One afternoon some 7 years ago, I was casually going over the notice boards in the main building at MA College of Engg in Kothamangalam. It must have been my third year at MACE. My attention was drawn to a small notice about a mailing list on yahoogroups. So out of curiosity and a desire to know what going on in the community, I subscribed to IndianOrthodox@yahoogroups.com from the college internet centre. Over the years ICON, as it later came to be known, has grown to over 6000 members from around the world (including a few bishops and many priests) and matured into a forum for serious discussion.
In grad school (yes, at CUSAT we call them schools), I started playing around with social networks. The following year I got an invite to Orkut from one of my fellow trainees at Motorola, where I was doing a rather long internship. Someone had just started an Indian Orthodox community in Orkut and I too joined in, though I rarely went through any of the posts. Recently, somewhat to my surprise, the community crossed the 10,000 member mark to be one of the largest communities of its kind on any social networking site. Although there is no way to know for sure, the vast majority of members must be in their teens or twenties.
A couple of months back I moved to Hyderabad and it was the week before Pasha. The move happened a few weeks earlier than I had planned and in the rush of things I didn’t get the chance to ask anyone for the address of an Orthodox church in Hyderabad. So now I was in a city that I barely knew, I need to find a church and I didn’t have the faintest clue whom to ask. So I turned to the internet, which had over the years gone from mailing lists to Web 2.0 - clouds, SNS, wikis et al. I started with a search on Live which gave me a rough idea of what I was looking for. I grabbed whatever info I could find and switched over to Orkut where I found three Orthodox churches with full addresses and alternate names of localities, but unfortunately there was no data on service timings. So now I had the address of 3 churches in Hyderabad, I had to figure out which was nearest and how to get there. So I go to Wikimapia, zoom in to Hyderabad, and search for the street or locality of each of the three churches. A few minutes of zooming and panning later, I locate the nearest church on a map of Hyderabad superimposed on a composite high resolution satellite image of the city. Someone I will probably never know had taken the time and effort to locate and mark the small church on the outskirts if the city. I then do my bit by adding some more details to the wiki tag. I then take a print out of the map, mark the location with an X and hand it over to my cab driver. Next morning, I reach St. Mary’s Orthodox Church at Ramachandrapuram just in time for the Hosanna service.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Dark Brew
The other day I was having breakfast with a colleague in the office cafeteria. The conversation went something like this:
Hey! What’s that you have there? (Pointing at my coffee)
Coffee. With chocolate. LOTS of chocolate.
Coffee and chocolate??? (Coffee and chocolate don't mix too well in the resident Indian psyche)
Really! It’s a great combination. (With that - you gotta try it - look)
Could you make me some of that? (Politically correct what!)
Yeah! Sure. Come on, I'll show you how it’s done.
So we walk over to the coffee machine and I go like:
3 sachets chocolate powder (150g)
2 sachets Bru instant 70-30 coffee-chicory mix (Pure instant coffee isn't as good)
2 sachets sugar substitute (Have to stay within the calorie quota - Sedentary Male, South Asian)
200ml hot milk
Mix well. There you go.
We return to breakfast. I half-jokingly tell him that I moved to Microsoft for the complimentary chocolate. But seriously, you can always judge an office by its cafeteria. I guess it was Napoleon who said that an army marches on its stomach. Things haven't changed all that much in the last 300 years.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Chicken soup for the job-hunter's soul
Another long silence ends. Whoever said that silence speaks louder than words knew what he was talking about. Yes, I was busy. Busy attending interviews and making a career change.
As with most things that would keep one busy, this too was a learning experience. After close to four years of working on code that runs the most heavily used applications on hundreds of millions of handsets around world, I didn't expect to have much trouble answering a few technical interview questions. My first interview changed all that. It is a sad story so I’d rather not go into the details now. Maybe later.
It is said that a wise man is he who learns from the mistakes of others. So, for those who would be wise and learn from my mistakes, here is distilled wisdom.
1. First get your basics right. Read Programming Interviews Exposed.
2. I'm a big fan of CareerCup founder Gayle Laakmann. So I'll strongly recommend both her books - Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume.
3. Read the C FAQ at http://c-faq.com/questions.html. And the C++ FAQs at http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite
4. Read the Gang of Four, or better still Head First Design Patterns for Design Patterns.
5. And some more advanced stuff on Operating System Concepts and Data Structures and Algorithms
6. Check out resources on the internet. Examples follow:
8. Research each company you plan to interview with. Get the big picture from Wikipedia. Then Google News for latest happenings; Google Finance, to see if they have the money to pay you. Visit the company website. Search careercup.com and glassdoor.com for previous interview questions asked at that company.
