What’s wrong with “Race condition” in India?
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To all developers from India We are interviewing candidates for programming position in Hyderabad India. None of them is able to answer question "What is Race Condition". Can it be that you are using different term in India? Regards
There is a variety of ways they could have heard the term, even in different contexts. For example, the first thing I thought about when reading your question was "Ah, yes, it's the problem with Verilog". That's because I work on an EDA tool that parses hardware descriptions written in the Verilog language, which is prone to race conditions. Then I thought about multithreading. So I find strange that every candidate hasn't heard it somehow. I believe however that one should not draw the conclusion that "if they haven't heard about this technical term, they don't know what multithreading is". My impression is that software engineering is still a bit chaotic when it comes to naming things. In a text you may find the term "race condition" actually defined, in another one you may find that it is classified as just another problem arising from the pre-emptiveness of the thread system.
-+ HHexo +-
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I'd be surprised if a decent candidate hasn't heard of the term. My best guess is that the candidates did not get your accent. Sometimes Indians find it hard to understand a foreign accent, specially if the foreigner himself is not himself or herself a native English speaker. Although it might sound a little like you are being condescending, perhaps you could have tried spelling the words out. If the candidate is insulted, the good thing is that he's on the other side of the planet from you - so not much awkwardness there I guess. Of course, you might just have been interviewing the wrong candidates. If they are unemployed and are more than a month out of college/school, chances are good that they aren't very smart. in my opinion, the trick to hiring quality people in India is to hire people who already work for reputed companies. As my boss likes to say often, a lot of Indian programmers have "Indian programmer syndrome" and he does not mean that in a nice way either. You gotta find Indians who don't have IPS. They are out there, but they are hard to find.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkNishant Sivakumar wrote:
My best guess is that the candidates did not get your accent. Sometimes Indians find it hard to understand a foreign accent, specially if the foreigner himself is not himself or herself a native English speaker.
This is weird, I got to work with a lot of Indians, not in India altough. And they got the worse accents I ever heard. They didn't do any effort to speak better, I just had to do my best effort to try to understand what they where saying, so the least I expect, is the same in the other way. Is it like this in India too? Do they have this terrible accent?
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Actually, to answer your question more seriously, a race condition is much more a hardware term than a software one. More here.[^] The equivalent of a race condition in software is not a deadlock but rather the reading/writing of the same data by two different threads. Locking is an attempt to prevent race conditions, and deadlocks are the result of improper locking. So, unless someone has some hardware experience, I'm not surprised that they wouldn't know the term "race condition". Marc
Marc Clifton wrote:
The equivalent of a race condition in software is not a deadlock but rather the reading/writing of the same data by two different threads. Locking is an attempt to prevent race conditions, and deadlocks are the result of improper locking.
Yep.
Marc Clifton wrote:
So, unless someone has some hardware experience, I'm not surprised that they wouldn't know the term "race condition".
If sonmeones done any driver work they wil be very familiar with this too.
Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription
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Perhaps a suggestion for http://www.questpond.com/[^]
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them. --Leonard Louis Levinson -
Yes, they say "but it works on m computer" there :rolleyes:
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
blog: TDD - the Aha! | Linkify!| FoldWithUs! | sighistpeterchen wrote:
but it works on m computer
Truly. I have encountered such people coming for the interviews very many times. Also, they give replies based on their own 'internal framework'.
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage
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A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them. --Leonard Louis Levinson -
Most Indian developers are not necessarily computer engineers or who otherwise have exposure to computers beyond chat and orkut. In larger companies, all graduates are put into a 3-6 month training program. They are then placed into existing teams writing business logic code in well controlled frameworks. After some time, these developers latch on to a particular vertical (eg retail) and build their career around implementing more business rules in even more well controlled and abstracted frameworks. Of course, not all jobs are like this - just the overwhelming majority. If you want to ask questions on race conditions, you need to interview students from computer science background and from top universities.
Vivek Rajan wrote:
chat and orkut
The worst devil on team productivity. There should be a global standard to bring a blanket curb on these. :mad:
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them. --Leonard Louis Levinson -
Nishant Sivakumar wrote:
My best guess is that the candidates did not get your accent. Sometimes Indians find it hard to understand a foreign accent, specially if the foreigner himself is not himself or herself a native English speaker.
This is weird, I got to work with a lot of Indians, not in India altough. And they got the worse accents I ever heard. They didn't do any effort to speak better, I just had to do my best effort to try to understand what they where saying, so the least I expect, is the same in the other way. Is it like this in India too? Do they have this terrible accent?
_Zorro_ wrote:
I got to work with a lot of Indians, not in India altough. And they got the worse accents I ever heard.
The word "worse" is relative (not to mention that it's grammatically wrong, I guess you meant "worst"). What you are hearing is presumably a strong regional Indian accent. Unlike most other countries (where English is not the first language), Indians heavily use their own version of English. In fact some dictionaries even have a category called Indian-English, which includes special words and phrases too.
_Zorro_ wrote:
They didn't do any effort to speak better, I just had to do my best effort to try to understand what they where saying, so the least I expect, is the same in the other way.
