Illustration courtesy of Mozilla.org (click image for link)

The course is a combination of practical in-class exercises, case studies and interactive lectures, culminating with a one-on-one coaching session with the professor. I took the course partly because it mandated that students participate in class, and since I had raised my hand and participated in lectures during the entirety of the program a total of just one time (Jim Utterback’s Technology Strategy, last lecture, the answer came back as “yes”), I made it a personal challenge to try and fix that.

The coaching session was the real life-changer. I emailed the professor ahead of time saying that I wanted his candid opinion about what the reason might have been for not getting offers from the two companies that I had had a set of on-site interviews with to date despite walking away from them confident that I had done well. Shalom saw right through me and pointed out that my perception of myself did not really match how I actually came across, which was an eye-opener. Despite believing that I was candid and relaxed, which is the case in normal situations, during interviews, I seemed to come across as reserved and cold.

I took the bouquet of advice and promised to apply it to the four on-site interviews I had lined up in a few weeks in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Sure enough, being myself worked wonders and I heard good news from all four companies. So to invoke the oft-used, seldom meant cliche, the course did in fact change my life.

I guess the take-away is this: it’s important to leave a graduate program with an improved arsenal of engineering tools, Systems Optimization being one of my favorites, but it is probably more useful to take advantage of courses that teach one about the most complex system of all: oneself. That can do wonders.  But then again, maybe one doesn’t need to go to graduate school for that?  Well maybe they do.  I don’t know.

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Baby Fatima saw the light of day last week and became the newest member of our family.  Contrary to what I had expected, she appears to always be calm and composed…so much like her father then

Signed copies of oversized Windows CDs

I was sitting in the office of one of the Windows Group Program Managers in Building 27 at around 2:00PM after having gone through three interviews, each an hour long.  Building 27 is one of the oldest buildings on the Microsoft Campus and I was told that Bill Gates had his office there before he left the company.

We were about 10 minutes in when, as luck would have it, I got a new email and and my iPhone sounded the usual alert.  I must have accidentally flicked the switch at some point.

The interviewer appeared distracted and perhaps even annoyed.  Fair enough, I thought.  I would have been annoyed too had it been me.  What followed panned out into one of the more memorable experiences of the day, in hindsight.

Is that an iPhone I heard?!

Yeah, hehe…

I don’t understand, why would you have an iPhone?

I switched to serious mode (no “hehe” this time):

So, I had a Nokia phone for a long time and was very skeptical of smart phones because of their short battery life, unusable touch screens (the feedback was delayed and they were too annoying) and other reasons as well.  I then got an iPhone because everyone seemed to have one and my Nokia phone had started to act up; at one point, it decided to crash and deleted all my media files and messages while it was at it.  I can’t say that I’m discerning enough of the mobile space to know the relative merits and drawbacks of the different smartphone offerings.

Huh.  So is your laptop also an Apple?

It is, yes, but I do have Windows 7 installed on it and I regularly switch between OS X and Windows.

Why do you even have Windows?  I mean what’s the point?

Well, I have to because a lot of academic programs only work on Windows (did I just say “have to”?) Wait…no I didn’t mean “have to” (good god).  I mean I have it installed and use it regularly and it so happens that I use it for some academic applications as well.

Huh.  So…What browser do you use?

I use Firefox and Chrome a lot since I do a lot of Web development and they have great debugging and code inspection tools.

I really don’t understand why you would choose to use OS X and then not Safari.  If you like Firefox and Chrome, then why not use them on Windows.

I don’t know.  I honestly don’t know.

Do you like IE?

As I had already been painted with the brush of heresy, I think I said something like:

I use it a lot when I’m developing cross-browser compatible code.

The second half went great with the whiteboard design and coding questions and I made it to the 5th interview with the Director of Program Management who was a genuinely great guy, probably one of the kindest and serenest people I’ve ever chatted with.  The conversation went really well and we ended with him asking me which projects I’d like to work on as a PM in the Windows group, which I took as a sign that they would likely be extending me an offer.

