Deliberations on giving interviews

Giving interviews is hard.

I used to think interviews are a breeze, but this was before realising that "being yourself" in an interview is not an optimal strategy. Till date I'd been fortunate -- for the most part, my interviews had been conducted by somewhat like-minded people. In such situations, being "true" to oneself works quite well.

However, the trick is in sizing up precisely what the interviewer is looking for, in asking the questions that he is. The response then needs to be tailored to match the interviewer's expectations -- not the role's. and not the organisations, even though they should ideally be aligned.

In the case of a question looking for a factual answer, while the core of the response can stick to the facts, the language it is couched in can make a big difference (firm? conciliatory? with gusto? with a sense of distaste?). This also applies to the length and approach of the answer (curt? concise? rambling? detailed?).

Of course, the most correct, internally consistent, and confidently stated responses won't do you any good if the initial read on the interviewer is completely off-base. If your approach to validate a hypothesis is Bayesian when the interviewer is a fanatical frequentist, it may not matter at all that you were entirely right. Back in the day, expounding the virtues of JSP in an interview where the interviewer was an ardent PHP fan didn't work too well.

If you aren't applying to roles that are clearly out of your league (claiming knowledge of a tool or technology that you've only read about, or only dabbled in), then the associated interview should be a piece of cake. But humans being what they are, and ridiculously susceptible to biases, the best strategy for an interview is always to get a read on the interviewer(s) and manipulate said biases in your favour. If you're unable to do this -- ceteris paribus -- the chances of making it through the interview are entirely 50-50, which is really quite low.

Corking it up

One of the life changes I attempted to make recently is to clean up my usage of Twitter.

Up until now it was mostly irrelevant junk. Some of it was interesting links and the occasional stimulating conversation, but the stream pretty much ended up being dominated by random uninteresting and malformed brain dumps and running commentary on sports events.

One of the effects of this obviously an impact on the quality of the network -- a large number of followers were bots and spammers. The more invidious impact, however, was on blogging. Owing to ready access to a Twitter client at pretty much all times, every time I'd think of something, it would immediately get posted on Twitter. There might have been a modicum of thought applied to figure out the optimum way to optimise the information density in the tweet, to make it pithy, funny and/or link-baity. After this, the tweet and its contents would mostly be forgotten -- unless it was really memorable, which weren't very many.

An instant means of vomiting a thought out meant that any germ of an idea would remain just that. It wasn't nurtured and allowed to develop into something more substantial. And this phenomenon wasn't just restricted to me -- a lot of my favourite bloggers noticeably slowed down or outright stopped posting on their blogs once they got on Twitter.

All this combined with the gradual flexing of Twitter's closed-platform muscle meant that I no longer wanted to rely on Twitter as a log of my thought processes. I ended up unfollowing a lot of generally pointless "celebrities" and actors, and cleaned up my lists to include a healthy number of people aligned with my more useful interests (science, data science, programming).

But more importantly, I am learning to bottle up my thoughts and let them age, till they're developed enough to be written down. I can't say that I've succeeded in doing this quite yet, but hopefully, these are steps in the right direction.

Broken thoughts

1. "[O]ur modern notions of wealth, money and currency are built on a type of social proof pyramid."
2. Depending on good behaviour from participants doesn't scale well.
3. Labels are stupid. It is perfectly fine to hold opinions that span a political spectrum, as long as they are orthogonal and don't contradict each other in weirdly hypocritical ways.
4. How do you deal with a situation where a job has low desirability, great demand, but very low pay because it just doesn't provide more value just about minimum wage? This appears to be a problem with the "caring for the elderly" sector, and will only continue to worsen as the average age of the developed world keeps increasing. More importantly, who deals with this situation?
5. Don't tell me to "hate the game, not the player". I am well capable of hating both equally strongly, TYVM.

Some day, maybe I will be able to string together a more cogent and developed position on some of these, but till then, this will have to do.

Aches can be blamed on footwear, right?

Everything aches.

That's been the constant refrain over the last couple of days as 4 of us climbed hills, descended into valleys and lost our way in woodlands in the course of hiking the South West Coast Path.