Do some introspection. Why are you doing this? First, is there a way to achieve the same goal without changing jobs? Which companies and roles can offer you want you want? Is what you want actually good for you in the long run or is it just a passing fancy? Talk to people - friends, mentors, family. Be clear about what all you want. No company or role can give you all that you wish for. Being clear about your priorities goes a long way in taking the right decision under pressure, when you have to decide between three good offers.
Invest some serious effort into your interview preparation. It is better to prepare 14x7 for a few weeks to get a job that you enjoy doing and pays well, than to work 14x7 for the next few years at something less satisfying.
Research shows that most interviewers take a decision in the first 30 seconds after they meet a candidate. And the deciding factors in those 30 seconds are speaking clearly and smiling, part of the PRESS technique (Posture straight, Relax, Eye contact, Speak clearly & Smile). The idea is to present yourself as confident and warm, the kind of person almost everyone wants to hire. Happy hunting!
As with most things that would keep one busy, this too was a learning experience. After close to four years of working on code that runs the most heavily used applications on hundreds of millions of handsets around world, I didn't expect to have much trouble answering a few technical interview questions. My first interview changed all that. It is a sad story so I’d rather not go into the details now. Maybe later.
It is said that a wise man is he who learns from the mistakes of others. So, for those who would be wise and learn from my mistakes, here is distilled wisdom.
1. First get your basics right. Read Programming Interviews Exposed.
2. I'm a big fan of CareerCup founder Gayle Laakmann. So I'll strongly recommend both her books - Cracking the Coding Interview and The Google Resume.
3. Read the C FAQ at http://c-faq.com/questions.html. And the C++ FAQs at http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite
4. Read the Gang of Four, or better still Head First Design Patterns for Design Patterns.
5. And some more advanced stuff on Operating System Concepts and Data Structures and Algorithms
6. Check out resources on the internet. Examples follow:
techinterview.org7. Research pay scales at payscale.com or glassdoor.com so that you know what to expect if all goes well.
cslibrary.stanford.edu
blog.mattgoyer.com/technical-interview-at-amazon-sde-and-microsoft-program-manager
ualberta.ca/CNS/RESEARCH/LinuxClusters/mem.html
www.datastructures.info
brpreiss.com/books/opus4/html/book.html
steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html
vishwacsena.blogspot.com/2008/03/program-manager-interviews-at-microsoft.html
8. Research each company you plan to interview with. Get the big picture from Wikipedia. Then Google News for latest happenings; Google Finance, to see if they have the money to pay you. Visit the company website. Search careercup.com and glassdoor.com for previous interview questions asked at that company.
Do some introspection. Why are you doing this? First, is there a way to achieve the same goal without changing jobs? Which companies and roles can offer you want you want? Is what you want actually good for you in the long run or is it just a passing fancy? Talk to people - friends, mentors, family. Be clear about what all you want. No company or role can give you all that you wish for. Being clear about your priorities goes a long way in taking the right decision under pressure, when you have to decide between three good offers.
Invest some serious effort into your interview preparation. It is better to prepare 14x7 for a few weeks to get a job that you enjoy doing and pays well, than to work 14x7 for the next few years at something less satisfying.
Research shows that most interviewers take a decision in the first 30 seconds after they meet a candidate. And the deciding factors in those 30 seconds are speaking clearly and smiling, part of the PRESS technique (Posture straight, Relax, Eye contact, Speak clearly & Smile). The idea is to present yourself as confident and warm, the kind of person almost everyone wants to hire. Happy hunting!
Saturday, December 01, 2007
A new penguin in the coffee bar
The mobile devices grapevine has been abuzz with rumors about the Google phone for more than a few months now. And Google’s has shown serious interests in the mobile space over the last one year. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise when the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium that includes Google and Motorola, announced the Linux based Android platform for mobile devices a few weeks back. (Motorola is a pioneer in mobile Linux platforms and many of Motorola’s high end phones have Linux under the hood.)
Some critics have dismissed it as just another mobile Linux platform, which is technically true. The difference though is that it is backed by some of the biggest mobile manufactures, telecom operators and content providers. Which is more than one can say about any other mobile platform out there today. If Android does manage to establish itself, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t, we could expect to see some standardization in the mobile platforms space.
