Abhinav Vora’s Weblog

This week has been a particularly negative week for Microsoft in terms of comments on the blogsphere. From Henry Blodget predicting the collapse of Microsoft to the comments by Rob Glaser about the lack of innovation at Microsoft.

As an employee it is easy to fall prey to this commentary and feel disheartened by the predictions of ’experts.’ These are moments that define people. Either you are going to believe what is written and quit. Or you are going to believe it and move mountains to challenge the prediction. Which one are you?

Something that stood out for me was the number of years that entrepreneurs worked for other before starting their own companies.

More than 75% of the respondents* had worked for someone else for over 6 years before making the leap. The typical story in the popular media of a successful entrepreneur starts with the founder dropping out of college. Clearly dropouts are the minotiry. Do these stories get published due to the media having a selection bias toward outlier stories? Or do I have a memory bias that only remembers outlier stories being published? Either ways, a great report to clear any common misconceptions about entrepreneurship.

Get inspired now!

Abhinav

* A caveat on their methodoloty. Their definition of an entrepreneur includes any one that either founded a company or was an early employee. Given that it is far riskier to be an early employee at a startup than having the same job at an established company. Although, arguably, it is a far stretch from being an entrepreneur.

I’m really passionate about the task of finding, recruiting, and retaining great people in technology organizations.

Recently I was on some interview loops and found it really easy to make decisions when the answer is obvious. It becomes very complex to think through the details when you are on the fence. What factors should you consider? What weight should each factor get? How do you create a composite metric based on individual factors? Like a lot lot of statistics, you can twist these factors until you find the answer you are looking for.

Microsoft is unlike any other workplace, so certain factors and their priorities are not bargainable. Clearly there has to be a simpler way to arrive at an answer. I found two objective questions that directly contribute to the decision making process:

• “Does hiring the candidate raise the average bar?” – Amazon.com’s hiring philosophy
• “Would you be upset if we din’t hire the candidate?” – Peter Spiro, Technical Fellow @ Microsoft

What other questions are helpful?

- Abhinav

Information has always been stored in a way that makes it easy to retrieve. E.g., based on the preferences of an individual he might store books on a shelf alphabetically or by subject. Consider another scenario in which the decision has a more profound impact: I wrote a review for a book, should I store it in a separate folder that contains all reviews I’ve written or should the review be stored along with the book? In the digital world we make these decisions constantly.

Clearly, how information is stored places constraints on what can be done with it. What is possible if there were no constraints to how information is stored? Check out this video to explore possibilities:

Linq is a great .NET technology for accessing data across a variety of data sources. Visual Studio and Linq make the task of manipulating data in SQL Server super easy in your .NET program. I highly recommend it!

A word of caution though. Make sure to re-generate your Linq to SQL classes upon ANY change to the database tables, otherwise you will start getting error messages that don’t always make sense. One way to avoid the problem is to use the SQLMetal tool as a pre-build command to automatically re-generate Linq classes.

It’s that time of the year again. Writing aspirational resolutions that can be broken without guilt, or not. My first commitment would be to blog (that includes micro-blogging). Some others:

• Watch TED videos
• Go to TiECon 2009
• Go to NetIP National Conference 2009
• Write a ThinkWeek paper (sorry, Microsoft-only reference)

This will be a live document with more commitments to come.

Abhinav

A talk by Randy Pausch (of Last Lecture fame) on time management

I came across a very interesting demo from Johnny Lee at TED. He repurposed the Nintendo Wii remote to function as an innovative input device to a PC.