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Name: reallyvirtual
Nickname: reallyvirtual
Member since: 2008-07-02 19:21:40
Website URL: http://www.reallyvirtual.com
About me: http://www.reallyvirtual.com
 

User comments

So, apparently Badar Khushnood doesn't know who we are?

January 13th, 2009 at 2:44 am

@Teeth Maestro:
But it has your name and URL doc! How could it not be you?! :-)

@Osama A.:
Are you a [fake] too? :-)

@The Passionate Kids’ Army:
The internets… they never forget. Try not to make fools of yourselves :=)

Comprehensive review of alpha of Samaa TV citizen journalism service - it concerns your privacy

December 14th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

@Jaffer: a few possible scenarios to make sense of the ‘why’ part (I have seen this happen more than once, if that counts) …

* After working for 3-5 years / making half a dozen websites, an average web-developer (lets call him A) usually knows about these mistakes (though he learns them the hard way) – as soon as that happens, A is ready to take off to the US, UK or even Dubai.

Since formal training/mentoring/apprenticeship is not exactly the foremost priority of the ‘Sayth’ IT firm owners, the void created by A is filled by A`, who is just like A, minus the 3-5 years of experience, and is bound to make the same mistakes – reminds me of a twilight zone episode where Hell was supposed to be about making your worst mistakes over and over again.

* A big corporation working in a non-IT domain hires a temporary in-house team, but forgets to hire a software development manager to act as a mediator. Since it is an in-house team, so requirements are not frozen, feature creep is allowed, which results in a ‘spaghetti product’ not unlike this one.

* Lots of firms bid for an attractive medium to large sized project, and the most qualified firm does not always win the project. Sometimes, the winning firm does not really have in-house expertise for that particular domain, and sometimes the bid-winning firm is small and has all the needed ambition but none of the expertise. So they quickly assemble a team and hire people not very different from A` – the team manages to develop a half-baked solution for the client that ‘covers all their requirements’ but one that does not solve the client’s actual problem, or the that of the system’s users.

Marketing via EasyLoad - Stop.pk's approach to increasing signups

December 5th, 2008 at 7:28 pm

@Osama
There’s a lot of good people in Lahore too, but I’m sure Jeff doesn’t mind the collateral damage as long as his INBOX spam stops, so we must comply with his wishes, we have to be WITH him, not AGAINST him!

Psst Jeff – come this way please… :)

PTCL extends free Smart TV service deadline

October 30th, 2008 at 11:09 pm

(I don’t watch TV but) I think with PTCL, you can’t split it to run 3 TVs and are stuck with a single TV per line. Is that true?

Rentacoder Removes Offensive Message and Applogizes

October 30th, 2008 at 10:08 pm

@Zeyad
I agree – a P@FA (with the F standing for freelancers) is needed, even if it is only to start with networking. Infact, Badar Khushnood (our Google guy) started a Facebook group “Pakistani Freelancers” http://tinyurl.com/5jkenc a while ago that everyone is welcome to join. If enough interest develops, we can think about moving it to its own domain, and can have an FAQ targeted at potential clients for everyone’s benefit.

Rentacoder Removes Offensive Message and Applogizes

October 30th, 2008 at 12:30 pm

That is a question that has been on my mind lately. There are a number of freelancers or 2-3 people teams I know who can’t afford the membership fees of any these organizations and groups at an individual level.

IMHO, this solopreneurship / small freelancers’ team trend is here to stay, so our organizations should actively encourage and appreciate the small guys, and capitalize on the phenomenon.

Approximately 1000 guys on RAC x 1000$ worth of work per month is 1 million dollars. Not a huge amount, but add ODesk and Elance and similar platforms and the figure starts becoming more significant, and that is without counting repeat clients/direct business deals by the solo guys.

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 28th, 2008 at 12:51 pm

@Dean
Getting mad doe$ not accomplish much, getting together doe$.
BTW, I am ju$t an UNpaid, concerned and volunteer (occa$ional) blogger donating a chunk of my life in an attempt to $et the record $traight ;-)

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 27th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

@Nash
A Force_Majeure based line of defence would work if the coders are caught off-guard, which they are not. If someone living in an electricity-free zone takes up a project and is afraid of a drop in his rating, its his own fault.
Remember the bird-flu scare, and how the prices of chicken dropped due to the scare and put the whole poultry market in hot waters? I think that an insiginificant but reliable presence is much better than a significantly notorious presence.

