Masterminds India

I had been to one of the institutes yesterday to recruit some freshers into our company as contractors. Conducting interviews, I must admit is one of the most intriguing and refreshing experiences one can have while working. That it allows you to pander to your sadistic impulses is also another big plus of doing them. Here are some of the snippets from yesterdays comdey of errors.

"Hi. I am Sandeep. Please Sit down.So tell me something about yourself"
"Sir, Myself Rajat."
"Umm..Go on!"
"Sir everything else is there in my resume"
"Well you should have something else to say about your self"
"No sir! I am not an interesting guy!"
(Whew! Talk about first impressions!)


"Ramya, tell me what's a Zombie process?"
"Sir, child dies. Parent doesnt know what to do!"
"But what is the issue if you have them?"
"Yes sir! Parent doesnt know what to do."
(Damn! Dont all parents in the world complain that they dont know what to do about their child!")
"Lets try to get to the answer. Tell me what is your favourite sweet."
"Sir, Gulab Jamoon"
"Lets say Ramya, that you have a box that can hold only 10 jamoons. But unfortunately three of them are spoilt..."
"Like some one has eaten them Sir? They will spoil the other jamoons also Sir"
"Huh??!! However!!!! Say three are spoilt. You have three good ones with you now. Can you put them into the box now?"
"Yes Sir! I will remove the bad ones and the put these inside".
"Good! With Jamoons you can. But can you do such manipulations in the process table of the kernel?"
"Sir?"
" Try to draw a parallel with the zombies processes. They are like the bad jamoons, arent they?"
"I didnt get you Sir."
"If the process table is full of zombies, and space runs out can you fork new processes?"
"No Sir!"
"So could you understand the problem now?"
"No Sir!"
(Damn! She's the one supposed to be explaining. Not me! I stopped that interview)


Favourite hobby:
Candidate A: Playing Chess
Candidate B: Chess
Candidate C: Chess
By then, I was sure that the intitute had driled into them to put such "intellectual" things in their resumes to impress the panelists". I was sure that even the next one would have put up the same thing on his resume.
"Umm..I see in your resume that your hobby is playing chess"
"Yes Sir"
"Can you tell me somthing about Sicilian defence?"
"No Sir"
" Whats en passant?"
"I am sorry Sir. I read all these things in my early semesters. I dont remember."
"Hello! I m talking about chess here."
"Oh! Sorry Sir. I dont know."
"But you have told that its your favourite hobby"
"Yes Sir. But not playing. I like watching it."
" you like to WATCH chess???!!! How can you watch when you dont understand it? It must be the most boring game to watch on earth."
"No Sir! That is my hobby"
( Interesting! So if this qualifies as a legitamate hobby, I will tell ppl my hobby is sky diving. Only watching it of course!")


"Let me give you practical example. Say I have an application running and it can authenticate users who have a vaild login and password. Lets say there is somw command like" connect to" which you can use on the shell prompt to connect to it. Now, I want to see how many users can the application simultaneously authenticate. You should do this using shell scripting. There is no need to write the script. Just explain how you will approach it"
"Sir, ummm...I feel...err...ther are two main things here. umm..the number of users and the time to connect at."
"Lets say its 3 PM and 500 users."
"Ok."
"For exapmle just think that the application is something like Yahoo mail."
"Sir, there are two important things here. Time and no of users."
"Agreed. But how will you approach it?"
"Sir.Does it have to be 3 Pm? Not any other?"
"Whatever time you want. It doesnt matter".
"And only 500 users?"
"Any number you want. Yo choose"
"Sir, according to me. There are two imporant things. number of users and.."
"Yeah, yeah ! I know. Time!!...we have agreed upon that already! Just tell me how you will approach it."
"Sir, I feel the only two factors are......."
( I recalled Asterix and the big fight then. Vitalstatistic has to fight some giant dumb Gualish cheftain to proove that he is still the worthy cheiftain of his village. ther is no way he could have brought that guy down without the magic portion. So, he pratices to run and on the day of the fight he will run so fast all over the ring his opponenbt gets tired of chasing him and collapses. So I guess, even this was a strategy taught by the institute. Just keep giving the same line till the panelists get raging mad and move to the next question!")


"Can you explain the sequence of compilation, till you get a .o file?"
"Sir first you have to write a program!"
(There! Just shoot me! I cant take it anymore)


Well what more can I say? If you are bored of your routine, work is no longer interesting, you feel no one treats you with respect...simple solution. Go take interviews!