We had picked the 3 legs starting from Minehead and ending at Combe Martin. The first day wasn't a walking day, and would see us get to Porlock by a combination of buses, taxis and steam trains. We then proceeded to walk about 45 kms over the next two days (Porlock to Lynton, Lynton to Combe Martin), fuelled (for the most part) by a healthy combination of carrots, apples and water.

Swayed by their sleek appearance and a little marketing-speak, I (and another member of the party) had decided to don "barefoot" trail-running shoes for the trip, instead of the usual pair of hiking boots that's been a trusty ally so far in such endeavours.

The only problem with the boots had been that my feet would get sore after walking in them for long-ish durations, because they were quite heavy. So it was with great excitement that I had trialled the barefoot shoes on the treadmill in the week just before the trip. They performed fabulously well -- I ran faster, the legs didn't hurt and most importantly, the modified style (minimalist running) was plain more fun.

So it seemed like a reasonable idea to attempt the hike in the new shoes.

Well, I can honestly say I'm never doing that again.

While the shoes themselves didn't detract too much from the overall experience, they do have a rather unique characteristic of letting you feel every tiny irregularity on the "road". This meant that every time we hit a rocky -- or even just gravelly -- stretch, it would be an exercise in focussing intently on the path to avoid landing a foot on any slightly incongruous looking stone.

Additionally, because feet encased in these tend to land "naturally" towards the front and middle parts, my calf appeared to have become the primary load-bearing structure. And my load is not inconsiderable, so my legs had to heft me over hill and dale without any assistance from the feet at all.

All of this resulted in every muscle in the legs crying out in complaint at the end of both days of walking. Moving forward through pain is perfectly fine, but hobbling around at the same B&B where significantly older hikers flit around happily having completed the same trail is intolerable.

The next coastal hike I go on (and I plan to go on lots more!) , it's back to the old and comfortable Woodlands for me. The Vivo Barefoot Neos can -- all multi-terrain claims aside -- remain relegated to the treadmill.

Attempting some Respectful Insolence on the Tiranga Bangle nonsense

I figured Orac might like to heap a steaming pile of insolence and generally name and shame a couple of prominent members of the Indian parliament, who have launched and promoted a metallic band called the "Tiranga Bangle".

In addition to being a shameful attempt at capitalising on the general patriotism of Indians (the Indian flag is called the "Tiranga", which means "tri-colour"), the manufacturer of these bands is a marketer called Dr. Anton Ungerer. He runs a company called TriVortex, which makes these bands and claims [PDF warning] that these bands can relieve arthritic pain, help lower electromagnetic sensitivity, synchronise internal and external energy flows, and that eternal woomeister favourite: detoxification.

 

As you may well have guessed, none of these claims are backed up by anything resembling competent or legitimate studies, and instead rely on cherry-picked anecdotes, dubious marketing and general woo about "trinity in duality", "light, sound and geometry", and "bio mimicry" [PDF warning].

 

The saddest part of all this is that the two MPs in question (Shashi Tharoor and Naveen Jindal) are considered quite young and 'intellectual' in comparison to their peers, and widely regarded as being future prominent faces in Indian politics.

In his very vague defense, Tharoor (a PhD, incidentally) put up a post attempting to dissociate himself with the entire kerfuffle, but still ended up resorting to mental contortions like, "my launching the product does not in any way amount to an endorsement of any of the claims associated with it."

 

The latter, however, has doubled down on his support for the 'technology'. He obviously has a vested interest in its success as the bands are being sold and distributed by his "Flag Foundation of India".

 

Finally, I was surprised to find this, but there has already been a randomised controlled trial showing NO effects towards arthritis pain relief by wearing magnetic or copper bracelets -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19942103.

Stephen Fry on dancing

Stephen Fry on his fear and loathing of dancing, from his podgram - "Bored of the dance":

I hate dancing more than I can possibly explain. I hate doing it myself, which I can’t anyway, but I loathe and resent the necessity to try. [...]

