You should not miss this

Scott Schober is the President and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, a 50-year-old, New Jersey-based provider of advanced, world-class wireless test and security solutions. He is the author of three best-selling security books: Hacked Again, Cybersecurity is Everybody’s Business, and Senior Cyber.  Scott is a highly sought-after author and expert for live security events, media appearances, and commentary on the topics of ransomware, wireless threats, drone surveillance and hacking, cybersecurity for consumers, and small business. He is often seen on ABC News, Bloomberg TV, Al Jazeera America, CBS This Morning News, CNN, Fox Business, and many more networks.  Scott also serves as the CSO and Chief Media Commentator for Cybersecurity Ventures and is a Senior Advisor for Cyberlitica.