Me and my big mouth...

As promised, here's the lowdown on the TCS experience. It's just a short bit, as my posts go, but it should showcase my monumental foolishness wonderfully...

The entire recruitment process was divided into three sections: an aptitude test, a technical interview, and an HR interview. Most of my friends correctly predicted that the first two would be no trouble for me at all. Most of them also said something similar about the HR interview - and that's where the real interesting stuff happened.

Some background - at the time the HR interview took place, those who flunked the tech interview had already gone off home, and the rest of us were sitting and getting bored, waiting for the HR to start.

I got lucky - I was the second person sent in. There was a panel of two people, and they did the usual HR sort of stuff - questions that are obviously meant to see how well you'll fit into the company, work with a team, etc, etc...

Then the bombshell - "Any plans for further studies?"

Me: At some point in the future, perhaps. I'm thinking of picking up some experience first.
(Not strictly true, but not strictly false either...)

Them: Have you given the GRE?

Me: Yes. (Foot on an intercept course with mouth...)

Them: How much?

Me: (Foot enters mouth...) 1600.

Now unlike the tech guys, these chaps knew the significance of this kind of GRE score - plus the shock value of a perfect score is enough to grab anyone's attention. Consequently, the two chaps, who had showed no emotion whatsoever, suddenly seemed to become slightly more animated...

Then they began the usual thing - "So you'll definitely be going abroad then? After all, with this kind of score..." and I'm struggling to dance around the subject, equivocating like a politician.

They actually stayed on this subject for a few minutes. That should have tipped me off. No HR guy wants to get his company to spend money on a chap who is almost sure to be gone within the next 4 or 5 years at most - never mind attrition rates. My dad says this has something to do with not looking like a dumbass in front of your boss...

Should be obvious what happens now - at the end of the day, when they finally announced the people they'd picked up - I wasn't one of them. I had a sneaking feeling about this - one of the Electronics guys was talking to someone about how they'd grilled him about his sister being in the US. Stuff like "You can always go there now...what prevents you from going there to study..." and so on. If that was what they were thinking, no wonder I got eliminated. I suspect that a significant fraction of the people selected don't actually accept - under these circumstances it makes sense to eliminate anyone who has a good reason to reject their offer...

Looks like I'll have to learn to keep my big mouth shut, or rather, to lie with a straight face - I never brought up the topic - they asked me. If this is a common campus placement question, then the truth is one thing I can't tell them...

Impaled upon the sword of my own achievement - who ever said honesty was the best policy?

Moving on to more interesting topics - looks like I'm finally coming out of my TC rating slump. I passed over the 500 in favor of the 1000 this time(500 had a closed form combinatoric solution, which hit me in a flash of inspiration - about ten minutes after the match ended.), but for some odd reason, I couldn't get the 1000 pointer to work. The solution was perfect - but it just kept doing weird things. A little debugging showed that certain sections were seemingly not getting executed, but for the life of me I couldn't understand where the problem was...

I've actually had this kind of problem a couple of times before - something is obviously screwy, but you can't figure out what. The only solution I've found that works is to code it all over again. Never mind if it's identical - the second time it always works, and the first time it doesn't...

No points for guessing what happened when I rewrote the solution...

The interesting thing is that I finally made my first challenge - I've never challenged anyone's code before(25 point penalty if your challenge fails). This time I saw a solution that just had to be wrong, and pocketed 50 points.

Next SRM is more than a week away...better do some training until then...