Discrete Vector

My job is a cliché where I live. And I live in Bangalore, the IT capital of India. Also know as the outsourcing capital. the job theft capital etc etc. I am just another entity in an overcrowded career field known as Software engineering, the umbrella term used in India for anyone who can write a line of code in any programming language to print the words “Hello world” on screen.

I have had the privilege of taking several interviews when we were recruiting people for my current team. A privilege, because I was asked to do it when I had hardly a year’s experience under my belt. A privilege because by some cosmic coincidence, some of the smartest minds in the company are in my team. In their company I am humbled.

The interviews were an eye opener for what goes around for talent around here these days.

There was a chap who couldn’t complete a recursive method for finding the factorial of a number (a text book question in India).

Another one a few days back was for an ASP.net programmer. In big bold letters he had the words AJAX written on his resume. As an ice breaker I asked him what the acronym stood for. Asynchronous was all he could muster. Ever heard of xmlhttprequest? Not in this life time.

I recently started contributing my two cents to a site called stackoverflow (founded by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood). Stackoverflow uses a community driven method for getting programming questions answered. You ask a question and the SO community of programmers pitch in and try try to help you out. Other members can rate answers depending on how useful they think it is.

I was wowed at the amount of talent on that site. I was recently migrating our projects from VC6 to VC9 and few of the compiler errors had me stumped. I posted the question on SO and someone replied with the right answer in under 10 minutes. That was incredible by any standard.

So am I the greatest programmer on this side of the globe? Not even by a long shot. But what makes me a little better than most people in the industry down here is that I don’t do this purely for money. (The reader should not entertain the notion that I will work for free or even cheap. I need money for all the stuff other people usually download off the net. I don’t pirate.) Unlike many people for whom coding is a chore and debugging a task to be avoided at all costs, I revel in it. The feeling one gets when you have spend hours over that fickle crash and then just like a bulb being turned on, the solution dawns on you, is simply nirvana.

I currently work entirely on C#, and I am considered somewhat of an expert on the subject on my floor in the office. (that’s a start I guess). I love the language and thank Microsoft for inventing it. I understand how threading works, how threads abort, why invoke is required, the real differences between structs and classes .net and some more stuff in between.

I would love to work on web services, AJAX and ASP.net. I do some coding in my spare time on the same. I have had people from other teams come over to by seat to help me with their queries on ASP.net. The funny thing is that I have never worked on ASP.net as part of my development work in office.

I learn quickly, if not anything else, you have to grant me that. And most of my designs never underwent anything more than a trivial change in the hands of senior team members.

I would love to attend developer conferences like Microsoft PDC Stack Overflow DevDays but then my company, though huge by several tens of billions, doesn’t think it makes good business sense spending money on something as trivial as a Dev Con. And my strategic location on the globe doesn’t help either. I should remember to ask my next employer about this before I join. Hmmm.

Ok. What else… Oh, I am strongly against piracy. No matter what the guys at EFF say about everything in the world being free, its simply not possible. Quality has a cost. And maintaining that quality requires money. I wrote a related article sometime back on this topic.

I love what Joel Spolsky writes and I guess Fogcreek would be a great place to work.

Lastly, if you are a potential employer and you think that my passion can be put to good use in your organization, drop me a mail @ bobbyalex (at) gmail (dot) com. Maybe we can meet over coffee and discuss how we can invent a better mouse trap.

FAQs

What kind of experience do you have?

Good question. I started with BASIC in my school years. (Ok, I actually started off writing HTML and Javascript code but I don’t know if that counts). Then I moved to C++ and VB. I also did a smattering of Java somewhere along the line. My passion for the web made me taken on ASP and VBScript. Currently I am holding strong on C#.

Why do you blog?

To share, mainly. If you know something that could benefit someone, why hold on to it? Share! Of course, I hope that, eventually, people would say things like “Well Bobby thinks….” or “ I don’t think Bobby would approve of….) in developer forums!

What do you do when you are not coding?

Well, I try to learn something new. Currently I am on AJAX and WCF. I love books – the paper versions. E-books just don’t seem right. Stephen King, Jeffrey Archer (I have an autographed book). The remaining time is divided between my wife and my Playstation. (The console usually wins)

Cheers,
Alex