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Start ups – This is not every one’s cup of tea. As sexy it may sound by dreaming your picture to be in front page of Inc or Fortune, start up is not for every one.

The failure rate is astonishingly high(90%). It has a lot of stress, ups and down( mostly down initially) and you might end up draining yourself than what you had every thought of.
On other hand MBA are generally on a defined trajectory. You know how much it is going to cost, how much time will it take and you are very much certain /hopeful that you would get a career jump and a hike which you had been dreaming of.

A few of my friends and colleagues who were not happy doing their current job and wanted to move up the career hierarchy, went for an MBA. Here are the profiles of some of those people who did an MBA

• 5 10 years experience in it services , programming, project management
• IT consulting with top notch reputed companies
• Software Engineer/programmer
• Business analyst

All or most of these had one simple goal. Make a career switch and do something which is more rewarding than current one in terms of job satisfaction, quality of work and get rewarded with a higher salary.If you are in US  and plan to do an MBA, you would generally have few career options if switching from IT. Some of the career choices
1.  Investment Analyst
2. Sales /marketing
3. HR
4. Strategy Consultant
5. Business analyst into a financial domain.
6. Managerial/Operational roles

Investment Analyst : Join financial institutions like Citibank, BOA as a investment analyst or some other top notch position which pays well. This was the most sought after option before 2008 and God knows how many people left their promising career only to join Wall Street with dream of becoming an overnight millionaire.
Post financial crisis, unless you demonstrate some specific skills, past experience , pass out from top ranked institution like Harvard or Sloan  and most importantly have some contacts or network with people in company, you cannot possibly land up a Job. Even if you do,  I do not think there are any fast way to become a millionaire.

Sales/Marketing: You can land up in a sales or marketing gig which has decent base salary and good bonuses. But you should really ask yourself, is this job for me ? I have seen lot of people whose presentation, communication and social skills are not such great and they land up in sales. Sales and marketing are not for everyone. If you do not enjoy socializing, meeting, traveling, you will not live this role. And the biggest indicator of your performance is how well can you sell.

HR :  Not to say much on it but Human resources and recruiting (although they are different roles) is another area where people land up

Strategy Consultant/Management Consultant : One of the most popular sought up  options post MBA.  There are not much jobs in this area and whatever are ,they are  limited to top companies like E&Y, MCG, Cap Gemini.  These companies rarely take candidates other than top notch business schools.

Business Analyst : People who have good domain experience tend to make a better business analyst so it has to do more with experience than education. Unless you did specialization in Finance, an MBA does teach you much to work as business analyst. But I have seen people with decent experience , taking on managerial responsibilities and moving up the career path.

In my opinion , the biggest gain one  can get from an MBA is the network you build with smart people around you. This  network could be one of the most valuable asset build during the 2 year course.  If you are going for MBA, make sure you have in mind what you want to learn and start building the network from day one.

Having said all this, let us evaluate the options of a startup. It could be either you starting a company or joining an existing startup.

What is starting a company going to teach  you ?

1. Out of Box thinking : You start thinking out of the box. Although your idea or product may itself be not a very revolutionary , you have taken out time to think in terms of what you can do to create some value. What can be build to solve some of existing problem ? Instead of some one telling you what to be done, you start to brainstorm on  ideas and solutions.
2. Network : You will start building network. One of the most important factors in contributing to your success as a individual or as a company is how well your are networked, connected to people who can give you inputs, ideas, feedback  ( and maybe money) to build out your company.
3. Team building : You will either have to find co founder or a business partner in order to start. If you plan to go solo, you will need to find some trusted source to work with. Since you would be on very minimal or no funds, it is a challenge to build team and convince them about your concept.
4. Time management : Unless you are super lucky to have your start up funded , you might be keeping your day job and working with your startup or might have quit job for 6 months to give it a shot, you would be pressed against time to get the results. I have seen people working full time to support family, pay mortgage and then toil in the night cranking out code, seeking out partnerships, feedback , answering emails of early customers.
5. Marketing. Not everyone has in build marketing skills but the marketing game has changed drastically in last couple of years. With SEO, web based marketing,   Google adwords, social media ( twitter, Facebook, google+), it has evolved from the traditional print and media . The motivation to sell your products/concepts to your  customers would help you understand these concepts.

Once you get your self going, You would learn so much stuff that it is unbelievable.  You let go your fears, hitch and jump into the world . If you would be raising funds, which I am sure you would try, you would learn to  understand term sheet, preferred stock, vesting schedule, etc.

