Sunday 15 March 2015

A Life without a job (and with a lot of interviews)

It was a usual day at my office. Last night watched Birdman with a friend. During the lunch break I was amusingly fighting with Ishant- a colleague and friend when he said he did not liked the movie much. We proceed for the lunch. I had put on a lot of weight and decided to go to Gym. It was just 2 days and I was trying my bit to reduce weight. At the lunch table, somebody amusingly asked "Howz your gym man?" I said "Yeah today is the third day".Another guy said your shirt buttons are trying hard to be in place because of your tummy. Amongst us there was guy from the QA team-a well build dude who doesn't hesitate to avoid whenever it comes to workouts.  The guy advised me to get operated like adnan sami else I would not be able to loose weight even in 5 years. Some others said I can gooble up 3 4 chickens in one shot. I did find any of those comments to my taste. I never made fun of anyone in such a large group. It was always one on one. Suddenly I lost control and told of them to shut his mouth else I will beat him hard. To that the guy replied "Even I have hands". I don't know what happened to me. I did not like that guy and felt extreme urge to slap him. It took another 10 mins by the time everybody finished the lunch.

As the guy came out in stairs, I slapped him hard 2 3 times. He was in shock and so was I. A friend shakir pulled me off him. I told the guy I slapped not to talk to me ever and left from the scene. I was a sudden reaction that happened- an accident that I did not know the thing it would bring. I was at my seat again thinking about it. By the time I realised that the guy had complaint about the confrontation to my senior director who took it up with HR. The director and HR director called me to the cabin to discuss the incident briefly and then asked me to leave home. My manager called me to a meeting room and told me to be prepared for even job loss. A sudden fear gripped me. I left early for the home. There was no one at home. My wife and 1.5 year old daughter were in mumbai with my inlaws.  I created a linkedIN account and applied to lot of jobs. I even went to career section of  some companies and applied online. It was hard to take rest. I was not able to sleep that night. Next day I went to the office and was barely able to work. I talked to the engg director about the circumstances I slapped the guy and pleaded him to do something for me. He told me that it is the panel to decide the fate. He could do little in this regard. Late that day I was called by the HR director and engg director to tell in detail about the incident and I told them the truth. I confessed of the mistake I did and pleaded to forgive me. They asked me to send a mail stating the incident which I did. I felt they might leave me with a warning. After 2 days of weekend I was called to the cabin. The HR director told me that they discussed this with the management and the decision is termination. I did not feel anything. No fear no emotions. He said that they do not want my career to suffer because of this one incident that happened so they will not terminate me but ask me to resign. I asked them if there is any way I could be left this time. He said no. He had the resignation paper with him that I signed and within 10 mins I left the office with all my belongings.

********************* I was unemployed********************************************

Up next, upcoming 2 weeks were filled by tech interviews. Here is my experience with them.

1. Vizury
1st round: Data structure questions on sorting. He asked me a tree question using recursion that I did. The guy interviewing me was not able to trace it in a recursive way. I explained to him how the control would work in recursion.  I did pretty well. You know it when you have.
2nd round: Asked me to write a queue implementation with linked list. I made a program and told him that it would work in uni threaded env. For multithreaded environment, i can modify. This round was also good as per the understanding.

The HR came and told me that the response is not very positive about me. I was shocked. Both round were quite easy and there was least chance of any error. I told him that I wanted to talk to the interviewer to which he said he will give me detailed response. He was very angry but then left the scene totally baffled.

Result: Not selected and did not know what went wrong.
Interview experience: Very negative

2. souq.com
1st round: A guy came in and asked me to summarize my education and career. He then proudly told me that he was from IIT delhi, M Tech. I was not impressed. He moved to ultra regular style of asking me java questions since my initial half years of my exp was in C++. He wanted to even check the syntax while I am writing code. He asked me about collections, how to iterate them. Talked about private, public stuff. Asked a couple of data structure questions including reversing a linked list, sorting etc. He had a hard time understanding my code which I felt was plain simple. I had a hard time answering his school like java question which included some question like "can you call a constructor from another constructor". By this time he was sure that I am no good in java and ok in data structures. Honestly had a hard time with this guy. He was immature and was quick in having conclusions about the person.

2nd Round: This interviewer was an experienced one. He asked me to design an LRU cache. Asked me about odd even alternate printing thread question. Grilled me on multithreading and distributed systems, high availability, fault tolerance. Overall I was ok in this interview but his questions were pretty good.

Result: Not selected but learned how to expect in interviews for my 7.5 years of exp
Interview experience: Neutral.

3. Thinkvidya.com

Just a single round on multithreading and distributed systems-which was little tough. He asked me why I was looking for a change. I told him a stupid reason that company env is not very healthy though company is good technically. He knew my manager who worked with him before. I then told him the truth.
Result: Not selected
Interview experience: Neutral

**************************To be continued************************************




No comments: