muktabh

I have tried to use Atom many times. It is built in open - source spirit and has a very friendly community. So I download every release which is even slightly talked about and try it (including 1.0) , and every time I end up wishing it was faster like Sublime and switch back. I code in Python/Go, both of which have very exhaustive plugins in Atom, but it turns out autocompletes are noticably slow. I do not mind if I type a few characters and they appear a bit later on screen, but like 5 seconds after pressing enter <I use enter for autocomplete> is kind of unfair, esp when you see things happening almost spontaneously in Sublime.

However, I would like to say that it is getting better (version 1.0 is way better than the first one I tried) and has the potential to become the next emacs. But its not right now there. I will not wait till then to switch, but unless Atom gets faster, I am not taking a plunge. I think Sublime is the undisputed leader for me till this happens.

No. I think that is because most Indians are too low on resources to experiment with their life. This hence has evolved into a culture, where safe (prestigious) jobs (and now safe startups) are the only ones considered good.

I recently started a startup building a product which does not cater to the "hot" sectors like e-commerce and convincing people (we're B2B) to take a risk (for anything, even a free trial) is really hard. Also a innovative solution is generally looked with suspicion (I dont blame people for this, most shiny things here are frauds). I hope we can change this in the long run.

I wrote more on this (just yesterday) here: https://medium.com/@muktabh/why-is-a-pure-technology-startup...

Some interview anecdotes from India (Not all mine) :

For an SDE interview obsessed with binary trees after around 4 possible traversals, the fifth one was: "Can you write code to traverse Binary-Tree in a zigzag manner ?" "seriously ?" Rejected.

Questions asked in a PHP dev interview: "Can you write code to invert this link list ?" "Yeah I could in college, but I haven't touched C for last 5 years. I can explain the logic though" "Being a Php developer doesn't mean you forget how C looks like" Rejected.

Salary negotitation "My current salary is 50k, I am hoping for 10% increase" "We will give you 30k, dont you want to work for a world class technology product company " "Ok, can you still match my current salary ? I might join in that case" "Do you want to work for a world class technology product company or not ?" "Sorry" Rejected. candidate too demanding, lacks passion.

"Do you know Node JS ?" "No I am interviewing for a frontend developer post" Rejected.

As these interviews point out, most of us are bad engineers.

Yes we Indian developers are shit. We are expected to work 24 hours a day, taking orders* from product managers, who many times just become PMs because they did not want to (or never understood how to) code and are expected to feel oblige to take the smallest cuts from the bonus pie, not paid for/encouraged to take any courses (one of my bosses actually suggested me to unlearn all the "cool shit" as I was increasing expectations of good work of other employees ) , and we are inefficient at that.

But even after this, it is not at all fair to compare us to the foreign recruited people who earn twice, generally have more experience (as every experienced person in India becomes a manager), and could do all cool github coding in their career (try telling about Github to one of my previous PMs, he will point you to know more about scrum) . After all its only in foreign developers one can find "10 years of big data" (Hadoop recently turned 10 btw) and "15 years of building scalable applications in Golang" type of experience.

There are a few Indian startups which are changing the scene. For the rest, its better they hire from outside the country. If someone can make a bold statement like this, he should have done his homework.

Go seems to be getting really popular in India (More than other new languages like scala/clojure/elixir that is) . We had a GopherCon earlier this year and some large e-commerce companies now use Go in their stack.

"Whiteboard problems were never meant to be fast, scalable or simulate real-world problems to ensure high-quality hires." No "problems" can simulate a real world situation, real world development is not a set of questions to solve. Not even the popular problems where the person is asked to do stuff like write a zigzag binary tree traversal or put ant on a chess board.

Also I still have to understand why interviewing has to be a scalable process. Are we interviewing 1000s of candidates at a time at some company ? From all I can think that is totally not the right place for a company to be. Granted there are millions of upcoming jobs, they are distributed across too many companies/teams , so the number of interviewees per head would be more or less constant.

"Programmers in this era were just used to the idea of writing code on paper. " So no one in current age group is comfortable planning on a whiteboard ? Does the author think that things are not planned on a whiteboard in real life ? I am 27 years old (maybe too old according to the article but still I was never a part of the punched card generation ) but how does that count as a reason not to ask someone younger to explain his/her approach or how they incorporate feedback on a whiteboard ? Whiteboard interviews are not meant to check if a interviewee can memorize the language constructs properly as being portrayed by the article, if such is the case, the candidate better walk away.

Yes, I scored an S (and I am a developer). IMHO, The reason why most people get an "N" and often INTJ is because all the cool answers lead one to be typed as INTJ (I score INTJ sometimes, but I was pretty sure I am not that sharp and did not score straight A's in school) . If one attempts the test thinking he is logical and unemotional as Dr.House or Dexter, he would end up being typed as an INTJ. A lot of the times questions are ambiguous and I choose an option as I just wanted to get done with the boring part. The interesting part is then later talking about what fiction character has what type and what celeb is of what type and then reading up /r/<MBTI>. I think the rest of the stuff like correlation with being a developer (and good developer if you look at INTJ forums/descriptions) is generally wrong because 1) people take the test thinking about what they want to be and not what they really are 2) Most of it is plain stereotyping and since S types are generally typed in as less logical, most developers' will end up not getting that as their results. 3) I believe (and have observed in my 20-something life) that hard work trumps everything in the end

Moral: Should answer INTJ whenever a recruiter searching for a "ninja/rockstar" developer asks my MBTI type.

She is not India's first openly transgender mayor. My city elected one more than 10 years back. She was later disqualified because India's Supreme Court did not recognize "third-sex" officially then and she contested stating her gender as female, and my city's mayorship was reserved for women . Here's a link about her dismissal: http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/may/13up.htm .