lunatechian (lunatech-ian) (Entries tagged as work)

Message of the day

nospam@example.com (moblog) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 18:16:00 +0000

Avoid sugary, fatty and carb rich food.

A Hard Day's Night

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:16:12 +0000

This song is dedicated to my pager and my wife. This song needs to be sung in the same tune as A Hard Day's Night

It's been a hard day's night, and the beeper has been beeping like a ticking clock
It's been a hard day's night, I should be sleeping like a log
But when I get home to you I'll find the pager beeping off some more
It Will make me feel like a dull robot

You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things
And it's worth it just to hear you say you're going to give me everything
So why on earth should I moan, 'cause when I get you alone
You know I feel ok

Third anniversary at Yahoo!

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:22:00 +0000

Today I completed 3 years at Yahoo! Bangalore. Thanks to t3rminator for reminding me the happy occasion (t3 had joined a day before I did).

Thanks to great teammates, partners in crime and mentors for making this day possible.

phew!

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:03:30 +0000

Phew!

I hope this is the end of it

Link to the AP story

visa interview in Chennai

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:43:58 +0000

Yesterday I had to go to Chennai for my US visa interview. Chennai is a really sucky city, it sucks even worse than Bangalore . Here is an account of the process.

Documents required

The vfs-usa.co.in site has a list of documents that you require to bring along with you. If you filled the visa form at the vfs-usa.co.in site, you would have received a printout of the forms D156, D157 and an appointment letter mentioning the data and time of your visa interview.

I had packed in all the required documents the night prior to my departure to Chennai. Due to security concerns you are not allowed to carry mobile, CDs, music player or any electronic device into the consulate building. However, you are allowed to carry books and one polybag with all your documents inside. These people are really serious about security - do not bring any stuff which is prohibited. You will not be allowed to carry it inside no matter what.

Since books were not on their Do not carry list, I took along a printout of the MySQL Internals manual for my inflight entertainment.

Reaching there

The American consulate is located in Anna Salai. Once you get down at the airport, you will find a government operated prepaid taxi counter there. They will charge you 240 Rs. (rupees) for a taxi to the American consulate. The people manning the counter were able to understand english.

Since I was returning back to Bangalore the same day, I had not made any reservations in a hotel for my stay. The taxi driver knew the place and he dropped me infront of the consulate gate. The guards there guided me to the gate through which the visa interviewees had to pass.

Passing time

I reached the consulate by 0900 though my interview was at 1230. There was a average sized queue at the gate. I liked the queue managment system at the Chennai consulate. The guards called out the interview time that was mentioned in the appointment letter and people who were scheduled at that time moved ahead in the queue. Since my interview was scheduled atYou will 1230, I roamed around in the streets to pass time.

It is really a hard job to pass time in Chennai. There were no parks or malls in the nearby area. Since I did not know the city well enough, I did not want to wander far off from the consulate.

After killing nearly two hour, I got into the queue at 1100 hours. I was allowed into the consulate at 1300 hours.

Pre-screening of the documents

Once you are inside the consulate, you have to wait to have your passport, forms D156 and D157 verified. The officers check if you are missing something. They are quite efficient. You have chairs available once you get inside the consulate.

By the time I reached the pre-screening counter, it was already 1430. Unluckily for me, the photograph on my form was not of the correct size. The officer at the counter asked me to get a proper sized photograph and come back again in an hour.

There is a market near the consulate and the shopkeepers there understand english and hindi. I asked around and quickly located a place to have my photograph taken. It was a seedy place and the photographer charged me 200 Rs. for four correct sized photograph. My guess is that he charged me at least thrice the price I would normally have paid.

I hurried back to the consulate and showed the guards at the front gate that I had been rescheduled for my interview and I had originally been called aat 1230. He kindly allowed me to go in without waiting in the queue.

This time around I did not have a problem in the pre-screening part and they asked me to go in for my visa interview.

Visa interview

There was quite a crowd waiting for their visa interview. However, the queue managment was again good here and no one was complaining. There were enough chairs around, so waiting was not too much of a hassle.

You first had to get your fingerprint taken and then stand in a queue to have one of the officers interview you. I was quite apprehensive about the interview as I had heard quite a lot of stories about the randomness of the visa interviewers in rejecting the visas. However, I was quite surprised. The visa interviewers gave perfectly coherent reasons for the rejection of the visas. They were direct, but polite in their rejections. They asked pertinent questions and I do not think that hassling the visa interviewees was their aim.

When my turn came, I was asked a few question about why I was going to US and told that my visa has been spproved and I would receive it in 2-3 days . I was quite happy and came out of the consulate. The process ended at 1700.

Back to Bangalore

My flight was at 2125. I killed time till 1830 and then took an autorickshaw to the airport. He charged me 150 Rs. and dropped me at the airport by 1915. I walked inside the airport, found an empty seat and tried to get some sleep. Since I had done lot of walking that day, my feet were killing me. I took off my shoes too and then tried to get some more sleep. Pretty soon the boarding for my flight was announced. I got into the the aeroplane, flew back to Bangalore and was back home by 2300.

All in all, it was a tiring experience, but a productive one.

thinking big

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:29:18 +0000

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.

desperate to be noticed ?

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 04:04:18 +0000

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.

breaking the tv addiction

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 03:25:18 +0000

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.

more thoughts on retaining

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 05:35:53 +0000

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?

hiring and retaining

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:06:54 +0000

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!!

freedom from legacy systems!!

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 11:58:02 +0000

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