I have been in Hyderabad for about 3 weeks, so its probably too early to comment on the city. And no matter how much I tell myself, involuntarily I end up comparing it to Bangalore. And that is the entire fault. Most things seem not good enough. I work and stay in this place called Madhapur which is some distance from the main city. Everything around Madhapur is exorbitantly pricy thanks to the impression that software folks make a lot of money. Many of the local people are puzzled as to what these guys do on the computer to get paid so much and change the city completely. Hyderabad has seen a lot of growth in the last few months [and years]. The govt. seems to have done some really good work in terms of growing the city. The roads are wide and well laid out, traffic is a lot lot better than you know where, and it’s largely a beautiful city. Lot of rocks and hilly terrain in and around the place – the sort you would travel miles to reach. The people are yet to catch up with the growth though. Its like a sudden gush of activity has poured into an otherwise laid back, quiet, conservative place.

Microsoft is a fun place. A lot of smart folk around and very little time on hands. I am working on the WinFS team here. I should be talking more about this soon. Last week I went for the 6^th anniversary celebration of the India Development Centre. Kinda weird to say my first 6^th anniversary.

I have rented a flat here and am finally going to try to live independently. I haven't started cooking yet, but considering the options that I have I might as well cook :). Before I took the house, I liked the idea of opening my door/window and looking at the fields around. Now I know I see the fields and the pigs together. Sometimes buffaloes too. Hmmm.

Interviews, perceptions, misconceptions

How do you select an ideal candidate after an interview and what is the best way to interview are just as complex and contestable as saying what is a good house. In the realm of software where there are product companies and services companies, many companies have tried to use interview methodologies what they think works best for them. While some are good, some other practices are ridiculous. Like asking what the 3^rd option in the 5^th dropdownlist in  the 2^nd screen of XYZ is and rejecting a candidate based on that. I don’t know how well the method of selecting candidates for software development jobs after a 30 min interview works. How do you know you picked the right person? Given limited time, resources and vacant positions how do you get the right people for your job? It’s tough to find smart people who are excited about working for you. But as an interviewer (IMO) besides asking questions and listening to answers you should project the company, its values and policies in the course of the interview. This makes sure that the interviewee has a clear idea of who he is applying to work for, what they are looking for and if he is still interested in being offered the job. If the place is the sort the candidate is looking for, then at the end of the interview he must go with a  feeling that this is an awesome place and I would love to work for them. This depends a lot on the interviewer, what he says about the company and how he puts it.

The best experience

My best experience with interviews has been with Microsoft, PSS, Bangalore. Before the real interviews started I had a one hour talk each with 2 of the managers. This time was effectively spent in letting me know what they do, what I will get in as and in finding out what I really want to do. They were making sure that I understood what they were looking for and what I would be doing if I got into the organization. If any of the candidates are not sure, this talk helps clear some of the ambiguities and is probably a good time to decide that this is probably not what you want to do. My real interviews started one week later at 2.00 pm and went on till after 8.00 pm.
More than the questions asked, what impressed me were the people. The sorta people who make you say “I don’t know if I like the job profile or not, but I would love to work with these guys”. Something that the other interviewers could pick.

The Microsoft Interview

Microsoft interview is again a 1 day procedure if you are lucky. Initially there is a one hour screening round to decide if they should interview you or not. After that if you are in, the grill begins. I was asked some amazing questions, [no, none like the manhole question J], the sort that churned my grey cells. Most questions required me to write code. I shall not write the questions here, they will spoil the fun for you if you ever go for a Microsoft interview. All the questions were new to me [surprisingly], there were some design questions, some general problem solving and some CS fundamental stuff. The interviewers help out and drop hints, its your job to pick them and think further.

Just one tip, keep things simple. [Its tough to do that]. Most of the seemingly tough problems have simple answers. Just think out of the box [What is the “just” in the prev sentence doin?] J

I have been getting some weird referrals [no, don’t think about Rory. This is far from it :)]

Apart from the *<wats_the_right_word>* search results by search engines[which I shall not talk about] taking people to my blog, I have had some referrals in languages I don’t understand. One of them is a thai website [http://community.thaiware.com/index.php?showtopic=122226] that I happened to stumble upon and on scrolling down I found a link to my blog entry on monad. Next to a half-nude pic of Halle Berry!!

