We’ve updated the list of positions available with us on the join-us page. We hope to hear from driven & talented people interested in working with us. At the end of the month our team size would be just around 25 – we have doubled our gang in the last year and hope to keep adding more phenomenal people to the mix.
This was produced a couple of months ago by the gang at the HQ. This is the PG HQ Handbook which we hand out to all new joinees. What do you think? 
We are fanatical about hiring great people. It is one of the areas we seem to put in phenomenal effort and don’t always seem to strike gold. For example in the last 2/3 months we have interviewed in excess of a 1000 folks for multiple positions we’ve been looking to hire for. We hired two and asked one to leave. Now that is a staggering statistic – We just hired one person from over 1000 people we interviewed.
We floated this new statistic around at office and well, I expected to see surprised faces, but for some reason everyone seemed to know this rather well. With a knowing sigh, everyone got back to their work and then back to hiring. For a lot of people who we interact with – they find the statistics to be damning. At some point they don’t hesitate to tell us that we are nuts and no company should spend so much time hiring. We disagree .
Contrary to the way regular companies operate – i.e. of having a few great people at the top and then driving work to the below hierarchies, we are focussed on making sure people who work with us are capable of achieving phenomenal things on their own and we are obsessed about it. If you don’t want to do something great in your life and solve complex problems – we don’t see how you would enjoy your stay with us. As a motley bunch of people we realize there are infinite problems to solve and as you continue to keep solving them you start realizing the need to continue to work with awesome people. The ‘best workplace’ doesn’t exist and not are we sure we can create it. But we are keen on solving some parts of the problem – how do you create an organizational structure that works for such driven, talented people – how do you create systems and processes that are absolutely non-intrusive so that you focus on things you want to do.
Although the problems might sound alarmingly simple, the truth is they are extremely complex and tough to crack. Some changes might need major changes in the way the company operates at this point. To ensure we don’t shy away from doing what we need to – we keep asking ourselves tough questions. Heck, obsession is not a bad thing after all
As for the patience – it does get on your nerves when you do the 500th interview and realize this person is not the ‘one’. But well, do we really want to work with people we are not terribly sure about – that is a HUGE ‘NO’. I do hope we grow fast enough to hit the tipping point where we are able to work with more awesome people as we continue along. Until then, we will just get by admitting just over 0.1% of the folks who apply to us. Statistics be damned.
Nothing survives bad code. Absolutely nothing.
For a month before CAT we spent a lot of time managing the hardware infrastructure at PG and scaling it. We hit all the usual roadblocks of scaling mySQL and Apache. Working around them was both fun and enlightening.
We ended up running a multiple server configuration that allowed us to use the master/slave configuration for our databases and also ran a few machines in the front end to manage our front end traffic. Our front end traffic was distributed over the few servers using a load balancer. For those in the know, Apache is kind of not the coolest webserver to serve images. It is ineffective even if you tweak it to the very limits and so we had to find ways around it. We did it in two ways:
a) We offloaded most of our image serving to the Amazon S3 setup. Last month we served over 70+ million image requests through the S3 setup.
b) On the load balanced machines to ensure Apache is not given the job of serving images, we reverse proxied it with nginx. It is the cool webserver from russia that is probably the most efficient at serving images. The nginx + apache combo can handle a ton more traffic than apache alone.
We felt we were fairly well set for the traffic onslaught and we were right. Until, we released a new product on CAT day. The scorecard app which we put out had a bug that put processes into a loop. We crashed. Twice. Like a virus spreading across multiple servers, the bug in the app got replicated across all our frontend servers and pulled them down.
We had to the pull the application down to ensure the site was up.
It was a reminder, a rather stark reminder that Nothing survives bad code. Absolutely nothing.
The PaGaLGuY.com Bschool rankings was launched last week – Check it out http://rankings.pagalguy.com . With close to 6000 voters, the ranking shows serious insight into what people across India think about Business Schools.
With so much data to churn, it was a major challenge for us to present the data in an intuitive format that is both useful and easy to use. We hope you like it.
Some of the key articles are listed below:
View Complete Listings of the Rankings – view discussion threads, articles and interviews for each ranked B-school with just one click. Compare B-schools – choose two or more B-schools and compare their rankings across various regions and profiles. Opinions and insights – read the overview of highlights from the rankings, how women and people in various regions of India think about b-schools. Our Guest Columnists – SP Jain’s Dean Prof ML Shrikant scrutinizes all that is wrong with the AICTE;And finally, we invite you to discuss the rankings in the community, spot interesting trends and help us evolve India’s largest ever B-school Rankings initiative.
Earlier this week our office gizmo factor skyrocketed with Allwin bringing in…
1. A 32-inch LCD TV
2. An XBOX 360
… and hold your breath…
3. A Nintendo Wii !
Yes, we are probably one of the very few owners of a Wii in India. Take a two minute pause to feel extremely jealous.
The gadgets are bringing in major lifestyle changes within the office. Everyone is already at being a gizmo-guitar player with Guitar Hero III, not to mention the Grand Theft Auto and Fight Night and FIFA 07 Soccer face-offs.
On a serious note, each of these games are absolute User Interaction and Usability wonders. Until now, our design and tech guys had only read about the revolutionary changes that Wii had brought in. But now using the Wii everyday itself is a great source of insights into how small and simple ideas change the ease of operation of devices that otherwise could easily be made complex nightmares.
