Am "not in the" way

There was a guy who kept pestering me for long to attend some meeting which will give me new business opportunities for creating passive income. I was evading him but finally I thought of attending the meeting yesterday.

Before going, my roommate swami warned me that this will be the Amway one but I still wanted to give it a shot. I have read case studies about Amway and how it has revolutionized the retail supply chain. I was prepared not to be brainwashed by whatever they say, but just wanted to see how it goes.

The meeting was in a house and there were old members and some new scape goats like me. It looked more like a “Jesus Calls” meeting (Not to offend any religious mind, please take in lighter sense). One person used the fake smile and all marketing gimmicks to explain what Amway is and how it can make us Millionaires (“Next to Bill Gates, Amway has created most millionaires!!”). Then they showed some products and demonstrated how it is better than the current ones. I don’t have anything against Amway products as I too think they are of good quality.

Then they sat down and started hooting and shouting and boy, this time I really felt I am in a “Christ calls” meeting. They said that they do that to maintain enthusiasm and energy. Then they asked me to say what I felt about the product. How can I say something bad when a group of united brethren are staring at you to hear some holy praising? I said that I have read case studies and Amway way has worked for many.

Then each member read out what he sold that week (two shampoos and one soap!! I thought he could consume more than what he sells) Later, they marketed some cassettes and books which could improve your Amway way. I was given a cassette and I silently dismissed myself from the holy crowd. Amway way works, but am not in the Amway way.

Postscript: Swami asked me to add this -> If you hear back from a married ex-girlfriend, don’t be puzzled - chances are that she is canvassing you to join the Amway way. Just his 2 cents.

A poor creature called manager

What would you do when you get a very complex bug on the day of your production release? This was one of the questions I faced in my Amazon interview and I never even imagined in my wildest dream (well… I don’t waste my dreams thinking about work ;)), that I might have to fact the same situation … And that too in the very first project.(Well... Not really production release but code freeze)

Since I was not involved in the technical and design part, all I could do is get status updates, watch developers running around here and there and pray for some miracle to happen. In the remaining time, I think of the good old days when I was a developer and when my manager was getting status updates, watching me running here and there …

I know that theoretically I should have added buffer for all such unwanted situations but practically it just doesn’t work that way ( What … Four days for an exit button ???) Atleast as of now I am having plans for a relaxed schedule for the next release and am also pretty sure it’s not going to work that way. Well… Program management seemed easy when I read the mythical man days and joel on software !!

Form the next release, I am planning to get hands on and take part in development also. In this release, the only technical thing I did was to write some perl scripts for an intranet page … Should go some steps deeper …

This release has increased my BP and worsened my neck pain. Apart from that, I have learnt a lot about Amazon internals, but it was not worth for the pain. Does anyone has suggestion how to keep cool when your boss is yelling at you?

Google in the Paypal way ...

Today I read about Google’s plan to foray into the payments market and compete with Paypal. It’s an anticipated move. Payments platform is very lucrative and my feel is that one day Paypal may surpass ebay. Now Google’s foray is certainly a setback for paypal. But we can look this in another way. Though paypal has a good presence in the online payments market, still there are a lot of avenues that are yet to be explored in online payments. There is a need for creativity to create new payment avenues. So Google can as well complement paypal rather than collide head-on with it.

Though Paypal has gone international, it is still focusing only on few countries. Take India … I struggled a lot to explain about paypal to a landmark (bookstore) employee for getting a book on paypal. It shouldn’t take that much time to explain Google wallet. And paypal alone cannot satisfy all the growing avenues in payments and they cannot take the responsibility of educating customers about each and every payment avenue. Paypal desperately needs competition and Google should fit right there.

All in the name …

I went on a vacation last week. Work has piled up but thought of blogging a bit before diving into the work…

Today I tried registering to some yahoo groups and wanted to create a separate profile for that … I tried all the weird names for the profile but nothing worked out … I tried common names like wind, magnate, cyclone, superpower etc which I know would have already been used.

I tried computer terminologies like ascii, digit, digiterati, gigabyte, terabyte and even QWERTY, SPACE BAR, LATITUDE etc but netizens have already taken these names. The real surprise was when I tried su, su_j, s_uj, suj and everything was already taken. Frustrated, I tried cube_12 (my cubicle number) and to my surprise even that name was not available. I was really clueless and after a lot of iterations, I settled with a shitty ID “su_988688”!!

Then I noticed that all the profile IDs in the forums are as shitty as this. I think in the future, we will just have our mobile numbers as the email IDs to avoid this frustration. But that will have privacy problems. How about SSNs? But that’s not applicable outside US. mmm…I am planning to reserve email IDs for my son/daughter for future :)

Intraview

After a long time, I have got some time to blog … Things have been hectic here and its really difficult to find time to blog …

I have been interviewing a lot this week … Most of the candidates are not aware of the stringent interview process of Amazon and are completely taken by surprise once they get into the interview … I have got a variety of interesting responses ….

"What is the spelling for Amazon?"

“Usually they will ask about my experience… Why didn’t you ask?”

“How did you come up with this question?”

“Interesting question! But I don’t know the answer”

“Don’t say that you are going to ask puzzles”

“Did you go through my resume?”

“I can’t solve this. I don’t have paper and pen”

“I will have a TV in the room (when asked to design a room for a blind person …)”

“How to know more about Technology?”

I will keep updating this post as and when I get some interesting responses …