@Azam
I’m glad you noticed the title :-) RAC does not ‘write’ it, but their (un)careful choice of words implies it, and you can ‘say’ a lot of things between the lines, intentionally or unintentionally. The fact that this was a well-meaning and unintentional warning does not make its effect any better. I do not see what is so horrible about the heading, it is just a little bit sensationalized, but we are used to that, right? If you think a post on G&W, a small blog by comparison, can affect you, waht do think an innocent and unjustified warning on a site with a few million visitors per day can do.

@Faisal
You are right, it is the wording and their placement that are the cause of the commotion on their forums as well. I did write an email to them, there has been no response. Pakistani sellers have been posting their clarifying and/or frustrated comments on the RAC forums for the last 3-4 days without any official response from them. Here’s the link again:
http://rentacoder.com/CS/blogs/severe_weather__other_critical_situations_-_update/archive/2008/10/23/5748.aspx , and yes, the notice is still there, the wordings unchanged.
Like my PS. says, I do not work at RAC so I am not affected personally, but if it affects my marketability as a Pakistani, then I have to do something about it, even if it is writing a post. As a top 10 RAC Pakistani provider, may I ask you whether you think this notice affects your brand (not your current business) at all?

@USA Coder
That is interesting information, I wonder how RAC would feel if there’s a notice on their own site (or a few competitors’ sites) saying:
‘Are you working with Rentacoder? If so, you need to know that RAC office is in the Gulf South (a hurricane prone area) and is evacuated on hurricane warnings…’

@ali hammad
Writing about it, contacting them and commenting are three ways you can protest.

@David
Nah, we will probably slide into darkness before going bankrupt.

@azam
There are as many truths as there are people. I am sorry to repeat this multiple times – but here I go again (probably for the final time):

* We have severe load-shedding in Pakistan, around 8-10 hours daily atleast is common, many of us even get uncomfortable without their daily dose of load-shedding :-)
* Most IT professionals can not survive in the market without electricity.
* Contrary to popular belief, government provided electricity is not the only way to have some electrons running through your devices.
* IT professionals have adapted to the crisis by switching to generators and UPSes instead of relying on the Government of Pakistan.
* The programmer/coders/offshore team members etc. in Pakistan are now operating mostly without hitches, for the last few years atleast.
* Our media, Goe etc. making it sound like the whole country is engulfed in darkness, mostly true, but the darkness does not affect the IT workers’ eletricity need as they have learnt to be self-sufficient.
* Rentacoder is saying that electricity is not available most of the time in Pakistan, mostly true for average Pakistanis, but not the part of Pakistanis working with them, the people mentioned above, a fact they don’t mention.
* This notice on the RAC website, a website that probably gets a million or so pageviews per month, is adversely affecting the Pakistani IT market indirectly.
* Many Pakistanis coders-for-rent are protesting because the news creates wrong perceptions about a part of who they are, perceptions that MIGHT affect their business stream directly
* RAC have not replied to any of the messages/protests on their forums by Pakistanis. The warning is still displayed all over their website.

As for myself, I am concerned because the news affects many of my friends/peers and the Pakistani IT industry directly, and therefore, it affects me. So my belief, wrong as it may be, is that their message has a mostly negative impact on the Pakistani IT community and cause for concern. I apologize if my attempt to change all these misconceptions about this nation sound negative or hostile to you. If you have other ideas about what is better in reality for Pakistan, do share in the appropriate thread.

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 26th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

@Brian
Your comment contains the answer to your question. Two words: “My Country”
I don’t know what you mean by ‘right people’ but if an irresponsible news is posted on a website that affects the reputation and potential earning capacity of even a few Pakistanis, that is enough cause for concern. BTW, did you know Green and White are the colors in the Pakistani flag? Usually, all we can do is criticize, and you are welcome to criticise us all you want, come join the party, Just don’t escalate issues that have been solved one way or the other already. And oh yes, no more cartoons either :-)

@Paige
As I have mentioned mutiple times,the policy itself makes a lot of sense – but it is the method of execution, the timing, its validity and the cause that people are objecting against. It the difference between saying “electricity is unavailable more often than not” instead of “though government provided electricity has been unreliable for many years, most of our providers have alternate means of power – make sure your providers do too”
If a google search and hitting two URLs is all RAC needed to be convinced that its 800+ Pakistani providers can not handle their business and create alarms, then people relying on that platform have the right to be upset. Do you see the US government telling the world not to invest in the Silicon Valley since it is bound to face the Big One any time now?

@Joao
If the people are discouraged from trying to compete on level grounds in a fair market, then of course they’d look at other options, there are many around. That is why the whole affair does not make much sense – instead of fact-checking and research by asking a few Pakistani providers and their clients, RAC chose to piss off 10% of their providers and misbalanced the symbiotic relationship. Please compare the warnings posted on RAC forums before this one. Atleast three of them feature Pakistan as well, all of them have ZERO comments/protests. The notice is still there as a site-wide warning, and if RAC really have to display it as part of their policy, it will probably stay there for the years to come.
BTW, we are not miserable, we just live in miserable circumstances.

