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Interviewer Interviewee and ?

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Post covid, almost all hiring is done over video calls. I have had some good and bad experiences. Let me narrate an incident which was not so pleasant. A candidate had cleared a few technical rounds. I was supposed to conduct the management round. Well, I started the interview with some basic questions such as where were you born, which city did you complete your schooling, graduation? The usual icebreakers. Then I moved onto a few technical questions just to understand the team structure, the project SDLC, overall technologies used. For most of the technical questions, the candidate asked me to repeat the questions. While answering technical questions she looked down, perhaps at some screen. There was a pause before she started answering, she might be mentally scanning the answer. Then the answers didn't just follow, they flowed. The answers were theoretical as if being read from some technical source. I suspect the setup must have been like this.  Candidate was facing a laptop, o...
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Questions about mind, memory and information

I am reading an excellent book "Late Bloomers" by Rich Karlgard. I came across a point mentioned by Rich which triggered a lot of thoughts in my mind. He mentioned : "Old people take time to recall things because the more information we store, the longer it takes to retrieve information". This is an interesting insight which triggered many more questions in my mind. 1. Should we avoid dumping unnecessary information into our head ? Yes, of course. I believe this will limit the overall information in our mind and help us with faster retrieval of information. So avoiding the nonsensical videos on Insta, FB, YouTube is indeed a good thing. A plan has to be put in place regarding consumption of posts on FB, web series on OTT platforms, televisions shows, movies, messaging platforms, news on Twitter or any news platform for that matter. The plan should help us decide on what can be avoided completely and what can be consumed in moderation. These are the times of informat...
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Slow machines - Productivity? Who cares !!!

This is a story from one of my previous organization. Almost all engineers were frustrated by the machines they were working on. The common problems that everyone faced: Extremely slow boot up (Minimum 20-30 minutes just for booting up) Unable to run multiple applications e.g. cannot open two instances of an IDE Machines freezing during certain hours of the day (when the security scan starts) Builds taking light years Unplanned and forced updates The dreaded blue screen Extremely heavy laptops If I calculate the loss only due to boot up time.  30 minutes per day * 4000 engineers = 2000 hours lost per day. I have not even calculated the loss due to machines freezing, longer builds, unplanned updates, blue screens. Imagine how agitated the engineers might have felt. They lost precious hours of the day, having a severe impact on productivity. What would have it felt like ? when someone got into a flow e.g. coding / testing / debugging and then he / she was unable to proceed, they were...
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Replace an Architect with Interns ?

This incident happened a few years ago. My organization (part of Indian IT service industry) as usual was looking at ways to increase margins. The consultant firm which they were working with came up with few charts. One of the chart showed the billing rate vs. employee cost (as per years of experience).  Their conclusion - Bring down the average years of experience in each and every project (irrespective of the size / type / nature of the project). This way the cost will go down, and since the billing rate remains the same it automatically leads to an increased margin. The rumor going around those days was that Senior managers were given margin targets and promised a hefty bonus in return. Mails started floating around. Every project manager was called for a discussion with Senior leaders. Before the discussion, the PM had to collate the designation, years of experience and the salary band of the members in their projects. Here is a sample of how the data was supposed to look like...
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Relocation and its compulsory

The Indian IT service industry has always been about margins. Long long ago, in one of my past organization the senior leaders were pondering over the question "How to further increase the margins?". Probably the discussion might have gone this way: Senior a** no. 1 - Lets move all employees from Mumbai office to Pune or Bangalore where the rentals are less compared to Mumbai. We will save a few pennies. Senior a** no. 2 - Hey if all employees move out, we will have to leave too. Senior a** no. 1 - Ok in that case 50 % of mid-level and junior employees need to move.  All senior a*** - Wow, that's brilliant !!! HR promptly mailed the senior managers to identify as many people as possible and force them to relocate. The word spread like wildfire throughout my organization. People wondered, the maximum cost in IT is the employee cost, saving on a few pennies on rental by forcing people to relocate, how's that going to help? The mood was sombre. Ali baba worried about his...
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The Laptop Story

Sai a sincere software engineer joined my team in Bengaluru. Sai came from a remote village in Andhra Pradesh. He had spent 4 years in Bengaluru and joined our organization in the hope to further up his skills in the ETL domain. This story is much before COVID happened. The organization mandated to be in office for 5 days a week and 9 hours a day. Our operations in Bengaluru had just begun and services such as car drop, canteen facilities were not yet available. I was fortunate to be in the old office in Mumbai having all facilities. Our customer calls used to run till late, at times till 11 PM. We had to work till late hours. The organization provided Desktops to all engineers who had less than 5 years of experience. The challenge Sai faced is "dinner". He could not leave office early as he had a desktop. Poor guy had to go home and have dinner post 11 PM, which had been ordered by his room-mate few hours earlier.  There was a simple solution to this problem. "Allocate ...
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