Interesting ways to teach

We had a presentation from one of the new persons who has joined the team on a topic. He is going through the specifications and he had to explain one part of the specification to us. There are two things which are kind of blocking his speed of progress:

1. He is a fresher, so everything is new for him
2. He is reading a specification which assumes you have some previous knowledge about things and he has none

After the presentation, there was a look of exasperation on his face - I start at one point in the specification and end up somewhere else.

Now how to you make his learning process interesting?

It is always good to relate some new thing to something you already know. For ex. A person who has been for 5 years in the industry would relate a new project work to one of the older projects he has already worked on.

What does a fresher relate to?

He cannot relate to anything because he knows nothing. So it is important for his mentor to help him relate to things he might already know. For ex. he asked a question during the interview which was: What is preamble and how is it used?

Now preamble are certain bits of information which are used to separate two frames from each other. When we switch on a mobile, it might be switched on within a frame but we need to know the start of the frame. So mobile keeps waiting for the preamble to know the start of the frame.

Now the fresher knows neither preamble nor is right now comfortable with the notion of a frame.

BUT he knows cricket. Now how does cricket come in between all this?

To answer the question above, an over in cricket is like a frame and preamble is like taking a break between the overs.

When we switch on a mobile, it might be switched on within a frame but we need to know the start of the frame. So mobile keeps waiting for the preamble to know the start of the frame.

CHANGES TO

When we switch on the TV, it might be in between an over but we need to know when a new over starts. So we keep waiting for the break to know when a new over starts.

I BET HE WILL NEVER FORGET THIS ONE :)

Its does more bad than good

We have been taking interviews during the past few months for recruiting people to our company. There are many things we test people on. In addition to the technical details, there are lots of inter-personal things which come into play when you are being recruited to work in a team. In all these things, it does MORE BAD THAN GOOD to all who speak what they do not mean. For ex. We generally ask a person how comfortable he is on a topic before asking relevant questions on the topic. Based on his assessment, we then start from a certain level of questions and then go into easier or difficult ones. Now, if a person rates himself 7 out of 10 and then is not able to answer questions that I expect a person at rating 3 out of 10 to answer, then either I am expecting too much or he is thinking too highly for himself. Anyways, at the end of the day it is the other person looking out for a job. Being open on what you know and what you do not know is the BEST way to behave in an interview because there would alway be things which you would KNOW and things which you would DO NOT KNOW. So whats the harm in admitting it. Follow it up that you are more than willing to learn things which you do not know (of course only if YOU ARE READY to do this).

As the Aussies team have repeatedly said throughout the series:

Your words should be backed by your actions. It leaves a bad taste if only words flow and actions do not follow.

How tough is it to manage?

Day before yesterday we had our weekly status meeting. A fresher has joined our group and he is reading the specifications to get to pace. As he is a fresher and because he is reading any specifications for the first time, he is bound to have quite a few questions. So our manager assigns a person to help him in his queries. There are four persons in our group who could be assigned as freshers. While asking the fresher to be proactive and ask wherever he gets stuck, he asked him to collate all this questions and ask them once a week to whoever is his mentor. Huhhhh. Once a week :) By the time a week passes, things would be all confused within his brain. Ofcourse, if he starts asking whenever he wants to, that also is not the best way.

So what could be the best solution?

Ask the mentor how much times a week he would like to get interrupted?
Would he like fresher walking in without notice, with some notice or at some fixed time in the day?
Any other concern he might have!

Ask the fresher what he would be comfortable in?

Would he love to ask whenever he has a doubt?
Would he like to consolidate questions once a day / few days and then ask?

As a manager, the next step for you would be to find a middle path that makes both of them happy. Going by past experience, you would definitely be able to find one.

Ek Bhi Nahin

A friend of mine has two kids. Once when they happened to be out of house, a guest came to their house and they were received by the kids. The kids invited them to drawing room and made them comfortable on the sofas. Those were the days of KBC - a popular game show on TV where Amitabh Bachchan used to play a game with the people where he used to ask them questions and give them four options to chose. The kids were impressed and decided that it was time they played KBC. So they asked the guests:

Aap kitne gilas paani piyenge? Inmein se ek chuniye

1. 1 Glass
2. 2 Glass
3. 3 Glass
4. Ek bhi nahin

The guests said "2 Glass" (The husband and wife had come and both were thirsty). The kids (in Amitabhh style):

Bilkul Galat Jawaab. Sahi jawaab hai "Ek bhi nahin"

Performance Metrics for kids

Performance Metrics for kids - yup, thats true. They do exist, at-least in India. A colleague of mine is going through the admission process for his kid (2 and a half years old) in school. Following are some of the expectations schools have from a 2 and a half year kid:

• He should know the different colors
  
• He should know counting (more he knows better metrics he has)
• Should know A for Apple....

How do they test it?

They gave him a sketch to color which had a shape of mango on it. Now with this test, two things are tested in the kid:

• Whether he is able to recognize that the thing drawn on the sheet is a mango
• Whether he is able to remember that mango is yellow in color
  
• And if he does manage to pass these two, whether he is able to color it properly

Wew.......

