Of Bumblebees and Technology!

This is just a thought that raced through my mind this afternoon when I went for a walk to the nearby mall. It seemed that people who know nothing about technology run nearly most (that would mean almost all) technology companies. It gives rise to irrational, or, funny situations – look at it the way you want to. The sage who said, “Ignorance is bliss” was probably wrong. It is disaster, as the following example would show:

The managers of a technology company in Andheri, suburban Bombay, were interviewing a candidate for the position of Search Engine Marketer. They didn’t have much knowledge of Search Engine marketing, which is a very specialized field. The candidate said something about “pinging” the feeds of the site to feed aggregators. (Feed aggregators are the entities that aggregate content and supply them to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) readers. If you don’t understand this mumbo-jumbo, doesn’t matter, neither do I.)

The managers didn’t know what “pinging” meant and asked the candidate to explain. The candidate wasn’t very articulate and botched the explanation. That was the end of the interview. The managers ended the interview because the candidate (who really knew what “pinging” a site meant through experience) couldn’t explain the term properly.

The managers’ ignorance made them lose a good candidate. Then how do technology companies run when they do not know their own businesses and techniques? Heard of the bumblebee? The bumblebee cannot fly (speaking technically) but it tries, and tries, and tries and somehow manages to stay afloat in the air. This is the same with managers of technology companies in India.

| India | bumblebee