YuviSense: Codin Kid

Quick: How many people do you know who have blogs at blogs.msdn.com and put spaces before fullstops? Oh, and do they write Virtual Machines for mobile phones as well? And, do they advocate teaching Python in Schools? Or maybe say that college is awfully useless some of the time and just awful most of the time[extra long sentence to avoid extrapolation:D]? I do know one, and he was gracious enough to grant me, a small almost unknown kid, an exclusive interview! So here comes the first online Interview for The Marian Star, our School Magazine, and if you haven’t figured it out, it’s with uber-geek softie Sriram Krishnan.

P.S. This is an Unedited version. Our School Magazine will carry a highly edited version… Also note that due to my laziness, this interview is getting published a month after it was done. So, some statements are no longer true. Like, for example, the Zune has been released, and Barry Bond(no, not the sports star) has moved to another team.

Read on, and enjoy!

First, tell us about yourself

I was afraid of that question

I’m Sriram Krishnan - I work as a Program Manager here at Microsoft. I work on Visual Studio for Devices - that means I help people write software that runs on smart devices: mainly mobile phones but even refrigerators, washing machines, set top boxes are smart machines. I’m from Chennai, studied in SRM Engineering College and finished my BTech IT last year (yippeee!). I’m really tall (6 feet 5), really loud and have an unhealthy love for Star Trek and most forms of TV in general. I studied at Sir M Venkat Subba Rao Matriculation Higher Secondary School, in T Nagar.

As a Program manager, what are your Job responsibilities at Microsoft?

I need to explain this a bit as a ‘Program Manager’ is a unique beast to Microsoft. In short, PMs have all the responsibility and none of the authority. Basically, we ‘own’ the feature. This means that we figure out how the product/feature should look like. This means talking to customers and finding out what they want.

We then own the ship cycle - so we have to figure out how many features can we build given the limited time and people we have. We then go write ’specs’ or specification documents. The developers take these and turn this into code. We are always the external face for our feature.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we control the developers in any way. All the 3 roles (developer, tester, PM) are equally important. If my developer doesn’t like my spec, he’ll tell me so. That’s why my title is interesting- I ‘manage’ the program, rather than any people. Folks get confused due to the ‘Manager’ part of my title Hope that explains what a PM is in short. You really have to be here to understand the full scope of what a PM does

So, you’re the guy who’s responsible for how the Visual Studio for Devices looks/works/doesn’t work?

Well - a part of it. I own the data parts of it. I’m currently working on Visual Studio Team System for devices - bringing the whole unit testing experience to .NET compact framework and the device world in general

We have around 5-6 PMs in our team. That’s what I’m *supposed* to do anyway

Data Part as in the integration with SQL Mobile and stuff, right?

Yup. So if you have any questions/bugs to report, I’m your man!

And, you redirect the bug reports you get to the proper developer, right?

Well - it depends. I’m more technical than a lot of PMs. I like to look at bugs myself. But yes, most times I’ll just redirect to the dev if I can’t figure it out myself

So, you use MS Project?

Yikes! But I’m not good at it. I prefer to just keep a simple file in Notepad

Now, tell us something about Microsoft…

Microsoft is a weird and interesting place. Kind of like Never Never Land (if you know Peter Pan). It is big - the people here are really smart. It is scary how many people your software can touch. Imagine if you were the guy writing the Start Menu in Windows - imagine the number of people who are using your code. The sheer amount of responsibility you have is incredible

Another interesting thing is - for whatever interest you have, you can be sure to find some team in Microsoft working on it

Most of all, I like the people. Incredibly, scary smart. I love the fact that I can say I work in the same company as Dave Cutler (the guy who lead the development of the NT kernel).

Tell us about your College Life.

It was awful. Seriously though, I now think that I wasted too much of my time and energy worrying about things like exams and college. When I recently went back to college for my convocation, I told my HOD that the only useful time I had spent in college was the time I had bunked and stayed at home.

If you’re a geek or a creative person, I would urge you - spend time on what you’re good at and what you like doing. Spend time drawing or writing or coding. Don’t spoil your health too much by killing yourself for your exams

When you reach 12th standard and all throughout college, people will always tell you “This is the most important exam of your life”. That is nonsense - no one at Microsoft has ever asked me how much marks I have got

What matters is what I did in my spare time in school and college. I liked to play around on my computer - and that’s what has helped me

I spent a lot of time learning subjects I hated and that were useless to me. School was better in that there wasn’t the pressure we had in college (except for 10th and 12th public exams). The best part about school was the culturals I attended. I got over my fear of the public, of strangers. The public speaking I did then helps me till this date.

If I could go back in time, I would tell myself before the 10th exams “Don’t worry about it - no one will ask you about this even 2 months from now”

I would tell myself before the 12th exams “Don’t kill yourself. Don’t spoil your health. It’s not worth it. No one cares”

I would tell myself “Spend more time having fun. Go play more. Spend more time on your computer. Spend more time dreaming. Spend more time idling away time. Spend more time reading good books (not related to studies)

Spend more time discovering yourself.

