TechLahore

I recently heard a rather shocking story involving a local software firm (which we will leave unnamed, for it is barely germane to the rest of the story) and one of its former employees. Apparently, said company was having some payment problems with a foreign customer. By all accounts, the foreign customer was being quite a pain and refusing to pay several months development fees without initially having contested them. The local firm was using undelivered work as leverage to get their money – pay us for our work or you won’t get the deliverable. Fairly normal till here. Happens all the time. Until we add the spicy, local dimension…. The foreign customer, sensing that they would have to pay to get the code, contacted one of the senior developers on the project and essentially asked him what the “alternatives” were to get their hands on the deliverable.

The developer, eager to make a quick buck, stole the latest version of the application and uploaded it to the customer from a private account, thereby eliminating all leverage the Pakistani software firm had to recover its money.

And it doesn’t end here. The developer then, keeping everything hush hush ofcourse, resigned from the software firm on apparently good terms (little did they know!!), got a good recommendation and went to work for another firm in town. A week into it, our poor victim firm realizes what has happened, and that too, by accident. While they are figuring out how best to tackle what for them is truly a crisis, the question for the wider industry is, how often does this sort of thing happen? And what can be done to prevent it and skin the scoundrels who do this sort of thing?

Another very similar story is that of a large orthodontics company based in Lahore catering to the US market (woe is you if you can’t guess the name!). Apparently they were in the middle of a patent related lawsuit with a competitor in the US. The US competitor simply “hired” one of the factory techs and “encouraged” him to say the needful in return for relocation to Dubai for him and his family, accompanied by a handsome payout.

What Thieves and Scoundrels! Stuff like this can kill a nascent industry, which the software industry is in Pakistan.

A while ago some software industry CEOs in Lahore were toying with the idea of maintaining an industry wide “reference check” database on current and ex-employees. I, for one, strongly feel that if someone does something remotely close to the above, they should not only be blacklisted from the industry but have severe criminal charges pressed against them. The famous “drawing room ki sair” at the hands of the Punjab Police does have its uses!

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