clog

Some time back I was having a discussion with a friend of mine who is into epics and scriptures. We discussed Mahabharata only to conclude that it wasn't a tale of good vs evil. Rather it was a tale of tact vs tact forming a foundation of politics henceforth. The winner takes it all and gives it a favorable twist for future generations to follow. However, Mahabharata, has very many interpretations, some of them unfavorable to Pandavas who were the winners and survivors at the end.

It is one of the most fascinating tales of all times. It scores over a lot of other epics because of the richness and complexity of characterization which lends itself to infinite interpretations. There are some Mahabharatas floating around in the blogging world also.

A wicked look at Mahabharata which is defined as a tale with plenty of sex and violence. Too bad this blogger did not take it to its conclusion.

Here is another perspective, from the eyes of Bhima by veteran blogger Prem Panicker. Enjoy!

There is no doubt about the movie being a super-hit owing to the box office collections it has garnered in a week. The movie has mostly received an above average rating from critics, but found a few very negative reviews on blogosphere, some of them from famous bloggers. The movie is receiving flak for the fact that it's a copy of a copy (tamil Ghajini which is 'inspired' by Memento), a second level copy.

Now I haven't seen Memento, so I don't really have much to comment on the extremely intelligent or complex plot it had. Nor could I appreciate how Ghajini in Hindi failed as opposed to the one in Tamil. So, my reaction to the movie is without any baggage or benchmark.

Overall as a potboiler, it delivered to its promise. I would be surprised if someone really thought it was going to be an accurate documentary on anterograde amnesia.

There are stupid moments (Air Voice's executive team saluting their MD on road) and some over the top scenes (like the "60 by 40 me chaddi wale poster" scene). The villain might have looked stupid and might be flawed in his plots or reactions. There are flying bodies, endured-without-a-flinch rod hits and much more unbelievable stuff. However, even before I entered the hall I wasn't expecting it to be a logically and technically accurate realistic movie. If you needed to watch the movie to realize this, you certainly wouldn't have understood the complex plot Memento had created (again this is on the basis of claims by people, no first hand experience on Memento).

The movie is meant to be a hyperbole in violence and you don't try and find logic and technical accuracy in the trajectory of bodies flying around. Nonetheless, Amir Khan building an almost impossible body for the film to lend credibility to action sequences is commendable. I thought as a masala movie, the action sequences were very well done. They weren't too realistic to be boring or too unbelievable that they look ridiculous (like flying and reaching to a roof). I don't know if those who criticize the unbelievable action would actually enjoy watching two guys rolling on the floor fighting, pulling each others' hairs and doing other believable stuff.

Much has been said about Asin's OTT portrayal, I would agree to some extent, but then a movie doesn't need to be perfect to be enjoyed. The un-concluded love story I think is one of the high points in the story transforming a common man literally into an animal.

I watched the 3.5 hours long movie, didn't get bored for a bit and enjoyed it thoroughly. It helped that I wasn't really trying to spot inaccuracies because I assumed they were there but didn't really matter.

This post, apart from being a self referential metaclog, is like the following picture in more ways than one.

Hiring is an extremely complicated problem. It is extremely difficult to judge a candidate's success in a given setting given it is a function of infinite things, a lot of which are things that the candidate doesn't control like the work environment, co-workers etc.

I have often thought about how majority of people would hire or not hire people in software companies. Some of the common reasons for people in technology industry would look like [they might not admit it ;-) ]

• He wasn't non technical enough to be a software engineer
• He didn't use words "scalable" and "business value" enough in the interview
• He knows about Data Structures and algorithms
• In cases where he didn't know the answer he just said "I don't know" instead of trying to justify that knowing those things is not required and isn't helping deliver business value. I would have loved if someone had gone one step further and claimed that not knowing them would bring valuable "layman's perspective" in the system which no other person in the team would have.
• He didn't think our company was the greatest place on earth to work for and we were just an option.
• Instead of agreeing to something wrong that I said, he tried to correct me. Didn't help that he did it politely.
• Didn't know enough American politics and sitcoms.
• He was smarter than me.

Disclaimer:
1. This is not a reflection on my past, present and future employers, is written as a non serious comment.
2. Using only he in the post is not because of any gender prejudice but just for the ease of writing.

Just when I thought I couldn't take any more of the "talks" or jargon, I decided to attend PAN-IIT Global Conference 2008. As surprising as it may sound, the talks didn't bother so much this time. I went with the intention of bunking most of the sessions save the really good ones.; ended up spending all my time in sessions. There goes the Go-karting trip.

The theme of the event was Inspire, Innovate, Transform, a much better expansion of IIT than the ones we created while studying - Indian Institute of Torture or Institute of Infinite Torture.