And finally, spend more time not growing up.

Any Advice on following your footsteps and cutting classes? Tips and Tricks?:D

Let me be clear by what I meant there. I didn’t go to college a lot because I did a lot of creative stuff at home. In all my 4 years of college and the many, many times I bunked college, I don’t think I ever went to a movie, for example.

If you’re looking for me to say “skipping class is ok”, I’m not going to say it. I’ve seen too many people waste their college lives by skipping class and wasting their time.
Do what you want to do and what you think will hold you in good stead later.

Follow your passions. Don’t go party

One of the reasons I got away with a lot of this was because I had a great academic record and I had a long history of doing well at inter college symposiums and so on. That kind of credibility helps.

What do you think of Marks?

Don’t put too much weight into them. Don’t spoil your health or your peace of mind over them.

And please don’t judge people based on them.

What do you think of the current “Education System” in India?

Loaded question and one that I pontificate on at length all too often.

I think it is broken. Here’s why.

Human beings think. They are good at it too. However, no school or college encourages you to think. Human beings are good at doing new things. The greatest things in our history have come from someone asking ‘What if’ or ‘Why’

But in school, you’ll probably be branded as a brat if you ask ‘Why’.

All throughout school and college, I saw people being taught to be the same. I saw individualism suppressed. Being yourself was bad – being like everyone else was good.

College was worse than school. If you need to have 250 engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu, what chance do you have of getting quality lecturers? So you make do with what you have - which is mostly lecturers who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else.

And then they force students through 4 years of mindless torture, while the college authorities devote time to useless things like banning jeans for women and cellphones on campus.

I’ve always dreamed of someday setting up a school where people would be encouraged to think for themselves. Where they would be taught to question everything.

I told someone recently ‘The most useful time I spent in school and college was in the time away from class. In school, the most valuable thing I learnt was how to speak on stage, thanks to all the culturals I went to. In college, it was all the days I bunked and wrote code at home’

Question Everything. That’s a good mantra for everyone.

If the Education System is broken, why ain’t it fixed?

Because the people who can don’t care. And it is the ‘broken-ness’ of the system that keeps them in place.

If you were the Education Minister, what would you do?

I’m going to sum up everything in one line.

Teach people to think. Don’t teach them to be like everyone else.

Have them write essays like ‘Why is Isaac Newton wrong’ rather than essays that conclude with ‘And thus, we conclude that so and so is true’.

Teach them to question. Teach them irreverence for the status quo

What’s your advice to students on choosing Colleges?

Thanks for asking me this!

• Choose a college with good transport facilities. If you need to leave and come home, you should be able to do so quickly
• Choose one that lets students go attend symposiums, culturals without any restrictions
• Don’t join one that imposes these moronic ‘boys and girls shouldn’t talk’ rules. Inter-gender communication is important in the workplace.
• Apart from the IITs and Anna University, chances are low that you’ll find good faculty in other engineering colleges. Yes, there are a lot of gems out there but they are few and far between. So you would do well to ignore claims of a great faculty
• See what the former students of the college are upto. See how many have gone on to join Microsoft or Google or pursue a PhD.
• Join a college for the quality of the students, not for the education or the faculty. Trust me it is the people around you that will make the most impact on you
• Pick one that doesn’t enforce attendance so strictly (i.e. they won’t fail you because you have 74.95%)
• Pick a course that you *know* you enjoy. Don’t join a course because it is the ‘in thing’ right now or because your parents said so.

In fact, the last point merits some more explanation. I see a lot of students doing this - joining non-computer science departments and then getting a job in an IT company. Please don’t do this. Why? For it will be a long time before you’ll get all the CS background required to be a good programmer. Computers are like art - no one can ‘train’ you in 6 months.

I need to tell a story here.

When I wrote my engineering entrance exams, I had to wait a few days for my counseling. I remember watching on Sun TV, an interview of the guy who had scored the highest marks and who was Rank #1.

He had picked some electronics related course at Anna University. When the reporter asked him ‘why’, he said ‘Because anyone can learn computers by going to a class for a few weeks’.

I remember shaking my head and thinking ‘What an idiot’. For you cannot learn computers by going to a class for a few weeks.

Pick a course you already enjoy.

What do you think CS Students should be taught in High School? College?

Python? And the Visual Studio Express Editions;-)

Seriously though, students should be taught how to debug. And how to code iteratively. I never understood why you have to write code on a piece of paper and then present it to your examiner - that’s not how you write code in real life.

And most importantly, students need to understand the in-depth working of whatever they’re using. What is the processor doing when you do a printf? You need to understand stuff like that

What do you think of “Computer Institutes”, especially for non-entry level courses?

I shouldn’t be too hard on them since I would have never got into computers if it weren’t for one of these institutes. It really depends on the expectations you have.

Please don’t join an institute because they’ll get you a certificate or because they’ll get you a job. That’s the worst motivation ever. Join to learn something. Don’t expect them to teach you everything though.

What first hooked you on to computers?

