Trainings on Saturdays...

YES... I completed the three day training on IBM Websphere. And well..I did learn... atleast on thursday and friday but on saturday..

All these three days i have been thinking "Do we at this stage of our brain development cycles need trainings?". When was the last time you listened to your teacher and actually understood what was being taught. With male teachers, the cricket match happening outside the classroom was always more interesting. With "good" female teachers, we used to be attentive.. but hey hey... not to what they were teaching.. And the last and the least.. with not so good female profs.. fortunately they were not so harsh on attendance.. so never attended... :)

In this, the one i attended, a poor little "muchhad" soul tried to make us understand everything about websphere. Starting from the basics he went on the most intricate topics like clustering and messaging etc. And well, i must mention, the guy was good. He was technically sound and a decent communicator.

But again do we really need trainings. Arent we along with the services of Google capable enough to make any damn stupid thing (yes even websphere) work when thrusted upon us. To support my motion, I have completed almost three years in the industry, worked on various technologies, various different products without a single training (this was my first). And I have atleast survived without struggle.

Spoon feeding is what i call such trainings. And problem comes when someone is trying to spoon feed you while you are not hungry. You will either refuse to swallow, or puke it out later. When you are actually hungry, and you are as mature as a twenty something should be, you will easily find food to your liking (ofcourse, google has laid out all the delicacies of the world at a click's distance..:)

Ok, so i buy the other argument as well. A good training can save us a lot of time. Ofcourse, whatever i was taught in three days, googling it out would probably have taken a week. But the important part is right amount of training and more importantly at the right time. So if you are taught something today which is not to be used before 6 months, its useless.

And lastly, my motivation for this blog, IT SHOULD NOT BE ON SATURDAYS. Imaging yourself getting up early on a weekend, taking a bath early on a weekend, getting ready and leaving the house early on a weekend. Driving 35Kms to office. And all this, to attend a training... Had it been to work and meet some deadline, it was still understandable.. But for a training... no way.

So I dont know if trainings are good or bad... but there are a strict no no on weekends...Had it not been for the saturday, Probably the topic of this blog would have been : "Trainings, A must" .... :)..

My Interviewing Experiences

Date : Some day in October'03.
Time : Some time early evening (around 5)
Venue: My cubicle at my first company.

Tring .. Tring... (mobiles dont sound "tring", so had to be my seat landline...)

Myself : Hello
Other side : Hi Aditya, This is Punam (HR exec).. how are you
me : hey, hi... call from HR... Must be some bad news... dont tell me that i dont fit in company's scheme of things anymore..
her : ha ha... dont worry.. its just the opposite..actually a candidate has come for interview for your team and the manager is not in office, but he has told me you can handle this. He is waiting in conferenece room3.
me : are you serious, i have not taken any interviews before.. (my heart beats had actually started beating... me taking an interview..!!!!)
her : arre i know you can handle this easily... its easier than writing software .. so dont worry... !!!!BANG!!!!!

For next one minute i was just dumbstuck... I had attended attended a few interviewing sessions earlier .. My manager used to take me along.. but i used to be a mute spectator.. trying to solve the questions in my mind.. admiring my manager along with... And now here i was... It was just hard to swallow the fact that I was about to decide the future of a person.. who had more experience than me... (ok!! not the whole future.. but atleast one job prospect). I went inside, and fortunately the candidate was not so good, beleive me.. rejecting is much much easier than selecting...

In the next 6 months i took around 40 odd interviews... selected only around 6(out of which 2 got rejected by the cto), and the biggest dissapointment was .. Got a chance to interview very very few females...!!!.. Why cant india produce more female software engineers....

I am absolutely no one to explain the art of interviewing... Still a beginner in my career... But i thought i should share what i felt taking all the interviews.

The first 5... Unfortunate candidates..
I have to say... the first 5-6 candidates i interviewed were unfortunate... I just didnt have the confidence to select anyone at that time... What if the candidate is not good enough.. what if he is not able to perform later... what if.. what if...
I was asking the same set of technical questions to everyone.. most of which were taken from my managers interviews... Gave them the toughest puzzles i had encountered (and was not able to solve myself..).. In short I WAS TERRIBLE

The Next 10.. Learning experience.. Candidates still unfortunate...
With each rejection(fortunately not mine) i was learning.... and learning fast... My question bank was growing.. and so was my confidence.. I was learning to take interviews based on candidates resume... The best part was.. i was reading a lot... I didnt want to be in a situation where candidate is explaining something i had no idea about. Was trying to find new puzzles. I had started to enjoy the whole thing...but somehow the candidates were still unfortunate...

And the rest... I was a seasoned interviewer..
Soon came my first selection... And i must say it was an easy one.. The candidate was brilliant.. had a descent enough answer for everything.... I think even if he had come in my first 5 interviews, i would have selected him. But that selection gave me great great confidence.. I also came to know that good candidates are indeed rare... I was now rejecting candidates with more confidence... and ofcourse selected a few as well.. :)

So what did i learn..
I am not explaining what kind of questions one should ask.. I still dont know.. its every's interviewer's personal judgement. What i am putting here is something which i felt/learnt while taking the interviews

Interview is a selection process and not rejection (though the selection ratios dont suggest that). So as an interviewer you need to find out what are the strengths of the candidates before judging his weaknesses. Making the candidate confortable is of utmost importance, that brings out the best in him. And beleive me you dont need to know the answers to everything you are asking. The candidates body language is a good enough indicator if he is fudging. So you can ask him to explain a previous project of his, of which you have no idea about(of course dont let the candidate know that).

And what about the interviewee... One thing I would like to share... In most interviews.. the interviewer forms a perception about the candidate in first 5-7 minutes(my manager agrees with me on this). Unfortunately, Its very easy to ruin that later but very very difficult to improve. And that perception is mostly not because of the technical answers you give, but more for how you approach the problems(even the way you say you dont know), and your body language. So be very careful about what you say or how you behave initially. Attitude is an absolutely no no.

Well enough of this trash... If you are good... you are good at both interviewing and being an interviewee.... So if you have taken the pain of reading upto this far... forget everything written above... I just had to pen down my thoughts.... :)

World of cryptography :layman(alias me) view

I have moved this article to my technical blog. Please visit the following link.
http://technical-abhushan.blogspot.com/

My First ever blog

Hmm.... I could not keep myself away from the blog fever, thanks to a few fantastic blogs i have read today.
So Pankaj, Harshdeep .... and other young bloodeans... (could not find a better pharase for our group members.. :) you are responsible for all the trash that gets added to the net through this page...