Exit Interview

I knocked at the door. “May I come in, sir?”

“Yes, yes, yes. Please do come in. What is this I hear? I almost dropped my cup of coffee when Shah told me. I was drinking coffee at the Taj Residency’s buffet breakfast, like everyday, when Shah called me and told me that you were planning on leaving and I jumped 20 feet in the air…”

“Gosh, I hope you didn’t hit any chandeliers!” I wanted to say, but bit my tongue. I realized that I was not expected to talk as yet, since his mouth was still moving.
“…and they have great prawn. Yes, you should try it sometime. They sometimes also make great dosas and idlis. I hope you’re not vegetarian. Vegetarians are a disadvantaged lot in this country. When I was young …”

This exit interview was not something I was looking forward to. Our HR manager had an infamous reputation for going off on irrelevant tangents. People said that he could never stick to one point, and kept squirming about a discussion like an electric eel with a short circuit.

“…and in Venice, the authorities will jail you even if you dare to spit on the road, but in this country, I tell you, this country is going to the dogs…”

His cell phone rings. Thank god, at least he’ll stop talking now. But I’m mistaken. Phones are devices meant for talking.

“Hello? Yes, hello my dear old chap. How are you? I think you’re fine. Yes, if I was you, I’d be fine too. And how are the kids? They must have grown up by now, no? Yes, they must have become big. You were pretty big when you were small. And how’s the wife doing? Yeah, I’ll bet she’s doing fine too. Anyway, it was nice of you to call and talk to me.”

I doubt the person on the other end of the phone had managed to get past the initial “hello”. Our HR manager believed in the Q&A style of conversation. This means he asks the questions and also answers them himself.

“Yes, you should do that to keep up friendships. Yes, that’s a very good idea. All right then, I’ll see you later. Keep in touch.”

He finally turned his attention towards me.

“So, I hear you are planning to quit the company. I don’t think it is a good idea because it is my job to tell you so. Ha ha ha. Anyway, I want to understand the reasons that you are leaving, so that we can do a better job next time. So talk to me. Why do you feel the need to change companies at this point?”

My turn to speak had finally come. As I opened my mouth and drew a breath of air to start talking…

“You know why I think you are leaving? I think you want to change companies because you don’t understand our culture…

A Hijack! He has managed to hijack my time to speak. Revenge! This calls for revenge!

“…because you see, organizations grow in layers like onions. There is a core and then there are layers…”

His phone rings again. This time it is his desk phone.

“Hello? Oh yes, how are you Sir? Yes, I will have it ready for you tomorrow morning sir. Definitely, sir. Yes, you’ll have it to read before your morning coffee, sir. Definitely, sir. I understand, sir. No Problem. Ok, sir. Bye bye.”

He keeps down the phone, no doubt planning on how to delay this other person’s coffee the next morning.

“So where were we?” He asks, with the air of a very busy person.

Now’s my chance! I place a back-door bomb, something that he’d never expect.
“You were describing onions”, I say.

“Yes. Onions. You see, companies are like onions. They grow underground, and because they grow underground, err…, hmm…”

Boom! The bomb hit right on target. Success, ladies and gentlemen. Medals of Honor awarded to me.

“… and the onions, … … they mushroom once a year, err… like mushrooms, and since ……… we are ……… hmmmmm……”

I had no idea what he was talking about. And he had even lesser idea too, but he kept talking nevertheless. I really admire these people. I’ve always wanted to go inside their head and see what it is really that they are thinking.

“…… and so, in this critical phase of this industry, we should grow back into a ……”

How did he jump from mushrooms to the “critical phase of the industry”? Man, I wish I was paying attention. It looks like he is recovering from my attack rather well.

“……it is therefore important that we keep our closest people close and our enemies closer………err….hmm… but the enemies shouldn’t be closer than valued employees like yourself….so we’ll keep the enemies closer, but not as close as employees, but didn’t someone once say to keep enemies closer than customers? Or was that friends closer than customers before employees except when managers…….”

Why do these people feel the need to talk? I guess that’s because they think that it’s their job to talk. They “manage” by talking. How do these people get stuff done? What’s the point, talking all the time? Then it dawned on me. They probably thinking that they “do” by talking. “We talk, because that’s what we do” must be their slogan. I’ll bet that’s what they teach at B-School.

“Yes sir. Definitely. I completely agree with you, sir”. It’s usually safe to agree with our HR director, because there usually isn’t much substance to agree with in the first place.