One reason they cannot "improve" is that in India, you will find that there are very few non-Indian English speakers. India's work-permit policy is very strict, so foreign nationals cannot come and work here. And in any case, westerners won't want to work here, considering a US$ is about 40 rupees. So, unlike in the west, where people have a chance to hear other accents, in India you rarely get the opportunity.
_Zorro_ wrote:
Is it like this in India too? Do they have this terrible accent?
Well yes. Just that we don't know it's terrible. We think that's the way everyone else would speak too :rolleyes: Reminds me of the Chris Tucker joke in a movie where he tells a fellow african-american, "but to the chinese, all of us look alike too".
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com link -
_Zorro_ wrote:
I got to work with a lot of Indians, not in India altough. And they got the worse accents I ever heard.
The word "worse" is relative (not to mention that it's grammatically wrong, I guess you meant "worst"). What you are hearing is presumably a strong regional Indian accent. Unlike most other countries (where English is not the first language), Indians heavily use their own version of English. In fact some dictionaries even have a category called Indian-English, which includes special words and phrases too.
_Zorro_ wrote:
They didn't do any effort to speak better, I just had to do my best effort to try to understand what they where saying, so the least I expect, is the same in the other way.
One reason they cannot "improve" is that in India, you will find that there are very few non-Indian English speakers. India's work-permit policy is very strict, so foreign nationals cannot come and work here. And in any case, westerners won't want to work here, considering a US$ is about 40 rupees. So, unlike in the west, where people have a chance to hear other accents, in India you rarely get the opportunity.
_Zorro_ wrote:
Is it like this in India too? Do they have this terrible accent?
Well yes. Just that we don't know it's terrible. We think that's the way everyone else would speak too :rolleyes: Reminds me of the Chris Tucker joke in a movie where he tells a fellow african-american, "but to the chinese, all of us look alike too".
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkI agree with you that it was a big word, I'm sure there are worst accents in the world I never heard. And yes, I did a grammatical error, I speak it quite badly myself so I should just keep it quiet ;P I understand what you are explaining about India. And I didn't knew that the work-permit policies were so strict. Anyway, thanks for lightening this for me, and excuse me for my past and future grammatical errors :doh:
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I'd be surprised if a decent candidate hasn't heard of the term. My best guess is that the candidates did not get your accent. Sometimes Indians find it hard to understand a foreign accent, specially if the foreigner himself is not himself or herself a native English speaker. Although it might sound a little like you are being condescending, perhaps you could have tried spelling the words out. If the candidate is insulted, the good thing is that he's on the other side of the planet from you - so not much awkwardness there I guess. Of course, you might just have been interviewing the wrong candidates. If they are unemployed and are more than a month out of college/school, chances are good that they aren't very smart. in my opinion, the trick to hiring quality people in India is to hire people who already work for reputed companies. As my boss likes to say often, a lot of Indian programmers have "Indian programmer syndrome" and he does not mean that in a nice way either. You gotta find Indians who don't have IPS. They are out there, but they are hard to find.
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkNishant Sivakumar wrote:
My best guess is that the candidates did not get your accent. Sometimes Indians find it hard to understand a foreign accent, specially if the foreigner himself is not himself or herself a native English speaker.
Unfortunatelly, that's not the case. The questions are written.
Sincerely, Elina Life is great!!! Enjoy every moment of it! :-O
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I think he means the Blacks Vs. the Whites (Apartheid)
Upcoming FREE developer events: * Developer Day Scotland Recent blog posts: * The Value of Smaller Methods * Creating Many-to-Many joins My website | blog
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peterchen wrote:
but it works on m computer
Truly. I have encountered such people coming for the interviews very many times. Also, they give replies based on their own 'internal framework'.
Vasudevan Deepak Kumar Personal Homepage
Tech Gossips
A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them. --Leonard Louis LevinsonHmm...a typical example of one case that may match your description happened where I worked in 1992. A programmer came in for an interview; he claimed that, on a scale from 1 to 10, his skill in C earned a 9. Then came the question about "for" loops: he (1) said he always used while loops and had never bothered to learn for loops, (2) he asserted that he would change any for loops he encountered in code to while loops. His 'internal framework' was, hmm, not compatible with ours, so we didn't ask him to come back.
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Nishant Sivakumar wrote:
My best guess is that the candidates did not get your accent. Sometimes Indians find it hard to understand a foreign accent, specially if the foreigner himself is not himself or herself a native English speaker.
Unfortunatelly, that's not the case. The questions are written.
Sincerely, Elina Life is great!!! Enjoy every moment of it! :-O
Elina Blank wrote:
Unfortunatelly, that's not the case. The questions are written.
So Ilia is your secret login? :-)
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com link -
Elina Blank wrote:
Unfortunatelly, that's not the case. The questions are written.
So Ilia is your secret login? :-)
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
My latest book : C++/CLI in Action / Amazon.com linkNo. It is my husband :). You met.
Sincerely, Elina Life is great!!! Enjoy every moment of it! :-O