Acronym Bazaar

Do you want to learn SAS, SAP or ABAP? Or perhaps you want to get certified as a CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, or MSCE? (yes, strictly speaking the latter ones are abbreviations, not acronyms) Then you have come to the right place. On both sides of this street are numerous buildings with all kinds of computer related classes.

I hope you will excuse me for posting more than one photo today.


This building is on the main road, not on the street pictured above.

There are no strict zoning laws here which separate businesses from residential areas. So in a building like this, typically the ground floor and the first floor are set aside for offices and businesses, and the floor above for residential flats/apartments. But in this case, even the floors above have been occupied by businesses as can be seen from the sign boards. In some of the flats/apartments where there are no signboards, you can see laundry hung out to dry.


The right side of the building above. (I don't know how to "stitch" these photos together).

There are computer classes all over the city, but here there is a concentration of them. And then there are national chains (not in any of these pictures). Education is big business in India - from English and computer classes to Engineering schools, all are minting money.

Students who enroll sometimes have no clue about which classes to take. They go by someone else's recommendation about what will help them make more money, and it doesn't always work out that way because the quality of the classes and the student's own lack of proper educational background can mean that the student has wasted the money on these classes. Some of these classes offer "live experience", which means they put the students to work on projects which have been outsourced from clients.

Most companies here look for at least 1-2 years work experience when they hire people. And when people don't have that work experience, some fake it on their resume. Companies have gotten wiser and in order to weed out the fake ones in the interview they ask not only academic questions but also questions about the exact location (e.g. which floor) of the company where the candidate claims to have worked, and not only the salary they got there, but also how much tax they had to pay on that salary!!! Recently one of the big IT (Information Technology) companies here let go over 500 people because the company found that they had doctored their resume.

" "Technology" is what we call whatever didn't exist when we were born."
-- Alan Kay, computer scientist at Xerox and Apple

"Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession."
-- Kingman Brewster, diplomat and president of Yale University