@bilish
I agree that every single human being out there must have a blog. The topic under discussion though, is not just the loss in reputation that Pakistani providers are suffering with EXISTING clients, but also the business that they would lose / not get from POTENTIAL clients, as a direct consequence of such false alarm. It is like a chinese restaurant advising its customers not to order frogs, because frogs can be poisonous!. Clients satisfied with Pakistani providers will not budge due to this news – they know better. New RAC clients, on the other hand, will develop a skewed and false perception that ALL Pakistanis provide unreliable services due to the severe electricity crisis going on – and you can’t retain or educate clients who did not give you any business in the first place assuming you have no electricity.

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 25th, 2008 at 9:51 pm

Thank you for your comment as a client Sara. This is exactly the stereotyped negativity I was talking about.

Can you please help us to identify the real problem by sharing whether you suffered mentally/financially because…

a- The person you hired was a Pakistani
b- He (or she) didn’t have the resources to tackle your project
c- He was simply incompetent
d- The severe electricity crisis that we have been having here for the last few months (or years) affected your project, but the person did not bother to find alternate power sources in time.

Thanks.

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 25th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

Thanks for sharing this information Ahmed,

I did already acknowledge that RAC must be doing this to ensure a consistent level of service for their clients. Even so, I fail to understand the reason behind the sudden panic by the RAC people when they are offering Pakistanis an ‘honorable discharge’
Why would Pakis be ‘forced to cancel’ their project due to electricity shortage now, when they have been working despite the shortage for the past few years! If they are following a newspaper for information, they better expel all Pakistanis from their providers’ list :-)
This is also the reason why we can not compare this situation with floods, they are sudden and natural disruption. You don’t see them coming and don’t have time to take counter-measures.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a slacker coder used this excuse to get out of a mess on RAC and RAC ended up posting this notice, but RAC hasn’t replied to any of the questions on its forums so far.

Pakistanis are protesting against this message on the forum thread and want RAC to take it off, so they don’t buy OR want the protection. They are probably the people who have taken Pakistan to #3 on RAC. Their concern is valid, ANY such message hurts business for Pakistan and should be noticed and corrected.

Of course, we have a huge problem with electricity due to our incompetent rulers etc., that is besides the point. The thing is, Pakistanis have adapted and overcome the crisis as far as solo IT professionals are concerned. So now, when their market and business is affected by these false and late alarms, and because they live in Pakistan, they will be irritated as they know that the quality of their work is NOT suffering because of these crises. To these RAC workers, it is probably like being forced to compete in special olympics after beating ‘regular’ people, despite their handicap, or like being called a monkey because they have vestigial tails. It undermines their effort and hard-work.

That is why they are showing concern instead of thanking RAC for being their big brother and coming out to protect them (or at least that is what I could understand from these responses):

* I request RentACoder team to remove this warning as soon as possible as this will really distress business of Pakistani Coders.
* please remove this message, it would hurt rentacoder in long run as pakistani coders would start switching to other platforms.
* Is RAC discriminating Pakistan and Pakistani coder?
* As such I request RentACoder team to remove this warning as soon as possible.
and i also request to my pakistani fellows that they should ask to Administrator to take out this message.

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 25th, 2008 at 4:33 am

Thanks Riz, those are some impressive stats indeed, considering the dismal circumstances that Pakistanis are supposed to be living in. 800 may not be a huge number, a medium sized Pakistani call center has more people than that, but most of them are individuals trying to make a living out on their own.

On a separate note, P@SHA and PSEB have their place, but I don’t think a parallel body that focuses on individuals (as opposed to ‘Software Houses’) exists at the moment.

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 25th, 2008 at 2:09 am

Obaid, most of the freelancers I know do own and write on multiple blogs. I saw the post on your blog, and it is a good first step towards such stopping misinformation.

IMHO, though, the developers do NOT have to prove anything, because they have been working smoothly with this constraint for a long time now.

This time it is electricity, next it will be the security situation, and later on it’ll be gas shortage. Same old story. We DO have these problems, but they are not showstoppers. We know how to overcome such hurdles, and this is why the developers do not have to PROVE they are capable of thinking beyond LESCO & Co.

Ironically, when I wrote the post, the “more information” link was down due to Community Server issues and I was unable to check the “More information” link. Now that the server is back, you can visit the post below, which suggests that Pakistinis [sic] should return their clients’ money, and gives links to two obscure news items about the power crisis here.