In the end, I didn’t get one.  I wonder if it’s because of the whole “Apple” episode with the 4th interviewer.  Despite growing up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 and being an avid user of all subsequent versions of the OS and despite BASIC being the first language I coded in, I think my candor may have gotten the best of me and made me come across in unfavorable light.  I can’t stop laughing whenever I remember that interview.

Seattle was beautiful though.  Pike Place Market and the pier were breathtaking and reminded me a lot of Bahrain.  The salmon I had at Anthony’s Pier 66 restaurant that evening was unbelievable and Microsoft were overly generous with covering all of my expenses.

I wrote this post in late March 2011 right after my on-site interview with Google for an Associate Product Manager internship in Zurich. I figured I’d make it public since it is ‘job-search’ time for a lot of students and so the below might prove useful.

The Google interview
Since I didn’t find much material online about ‘Associate Product Manager’ interviews, I thought I’d put this post together for anyone who goes through this process in the future. Because of the NDA, I can’t reveal specific questions, but I’ll give as much info as possible – in actual fact, I didn’t read the NDA all that carefully, so I may have agreed to give up my first-born for all I know!

The process is typical of all Google interviews: a recruiter calls to give you an idea about the position and ask about your geographic preferences, then there’s one to two phone interviews and then you go through a string of on-site interviews.

Phone interview
In the phone interview, I got asked the following type of questions:

Some of the questions were those lateral thinking ones where there’s no right answer; the interviewer just wants to see how you think and how accurately you’re able to estimate given limited knowledge. The trick here is to make reasonable assumptions and abstract. So if you’re asked how many planes are flying over the city of Atlanta, for example, abstract the latter to a circle or a square depending on which shape helps most and then base your calculations on that assumption.

The others were product-specific. The trick here is to talk about a product that you like using and be able to justify its merits, its shortcomings in moderate detail and be comfortable with thinking of new ideas for improving it on the spot. This might require some practice, especially if you’re the type of person who can’t be creative when put on the spot. Make sure you’re somewhat familiar with Google products so that you can talk about them with ease and be aware of their idiosyncrasies.

I got a call a few days later that I had made it through and would be interviewing on-site. Although I’d applied to the Zurich office, I was going to do the interviews here in Cambridge. Two of the interviews would be over VC with Product Managers in Zurich and the third one would be with a Software Engineer in Cambridge. So I spent Spring Break going over algorithms and data structures in the E62 Study Rooms.

On-site interviews
The interviews started at 9:30AM and went until 12:30PM. Each lasted for 45 minutes.

The first interview was with a very friendly Product Manager in Zurich. First, we went over some of the projects that I had done in the past and she asked me about my start-up company and how it started, projects, major challenges, etc. We then went through a particular non-technical product and discussed in a lot of detail how we could improve it. The challenge here is thinking of something that you’re fairly experienced with on-the-spot and then being able to go through 40 minutes of talking about how to improve it and implement those improvements. With this kind of interview, it’s really not enough to just gloss over concepts and processes; you will end up having to talk about them in great detail. The interviewer will push you until you break. Hopefully, you won’t, but that’s the idea. We then talked about the future and discussed a few products that I felt would be trend-setting.

In the end, she asked if I had any questions. Since she had experience working on Google Maps, I asked her a few questions about Maps that I had had for a while. One was regarding collision detection. Right now, if you have lots of markets in one spot, it’s really difficult to see what is where unless you zoom in. It would be nice if there were some collision logic to take care of that. She said that that was a very good point and wasn’t sure why it hasn’t yet been implemented. My other question was about local labels: not all countries have them.

