Abhinav Vora’s Weblog

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.