Dum Poyee

Original plan called for overlapping one year courses for eight candidates with a July batch for bachelors and January batch for eight Master's candidates. Ground reality turned out that there were very few suitable master's candidates available. Our engineers came up names of their friends and we filled up the second batch with six of their classmates. This time, it was a candidate from MIT, two from Bagalkot, one from Nitte, and two from BVB, Hubli. Training for the second batch started in Jan . One more confusion existed, candidates would come from Mangalore University and Karnataka University and they would graduate at different times.

By July, first batch would complete training, second batch would be in the middle of training. Taking stock of the master's candidate situation, we decided the system needed to be changed. We choose all 16 candidates to start in July, with class for eight in the morning and eight and the afternoon and somehow squeeze a third class for the second batch. We had to juggle the labs. We ended up with 9 hours of teaching five days a week, a punishing teaching schedule. This would last for six months and then onwards it would a leisurely six hours a day, .
five days a week

Now, we started more detailed plans for hiring for the third and fourth batches. This time there was more time on hand and we had KarMic engineers to conduct the interviews. We made preparations for interviewing from the three colleges. We had friends in Nitte, BVB Hubli and now in Bagalkot. Sharmila from first batch was in charge of hiring. This made it easy to convince women to join KarMic as well. We had application forms and presentation foils. We organized trips to the colleges for pre-placement talks. We collected the application forms with all marks cards and analysed them and shortlisted candidates for interview.

Interview Process

When my father's party came to select my mother - an old man accompanied them. Those days there were no hotels in Sirsi so the party stayed in my mother's house. Early the next morning, the old man was trying hard to open an almond. Automatically, my mother offered to help open the almond, running around to get a kitchen pestle. Almonds were extremely rare those days, I remember a few placed for a Pooja and when the Pooja was over, each of the kids would get one. Almonds were much tastier then compared to now, you can now buy a pound of almond seeds for $5, no need to open them and no need to go after the last bit of almond meat in the broken shell. I am told the help in almond opening ensured the marriage.

KarMic interview process consisted of selecting the students and bringing them to Manipal for a full weekend. They would reach early morning and stay with our engineers. They would stay for Saturday and Sunday and undergo three to four interviews of three hours each, play volleyball with our engineers, have an entertainment session on Saturday evening and provide feedback. Two to three of our engineers would interview three or four of the candidates. We would have looked at all there marks cards and gotten the professor's references. After each session, we would do a triage and concentrate more on intermediate candidates. Each triage was independent of others, this gave a chance to student to show their best side.

Usually we would have one of our engineers to go to the place students were from and accompanied the interview candidates in a bus or car arranged by us for the interview. After the conclusion of the interviews, the bus would take them back to their home and drop each of them to their homes, individually. Interviewees were treated with care. Results would be announced in due time. Hiring for long term is different from hiring in bulk.

Dum Poyee

A very large number of engineers graduate in India every year. Even then we knew that it would be an uphill battle to get the type of engineers that we wanted. We recognized it early. We built a thank you program. We did not have a lot of money on hand either.

In Udupi area, besides Kannada, two other languages are spoken. Both are dialects and do not have their own script. Konkani is spoken almost the length of western coast, from Mangalore to Goa. Tulu is more localized.

Konkan region was difficult to travel earlier, with wide mouths of rivers breaking roads. Only recourse was to either go inland where rivers were narrower and easier to cross or cross the wide river mouth with a boat. Synchronization of buses became inevitable, so the region enjoys very good private transportation. Travel situation is now much improved. The conductors of the buses in order to fill them to capacity urge the passengers to enter the bus and tell earlier to passengers "Dum Poyee" : move forward.

Tongue in cheek, we used "Dum Poyee" to work with the colleges that we were working with. If the big colleges did not want to work with us, we will make the colleges that work with us big. We invited professors from the colleges to spend a few months and learn along with the students. We got junior students to spend time in KarMic doing projects and on occasion included their projects along with ours on silicon. One mistake we did was not charging any money for it. Professors did not pay any thing. Students paid only their room and board. Unfortunately since there was no fee, some participants spent their time looking for hidden strings. Some students were sent to look for hidden charges in the room and board. Why do we do it to ourselves!

After all these years, the idea has taken root only in Bagalkot with Prof.Kambalimath. He routinely has students in earlier years do a more thorough project compared to any other institution in the state, may be the country in my estimation. In other colleges, the trained professors stopped imparting their knowledge and moved on to other things. The state of VLSI training is still dismal, now you can get a master's degree for the same amount of ignorance, compared to bachelor's earlier. Expensive tools have been installed, however very little training occurs.