Here is a starter on what IITs (courtesy Dilbert) are for the uninitiated (if there are any)

and I particularly like this quote ;-)

"Per capita, IIT has produced more millionaires than any other undergraduate institution." (Salon Magazine)

This is not meant to be a coverage of the whole program, there is plenty of that on internet. I have attached some of them at the end of the post. Here, I am trying to recall things that stuck after a marathon of talks. Here is my list of the top 10 at PAN IIT 08.

10. Prasad Ram (Head R&D, Google India) talking about social entrepreneurship. The way to move ahead is to take everyone with you.

9. Rajiv Grover talking about the need to have more open book exams. As such IITs have a culture of open book exams and contrary to what common sense suggests, they used to be brutal. But, he emphasized that moving away from rote learning is important, after all life is not a closed book exam.

He also had a comment or two about the recent trend of coaching institutes becoming an assembly line for churning iitians. IITs now, instead of getting smart people, get people trained by smart people. Food for thought?

8. One of the speakers (won't disclose the name here), who went on length about some facts and figures, got applause at awkward points which he duly acknowledged. After a few such instances one after the other, he got the drift and was quick to get away. No matter how old you get, some things just won't change.

7. Watching Viswanathan Anand play against 14 teams. He is the greatest sports icon I have seen live. He is the only player in the world to have won the world chess championship in all the three formats (Knockout, Tournament, and Match).

While traveling, once an intrusive stranger asked Vishy, what he did for living. When he got "playing chess" as the reply, he rephrased the question multiple times and got the same answer. Exasperated, he told him to be practical and start doing something worthwhile because everyone is not Viswanathan Anand who can earn money playing chess.

6. Innovators vs Ideators: The panelists, instead of putting innovation on a pedestal, demystified it to be anything that improves. Pointing out difference between ideators who bring out great ideas and innovators, who can take an existing idea and turn it around a bit to make it better. Taking example of Japan that seems to be doing a great job delivering great stuff using ideas originated in the US.

5. Amartya Sen: If you hear him talking, it would appear he is reading stuff out of a book. Went on length talking about the issue of Neeti and Nyay in India that struck a chord with one of my pet peeves - Process vs Execution. He was trying to point out that our issues, not so much lie in the Neeti part as much as in the Nyay (the application). An interesting piece of trivia I got to know was that he got appointed as the head of department, Economics at Jadavpur University at the age of 23.

4. Stephen Cohen and K Mahbubani on India Pakistan issue: This session was eye opening because of the way they conveyed that the crisis between India and Pakistan needs a span of 40 years to resolve starting now. And, how the conventional knee jerk reactions may not help. Some of the suggestions they had were to improve trade and education in Pakistan and try and make the moderates strong. Once empowered, they will fight the battle against terrorism from within and will be more effective.

An interesting point that was mentioned was the fact that the nuclear weapons in some convoluted way have ended up restoring peace in the world for the fear of collateral damage.

3. Raghuram Rajan: As economic adviser to PM, watching him speak added some confidence to our government. He was extremely articulate talking about primary education and about the cyclical nature of capitalism. He mentioned that capital markets are crisis prone and have a tendency to move ahead a bit and come back some, but the net result is usually positive. He indicated pumping money in infrastructure and try to somehow keep the growth wheel churning. Good news for market watchers?

2. Tata CEOs doing India's swot analysis with C K Prahlad

1. The Hospitality: The arrangements for delegates were awesome to say the least. I had the best South Indian breakfast ever. Every day ended with parties or musical nights.

Cocktail party was reminiscent of the days of yore. IITs are like gurkuls, take the old Indian ones or the new one run by Amitabh. The common theme between the three is lack of girls. The cocktail party had a 1000 odd people. DJ in his excitement called on all the girls in the room to get together. Some 12 people in the room responded to the call. The only one who came forward to dance was a kid still in her school. And you know you are in an IIT party.

There was some shouting also by different IITs to mark their presence. Overall it was fun, the next one will be held in Chicago.

News Coverage:
http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/23sd1-pan-iit-2008-a-star-studded-affair.htm
http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/18iit-madras-director-on-iits-and-pan-iit.htm
http://news.chennaionline.com/newsitem.aspx?NEWSID=6bc056b1-74b7-4317-97e0-dd87755070e0&CATEGORYNAME=CHN
http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=344004
http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/23slide1-an-engineer-from-iit-now-a-farmer.htm
http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/13pan-iit-meet-is-all-about-nation-building.htm
http://specials.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/19sld1-images-from-the-pan-iit-extravaganza.htm
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Chennai/Hema_Malini_steals_march_over_Manmohan_on_Day_One_at_PanIIT/articleshow/3864666.cms
http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2008/dec/09pan-iit-meet-an-attempt-to-make-a-difference.htm
http://news.in.msn.com/business/article.aspx?cp-documentid=1768008
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2008/12/20/stories/2008122052200500.htm

I am not a really great fan of music, much less a fan of organizing music on my computer. A recent encounter with a friend who uses an mp3 player that displays only "titles" (and not file names) gave me a chance to do a bit of coding. I don't remember the last time I did it and yes, I am a software developer ;-)

It isn't something totally new and not something that can't be found anywhere else. However, just for the kicks, ended up writing this Perl code to traverse a music directory recursively, list down the song details (meta data details like album, artist, track etc) and copy the file names to the title if you want to. Also, as was the need of the hour, I added a part that lists down empty directories in the tree as well.