As soon as the kid becomes one year old, it is common practice to start teaching him A for Apple, 1 to 10 etc. Everyone who will pick the kid up in their arms will try to teach him at-least one good thing. Its nice but its a little worrying. As long as you find innovative ways of doing it, great, otherwise, take care.......

Chote Bache (Kids)

There is a popular saying in Hindi - Chote Bache bhagwaan ke samaan hote hai (Kids are like God). This is True. And kids are funny too. Just watching their actions can be an experience in itself. A friend of mine narates great stories about his kids behavior at house. Some instances below:

• Ok, bye, thankyou - This is his ending statement after he is done with his talk on the phone.
• Chup ho ja nahin to bhaga kar shaadi kar lunga - This is the effect serials have on kids today. One of my friends tells that his nephew uttered this to his teacher. There wasn't anything funny after he said that though :)
• One of my nieces has a wonderful style of sleeping. She will put her legs in the air and sleep. Just looking at her makes it look funny.
• Ofcourse you cannot beat the kids at anything. One of my relatives son was shouting. I thought I could beat him at that. You bet. He beat me hands down.
• Papa, party: A colleague of mine used to take his son to the marriages they attend. Once they took him to a birthday party and now his son has changed his request from "Papa, shaadi" to "Papa, party"
• Try teaching A for Apple to them....... Send me a message if you are able to teach them without loosing your cool
• Bhaiya school jaayega - That was mine favorite when I was a kid
  

Different people, different reactions

Different people have different reactions to the same piece of news. This is quite common knowledge and I also completely endorse this fact. This was proved once again after this press release from CISCO declaring that is is buying Navini. For a brief background, CISCO is one of the biggest players in networking domain. Navini is a startup working on WiMAX (a part of Networking).

My reaction: Thats good for the technology. It has found an important supporter in CISCO. It is good for me because I am working on WiMAX and CISCO buying Navini means I am most probably working on the technology of the future.

A business friend of mine - his reaction: CISCO bought Navini for $330 million. Navini is such a small company. $330 million sounds cool - huh.....

One on One

It is a great learning experience to be in a Team. You know so many different ways of thinking about a thing that it amazes sometimes. Human Resource has always been an interesting aspect of management and more so in the world of Technology where everything is in the brain. If you cannot keep your employees happy, you are not tapping the potential of their brains to create value for your company. It is AS SIMPLE AS THAT. As part of ensuring you turn out fire before it spreads, managers and top management have what is known as One on One.

One on One is basically a meeting where an employee sits with his manager and discusses (almost everything which falls into the realms of discussion). It is meeting where in general it is assumed that there will be focus on things which are contentious, things which might be negative about you. This knowledge about what could be in hold for you prepares you in advance. There is nothing wrong because if you do not know you are in a hole, you will never get out of it.

So I had these one-on-one meetings with my top management some days back. Now as it turned out, it was different from one-to-one. It was two-to-one, as top management and my manager were both sitting there to discuss the things with me. There can be both negative and positives about this move which form the basis of a different blog post, but here are some excerpts from the meeting.

1. The Top Boss set the agenda for the meeting saying that he wanted to hear more of negatives than positives so that we can improve. Positives are already there and so nothing special to discuss.
2. My manager spoke about me - well he spoke nothing but positive things about me. I think this is not quite right considering this is once a while opportunity to tell what can be corrected. My fault I did not go out of my way to encourage him to do that.
3. My turn and some things which I think we can improve:
1. We are involved in decision making too late. It is common knowledge in software world that the later you change a wrong decision in a project, the more costlier it is.
2. We should get the buy-in of the stakeholders. I read it somewhere and I think it holds true for all teams - For any deal to be successful, it is very important to have buy-in of all stakeholders. If people feel it is their decision, they will go to any extent to make sure it is successful.
3. It is not a coalition government. You need to think what is best for the company. If everyone agrees, it is ideal. If some agree, it is good. If none agree, then change your decision as it will never work.
4. Everyone loves good work, so be careful while taking decisions. Different people have different mindsets, so you need to balance it. Managing people is almost a full time job if you want to do it well.
   

Theres something wrong in Google search!

There is something wrong in the way Google is returning my search results. I gave a string of 'VaibhavMadan Ladoo' for Google to search. It came up with two results - one of them was what I was expecting. So far, so good. Now I open the search result I am interested in and go onto that page. I expect my search keyword to be present in that page. But IT IS NOT. I am not sure what search algorithm Google used, but whatever it was it did not give me the perfect answer. Now my gut feeling on how it worked:

I read somewhere that google also indexes the links within a page. In the search result I got in my example, the keywords are not directly present on the page returned by Google but they are there in one of the pages for which a link was there. Now I think that Google also searched those links within the pages and happened to return this page. Because I knew exactly where the keywords are, I was able to go to the page where the intended result is. But if I do a random search (and that is what happens most of the time) I would never be able to guess this.

GOOGLE GUYS, ARE YOU LISTENING?

Or maybe, a chance for a competitor of Google to distinguish themselves from Google.

I would not really be happy if the keyword itself is not present in the page I open after a search result. RIGHT PATH TO THE WRONG DESTINATION ......