If I listen to music, I like either to do it completely alone, so that if I am taken by the desire to move my feet and body (which is inevitable with so much music) I can do it unwitnessed, or I like to LISTEN to it, to hear the line of it, to follow the lyrics and to allow it work inside me. [...] I do not want to use music as the medium for a mating or courting ritual. No one would ever select me as a sexual partner on the basis of my ability to froth, frolic and gibber in time to music anyway, and nor would I ever choose a partner by such desperate and useless criteria.

I can’t dance. It may well be true that guilty feet have no rhythm, but it is also true that perfectly innocent feet can also be unable to move persuasively or happily to the beat. I can’t dance and I SO do not want to. Or is it that I don’t want to because I can’t? No, I don’t think so. I can’t play football, golf, cricket to anything like a human standard and I want to desperately. Desperately. It really isn’t a question of being truculent and captious about it.

The unhappy self-consciousness of the adolescent on the dance floor at school, or in the village barn dance or local disco is too well known a standard hero of rueful dissection for me to need to describe myself in that guise in too much detail. Here were boys and girls my age twisting, spinning and jumping at each other and they all seemed to know what they were doing. Had I been confined to the sick room with an asthma attack the day disco dancing was covered in the syllabus? How did they know which way to move,when to fling up a hand, when to spin, when to jump? When to look into their “partner’s” eyes, when to look at the floor? There was nothing written down, did it accord to some chord change or eight bar measure that I, in my hot discomfort And pop illiteracy simply could not hear?

[...] So let me be absolutely clear about this. This is all a weakness, failing, problem, phobia, hang-up with me. It is something to do with physical shame, clumsiness, self-consciousness, pride in privacy, lack of co-ordination, all of which have culminated in a huge and insuperable hatred of losing physical self-control, in jumping in and joining in. The once sappy bendy young tree is now too old for anything to be done about it without his gnarled distorted shape cracking with a puff of dry dust, so it is too late to change.

A man after my own heart.

When Daddy Was a Little Boy - revisited

It was with much bombast here that I intended to transribe my PDF copy of When Daddy Was A Little Boy.

Sadly, a combination of too many things to do in terms of both work and pleasure meant that such mundane activities kept getting relegated to the back of the queue.

So, here's the next best thing: my copy of the PDF. Read it and enjoy, as I know you will. (Well, really this would be the best thing, and the transcript would be the next best thing, since the actual book has really nice illustrations and looks brilliantly quaint.)

Note that I do not own the copyright to this work of brilliance - anyone who does can let me know, and I will take down the link.

How programming lets me know I'm getting older

You're hammering away at a particularly hairy bit of code (or any other problem). You know exactly what you want it to do, but are just struggling to translate it into the right language. After hours of wrangling with convoluted logic and endless cycles of edit-build-debug-rinse-repeat, you throw your hands in the air, give up and walk away.

And then suddenly, while cooking dinner, or watching a movie, or in the shower thinking of what manner of pasta to snarf down for lunch, or simply just on the can focussing on your business -- it hits you. A brilliant solution to the hair-puller-outer, so elegant and so bloody simple you wonder how you never thought of it in the first place.

You scribble a quick note in your head (or Evernote, or a notepad, or whatever) and suddenly nothing else will do except firing up vim and set things straight right away. You do it.

The final turn on the safe -- maybe something audibly goes "click" in your head -- and it's done. You step back and marvel in the beauty of it. You can feel the mystery briefcase glow on your face, a la Pulp Fiction. All is right in the world again. You are the master of all you survey - there is no mystery you cannot solve, no stream you cannot ford.

You are also not me.

Maybe I am slowly gathering up enough work experience, or maybe I'm just getting older and my mind is atrophying, but while the initial frustration and subsequent elation are still very firmly in place, the "eureka!" appears to be happening a lot less these days. Instead, what I find works most of the time is just plugging away at the issue, continuously breaking it down into smaller bits, and gradually piecing the solution together from these little digested chunks.