“Yes, but I understand why you would want to quit. People want to quit all the time, but when people want to quit, you must keep in mind that quitting is not a sign of the successful. ‘The quitters must always quit, but the doers will quit only after they’re done’ as Leo Tolstoy once said, you should keep that in mind when you quit.”

He looks at his watch, and it’s around 1:15pm. He must be getting really hungry; because I’m pretty sure I heard some weird noises earlier. I think he decided to end the meeting and go grab some lunch.

“Anyway, as always, we wish you all the very best of luck and you’ll hopefully succeed in all your future endeavors. Best of luck for any future that you might have. And do keep in touch”.

He gets up, and walks me to the door. Just as I leave his room, from the corner of my eye, I see him get up and rush to the bathroom.

Aditya Kulkarni
Standard Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and any resemblence to real-life incidents is completely co-incidential

• 9 Comments

Here’s some help for all the people who struggle to find words to propose… Let me know if it works for you.

The first time I saw you, I saw all stars
I was all woozie, and a big pain in the arse
My heart skipped a beat, I was warm and blue
It was then that I realized, I had the bird flu

Without you, I am not complete,
You make my life a never-ending treat
By the gods of Linux, AIX and Solaris, show me the light
Will you be my kernel of my life?

• 9 Comments

A friend of mine was in this extremely romantic mood the other day. You know, when all the world looks wonderful and the pollution smells like roses. I was in the “life-has-screwed-me” mood, and he was trying to cheer me up.

Anonymous Friend(AF): Do you know your problem is? You’re not romantic.
Me: Tell that to my compiler.
AF: No, seriously. You need to be in deep connect with your inner self. That is the only true reality. Have you never been in love?
Me: Yeah, but…
AF: What does love mean to you?
Me: Large Ones Very Entertaining

I must have knocked his “deep connection with his inner self” right out. I must admit though, that line is not one of my originals. I picked it from another friend I knew in college. You should read some of the responses he used to write in slam books:

Q: What does LIFE mean to you?
A: Living: In Futile Existence

Q: What is your favorite hindi-movie moment?
A: Mein tere bacche ke maa banne wali hoon.

Q: How do you see yourself in the context of the universe?
A: I’m only making a guest appearance.

etc. etc.

Anyway, coming back to out conversation, AF was still trying to get me to see the light.

AF: Err…OK, lets try this again. Love is in everyone’s sub-consciousness. I’ll prove it to you. We’ll play a game. I’ll ask you a question, and you have to say the first thing that comes to your mind. OK?
Me: OK. Lets play.
AF: When you get up in the…
Me: Wait…How is the scoring done?
AF: What scoring?
Me: This is a game right? How do I score points?
AF: Just shut up and answer the questions. I’ll start again. When you get up in…
ME: Wait…What’s the prize money? You know, KBC is giving 2 crores, and…

I was enjoying this. AF is the type of person whose leg you can pull on and on and he’ll still earnestly try to help you.

AF: When you get up in the morning, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
Me: “Crap, I must be late”

AF: No, I mean, what does your heart tell you every day?
Me: “I wanna get rich. Quick.”

AF: No, WHO do you think of everyday?
Me: “Basanti”

AF: That’s more like it. Who’s Basanti?
Me: That’s what I call my car.

AF gave up at this point. He must have realized I’m just too far beyond reason and common sense.

AF: You’re hopeless man. Hopeless. You’ll never understand what true love is.
Me: Hey, I know what true love is.
AF: Really? What?
Me: You know RR? She bought her boyfriend a Playstation 2. Now that’s what I call true love.

• 13 Comments

Ten things I want to do before I die:
1. Go to the Rio Carnival
2. Write the story for a comedy Hindi movie
3. Buy a car that can talk like the Bat mobile
4. Meet Pamela Anderson, ask her why she ditched the silicon valley
5. Get a cartoon strip published in a National newspaper
6. Give a guest lecture at an IIT
7. Figure out what women *really* want
8. Buy a private jet, and then hijack it. Figure out what happens if you hi-jack your own plane.
9. < unused field, for use in later revision >
10. Meet some people form Iceland

• 9 Comments

A friend and I were discussing evolution when we stumbled upon this great insight:

“Mankind will not get any smarter”

Have you heard of Darwin’s theory of Natural selection? How the weak of a species are weeded out so that only the strong (and intelligent) ones survive to pass on their genes, eventually leading to a stronger and smarter species? Well, it looks like this law has stopped applying to human beings.