With all this said it very important to mention that start up world is filled with more failures than success. Reading the success story at Tech Crunch would make you feel good but that is the bright side of startup world. The harsh reality is a lot more people burn their hands & money than you could think of. Years of hard work, late night work, sacrificing your personal , family time might lead to no where.

For every Google there are a million “startups” that never even get off the ground. For every Google, there are 100,000 “startups” where the company barely makes enough to cover the 36K a year the founder pays himself. For every Google there are 10,000 startups that barely make enough to cover the salary of 2 founders. For every Google there are 1,000 startups that have a small amount of profit(~50K). For every Google there are 100 startups that actually have some traction, and can sell for 1-10 million. For every Google there are 10 startups that might have a 100+ million exit.

Over 90% startup fail because they did not find a market or customer

I am not advocating for a startup in favor of an MBA. That decision I am leaving to you.  It is is not that you have to start the company to learn Joining a small organization in early stages, teaming up with your friends and equally be fruitful in terms of learning.

Note : This post is my own opinion

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Spring 3.x certification mock test

Questions very similar to originals with almost the same difficulty level. Majority questions are from most important sections at exam: container, testing, AOP, transactions. Only few from other sections like MVC, REST, JMX, JMS.

This is a 30 question practice test. 5 questions are free for you to try.

It is very reasonably priced at $1.99.

If you buy all there tests, you would save on paypal fees.

I am sure you would like the test. Jacek is looking for feedback and inputs to make the test better.

Here are way to add google + on your site.

1. Go to your webmaster console.  i am sure if you would like to add google+ on your site you would have a  account with google webmaster.

2. Go to +1 Metrics –> search impact on your left and click on it.

3. You would find see a heading Add +1 button on right. Click on that and it will lead you to a page which code generated like

<!– Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag –>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>

<!– Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render –>
<g:plusone></g:plusone>

4. Add that code on your site. If for some reasons this does not work as it dies work with jsp and jsf sites, add this
<!– Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag –>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script>
<div data-size=”standard” data-count=”true” align=”left”></div>

Preview the page and + 1 button has been added to your  site

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1. If it is a small project with few tables , I think there is no need for a full fledge ORM framework like hibernate. You can very well using Spring with JDBC and keep complexity to minimum.

But this is a classic mistake made by teams initially. You assume that the project will have only 3-4 tables and few updates and inserts, but as and when you gather requirements, dive deep into design , add more features, it starts to get bigger.

At later stage you wishes you had started with ORM framework else you might have to write all the inserts, updates and selects which is a huge waste of time ,considering all this can be configured easily by hibernate.

2. Performance : A lot is being talked about hibernate performance. We have used Spring and hibernate with one of the biggest deployment in clinical applications and I can tell you, I have not seen any issues or so because of hibernate.

Yes we had to fix the hqls at few places but that is a normal tuning process.

3. Hibernate is slow because it uses run time reflection:  People who had faced performance issues with reflection in early ears were skeptical about hibernate’s use of reflection. But not anymore. You should not worry about performance loss due to reflection. From hibernate’s doc

Modern JVMs implement reflection extremely efficiently and the overhead is minimal compared to the cost of disk access or IPC. Developers from other traditions (eg. Smalltalk) have always relied upon reflection to do things that C/C++ needs code-generation for.

In the very latest versions of Hibernate, “reflection” is optimized via the CGLIB runtime bytecode generation library. This means that “reflected” property get / set calls no longer carry the overhead of the Java reflection API and are actually just normal method calls. This results in a (very) small performance gain.

You can always hancode sql’s at places where you think it is going to be complex scenarios and a native sql would perform much better. But this is required rarely , so this is an exception , not a rule.

4.  Composite mapping is complex : If you do not understand it , yes it is complex . But this will not be a disadvantage. We have talked about this here mapping composite keys in hibernate.

3. Everything is returned as object : Yes that is true and even if you would like to get an id or name, you would write the hql and get an object which has the complete data set. This is anyways not bad because while designing methods, you will have coarse grained objects which well be returned. I would not prefer to return String or int from my methods.

Our application was developed using Spring framework 2.5 , spring webflow and hibernate 3.0. We had Oracle application server (not the oracle weblogic ) and oracle database 10g

Caching : Second level caching was done using ehcache. The caching strategy was read-only which is the simplest and best-performing cache strategy

Stored Procedures : Procs were used at couple of places. These procs had business logic and were communicating with another database through DB Link.

Native queries : We did not use any native queries.

We have used Spring and hibernate with one of the biggest deployment in applications and I can tell you, I have not seen any issues or so because of hibernate.

Yes we had to fix the hqls at few places but that is a normal tuning process.

I cannot share much details here neither the performance statistics but will be happy to answer your questions.