Ysiad

24 delicious starters to choose from! All vegetarian friendly.

Friday’s trip to Pune made a deep impression on me. It was nice to meet with an outsourcing firm run by honest, ethical people who do not oversell themselves. It’s inspiring me to get back into software development.

Friday morning, at around 7 am, I boarded a cab to Pune.

11 am, I woke up at the Pune offices of a 200+ person business process, call center, and software development outsourcing firm.

The firm is part owned by SuperJ’s company and the owner is a very nice guy who is extremely helpful on the phone. They sent the cab to pick me up, and had a hotel for me in case I wanted to stay the night. All this, even though I only had a very small amount of business to bring to them. Just as they have been honest with me, I have been very forthcoming on the phone.

Throughout the day, they had several staff members give me presentations on the work they do. One of the presenters had done business intelligence related programming work at a US credit bureau for five years. He could go into heavy detail on my questions.

We had lunch at an Indian restaurant which had very good food. (Okra, dahl, butter and plain roti, a paneer dish, and decent mango lassi)

Then they took me to a partner’s office, where they send all their web development work. They were in a nice building and all the developers were on new machines with nice flat-screen lcd monitors. It looked nicer than many US offices I’d been in.

The developers were nervous when I interviewed them, but I could tell they knew their stuff.

By the time I got back to my hosts’ offices, my wheels were turning and I was thinking about how to get back in IT. At that point, we had a meeting with a senior VP and we called the CEO back in the US.

Afterward, we played some ping pong and went to dinner at a restaurant called Little Italy.

Little Italy is an all-vegetarian Italian restaurant. I could not believe the salad selection.

19 delicious salads to choose from at "Little Italy" in Pune

Throughout the day, my hosts insisted I stay the night in Pune, but I did not really want to stay by myself in a hotel in Pune on a Friday night. The same driver who picked me up in the morning drove me back to my place. He had on a radio station that was playing bad club music. Since it was a Friday night, I did not have the heart to ask him to change the station. I took off my boots and reclined the seat to get comfortable. And the next thing I knew I was at my door step in Bandra West. I was home before 2 am.