You can see also the frustrated and outraged reactions of the Pakistani developers who rely on RAC for income. Since this affects them first-hand, so they say it much better than I possibly can:

http://rentacoder.com/CS/blogs/severe_weather__other_critical_situations_-_update/archive/2008/10/23/5748.aspx

If I were a nationalist conspiracy theorist, I would have called this part of an attempt by a psyops lobby trying to affect the Pakistani economy :-)
For now, we can just call it a mistake made due to second-hand news.
The real question is whether we have somebody sitting in a Technology Park somewhere in Pakistan tracking such incidents and taking action as an official representative of the Pak IT industry, or is it asking for too much?

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 24th, 2008 at 9:43 pm

@nasheeli:
Despite the title, I did not intend this as a “Rentacoder is discriminating against Pakistan and is attacking it directly” kind of a post. I understand the QoS they are attempting to provide their clients requires disclaimers.

Obaid:
I do not deny that we have an electricity shortage problem, or that it needs to be solved. I also realize that RAC is trying to protect its brand (they want their customers to have a good experience with providers I bet), but in doing so, RAC is making generalizations about all Pakistani professionals, blowing it out of proportions and hurting the brand called Pakistan.

If you live in Pakistan, then let me ask you this:

Have you made sure that your connectivity remains unaffected during these frequent power outages, by using a laptop, UPS, generator or even a power plant – or do you just sit there waiting for the power to come back?
I’m sure the IT workers who have small offices or work from home have solved this problem. They have no other option if they want to put food on their tables. I do not have LESCO supplied power right now, and yet here I am, writing this comment!

I remember this frustrations due to power shortages issue was raised in the first Startup Insiders meeting in Lahore, by some guy who had grown up in California, when Imran Zia optimistically said that each problem creates another opportunity, this one creates a market for generators. So while we, the people living in Pakistan, can laugh these hurdles away and find solutions to them, it becomes a much bigger problem if the perception of the international market is changed by explicitly singling out Pakistan as an unreliable source of manpower, and if it results in Pakistan and Pakistanis losing business. State supplied power is not a prerequisite to being a reliable services provider, and yet the warning makes it sound so.
Maybe I am reading too much into it, but to me, the site wide message is a clear warning to steer away from Pakistani providers. I am sorry we won’t be able to measure the exact loss of business our small community of freelancers has to bear due to this message, but I am positive years after we solve the power crisis (I hope) – phrases like
“Pakistan bad.”
“Pakistan unreliable.”
will still echo in many people’s minds for years to come, if we don’t try to put a stop to it immediately.
So yes, we have a power crisis, and yes it should be solved, but as long as it does not affect our throughput, and as long as we solve our problem ourselves, it ought to be the job of our IT rulers to make sure that our reputation as reliable solution providers does not suffer due to an amplified negative rating.
Let us try to solve our problems, but let us protect our brand as an industry as well – or does that sound too idealistic?

If any Pakistani RAC professionals are around, maybe they’d like to share their first-hand experiences here.

RentACoder Says 'Stay Away From Pakistanis'

October 24th, 2008 at 8:10 pm

Thanks for sharing the stats Nash. Interesting that you guys have used the word “sad”, the word that surfaced in my mind was ‘irritating’- if we make up a significant portion of the outsourcing providers’ market, such exaggerated statements hurt both Pakistan and RAC’s own business, so unless they are wearing goggles given by Fox News, sensationalizing things like this make no sense. It is an open market, if Paki providers fail once due to power failures, they will get really bad reviews and ratings, and will not get any business in the future.

Why not warnings like ‘Are you working with an Iraqi? Think twice, the guy might get blown up by a bomb by tomorrow’ (I’m sorry about using this example to support my point)

The Evolution of Begging

September 24th, 2008 at 1:32 am

@Corona

I think there are more than one ways of obtaining such valid numbers, they can easily:
* use bruteforce (with automated free SMS, that is trivial)
* add intelligence to bruteforce by using BLOCKS of numbers (like IP blocks) that are being used by a particular operator
* steal the data from the telco (your guess)
* telco franchises have access to their databases as well.
* banks and insurance companies *lend* their customer databases for unsolicited telemarketing

The Evolution of Begging

September 23rd, 2008 at 11:30 am

Thanks for the link Sawant, my guess: this was started by some professional spammer(s) – the ones that let you send X bulk messages for Y Rs, with an under-utilized setup (unlimited outgoing SMS packages and all)
I was getting these messages every other month or so, but the frequency has spiked during this month of Ramadan – something must be working for them to get this active.
The ones on your blog from May are begging for 10Rs. while this one starts off with 15Rs. and comes down to 10Rs. so they are actually tweaking and improving their pitch too.