Kaleidoscope

I saw a movie called Illusionist recently. It was excellent. Really well-made. And it got me thinking about how the illusionist or conjurer uses smoke and mirrors to create a mirage, an illusion. And the audience is so excited about what they see that they forget all about the conjurer. He uses all the tools of his trade- pretty lighting, unearthly speeches, clever hand-gestures, fancy clothes, smooth expressions - to fool people into believing something that isnt. He gives the people what they want because he just wants to make everyone happy. And all his tricks are so charming that people stop caring about the real person-what his hopes and dreams are, what he likes, what he really wants. And then the poor fellow wonders how did he end up being so lonely? Did he do 1 trick too many? May be now his defences are too strong and nobody can get past them.... Or may be it is the fault of the people- none of them want to try... And so the illusionist stands - all alone on his stage.....

Thoughtworks selected three people from my college(Pune Institute Of Computer Technology) during the placement process in July 2009. (I was one of them :)) They had 6 rounds: Aptitude - which had flow chart based questions. You just have to be really, really careful while solving these- the maximum you can score is 12 and their selection cutoff can be as high as 10-11 Group Activity - Groups of 8-12 people are told to design a software system. We had to design an intranet for a second-hand car dealership. Other systems asked were pizza delivery, online airline reservation, online advertising, etc. They selected 3-4 people from each group. Coding round (Read the next post) Technical interview round 1 - 16 people reached this round. Each of us was drilled for an hour or so on C, OOP, Data Structures, Java, Puzzles and DBMS by a panel of 2 people. Technical interview round 2 - 8 people reached this round. Each of us was interviewed for almost 3 hours. Our concepts and problem solving skil...