Date archives "September 2006"

Interview Advice…by me

So if anyone out there has been keeping up with my blog, this week and last week I’ve been conducting interviews with ‘freshers’ (people fresh out of university) looking for around 6 people to be trained up by me in the art of programming, design, usability and quality control.

Side note: In the UK, it is often said (semi-tongue in cheek) that those that have the ability will use it, and those that don’t have the ability will teach it. So in a classic case of those that can, do, those that can’t teach, I can neither design nor programme computer code, and yet I will be instructing others in these arts.

I have now conducted 18 interviews and seen a wide range of candidates. Below I will detail some of the things that I was looking for and what I wasn’t looking for from the interviewees.

Note that these things are probably specific to computer programmers and graphic designers. I’m not saying this is how all interviewees should be, and if you decide to apply some of the stuff I talk about and don’t get the job, don’t come blaming me!

What I wasn’t looking for

Let’s start with what I wasn’t looking for…

a) I wasn’t at all interested in the career objective at the top of resumes about what the candidate’s goals are.. Once you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. Anyone can write a paragraph with buzz words like “challenging role”, “develop my skills”, “fast pace environment”, “work for the growth of the company”. It’s all contrived and not written with any passion.

If there is going to be a career objective in the resume, I would suggest writing something more honest and without the buzz words. Be different!

b) I definitely wasn’t looking at, or gave any relevance to, what the candidate had put down as their hobbies and interest. Unless you have a hobby or do an activity that is directly related to the job you are going to be performing, I would go as far as to say don’t even include it on a CV. Too many resume’s I read put their hobbies down as “watching TV”, “hanging out with friends” and “listening to music”.

c) Academic qualifications. This might sound quite shocking, but I wasn’t too interested in academic qualifications either. I was far more interested in seeing the persons motivation and enthusiasm for the subject.

What I was looking for

Now let’s see what I was looking for…

a) The biggest thing I was looking for was an honest enthusiasm for the job the candidate was applying for with a proven interest to learn about the specific role. If they were able to talk about it and show how they were motivated enough to learn about new things outside the normal academic education (doing things off their own back), then they had my attention – far more than those that had extraordinary academic qualifications but showed no evidence of having the motivation to carry on the learning outside academia

b) Another factor I was looking for was the undertaking of projects either through university or personal endeavour related to the job role the candidate was applying for. In this case we were interviewing for PHP programmers and graphic designers.

For the programmers, I was very interested in seeing what projects the candidate had done by themselves and not been told to do by the university.

For the designers, my interest was seeing a full portfolio that demonstrated a wide range of skills in photoshop and other graphics packages. Unfortunately most designers fell down in this area 🙁

c) The final thing I was looking at was the openness and friendliness of the candidate. Some candidates were a closed book, others came across as quite arrogant. What I was asking myself was “would I like to work with this person”. This is going to be mostly down to the personality of the candidate.

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Who knows, maybe I’m way off track with my interview technique and quite naive in my approach. But this is the first time I’ve ever been the interviewer, so if any of the older readers has any advice that I should take on board for next time, I’d love to hear it!

Bollywood Movies and Four Star Hotels

Life isn’t all hard work you know! This weekend I’ve been chilling out a little bit more (by that, I mean I haven’t spent 16 hours a day infront of a computer).

On Saturday we went to a really, really posh hotel called The Residency Towers which really is as nice as it looks on the website.

The reason for going to the hotel is because there are no bars or pubs in Chennai in the traditional sense, the only places that can get a license to sell alcoholic beverages are special wine shops and hotels – and only in a hotel can you sit down and drink.

Amazingly, the rooms cost just £37 a night for a single room. Very nice!

After a few beers and dinner (coming in at less than £10), it was off to see one of the famous Bollywood movies. As a side note to anyone that has never seen a Bollywood movie, the general format for all films is as follows:

– Boy loves girl
– Girl loves boy
– Some external force (parents, distance, religion) is keeping them apart
– Sing and dance about their love for one another
– Get married at the end

Although the films are predominantly in the Hindi language, the actors slip into English so often you can follow pretty well what is being said and what’s going on. Incidently, they can often be pretty funny at times too!

On Sunday, it was a little more relaxing, where it was off to a Starbucks style coffee house where it had everything but the Starbucks prices. Three panini’s, two coffees and two doughnuts coming in at under £4.

Then it was off to a Spanish bar/restaurant called Zara’s which wouldn’t look out of place in London. Again, this place is also a hotel, so they can serve beer here. Football on the widescreen LCD TV’s, cold beer in one hand, and a lovely lamb spaghetti in front of me. All for a mere £7.

There is of course the other side of life in Chennai, you simply have to step out side your luxury hotel or Western bar/restaurant to see families sleeping in the streets or the slum houses…but my host prefers me not to talk about such things!

And as a little bit of light hearted fun, you know you are in India when…

Speed camera’s are considered a complete waste of resources and money when a far more effective, entertaining and fun solution is to simply place a large metal barrier across one half of the road, forcing all the traffic into the on-coming traffic lane. It slows traffic down a treat. For 20 miles each way.

But where is the fun in just having one barrier when you can stick another barrier 30ft away on the other side of the road forcing all vehicles to sort of chicane their way down the road. Anyone who’s ever seen the Blues Brothers car chase should have some idea of the mass pile-ups that occur.

Click if you’ve never seen Blues Brothers

On a side note, if you want to send me some comments on this website (everyone will be able to see them), you need to register for an account on the right side under the login box. You’ll need to confirm your email, but once you have done that you can start posting comments 🙂

Mastering The Indian Language

India.