"Solution epiphanies" strike about two or three times out of ten, down from 6-7 out of ten from back in the day [when we wrote our code with styluses on papyrus and prayed to Ra to compile it into machine code via heliography]. The adrenaline and oxytocin rush is still phenomenal, but I find myself needing them less and less, since I can be more objective about the side effects and just more productive overall.

I still end up getting celebratorily hammered over the next weekend though.

You're doing it right

Dear Maciej Ceglowski: You're doing it right.

It is quite a breath of fresh air to see someone who's built a product, marketed it to the right audience, charged money from the outset (and thus not falling into the "users first, money later" trap).

I signed up for Pinboard (just out of curiosity, and wanting to see if my shiny new credit card did USD payments) pretty much the same day it was launched on Hacker News, and it became the first ever online service I paid money for. A mammoth sum of ~$1.

And since then, for this one-time joining fee, Pinboard has continued to add numerous features -- both asked and un-asked for -- while stamping out bugs nearly as quickly as they were discovered. And because it was making money, there wasn't a need to slather it in advertising or the atrocious amounts of social gunk that seem to crawl across pretty much every "Web 2.0" site now.

The Pinboard blog sees some brilliantly detailed posts and insights on technology (both site- related and otherwise), the site itself offers a spartan, uncomplicated and flexible API, and now -- this is what motivated me to pen this screed down -- the database schema behind the site!

This is how quality products are built - the real secret sauce is the execution; the actual idea and technical implementation detail can be at any point in the simplicity-complexity spectrum. It really is quite awesome to see someone basically give you everything you need to clone their product/service. The level of confidence in your own execution and delivery capabilities underpinning such candour and openness is a refreshing departure from the current clusterfudge that is "intellectual property".

Once again Maciej, you're doing it right, and I thank you.

Switching over to Ubuntu 12.04

Ubuntu has certainly come a long way since the days of the Warthog, and Precise Pangolin (commonly known as 12.04, to appease the suits) seems to be the slickest out-of-the-box experience of the lot. Unity seems mature and quite snappy on my 2.5 year old laptop, and the most common bugbears, audio and wifi, got set up in perfect working condition during the install itself!

Personally, what I liked the most was that GParted will happily re-partition your drives without data loss during the installation. This was the biggest sticking point earlier - having to 'source' shitty bloated tools from Acronis or PowerQuest, or struggling with boot disks and FIPS. And of course, the murky middle ground of Ranish and the Windows Disk Management tool. Bleurgh.

Not any more.

Not only do you not need to burn a CD any more (I think my CD/DVD drive has lapsed back into virginity...), you don't even need to hunt up a USB flash drive!

A combination of the Universal USB Installer and EasyBCD means you can install Ubuntu in a dual-boot configuration without needing to use Wubi at all. Simply use the Universal USB Installer to pick up your downloaded ISO and 'install' to an existing (non C: drive) partition on your hard drive. Then create a bootloader entry via EasyBCD that points to the newly set up Ubuntu 'live USB' location. Reboot, et voila. You can boot into the 'live USB' Ubuntu setup that resides on your hard disk.

Some people might want to leave this in place (dual-boot setup without re-partitioning! Hooray!), but I went ahead and installed Precise anyway. For one, I'm not entirely comfortable with having Windows manage my bootloader, given its tendencies to gobble up the MBR occasionally. Also, there was a nagging need to rid oneself of the Microsoft-centred ecosystem. And a desire to use a real terminal and solid command-line tools without resorting to nice-try-but-no-cigar solutions like Cygwin, Gow and Console2.

After a friction-less install process, all that remained was to mount the old D: partition into the current /home directory to retain access to old files and the media libraries.

Unity + Compiz is pretty sweet, and once you paper over some of the lesser annoyances with ClassicMenu Indicator (for a real applications menu) and Ubuntu Tweak (to smooth out some fiddly bits of the Unity interface), Precise Pangolin completely shines through in day-to-day computing. A few hours of sudo apt-get update/upgrade for Flash/Java/MS fonts (ugh), and an Aurora Firefox sync later, it was bye-bye Windows 7. Except for when iTunes is required. Ah well, one can't have it all.