Da Vinci Code, and being back in Kolkata

I am now back in Kolkata, India and am now being reminded just how hot and humid it can be here!  I believe I will be here for the next few months as I restructure the company to be more product development oriented (instead of being service-oriented).  There are many reasons for this – the largest being that employee attrition is just Too High.  It’s not really our fault.  Over the past week, I’ve received resignation notices from employees that are leaving our company for Hewlett Packard, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Mahindra British Telecom.

It’s flattering that they are heading to larger companies and are taking a step up as opposed to sideways or down but the question is: where does that leave us or what does it leave us with?  Services companies are made of people – if people are leaving to do bigger things at bigger companies, it’s just an uphill battle.  The goal is to get to products so that developers are designing and building software/SaaS applications that remain assets of the company even if the employee were to leave.  Building software is also just plain more exciting!

Business stuff aside, I went to watch The Da Vinci Code with two cousins of mine.  We all read the book already and I must say – what a lousy picture.  They cut out so much and it just didn’t flow like the book did.  Tom Hanks was a poor choice for Langdon although the dress sense and styling of his character was fairly impressive I thought.  My suggestion is that if you haven’t read the book yet but want to see the movie, go ahead and see the movie and then read the book to catch all the details that were left out.