With all this talk about “Human rights” and “everyone is equal” etc… that we have in the modern world, there is *no* way that the dumb among us are getting weeded out. The government collects taxes from the smart ones and gives it as subsidies to the dumb ones. Everyone survives, there is no evolution.

In fact, I’d like to go one step further and say that man is going to get dumber. How, you ask?

Well, the smart ones have high-pressure jobs, can’t maintain their marriages and don’t have children. The dumb ones have lots of children (think Laloo). Effectively, the average stupidity on the planet increases. This will continue to happen until the chimpanzees become more intelligent (thanks to animal rights groups, who will ensure that the monkeys survive) and recruit us to do their slave work.

We’ll all end up as second-rate slaves doing what someone else tells us to do all day (and sometimes even on weekends). We’ll spend all our lives in small cells staring at something in order to do something that we have no interest in, so that our lords may profit from our work. I’m so happy I live in the present.

Wait a minute…

• 4 Comments

I was interviewing for my company last week, and I met this guy, who has inspired this entire article. This dude was the best I’ve ever seen. Do you know how some people use the policy “If you can’t convince, then confuse”? This guy was using “To hell with convince, simply confuse”.

He walks in the room where the interviews are happening. Knocks on the door, politely asks if he can come in. He’s wearing a tie, a pressed, spotless white shirt and formal pants and shoes. I’m wearing a faded jeans and a T-shirt that says “Thou shall kick butt”. I ask him to come in and take a seat.

I’ve noticed during interviews, most people are *very* nervous. I’ve interviewed people who were shivering with nervousness. But this guy seemed very calm. He had the confidence of a person who knows everything inside-out.

Me : “Hi. How are you doing?”
Candidate : “I’m a very confident person and it is my objective to contribute proactively to a growing organization to create a positive work environment. I thrive on change, and strive for challenging work and it is my ambition to be recognized as a thought leader in the company”

I knew a guy in college who used to talk like that. But most people respond with a mumbling “fine sir, thank you”. I remembered that this is the kind of junk I used to put on my resume on the first line.

Me : “That’s very nice. You seem like a very confident person. So what do you do apart from computers?”

I got him on this one. He wasn’t expecting such a question, and he shuffled a little bit. He mumbled something about how he has won programing contests and quizes.

Me : “Great. Lets get started then. You can use any language that you want during the interview. Which language are you most comfortable with?”
Candidate : “English, Sir”

Oh man, this was going to be a great interview. I knew it right then.

Me : “No, I meant programming language. Are you comfortable with ‘C’ or ‘C++’ “
Him : “Oh! yes, sir, I’m sorry sir. ‘C’ will do fine”
Me : “OK, lets get started then…”

I asked him a question about how to search for an element in a list.

Him (very thoughtfully) : “The most obvious solution is to use a bit-vector to lookup based on a hashmap into a binary tree that I will construct while iterating over the linked list. I’ll store the resulting values in a union so that I can extract a long value from an int.”

I was like “Dude!”. He was just spewing jargon like a BTS bus spewing smoke. There was so much he had said in that one sentence, that I didn’t know what to ask him next.

Me : “Err…OK…So…hmm…What is the time complexity of this solution?”
Him : “Since we are doing a hash-insert into a binary tree, it is O(log n). The complexity of a binary tree is log(n).”

I think he had decided what answers he’d give even before the interview and had practised them to perfection. I’ll bet he would have said the same thing if I had asked him “So, is the binary tree vegetarian?”

Me : “Can you explain how you got the log(n)?”
Him : “Since the binary tree is binary, the operations will be binary. Therefore we can write the number of operations it takes by using the fourier expansion. Then, we can simply differentiate the series to get the complexity”

Me : “Great. Can you write code to implement this algorithm?”

After some time, he came up with some thing that I had a lot of difficulty reading. I realized why he had mistaken “language” earlier, because the thing that he wrote was definitely not English. I thought it resembled japneese, but I could be wrong.

Intersting as it was to interview this guy, I decided to end the interview. I’m sure he’d have become a great politician or TV anchor or something, but he was not exactly a star coder.

The moral of the story? Don’t try to confuse interviewers. You’ll end up being the subject of a blog post making fun of you.

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Welcome to my Blog. This seems to be a very fashionable thing to do, so i thought i will get in on the bandwagon as well. I have written a lot previously, but i thought now i can put it on the internet where everyone can ignore it

• 1 Comment