Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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Don Dodge offers to send anyone’s resume as a referral to the Microsoft HR. Want a job at Microsoft? I can help

The problem with it is, the hiring manager is going to ask Don if he knows you and get a negative answer. So, it in the end means, you might get a quicker or better shot at an interview call, but miss on a real referral benefit of a recommendation. However, since the company (Microsoft) will know it has to pay Don, it will affect your pay or signon bonus reducing or eliminating it. The same happens when you go through a third party recruiter.

It is nevertheless an option, a signon bonus or a better shot at an interview call.

Technorati Tags: Interviewing Microsoft Referrals Job Search

Update: I have changed my view on this topic, Don’s option is a good one and worth going for instead of directly applying through Microsoft website. Some openings are bound to have thousands of applications per month, a employee referral can take your resume close to the top giving it visibility. At the same time, Microsoft referral bonus is a pretty small amount($1k or so), so it would not matter in the salary equation.

As part of writing about the Amazon Data Center management tool Maya, Storage Mojo which is an excellent and a unique storage blog contains details about credit for inventions in Amazon being incorrectly distributed or rather being falsely attributed to others.

I cannot be sure of the above case, but from Brocade days, it brought back memories. Brocade had few good practises and many bad ones. In Brocade, on patent applications, names of managers and others were added who had nothing to do with inventions except maybe manage the engineers who created it and sometimes not even that. Some actual examples.

Publication US20040028063: For patent “Host bus adaptor-based virtualization switch”, which has everyone from the VP, Managers to Hardware engineer’s names, but created and work done by Subhojit and Naveen.

Gayatri Mantra in Battlestar Galactica

It is back.

Probably the best Sci-Fi TV serial on air, Battlestar Galactica is back, though Doctor Who and Heroes are strong contenders. The link is for Wikipedia as the original website on scifi does not display at all on firefox and linux showing only the ads and not the contents.

Which brings me to the Gayatri Mantra which is the theme song of Battlestar Galactica. For those who do not know about it, it comes from ancient Indian (Sanskrit) books called Upanishads. From Wikipedia

• In Devanagari:

ॐ भूर्भुवस्वः ।

तत् सवितुर्वरेण्यं ।

भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि ।

धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात् ॥

• In IAST

oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ

(a) tát savitúr váren_iyaṃ

(b) bhárgo devásya dhīmahi

(c) dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt

• In English by Gayatri Pariwar

O God, Thou art the giver of life, the remover of pain and sorrow, the bestower of happiness; O Creator of the Universe, may we receive Thy supreme, sin destroying light; may Thou guide our intellect in the right direction

Here it is incase you have not watched it yet.

I prefer the version in Chants of India created by Ravi Shankar, George Harrison and team due to the normal tempo and classical indian background music, it is refreshing to hear Indian music during my normal TV viewing. If you prefer the Battlestar Galactica version it is available on the composer Richard Gibb’s website and for sale as a CD.

Chaiya Chaiya in Spike Lee’s Inside Man

The other Indian music in the mix has been Chaiya Chaiya song from the movie “Dil Se” with music from A.R. Rahman which was in Spike Lee’s movie Inside Man and in the first episode of the TV series, Smith. Link for lyrics and translation in English of Chaiya chaiya

Jaan Pehechaan Ho in Ghostworld

And then there was Jaan Pehechaan Ho in the fabulous movie, GhostWorld from an old Indian movie Gumnaam.

The lyrics translated roughly mean “If we come to know each other, life will be a little easier”
Here’s to more Indian music, it is getting to be a good mix.

Technorati Tags: Bollywood Indian Music Sanskrit

Update: Sepia mutiny has an article on something similar,Battlestar Galactica is desi friendly. They do have a point about ignorance in US TV serial,s the unit had the CIA department head ‘detecting’ the off shore call center employee and telling her that he knows she is in “Karachi, India” and the list goes on.

Update Feb 2007: Added YouTube videos

Netflix announced the Netflix Prize today which will offer US $1 million for anyone to improve their recommendation system by greater than 10%. Every year, the most progress greater than 1% will get US $50k.

They have made available their data with 100 million ratings and 2.5 million customer-movie test pair (700 MB) to use to create the system. The ideas can be ready as early as 3 months and as late as 1 year for the first year. Detailed Rules.
Greg of Findory recommends thinking about mashups with IMDB, Amazon.

I believe, Netflix is looking more for algorithms or more specifically paying for a small recommendation startup. Kind of the rumors are of how Google rewards it’s big projects (GMail, etc.)

Should be interesting to say the least. The first non-trivial programming contest has began.
Technorati Tags: Netflix Algorithms