The catch though is that the penguin isn’t coming out of the coffee bar any time soon. Like Motorola’s Linux phones, the Android platform is also Linux-Java, which means that third party developers can only develop J2ME applications for Android. That’s right, no native Linux applications if you are a third party developer. It is ‘Open’ only to manufacturers and ODMs. That isn’t as bad as it sounds though. I expect Android to make up for it with a really cool JVM that can give third party apps the same performance, power and usability as any native app. When the first Android phone rolls out next year, the litmus test for the platform is going to be this – Will the lay user be able to distinguish between native Linux applications and third party Java apps designed for Android?
Some critics have dismissed it as just another mobile Linux platform, which is technically true. The difference though is that it is backed by some of the biggest mobile manufactures, telecom operators and content providers. Which is more than one can say about any other mobile platform out there today. If Android does manage to establish itself, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t, we could expect to see some standardization in the mobile platforms space.
The catch though is that the penguin isn’t coming out of the coffee bar any time soon. Like Motorola’s Linux phones, the Android platform is also Linux-Java, which means that third party developers can only develop J2ME applications for Android. That’s right, no native Linux applications if you are a third party developer. It is ‘Open’ only to manufacturers and ODMs. That isn’t as bad as it sounds though. I expect Android to make up for it with a really cool JVM that can give third party apps the same performance, power and usability as any native app. When the first Android phone rolls out next year, the litmus test for the platform is going to be this – Will the lay user be able to distinguish between native Linux applications and third party Java apps designed for Android?
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The Idea Salesman
A recent issue of Knowledge@Wharton had a review of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas by Wharton professors Richard Shell and Mario Moussa. The authors describe a simple 4-step approach to selling your ideas – 1.Survey the situation, 2.Confront Barriers, 3.Make your Pitch, 4.Follow-up on Commitments.
What attracted my attention and helped me relate to what the authors had to say was that these four steps are not very different from another (almost) 4-step process that I use everyday, the Software Development Lifecycle – Analyze, Design, Implement, and Maintain. The similarity seems to point to the possibility that, like building complex software, idea-selling or influence is an art that can be mastered by following a simple process.
The study, think, act, follow-up process is one of those abstract universal patterns. You can use this process to achieve just about any goal, provided you know the specifics of the particular goal that you wish to achieve. ‘The Art of Woo’ seems to get right to the specifics – the 6 channels, 5 barriers, 4 styles, 3 mistakes.
The first chapter of the book is available online. I'll have to wait till the next purchase cycle at the library to get a hardcopy though. Meanwhile, I came across this BW article - The Art of the Ask - that deals with the closely related topic of how to get people to put their money into your idea.
PS,Further reading:
Seven Hints for Selling Ideas
What attracted my attention and helped me relate to what the authors had to say was that these four steps are not very different from another (almost) 4-step process that I use everyday, the Software Development Lifecycle – Analyze, Design, Implement, and Maintain. The similarity seems to point to the possibility that, like building complex software, idea-selling or influence is an art that can be mastered by following a simple process.
The study, think, act, follow-up process is one of those abstract universal patterns. You can use this process to achieve just about any goal, provided you know the specifics of the particular goal that you wish to achieve. ‘The Art of Woo’ seems to get right to the specifics – the 6 channels, 5 barriers, 4 styles, 3 mistakes.
The first chapter of the book is available online. I'll have to wait till the next purchase cycle at the library to get a hardcopy though. Meanwhile, I came across this BW article - The Art of the Ask - that deals with the closely related topic of how to get people to put their money into your idea.
PS,Further reading:
Seven Hints for Selling Ideas
Friday, November 23, 2007
He he he, Namskara!
I am in a meeting. Phone rings. Unknown number. I had just taken a new connection a couple of days back and the only my immediate family and friends knew the number. So I assume it must be important, excuse myself from the meeting room and answer the call. The voice on the line goes, "He he he, Namskara ..." Sounds like someone called the wrong number so I politely try to explain. But the voice on the line does not seem to care. That is when it occurred to me that it must be a recorded voice ad from my mobile operator.
After the meeting, I try to call up the customer care centre but all their executives are busy. So I try again and then again. But even after an almost a hundred attempts, all the customer care executives are still busy and I'm the only one having nothing better to do. That’s when I heard about the national do-not-call registry. After some searching, I finally find my mobile operator's do-not-call web page, filled it and click the submit button. That was two months ago.
