Active participation, dedication to learn and the willingness to build software of the highest quality, this is all that Ungineering.com expects out of the people it hires. Based out of Bangalore and founded in 2012 by Anuj and Avishek, Ungineering is a bunch of entrepreneurs and want you to be no less. 'Build your own stuff and learn to sell it. We will help you with it and will learn along the way as well' is their motto.
In Bangalore during his one year stint with IBM, Anuj came across two sets of people – a) good engineers from bad colleges and b) the so-called “bad” engineers from good colleges. He realized that both sets were essentially looking for something -Category A- for a platform and Category B-for that spark which could unlock their potential. Around the same time, Avishek, while pursuing his post graduate at IIM Ranchi, came across a lot of start-ups which were extremely lean and were struggling to handle their IT needs. Realising that outsourcing to professional IT companies would push back their hopes of breaking even by at least a couple of years or so, the duo came together and soon after they realized that, irrespective of what the general sentiment is, good web developers are always in demand. "We couldn't have continued to work without payment forever and the idea seemed too good to give up upon as it solves two very pertinent issues – providing talent a platform and vice-versa" says Avishek on what prompted them to start this company-a training portal-cum-service provider.
What we can conceive Ungineering as, is a learning platform for the engineering students to make themselves capable of building software products end-to-end under a structure and guidance. In the process, a team of students will be formed that will build high quality software products, while they are in college. The students will get to work on all the aspects of software development, including designing the UI, coding, testing, and deployment .The idea is to give the student an exposure and an opportunity to build live software that people will use (firstly they have to find it useful enough) and give them the confidence of building a real life software product (confidence is a good substitute for money, isn't it?).
Ungineering is a double-edged sword in the right sense – their clients get industry standard work done at prices which at the worst are reasonable while college students, who are hired as interns, get to work on actual client projects. “Then again the key does not lie in doing it; it lies in doing it well. That is where our training comes into place. An Ungineer, fresh out of college, is technically at least one year ahead than 80% of his classmates. This works especially for start-ups who are adverse to hiring fresher because of the slow rate of ROI.” adds Anuj.
Currently the technical partners for Internshala, Ungineering.com works on LEMP stack (nginx) with object oriented MVC framework on UNIX platform, with the servers being hosted on Amazon AWS. With three part-timers currently and eight Ungineers, they have been able to set up a state-of-the-art training process for college students during their summer break.
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Team Ungineering[/caption]"Somewhere in the future we will be a mix of full-time employees, part-timers, interns and a lot of working-from-home students working on real-time project briefs from clients / our own products all across India (and maybe even the world!)", says Avishek, who is optimistic about what the future holds for their team.
“We did not find the need for funding till now but we aren't averse to it – we'll go looking for it as and when the need arises” says Anuj, who also has a message for young entrepreneurs stating “it’s always a good idea to keep a tab on the finances. It might take you ten ideas to succeed and you have to space out your savings accordingly to ensure that you get to the tenth idea with fuel in the tank".
"Anuj got an offer from one of our clients to become their CTO drawing a salary which was at least four times what he makes from Ungineering now. Also,we gave up a project with a client who has recently made it very very big because there were creative differences – we know we did the right thing now but at that time it had seemed very difficult to convince ourselves so especially as we had almost completed the project" Avishek recollects these two incidents and realises how difficult it has been over the course of time to stick around and keep believing in what they were doing. “Things like paid marketing and funding still bother us – we have to convince ourselves from time to time that we are doing the right things for us at present by not doing them” he adds.
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