Quite amusing to think that for men who don’t understand thai, it can be quite a disappointment to find a link to monad ! J

I have taken a snapshot [just in case the link doesn’t work]

Here are some links that talk about the changes in the shipping plans and features for Longhorn.

Jeremy Mazner’s blog entry about WinFs

Jeremy Mazner’s blog entry about Longhorn

CNET interview with Bill Gates

Official announcement by Microsoft

I am joining Microsoft, India Development Centre on the 23rd of August, 2004. I will be joining as a Program Manager for the Windows team. I am yet to find out the details of the exact group I will be joining. Judging by the interviewers and the work happening at hyderabad, there is a good chance that I will be joining the WinFS or SFU team.

If you want to discus about Longhorn, we must talk :)

A lot of people write about Bangalore in their blogs and now I seem to be yearning to do the same.

While on one end I am very excited about my new role, on the other end I am quite sentimental about leaving Bangalore. This has been the only place [of all the places I have been to in the country] where I could go out alone, be on my own and return home at 10.30 in the night feeling safe. Back home [cochin], being on the roads after dark [6 pm] attract suspicious stares and dirty looks as though you were committing a grave crime of the first order.

The pleasant weather [that I can compare to having centralized AC in the city] has pampered me too much. The roads and the trees also seem to be talking to me these days J. The cosmopolitan crowd, the baristas, the privacy, the groups, the friends, the pubs, the views, and ulsoor lake – where will I get all this?

Oh well…I will miss Bangalore!

This is based on some of the things I observed over the last ~15 years. Some of it may sound exaggerated and offensive, it is meant to be neither.

South paranoia

In Trivandrum, people were very concerned about what the kid would grow to be from the time the child was born. The choice was usually between a doctor and an engineer [sometimes lawyers crept in]. When the child in primary school would have exams, mother, aunt and grandparents would take an off from work to teach the child. Neighbours were requested to keep their TV and music players volumes low.

If the child didn’t get an admit in one of the colleges in Kerala, the immediate look out would be Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Next option would be to move to Dubai, Saudi, Kuwait or Muscat. I haven’t figured out the malayalees mania about going to Gulf. Every second lady I met had her husband in the gulf. The husband would come once in  2 or 3 years stay for a while and push off for work. He would be a big saar in his home town and a driver in the gulf if required, that didn’t matter.

In the hindu families, for every daughter, the parents would build a house to gift her as dowry along with gigantic amounts of gold and her husband would come over and stay there with the lady and in-laws sometimes. People didn’t believe in partying or indulging in huge celebrations, they would rather hoard up all money and savings and buy land and grow coconut trees and invest in gold.

Mallus [as malayalees are usually referred to outside Kerala] usually have great affinity for other mallus. They manage to find mallu friend(s), mallu restaurants, mallu shops and mallu barbers wherever they go. They usually hang out in groups and resort to speaking in malayalam wherever they go, whatever the crowd be. And mallus are omnipresent. The joke about Neil Armstrong finding a mallu chaiwaala when he landed on moon is a very valid one!

Mals [well, short for mallus] also displayed great affinity for medicines, they carried a bunch with them and sometimes took some in advance with the fear that they may get a head ache or something. A sneeze and they would have visited the ayurveda ashram next door, a doctor for antibiotics and a homeopathist for treatment. They lived on boiled water only and the moment they stepped out of Kerala they complained of food poisoning and required a fortnight to recover.

North paranoia

If you are a doctor or an engineer, boy you are a big man. And you got to flaunt it every which way possible. To the North Indians, back then South India meant Madhraas and Kanyakumari. Period. No concept of Kerala, Trivandrum, Kottayam [then the most literate part of the country].

If you are giving a wedding reception it ought to be bigger and grander than your neighbour’s aunts nephew’s. So what if you cant afford it. Families make plans for children based on their sex. If it’s a female child then she should be taught cooking, stitching, cleaning etc along with her education. She should be married before 22. If it’s a male child then, he should be prepared to continue his dad’s business just the way his dad took over his grand dad’s. So the idea would be to somehow take a degree [i.e. complete your graduation, BCom, BA whatever; not important] and help out the father businessman. If you flunk, (who cares), so did your dad and uncle... family business awaits you.