I still get an average of three calls per day. If I don't answer it, they immediately follow up with an SMS. Very prompt. But then again, all is not as hopeless as it seems. I heard from a friend that he gets similar calls on his landline from a competing operator. Imagine dropping whatever you are doing and running to answer the phone only to discover that your mobile operator has a new ringtone for download. If that isn't bad enough, there is this other guy I talked to, and he actually got a call from one of those busy customer care executives offering to block unsolicited calls for only 99 rupees per month. Now that is the definition of the word - hopeless.
However, this experience has served to broaden my perspective. I now understand that people don't always think alike. My friends and I may not like receiving those calls. We may find it annoying. We may even consider it downright harassment. But there must also be more than one marketing executive and his manager who think that this is a great idea. Come to think of it, if it serves to broaden people’s perspectives, then certainly it must be a good thing. In fact, it is entirely possible that these telephone operators are trying hard to broaden people’s perspectives out of as sense of corporate social responsibility. And customers like me who have had their perspectives broadened should be thankful for that.
PS: Figured out a way to reach one of those busy customer care executives. Called the customer care number from my office phone. Talk about differentiated service!
After the meeting, I try to call up the customer care centre but all their executives are busy. So I try again and then again. But even after an almost a hundred attempts, all the customer care executives are still busy and I'm the only one having nothing better to do. That’s when I heard about the national do-not-call registry. After some searching, I finally find my mobile operator's do-not-call web page, filled it and click the submit button. That was two months ago.
I still get an average of three calls per day. If I don't answer it, they immediately follow up with an SMS. Very prompt. But then again, all is not as hopeless as it seems. I heard from a friend that he gets similar calls on his landline from a competing operator. Imagine dropping whatever you are doing and running to answer the phone only to discover that your mobile operator has a new ringtone for download. If that isn't bad enough, there is this other guy I talked to, and he actually got a call from one of those busy customer care executives offering to block unsolicited calls for only 99 rupees per month. Now that is the definition of the word - hopeless.
However, this experience has served to broaden my perspective. I now understand that people don't always think alike. My friends and I may not like receiving those calls. We may find it annoying. We may even consider it downright harassment. But there must also be more than one marketing executive and his manager who think that this is a great idea. Come to think of it, if it serves to broaden people’s perspectives, then certainly it must be a good thing. In fact, it is entirely possible that these telephone operators are trying hard to broaden people’s perspectives out of as sense of corporate social responsibility. And customers like me who have had their perspectives broadened should be thankful for that.
PS: Figured out a way to reach one of those busy customer care executives. Called the customer care number from my office phone. Talk about differentiated service!
Monday, November 12, 2007
Purpose
It has been almost a month and a half since my last posting. It wasn't because I didn’t have anything to write. For a change, it was because I was actually busy with something else. Busy, jumping through hoops and totally stressed out. (But that is a different story and I hope to write about it some other time.)
So in the midst of all this, I asked myself the big question. Why? Why am I doing all this? Does it really matter in the end? What really is the purpose of this life? I was at my wits end and nearing burnout, so I was in an unusually religious frame of mind.
The answer was obvious - the purpose of this life is to do God's will. But then, what is God's will? I am yet to see any burning bushes. So how do I know what is God's will? What does God require of me? As it turns out, I was not the first person to ask this question. And so I did not have to search far and wide for the answer.
Someone had once asked Jesus a similar question, "What is the greatest commandment?" It was meant to be a trick question. But then again, being God, Jesus was pretty clear about what he wanted from people. Jesus answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and Love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
It is as simple as that. Love God, love yourself and love the people in your life. That is all that God requires. He doesn’t expect me to change the world, get a promotion every year, make a lot of money, achieve the impossible or any of those things. In the end, it only matters how well you scored on this love thing.
And somehow, knowing that made all the difference.
So in the midst of all this, I asked myself the big question. Why? Why am I doing all this? Does it really matter in the end? What really is the purpose of this life? I was at my wits end and nearing burnout, so I was in an unusually religious frame of mind.
The answer was obvious - the purpose of this life is to do God's will. But then, what is God's will? I am yet to see any burning bushes. So how do I know what is God's will? What does God require of me? As it turns out, I was not the first person to ask this question. And so I did not have to search far and wide for the answer.
Someone had once asked Jesus a similar question, "What is the greatest commandment?" It was meant to be a trick question. But then again, being God, Jesus was pretty clear about what he wanted from people. Jesus answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and Love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
It is as simple as that. Love God, love yourself and love the people in your life. That is all that God requires. He doesn’t expect me to change the world, get a promotion every year, make a lot of money, achieve the impossible or any of those things. In the end, it only matters how well you scored on this love thing.
And somehow, knowing that made all the difference.
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