Manish’s Scribble Board

So Folks! Interview results are out! Kicked out in the first round itself, though am not surprised ( had performed badly). Well leave it, no point discussing the same thing. I was told that am “Not Upto the Mark” as per Microsoft standards.

I was supposed to give a demo at 2PM today in Conference Room about my work which I did for the last two months. The presentation was for around forty minutes out of which I presented for around half an hour and last ten minutes were left discussing about the various design issues. I had made a small power point presentation to make the show a bit lively hoping that it can add interest. I had thought of many things which I would be telling only to find my mentor picking up the questions and answering them.

When I came back to my machine, I tried writing a funky but proper “Last Day at Work” mail. This is what I had written.

Hi everybody,

I would like to inform all that today is my last day of work at MSIDC. I was working as an intern in this group.

I would like to thank each and every person for the love and affection which they have shown during all the eight weeks which made my stay a really memorable one. I am very excited to return back to college with a tag of being a MS Intern. This really counts.

I would like to wish all of you best of luck for your future and would surely love to be in contact even after this internship.

Briefly describing myself: Am a student at Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal , Karanataka. Well what more to say of academics? I have decent grades and good reputation, but what I felt was that grades don’t matter in life (personal experiences).

My personal e-mail ID is manishsinha27 {at} gmail  {dot} com .

Regards,

Manish Sinha

My mentor called me up in his chamber to brief about the review and say some parting words As he thinks my strength is that am Committed and Hard Working. These two words gave me a great shock! I never came to office before 12:30-1:00 in the afternoon and never reported him on time after completion of work. Another strength was that I “never crashed in the work which has been assigned and somehow finished it howsoever unusual it ought to be”. This I can agree to some extent, though its the thing which made me work patiently for last two months.

Now coming to weakness… “I don’t have communication skills!”. Okay! “I don’t test my code for all test cases and half of the time its not running even though the algorithm is quite good”.

I would be leaving for college tomorrow night. Its actualy a break journey from Hyderabad to Banaglore and from there to Mangalore. There is also a 10 hrs gap between both the trains, which time is quite difficult to pass. Going back to college, I would be sitting for most of the companies including Sungard which is coming on 28th-Monday, Cisco on 30th-Wednesday, Yahoo on 4th-Monday, Toshiba on 7th-Thursday and Philips Innovation on 11th-Monday. No! I have no intention to take all, this list is only for those which I have registered.

See you in Manipal soon. Now wish me a Happy Journey!

Dont have much to say, after all its a scribble board! Me leaving for Hyderabad today 27th May for the Internship which starts next week, 2nd of June. I will be reaching there on 29th morning at Secundrabad which is quite near to my destination.

My journey has a break at Bangalore, means I will be boarding bus to Bangalore which reaches at morning tomorrow and then again train from B’lore to Hyderabad. Train (Rajdhani Exp. ) departs B’lore at 8PM and reaches its stop at 7 morning next day. The people to Microsoft will arrange for 15 days of accommodation at their guest house after which we have to arrange for ourselves.

I have fixed my laptop completely from all the problems except that the partition’s (sda9) file system (jfs) on which I installed “Hardy Stable” is giving a lot of problems. I hint some problems with the file system itself. The XSever hangs and I have no other option other than a hard-reboot. Next time, the Xserver fails to start and drops me to shell. Problem doesnt end here, whatever I try to do is blocked since / is mounted read-only.

P.S: Exams finished yesterday, nothing left to comment as it was completely messed up. Lab grades out, am satisfied except below expectation in one of the three.

When Luck Shines, there’s a heavy downpour of opportunities and success. This is what I felt after being being addressed “Congrats Manish! You have been selected for the internships, just tell us the time frame when you would like to pursue it?” It still echoing in my ears, what a pleasant surprise! I never ever thought of this day. My whole family is delighted, too much delighted, too too much!!

Want to know the whole story? Read patiently below, or test your patience.

We left Manipal for Shimoga at 5PM on Friday leaving behind the sessionals at a risk, well its a bit stupidity on my part to abandon the interview just for the exams. We were total of 7 people who headed on a Qualis. It takes three and a half hour to reach Shimoga by road, which crosses Augumbe Point (better known as Sunset Point). We stopped for five minutes just to have a look at the place and then headed on.

Reached Shimoga at 8 at night, had our dinner and went to station to catch our train, we had a third AC ticket which is supposed to be reimbursed by the Microsoft guys. The train left at 10 and reached Bangalore at 5 in the morning. We took a hotel room, 7 people in a room, got fresh, changed to formals, dumped our belongings and went to Exam Center without breakfast.

At the center we were told to sit in room no 11, after we had done our first question, the Microsoft dudes told us that my mistake they had put us in the wrong section, so now we will face a different pattern of exam. Our paper started at 11AM. First question was traversing a matrix in spiral order and secondly deleting n nodes out of every 2n nodes in a linklist.

Results came out in 5 minutes, 3 out of 8 people got selected. Now I had to face two rounds of interview. IN the first round, I was asked to implement memcpy and second to reverse adjacent nodes of a link list using address not values. The interviewer was very much impressed by my approach as I had prior idea of the both questions, thanks to PCS and DS papers which we had been taught we studied ourselves.

Second round was the most dangerous round. The problem statement is as follows

Given a whole C/C++ program in a program buffer, remove the single and multi line comments from this program. Draw a Finite Automata (or DFA) for it and write down the corresponding program as precise as possible.

After writing this program, he evaluated it thrice each time finding some or the other minute and minutest errors (guess that person was a genius and had an eagle eyes, catching even the smallest bug). He asked me questions on hashing, clash in hashing values, open hashing. Order of hashing etc etc etc. After it was done, he asked me to wait outside.

After 5-10 mins, a guy came out and said exactly the same words which I had mentioned at the top of the post. After that we were busy waiting for Adi’s results. God’s luck shined on them too and rest two of my friends were also selected. Who two? Drown yourself if you didnt come to know by this time. Its Sathvik!. Then had my dinner at 9PM after exactly 24 hrs. All this time I was alive on WATER!

We left Bangalore at 10PM night by a horrible but the only bus available was of come National Travels (or something of the sort). It had only 8 seats left at the last of which we booked 7. God! All the seats were defective . Mine was turned, Harry’s seat didnt slide to semi-sleeper and bulk loads of problems. There were mosquitoes all inside the bus. Reached Manipal at 9:30 in the morning. Am deadly tired, writing this post after sleeping for 3 hrs and missing my lunch!