Play music in your houses in the volume that suits your mood and environment. If the neighbours protest, tell them it’s your house and you are free to do what you want. Pull a fight to prove you are a bigger man. Priority goes to the clothes and jewellery that you wear than to the books you need to read. In fact education is secondary to many things.

And don’t visit a doctor until you are in deep waters. After all there is very little that the doctor knows and you don’t. So try out all your intuitions and medicines [suggested by the chemist] and when things don’t work out, visit the doc.

Hmmm….

While, you can’t generalize TVM with the entire South India you can relate it to Kerala. And though things have changed over the years, some of this is present to this day J

I am a North Indian who has been staying in the South. My dad came to Trivandrum, Kerala with some of his friends to see if it was a good place for starting marble business. He was very young then [He would have been around my age now!!!], I admire his guts to venture into an unknown city at the extreme end of the country to be an entrepreneur and to be the first in the family to do that. This was sometime in 1984 [Yikes, why did it have to be that year], Trivandrum was very different then than from what you see it today.

While they loved the greenery and the sea, they saw almost no men in the streets with pants. It amused them to see people in “lungis” because back home, men wore lungis in their houses only. Almost nobody understood English or hindi in TVM then, so gestures were the only communication medium. Food was a big problem, 2 days with Kerala rice and sambhar [after 2.5 days of train food], they yearned for some chappathis. After looking at several places, they found a place that would serve chappathis. They ordered more than 40 chappathis and the waiters and owners were way too shocked. Dad and uncles still laugh over that incident. While the chappathis were no where good, that place became a regular joint. People at the restaurant didn’t express shock and awe later when asked to bring 50 chappathis. Back then, there were no marble godowns/offices, most people got marble/granite from cochin for construction.

Five of them [Dad and 4 of his friends] started their business as partners and called it Friends Marble Emporium.

After a month, Dad moved to TVM with mom, me and my sister. Mom had a tough time talking to the landlady, worst was going out to buy groceries and other household things. She had to take care not to finish any of the dals [pulses], masalas, spices etc completely, she would take some of it as a sample to the shopkeeper and ask him to get her some of that. Funny, something like you take two cards and do a match-match by looking at both. Things you do to overcome communication problems!

My sister and I joined nursery and picked up the local language quite fast. We went to Rajasthan and Delhi every year during vacations and we were quite amused to see some of the differences. And as kids one of the most often asked question was what we preferred - the south or the north. In Kerala, people dressed up very simple. There were many instances when we would mistake a customer for a worker. During weddings, women wore gaudy looking silk sarees and were decked with piles of gold attaching no concerns to the overall look. And they wore slippers. Men wore lungis even for weddings. It’s only later that we got to know that lungis were the equivalent of dhothis in the South.

Women washed clothes by flinging the clothes against a washing stone in the south and in the north they would wash clothes by bashing the clothes using a bat. The south Indian temples required men to be in lungis only [You don’t say topless for men, do you?] to gain an entrance in the temple. In Trivandrum every kid had tuitions, in the north tuitions meant the student was weak and needed assistance outside his/her school.

Things have changed a lot in the last two decades. A lot for the better. It is still very amusing to hear notions that people have about the opposite end. When I went to Rajasthan recently, I enjoyed listening to people talk about South India. Some facts and many stories ;)

Its even more funny listening to some of them talk about computers and technology. I kind of love our country for the diversity. While on one end we are advancing, learning and growing in terms of technology, on the other end there are people expressing wonder and shock about the things they see. When one of them described this thing, [which happened to be a palm] that he happened to see and hear about, as a miracle, a saadu’s magic gadget or something, I couldn’t help smiling. I was in love with their innocence and their interpretations of what they saw around. Even more with their openness about wanting to hear and understand it.

[Desi?]

I am starting this new category called Desi which will be more like a scrap book. It doesn’t exactly qualify to be a blog entry and will be largely centered around India. Until I figure out where exactly this fits in, I shall be writing about movies, cultures, men, women, children, festivals etc in this category.

[Hindi]

Aaj mein upar, Aasmaan neeche

Aaj mein aage, zamaana hai peeche ..

Tell me Oh khuda, ab mein kya karoo

Chalu seedhe ki ulti chaloo …

Well, before I let out the big news, here’s your chance. Any guesses? </chuckle>