It’s an entirely different country you know. To master the Indian language, you would have to become a master of 15 different languages…and that’s just the ‘official’ languages. Unofficially, it seems every city, town, village, hamlet and quite possibly 3 member family has their own language.

In Chennai, the city where I’m staying, the official language is Tamil.

When I came over, I thought it would be only proper of me to learn a few words and phrases such as hello, please, thank you, yes, no, why is my dinner trying to escape from my plate, excusemewhereisthebathroomineedtogonowgetoutofthewayarragagghghghahg…mama etc.

Unfortunately it turns out that all the common phrases are spoken in English, so as good as my intentions were, they would have been in vain.

When you hear the Tamil language being spoken, it’s quite strange because there are English words mixed in – sometimes this is enough for you to get the jist of what they are saying, without actually understanding what they are saying…if that makes sense.

However, since most of their English is learned from american TV shows and movies, they don’t understand the brits when they talk. For example, when I was conducting the interviews, 70% of the candidates put that they spoke and understood English, but they needed a translator to say the exact same thing I was saying but in an Indian accent.

In other news…

You know you are in India when…

The motorbike you are on (ridden without a helmet of course) breaks down in the middle of the street. The problem is assumed to be no petrol in the tank. You park up the bike and wander to the nearest gas station. You don’t have a proper petrol container, but that’s ok, because you just bought a 500ml bottle of mineral water and tipped the water out. Viola! Instant petrol container. Fill water bottle petrol container up with petrol. Spillages? No worries mate, it saves us having to clean the floor. Take petrol container back to motorbike and fill up gas tank. Motorbike still doesn’t start. Scratch head. Stare at ground. Give up. Push motorbike back home.

Interviews In India

For the past week I’ve been interviewing “freshers” from the Southern Indian universities. There are six positions available, 2 designers, 2 programmers and 2 quality controllers.

The plan is to take these freshers on for work experience – but unlike the UK, it’s not going to be for just a few weeks, this is going to be a 6 month stint.

During this time, I’ll be mentoring them and giving them real life projects to work on as a team in order to develop their individual skills as well as experience of working in a office environment. If any turn out to be real stars, the owners of Agriya may even look to take them on full time.

Unfortunately I can’t comment on the quality of the candidates as the interviews are still ongoing with another round taking place later this week.

If you haven’t already, check out the Chennai Photos. I’ll try and remember to get some photo’s of the office posted in the gallery tomorrow.

Indian Food

Now there’s going to be a few raised eyebrows for anybody that knows me personally when I tell you this…

Indian food is lovely!

Once we got over the fact that you don’t need to add 10 chilli’s to add taste, the food is really nice. Everyday is something different and always nice. Once the chilli is removed, you can actually start tasting the food. With chilli’s the only experience you have is your mouth catching fire.

I think I will start taking some pictures of the food I’m eating – anyone who knows me will be in for a shock!

Even the fact that it is all vegatarian food is not a problem for me – I’m not missing meat one bit.

The only downside is that the family are insisting I’m not eating enough, so even when I’ve finished an entire plateful of food, they want to keep giving me more and more!

I’ve uploaded some photo’s of Chennai but the links are not working yet. I’ll get that sorted this week some time.

Living in India

Wow, first blog post from India! I’ve been here for 3 days now and I’m still not dead. And as an added bonus I still haven’t caught any weird and wonderful tropical disease that turns your face inside out, makes your eyeballs boil and your skin fall off – but hey, there’s still time.

So far I haven’t seen too much of Chennai (the city where I’m staying), but my first impressions are that it is utter chaos and completely mad. Outside it is a whole world away from placid, surburban London. Inside you just completely forget that you are in India.

The second night I was here, I needed to get a mouse for my laptop. No problem, Aravind (the person with whom I’m staying with) said, we’ll go out to the computer shop now and get one. This was fine, hop in the car, buy mouse, drive home. Or so thought I.

What he had failed to mention was that we would take a motorbike to the shop. Oh, and don’t worry about little things like helmets and leathers. They are not much use anyway when you travel at 4 million mph on the wrong side of the road while looking the other way.

If anyone has ever been to Oxford Street in London over the Christmas period can begin to understand the volume of people that I’m talking about. But now put all those people in cars, motorbikes, pushbikes, and rickshaws. Everyone’s going different directions, there’s no right of way, no traffic lights and no roundabouts.

Right of way goes to whoever is biggest and which way the flow of traffic is going. This gets interesting at crossroads where the only way to get across is sometimes to weave between the traffic coming at you from the left to right.

To make it a little more interesting (so far it has been easy), you also have pedestrians wondering aimlessly through the traffic and even people taking cows through the streets of the city. Wonderful 🙂

So back to the motorbike journey. It’s an acquired skill to tailgate the vehicle infront of you by mere inches while cutting across various other vehicles. Don’t worry about using your indicators or checking the mirrors – they’re not there! Simply lean on your horn before you make any manoeuvre such as turning left, right, slowing down, speeding up, changing gear…actually whenever you start the engine, just lean on the horn until you have finished your journey.

Another thing about India is that it’s a fusion (not my choice of words!) of old and new. You can be driving through a really run down area and slap bang in the middle will be the most luxurious hotel you’ve ever come across. Or it might be a Ford car dealership or some corporate offices like FedEx or Citigroup.

I’m going to be setting up a new area on this site to start posting photo’s that I’m taking – just need to find time.

Finally, it might surprise some people to know that the food here is absolutely fantastic, really nice and very filling! And no meat in sight! It’s all vegatarian.

Having a great time in Chennai 🙂