Here is the code, check it out. To run it on your machine, you will need a Perl interpreter and MP3:Tag module along with it. Any constructive feedback is welcome, any snide remarks will be summarily ignored deleted.

PS: The information is written as a pipe delimited file to facilitate easy transformation to an excel

Nostalgia has been a strange phenomenon for me all my life. I often think about my past, in fact, to put it in software lingo there is a daemon thread running in my mind thinking and relating things to my past.

However, unlike most people who fondly reminisce their past and feel like going back, I would never ever trade my present to be in past. I don't intend to sound like the eternal happy go lucky, living in the present kind of guy. That is the last thing I am.

But, I would be happier prefer being anywhere (even future, with the possibility that it may not be bright) but in my past (don't get me wrong, I have had my share of those delectable "fursat ke raat din" or those "purani jeans and guitar" days). Of course, like everyone, being in present is my choice by default.

I write this because I think I will be a visiting a very small part of my past soon. By that I mean, I will meet some folks who I have known only in a certain period of time in past and then lost connection, more or less. But with friends, your past and present have a way of quick reconciliation, you pick from wherever you left without any excuses or pretenses and soon those oldies from past will become a part of your new present. And that is how I would prefer it to be.

I am looking forward to it!

PS: I searched for any phobia for "fear of past" but couldn't find any. Am I the only one in this species?

Any iitians reading this blog, here is your chance to listen to the movers and shakers and possibly a great networking opportunity.

To give you an idea, some of the speakers are:

PM Manmohan Singh
L N Mittal
P Chidambaram
Amartya Sen
Orkut Buyukkokten

Here is the link to register

Process is one of those holy grails or holy cows that are sacrosanct in software development not open to questioning. A question posed is enough to label a person heretic, rebel, bad influence or any such thing.

There are three fundamental parts to the execution of a project. The classic trio of people, process and tools/technology. Any failure can be attributed to one of them and fixed appropriately ensuring it doesn't repeat itself.

The most common response to a broken process, causing issues downstream, is an additional process introduced to check it. Seldom have I seen people looking at the real cause before applying the fix on the process part. Isn't that the part project managers love most.

The right way out would be to first analyze why the process was broken, adding a process to avoid breakage of another is a self serving cycle with no gain for anyone but the process itself.

The people part in this triangle can offset the other two, but not vice-versa. Hence, it is extremely important to identify people failures and then treat them as such. A process cannot offset for a person not doing his job right.

In most of the cases, adding processes to offset for incompetent people(team) ends up in a bureaucratic team. And an over-process environment _slows_ everything down giving an impression of number of mistakes going down. Processes become tools for assigning blames in case of failures rather than being tools to stop them.

If you ever face issues in this trio, fix the people issues first and rest will fall in place in time.

Prem Panicker is pissed off with the terror attacks like everyone else. Here is a rant post that he wrote asking for comments. Since you need to register to comment on his site, instead I am choosing to write my comment here. So here it goes.

What pisses me off most is:

"The talk" - any kind; including the one in his blog and the comment I am writing in this post.

No matter how intelligent a debate is, it doesn't solve any problem. I hope for people (all of us) to get into the mode of "Stop talking, Start doing" (those who are already doing it, thank you and keep going) and doing whatever we can without any self promotion or any show of self righteousness.

After Obama's landslide victory much of which is attributed to his oratory skills, debating would be lauded even more. It always appears, you are right only if you can prove it, which is the point of any debate. But when it comes to real results, a lot of decisions that may be inexplicable or lot of people who won't be great at explaining stuff will prove far more useful than the windbags. Having said that, there is no other way than to debate for weighing the options of a decision but the ability to explain should not become paramount. People will end up providing "explainable" solutions not the best solutions. We may end up with just talkers everywhere.

Now that the decision is made, let’s move to the next step in the job change process which is to identify a target profile (company and role).

The two factors are: the company and the role.

Kind of Company: Here are some factors I found important while making a selection. Figure out which of these are important for you and how.

