Rohit Bansal, Co-Founder and COO of India's leading consumer internet company Snapdeal, is on a mission to create about 1,000 “rockstar” engineers in the company by letting them work on projects based on their interest.
Bansal, a graduate from IIT-Delhi and a hardcore techie himself, plans to do this through a unique initiative called ‘Sorting Hat’, wherein the engineers will chose a project of their liking.
“We want to break the traditional way of work where the manager of a team selects engineers for projects on the basis of skill sets and profile fitment. At Snapdeal, the new recruits will be allowed to work on projects of their choice,” Bansal said, adding that this will not only create enthusiasm among young engineers but also instil entrepreneurship.
The ‘Sorting Hat’ initiative, which was launched last month, will start with 280 new recruits, mostly from IITs and NITs, and will be an annual feature going ahead.
Snapdeal, which has about 1,000 engineers at present, plans to create a 2,000-member technology team by this year-end.
“It came as a surprise. We checked with several engineers what kind of projects they wanted to work on. The majority chose unconventional fields such as cloud, seller focused initiatives and customer experience. This was different from the earlier choice of coding, website and app development,” Bansal said.
He added that in the next 3-6 months, the company will be rolling out tech-based products coming out from this initiative.
The Google way While no other Indian technology company has ever come up with such ideas, search engine giant Google had launched an initiative called 20/80 policy.
Known for its unique approach to innovation and open culture, Google had created some path-breaking and successful products such as Gmail, AdSense and Google Talk through this policy, wherein it allowed it's engineers to spend ‘20%’ of their time on personal projects. The policy, however, was discontinued later on.
While Bansal said that such initiatives are also a way to retain talent, it also helps engineers stay motivated.