| Blessed are the software engineers as they have 3 great advantages
1) Starting cost is very low , compared to electrical or mechanical engineering ventures. 2) They can test idea validation very quickly and pivot early also, using lean launch pad language 3) And in Pakistan this area has seen huge success in recent years.
However, there are other areas of engineering that can benefit a lot from entrepreneurship courses. It would have been nice only to learn from the business models, and success strategies of software companies, but not all of the knowledge can be translated to other fields of engineering. The need to have generalized field of entrepreneurship, seperate from the business school and tailored for the skilled students of CS, EE, ME and other areas is very much here. Especially with the bad job market situation Regards, Ali --- On Wed, 4/17/13, Babar Abbas <abbas.babar@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Babar Abbas <abbas.babar@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [pakgrid] Entrepreneurship for Engineers
To: pakgrid@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, April 17, 2013, 9:40 AM
Interesting. If anyone can shed some light on the topic.
I have experience in applying for Contract Jobs on sites like RentACoder, ODesk. Infact I have more than 50 bids on RentACoder. The turn around was 2 or 3. It is interesting to note that you have to be carefull in your relationship with the employer. If any point of time he notices that you have lost interest or are not working fully he will back fire. with back fire I mean that It's within a reasonable project's approval that some delays e.g a week or so, some sickness is with a person, but delaying that further will have it's repercussions.
Note Above: If you lose interest you are out of the game.
Secondly: On a standard project on a site, e.g. RentACoder or ODesk, like the standard Java/J2EE Projects the bidding is abnormally high. The number of bidders will be e.g. in acess of 30's or 40's. So either you have a very good profile, or you go for an out of the way project. There are millions of technologies, there are millions of technologies, so chances are a bit high If you have skill in any one of them.
But how do you bid. I used to put an informed bid, an informed bid means that you spend a day or 2 or 3 days researching about the technologies involved, and then submit the bid dont' delay it too much cause as the time goes by either he will chose some bidder or the time will end.
How do you get paid: As you work you should get paid. Ask the employer to escrow money on site. He will deposit the projects total estimated budget on site. Then as you release phases you should get paid. e.g. after 1.5 months you release first phase you should get paid for the first phase.
How do you resolve if something goes wrong. First of all Making a Project takes some effort, not only in terms of man hours but Intellect and research, that these are the options of which we should chose from, One Option or the other, if one doesn't suit you should go for the 2nd Option. e.g. In one of our projects the client was asking to do the project in Java, while the whole technology stack was in .net, what should we have done, There was an online version of the application that was accessible through web services and we could have done it in Java. As Web Services are basically basically meant for InterOperability.
So here are my findings, If you have any please share.
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 12:25 PM, ali mansoor <ali_mansoor_kh@yahoo.com> wrote: | Aslaam ale Kum,
I have been educated to become an engineer, however as I got into teaching because of my interest I stumbled upon an intriguing question. Why do students choose certain careers over others, in a quest to answer this question I decided to change my field from engineering to management ( in fact its not purely management it is entrepreneurship).
I found this area to be very engaging as the fundamental aim is to allow us to work on ideas that attract us personally and to try and figure out how we can make those ideas into reality. Its not a walk in the park to realize an idea. It is gruesome and full of risk, but I am very passionate about teaching this to the future students of Pakistan. And hopefully if they learn something from me and apply it, we could reap the benefits as a country, in terms of job creation and solutions to our local problems.
One research topic that I find very engaging is how we can train engineers to become entrepreneurs. It is indeed the case that many our graduates are doing it on their own, without anyone teaching them. However, quality formal education in any area makes us learn from other people experience and our learning curve is reduced significantly. So if our engineering graduates were taught this stuff during studies, the chances of them getting into the startup world will become faster and safer, hopefully :) .
So what will it take for deans of engineering schools to allow entrepreneurship to be taught to their students. I think with the job market suffering this avenue is worth trying.
Regards, Ali Khawaja Lecturer, Faculty of Engineering University of Central Punjab |
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