The second interview was also with a Product Manager in Zurich. We spent almost the entire interview talking about how to design a particular technical product. So I started by breaking down the problem to its main sub-components and then went through each of them. The amount of detail I was being asked here was much more than the first interview. I felt that by the end of the interview, I could actually go out and build this thing! The interviewer wasn’t only interested in the first solutions that I came up with, but also in alternative ones. This is sometimes more easily said than done, but I feel like I did a good job at coming up with alternative solutions. In the end, we focused primarily on resources (servers, hard disk space, processing rates) and talked about how much infrastructure would be required to actually build this thing. We went over potential bottlenecks and weak points and I had to come up with solutions for alleviating them. All in all, I might not have clicked with with the interviewer on a personal level, but nonetheless, enjoyed the experience.

The third interview was with a Software Engineer. He was actually one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of chatting with. We went through a large number of algorithms and data structures questions, as expected. In the beginning, we went through a few problems that I had to calculate the runtime complexities for. We then went through a few more problems that I had to think of suitable algorithms and ADTs for. There was a discussion of HashMaps (again, as you’d expect), interfaces for a few typical ADTs in Java, packets, Web servers, protocols and a number of other things. In hindsight, it was certainly better going through lots of problems than focusing on just one, as was the case with an interview that I went through several years ago. In SE interviews, if you get stuck with a problem that you don’t know anything about, you’re basically done.

Final thoughts
I certainly benefited from reviewing data structures and algorithms and writing out sorting and searching algorithms on the blackboards in E62 and E40. I didn’t end up doing much coding on the day, but the exercise certainly helped. I also benefited from doing lateral-thinking type questions (e.g. estimate how many golf balls can fit into a school bus). Again, I wasn’t asked any of the questions that I went over, but the exercise put me in the right mindset for the interviews. In the end, I didn’t get the job, and was recommended for a Software Engineer position, which I’m not too sure if I’ll pursue right now. From the feedback I got from the recruiter, it seemed like two of the interviewers recommended me for the post while the third didn’t. Hope you do better. I’ll certainly try again next year!

Moon halos are caused by tiny ice crystals that have gathered twenty thousand feet above the ground, as thin, wispy clouds. These clouds are so thin, you might not notice them at night, if it weren’t for their effect on the moonlight. Incoming light rays from the moon are bent, or diffracted, by these ice crystals at an angle of 22 degrees.

Sleep tight.  And be sure to look out for our upcoming post about an exciting new addition to Skyrill.com!

(CC) Skyrill.com, feel free to use with attribution

I have been part of an international design group called Intrinsic Nature, with great artists from across the world. Their 11th experiment/show was just released today, and I’m really excited and glad to be part of it.

I submitted a piece by the title of Color Revolution, the piece was a collaboration with a great old friend of mine, Anthony Giacomino aka Agiaco. I mainly worked on the type and some parts of the scene, while Anthony worked on all the details and the scene with his great and exceptional skills! It was a great pleasure working with both him and the entire team at Intrinsic Nature.

Check out the IN 11 Experiment here!

Color Revolution

Color Revolution - Click for original size

Detail Shots

Project Link

Tools: Markers, Illustrator, 3D Max, Vray, Photoshop

Client: Al-Tharwah Holding Company

Sketches (by Tim Tsai)

Identity

Final Bottle

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Contrary to the Field of Dreams-inspired concept of “build it and they will come”, the reality is that without an adequate social network of like-minded people, many a good idea may get lost.  That’s where community-driven networks like Behance come in.  Behance is probably the top community these days for creative talent.  It recently passed its milestone of 1 million published projects and has its eyes set on working towards further empowering creatives.

It was very exciting for us to have the pleasure of catching up with the man behind it all this week.  Scott Belsky is the CEO and Co-founder of Behance and author of ‘Making Ideas Happen’.  We chatted with him about his thoughts on collaboration, community-based websites and the future of Behance!