That’s Soumik on the right trying to jam to Cream’s ‘Sunshine of your Love’.
Which reminds me – not sure what we’re doing, or is it just plain coincidence: almost every second person to join PaGaLGuY is a sufficiently skilled guitar player. No, none of them have the long hair or are the rock star types. But in a very counterintuitive way, you give them the guitar and they can pull some serious string!
Now it’s not quite normal behavior for us to show up at office as early as 9 am, unless the reasons are as compelling as an opportunity to meet the man behind one of India’s biggest dotcom success stories – Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and CEO of Naukri.com.
Staying not very far from PGHQ, Mr Bikhchandani dropped in at the PG insane workplace today morning and had a casual chat with the team on all things Internet and business. Some interesting excerpts from the conversation…
On the importance of listening to the client – “At Naukri, everyone including the CEO and CFO make sales calls. It might be an expensive call, but when you talk to the client, they give you insights. That feedback helps greatly in improving our products.”
On Sandeep’s question about site usability and design – “We realised the value of UI (User interfaces) only two years back and since then we’ve recruited an independent UI team with a well-experienced Head. It’s important to have such a team with a Head who gives firm push-back on right and wrong usability.”
On opportunity prospecting – “We always like to follow the money while building businesses. We prefer businesses where the source of revenue is other businesses, like in the case of Naukri, 99acres and Shiksha. Getting individuals to pay is very tough.”
“Google AdSense revenue is like low-hanging fruits from a tree and one should try to catch it by improving focused search, location and time based advertising.”
It was great listening to snippets of the success story that is Naukri.com straight from the horse’s mouth! Above all, it was an honor having Mr Bikhchandani visit PGHQ.
Jubilation jubilation… we are on way to becoming a Case Study which will be taught as part of the Entrepreneurship, Strategy and New Product Development course at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore – one of India’s top business schools!!
Prof Ganesh Prabhu, Professor of Corporate Strategy & Policy at IIM Bangalore along with Parul Bajaj are finalizing the case study that examines the growth, marketing and product development strategies of Pagalguy for teaching at IIM Bangalore in the future.
It is an honor to be considered case study material and a big thank you to Prof Prabhu and Parul! And this could not have been complete without the enthusiasm of our moderators from Bangalore Prem Kumar and Rajat Saxena, who went out of their way in person to meticulously explain the PaGaLGuY community functioning to the case authors.
Copyright matters permitting, we maybe able to share the case study here in public domain soon!
Here are some of the oldie posts you may have missed
In order of oldest to newest:
Spreading Insanity over Konkan
Openings at PaGaLGuY – (Highest commented post)
Some HQ Updates:
We have been growing up at a fast clip and are looking to move over to a new office. We intend to more than double our team in size and are now looking to hire for regional positions as well. If you are interested in any, just send us an email at jobs@pagalguy.com with your resume and a cover letter.
A lot of start-ups dream of having a technical team full of creative, rockstar software developers. But the problem is you just can’t buy creativity. Creative people require tools and environment which foster their success. Here at pagalguy, we are about to take one more step towards that kind of ideal environment. For the developers at pagalguy :-
1) Spend only 4 days (Mon-Thu) per week on developing products for PaGaLGuY.
2) Friday is a working day but you can spend the entire day on anyone of your side-projects (open source projects or your own product idea or anything).
3) If your side-project needs some resources like hosting etc or incase you want to turn it into a proper product we are glad to help you out with some much needed resources.
4) If you want to host some events like Devcamp etc or just invite some hackers to code and discuss your side-projects on sundays, we shall offer our office for such purposes and mostly sponsor pizza or something for food.
Honestly we are inspired by Google’s “work 20% of the time on your own project” principle. But we didn’t stop at that. we took few more steps to create an ecosystem around side-projects. we aren’t blindly following someone either, we did this because we truly believe in the importance of one’s own side projects.
Consider this, most of the hackers are those whose side projects ended up shaking the software world. Like David Heinemier Hanssen of Ruby on Rails fame, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame and many more. One cannot deny the importance of their side-projects and the importance these hackers give to their side-projects in becoming who they are now.
To quote Chris of github fame ” You should always have a side project. Side projects give you an outlet, provide a useful distraction, let you explore new ideas, learn new concepts, and generally give you the freedom to be unaccountable. You don’t have to worry about your boss, or your coworkers, or the damn commentators on Reddit. Just have some fun. Treat yourself.”
“Work on your small project for a few Sundays, declare it complete then move on. Learn another language, or write something else in your new language. Pick up a new web framework or work on flashy effect number two. Add concurrent task execution to your Rake. The more acclimated you get to this process, the more creative your ideas will be. It’s the whole 10% inspiration 90% perspiration thing, and it worked for me. My plea to you today is to start a side project. Scratch your own itch. Be creative. Share something with the world, or keep it to yourself.”
We believe in becoming a place where you can work with the very best on the very best problems. We are now thinking about how this would work across content, graphics, marketers and others. To be innovative is to be leading from the front and this is just one the many more ways we intend to build a rockstar workplace.
So four days of work for PaGaLGuY and one day for yourself. That makes us want to call it the 4.1 Way of Working. Did we just coin a buzzword?
