lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Seen on one of the mailing lists that I am on

I've heard it said - and find this to be true in enough cases to be useful as a rough guide - that men often try to stimulate conversation by disagreement, while women generally do the opposite (this provides a highly amusing view of teenagers' conversations involving the apposite sex, which tend to illustrate this, or something very close to it.) If so, then the Net often appears to be full of 12-year-old boys, stoned out of their minds on their brand-new experience with testosterone and desperate to be noticed.

Unluckily ( ) Yahoo! Bangalore has seen a big influx of "freshers" these days. Most of them come across as idiots, but I guess it is just their eagerness ( perhaps desperation would be the correct word) to get noticed.

I was in a very sour mood while I was driving back from work today. When I stopped in one of the frequent traffic snarls that adorn the roads of Bangalore, I saw that next to me was an autorickshaw with a small girl and her family. The small girl reached out and touched the rear view mirror of my bike. I made my don't-mess-with-me face at her and she just smiled at me. My reflex was to smile back at her and my bad mood was promptly broken. Sometimes I wonder how many of these small opportunities to make someone's days better have I have missed.

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .

When I moved to Bangalore, my brother and sister came here with me. However, sometime back both of them got admitted into MBA colleges in Pune and Mumbai respectively and I have been living alone. This has lead to a sort of tv-addiction. I come back from work and switch on the tv and bham! two hours have gone past just like that. Or on a weekend I take my lunch and sit in front of the tv and bham! it is soon dinner time.

To get out of this groove, I unplugged the cable that brings me cable television from the TV. Then I went one step further. I took a bit of string and the cable to one of the window rods. Now when I want to watch the tv, I will have to get up, untie the knot and plug the cable into the tv. Since this is too much work, I will not do it . However, there are some serials (like Simpsons) for which I would do that much work. This will reduce my casual tv surfing to null.

It has been two days now and this experiment has been successful till now.

He-he .. look at this. British pensioners regret not having more sex, says poll.

Seven out of 10 people aged 65 and over said they would make more time to make love if they could have their days again.

[snip]
[snip]

Sex was followed by travelling the world (57 per cent) and changing professions (43 per cent) as the most popular wishes pensioners had if they could go back in time.

Other regrets included saving for a pension (40 per cent), standing up to their boss (33 per cent), marry someone else (21 per cent), spending more cash on luxuries (19 per cent) and setting up a business (16 per cent).

You have heard what the more experienced have to say. Now go out and have more sex and travel more - leave those angle brackets alone for now

An update on my hiring and retaining post. This discussion was also happening on the pmclininc mailing list. One of the posters said that the good managers measure their job satisfaction using this list of questions

• Do I know what is expected of me?
• Do I have the right materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
• At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
• In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
• At work, do my opinions seem to count?
• Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
• Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
• Do I have a best friend at work?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
• This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

There has been a thread going on in the india-gii list about hiring and retaining talented coders in india. Here is the email that the original poster had posted

Over the past few weeks I've met with several people who are all
having the same headaches

1. Hiring talented coders
2. Retaining talented coders

The first is usually down to lack of talent (coders directly out of
college just don't have the "new " skills (for example) in things like
ajax, ruby, but have core knowledge of things like C, and what I call
"old" languages), and also salaries wanted, especially if you are
trying to sell abroad and compete with pricing abroad, i.e brazil,
russia, ukraine offer lower prices these days.  

My thoughts about this

When hiring freshers, I don't think you should look for what languages
they know. Instead you should
- try to gauge how much of the fundamentals they know
- if they (freshers) are self-learners

Point 1 can be checked by asking them about sorting/searching
algorithms or networking or process management (basically the topics
which are covered in their operating system course or their data
structures course).

Point 2 can be checked by seeing if they have contributed to any free
software project and actually asking them to show their code (it is
after all free software and there is no NDA).  If a fresher has worked
on an open source project, it usually means
- he knows about version control
- he knows about mailing lists
- he can work without much supervision
- he can work with a distributed team
- and most importantly, he can work with a team

In the email, the original poster had also mentioned this point

the big guns (tcs, infosys etc) hire like 10K users in a go, and its
seems that the prospects of getting a good wife/husband are directly
linked to the name of the company on the CV (again this maybe biased,
but am seeing it more and more).

WTF!! ROTFL!!