Credit: unknown; if you own the photo please get in touch so we can credit you

Skyrill.com: Trying to come up with a big idea from scratch can be paralyzing.  I like the quote that you reference in your book that all great inventions emerge from a sequence of small sparks. Behance is clearly a successful and trend-setting project; what previous “sparks” you worked on that ultimately evolved into the Behance network.

Scott: There were many. The first that comes to mind was a project during my senior year of college that focused on “redesigning the resume for the creative professional.” It was ~2001 and I was thinking about integrating live media content and video into a very old-school format for self-presentation. This was a powerful spark. Another powerful one happened years later when I was working in “organizational improvement and leadership development” in a large company. All of these sparks certainly collided during the founding years of Behance.

Skyrill.com: You mention in your book that from Behance’s activity data, you’ve been able to gain insights into how people with ideas gain traction.  It would be great if you could share some of those insights and any other discernible patterns that you’ve noticed in the way users interact.

Scott: Well, we do track co-owned projects that represent collaborations between creative professionals, often from different fields and locations. We are also tracking which tools are used for projects that are published. With this information, we’re trying to assemble a “creative graph” of how great work is conceived and produced. We’ll have more to show on this in the months and years ahead.

Skyrill.com: Before Behance, there were (and still are) online communities like DeviantART that have large user-bases.  Was your belief that Behance could successfully compete with them a leap of faith or was it more of a calculated decision?

Scott: It was a conscious decision to create something different that solves big problems in a very disorganized industry. We see Behance as a platform, not a website. The reason is that Behance powers creative portfolio display for LinkedIn and other sites like Adweek.com, AIGA, School of Visual Arts, and many more. Behance also powers thousands of personal online portfolio websites for creative professionals via our ProSite.com utility. There are many ways to showcase and discover creative work online, but Behance is all about efficiency, professionalism, and leveraging the LATEST technology to boost career opportunity.

Skyrill.com: Some aspiring entrepreneurs feel it challenging to garner a critical mass of users and so that becomes a psychological impediment for them early on.  Which of the recommendations that you mention in your book do you feel helped most in allowing Behance to grow so rapidly and capture the interest of such high-caliber designers and artists that we see on it today?

Scott: We assembled our own “circles” of credible users that helped us evolve the product and held us accountable over time.

The Behance Network

Skyrill.com: Do you think we’ll see more companies moving towards collaborating with their users and facilitating collaboration between users as a means of achieving innovation?

Scott: Yes, with the sharing of API’s and the rise of the art of community management, online networks will play a very powerful role in both tech innovation and spurring collaboration. We are certainly very excited about this.

Skyrill.com: Data visualization has garnered a lot of interest lately and there are several companies that are trying to capitalize on the increasing interest in it.  Does Behance have any plans to expand into this field?  Do you have plans, for example, to release an API at some point to allow developers to work with your data?

Scott: We do want to share more data about the Behance Network.  In fact, we JUST released this: http://www.behance.com/teamblog/the-creative-world-powered-by-behance-infographic/4065

Scott: We do have an API that we have shared selectively, and we are excited to engage more designers and developers with tools to tap into what we call the “creative stream” – the constant stream of creative work being published by creative professionals across industries, all around the world.

Skyrill.com: Have you ever had a mentor?

Scott: Yes, I have had multiple mentors in many forms. I think great advice, at certain moments, can make all the difference. I also believe that mentorship is a two-way street that must be mutually rewarding for both participants.

Skyrill.com: I see that you’re already on Google+, how do you like it?  Does their stated goal of making social interactions between people more like real life resonate with Behance’s goals?

Scott: I am lukewarm at the moment on Google+, but jury is still out. Keeping a close eye on it!

Skyrill.com: What are your plans for Behance in the near future?

Scott: We are very focused on organizing the creative world’s work. If we make progress, then we will be able to leverage the platform to help match the best talent with the best opportunity. Our team is up day and night working hard to make this happen. We have an extremely exciting pipeline… I just wish there were more hours in a day!

Rock on, Behance!