- Compensation Philosophy
- Kind of Work of the company does. It is important to see if you are getting into company's main line of business or support operation.
- Growth Path
- On Site Chances
- Brand: This is good especially you are at the start of your career. Having proven yourself in reputed firms will sit pretty in your resume.
- Temporary Relocation: Is this company open to let you stay in some other place if need arises. It can be another city in the country or may be abroad. The company should have enough offices to take care of this.
- Hiring Process (Exclusivity): This has direct bearing on the kind of people you would be working with.
- Work Life Balance
- Benefits/Asides: Some companies have perquisites which cannot be compensated monetarily, like having a door to door cab service. Having a cafeteria seems an extremely important factor to me and so is for lot of people who cannot carry lunch from home.
- Company Performance: If going is good, everyone behaves nicely, but as Joker said - "when chips are down...". So be careful if the company isn't doing well, unless you plan to go and turn things around and get credit for it
- Hierarchy: This sounds unimportant, but please make sure you understand all the claims made by the potential employers. It is usually fashionable to say that the company follows a flat hierarchy. Two points here, a- Having a flat hierarchy may not necessarily be a great thing. b - While everyone claims hierarchy is flat, it may not be so.

Kind of Roles
Don't confuse roles with titles. Depending on how a company is structured there can be wide disparity between the two. Make sure you know which one is more important for you and decide accordingly.

Scouting Channels:

Job sites are good (naukri.com, monster.com are the ones I have personal experience with). However, the job results they email you are not really useful because of exceptionally poor filtering done to provide you a job that suits your profile. But out of the piles of useless results will lie some good ones that you need to find out. The day you open your resume, take a day off work. I received more than 25 calls the day I opened it and then the number kept going down.

Referrals are very effective. You will have a much better idea of what you are getting yourself into. You also have a ready made contact in the organization to see you through the teething period.

So that concludes my thoughts on selection of your next job. I will come back with my thoughts on preparation in future.

As India is reeling under the impact of terror attacks and all those involved in rescue operations are trying their best, the last thing anyone would want is a painful, non-cooperative, intrusive and complaining media. For a change, the reporting has been uncharacteristically mature on all the major news channels. It seemed completely sensible until Shobha De and Barkha Dutt, two ladies who sensationalize everything, came on the screen chatting on phone. All the cliched talks of taxes and government apathy were repeated. One moment Ms De was not happy as there wasn't enough political presence on the scene, next moment she felt Manmohan Singh and Advani flying there was meaningless and then urged all the politicians to stay away. I am appalled at the logic and more so at the timing of these rants. Well, I guess I will end my meta-rant with this.

Citigroup gets ready to cut 52,000 jobs

This is continuation from the last post where I was talking about reasons why people look for job changes. I also want to add a quick note; you might find things are more applicable to IT than other professions because of the author’s nature of work. Hopefully, most of the stuff is still generic enough. Here comes the second part of the list:

My company sucks: This is such an overarching reason that it doesn’t even count as a valid reason rather a combination of one or more of the others defined in the list. Figure out which of the reasons combine to give rise to this one and then think about them.

I need better work/I am bored in my current job: This is a reason I would like to warn you against. It is possible to like or dislike anything depending on your attitude. Unless you completely want to change your line which can happen by doing an MBA that opens up a wide range of playing field. Ask anyone and you would get a million and one reason of why his/her job sucks. Jobs are meant to suck, high paying ones more so. So as one of my readers pointed, jobs are not meant to provide satisfaction. This reason needs to be dealt with caution. I am not ruling it out for the simple reason that there are blacks swans in this world.

I am not getting promoted: If you haven’t gotten promoted even after staying long enough in the current role, you got to do two things – figure out why it happened and go for a change. But when you do so, be careful that you specifically go for a role change. But the catch here is that, if you haven’t played that role earlier, chances are you will struggle in the new role in a new organization. There are just too many variables to take care of, so this is a significant risk as you don’t want to start your new job on a wrong footing. It might just push you back to negate the jump you just got.

I need more personal time: This is quite a noble reason. If you don’t have enough time for yourself, and mind it, enough is subjective and personal, then there is every reason you should look for a change.

Wildcard Reasons:

• Relocation
• Too much commute
• I need more flexible time (For ladies especially)
• Higher Studies
• Start -up

Joining a startup or starting your company and higher studies all are beyond the analysis. All those reasons are quite loaded and bigger decisions. They should be left to personal choice and preferences. Similarly, other wildcard reasons have lot of subjectivity and personal element associated with them.

Conclusion: These things are all meant for people who are serious about their work and don’t want to take hasty un-meditated reasons. For job-hoppers, won’t even care to look for a blog while making a change. Overall, figure out the real reason that gave rise to your thought of quitting and analyze it to ensure that it holds water before acting on it.