lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

My manager made a very good one-liner today (in context of whether we should concentrate on research or on actual implementation)

Think big and implement in small steps.

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.

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.

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!!

Dear Manager,
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for approvimg my request to move my work desktop to a RedHat system. FreeBSD4 sucks donkey balls (as Eric Cartman would say). Linux is so super-sweet (even if it is RHEL)
Now to move my home directory.
Your sincere slave
Raj Shekhar