This is quite an interesting story. Until 12th standard or so (sometime in 1999), I had never touched or used a computer apart from a few DOS commands we used to learn by rote for our exams. I had wanted to be a writer or get into graphics and animation.

My life changed one day in 12th grade when my Computer Science teacher summoned me during a lunch break. It turned out that there was an unknown institute (called Comp-U-Learn) that was doing a free, promotional “Introduction to Computers” course. Guessing that it couldn’t hurt (and it was free after all), I trotted happily to this computer institute where we learnt things like how to create a folder, how to draw in Paint and so on.

One incident there changed me forever. One particular class, we were being taught how to copy-paste and the instructor happened to say ‘Please right-click on the ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop’. Puzzled, I shot up my hand and eagerly asked ‘Sir, where is the desktop?’

Everyone in the class, including the instructor, burst out laughing.

I was hurt. In an almost cinematic fashion, I vowed to myself then that no one would ever laugh at me regarding computers again.

The ‘course’ was for 15 days and the institute wanted students to sign up for an additional 30 day course on C/C++.

I was the only student who signed up for the additional course. Since I was the only guy around, the bunched me with a bunch of older people who were studying Java and I got introduced to wonders like ‘import java.awt.*” and so on.

I finished 12th standard and the day after my TNPCEE engineering entrance exams, my dad bought me a computer. It was a P3, 850 MHz machine with an astounding 256 MB of RAM.

I was hooked throughout the holidays. I spent the entire holidays writing code in VB6 and have been coding ever since…

Why do I love computers so much? I’m really not sure. I think it has something to do with the sense of creating something, molding something from nothingness into a work of beauty. I tell my non-programmer friends that one of the greatest pleasures of life is seeing something finally work correctly, to track down that last pesky bug.

I’m also seduced by the idea of so many people using code that I’ve written. How many artists get to mass deliver?

What was the first Programming Language you learnt? Any Specific Reasons?

At the computer institute, I found coding intriguing and frustrating. The code I wrote was uninteresting, like sorting numbers and transposing matrices. What I really wanted to do was to write programs like Winamp or Paint or Internet Explorer.

However, one day, something happened which would alter my course in programming languages. I wanted to show a File Open dialog. I couldn’t figure out how and asked the person next to me. He didn’t know how to do it in Java but showed me this software called Visual Basic where he could do it by just drag dropping a control onto the form. I was blown away.

During the summer vacation, I bought a Visual Basic 6 book and started off. Inspired by a program called Netcaptor, I wanted to write a web browser with tabs. So through trial and error, I wrote a tabbed browser. And then a Winamp clone. And then a program that would encrypt files.

I don’t code as much in VB nowadays as I used to but I miss its friendly nature.

Which Programming language do you respect the most? And, which one do you find the most useful?

Well, one of the things that you learn over time is to appreciate different things in different languages. People ask me all the time ‘Which programming language do I learn?’ and that is a fundamentally incorrect question.

A programming language is like a tool in your toolbox. You don’t use a screw driver alone and refuse to use anything else, do you?

Anyway, here’s a list of some programming languages that I respect and why I like them.

Visual Basic - My first love. Made programming accessible to the masses. I love the idea that normal people could now code, even if it was only an Excel macro.

Python - My current favorite. I love its simplicity and the idea of ‘batteries included’. I think this should be the first language taught in school.

C# - My bread and butter. Anders Hejlsberg is a genius - I love where he has managed to take C# without making it inaccessible to people who want their curly braces and semi colons

Lisp/Scheme- Twists my head in some very interesting ways. When you code something in Scheme and you see it work, you get a sense of achievement - the same thing you get after you’ve written an exam well. Someday I hope to understand macros. Maybe a day after that, I’ll understand continuations.

C/C++ came close to being on this list but I decided against it. Weird, considering that I write so much code in them.

Where do you think the future of computing lies?

Well, I don’t think anyone has ever got the answer to this question right over the last 30 years, so I’m not even going to try and venture an answer

However, let me give you an alternative list. Here are a list of things I wish future computing and technology fixes

Accessibility
When I say ‘accessibility’, I’m talking of technology being accessible to the millions of people who are not mainstream technology users. These are people like my parents, like my sister and niece. They don’t care about blogging and they don’t care whether their computer is running Linux or Windows.

I somehow feel that we’re too elitist in the software world sometimes and that we ignore the non-technical people out there. Worse, we look down upon them.

Better programming models
With our hardware changing, I think a lot of our programming models need to change drastically. You now have several processors, if not several machines executing in parallel. In some cases like the Xbox 360, the processors are asymmetric. All this leads to some very tough coding.

I don’t know what these better programming models will be. I think Google’s MapReduce is an interesting idea. I also like a lot of the concurrency work and software transactional memory work coming out of MSR. But only time will tell

What do you think each and every Programmer on earth has to know?

When to throwaway code and start from scratch

Anyone you can call as Role Model in your life?

Interesting question - I’ve always had too much of an ego to acknowledge anyone as a role model.

However, of late, I’ve realized that I do look up to two people. One is Bill Gates and the other is Steve Jobs.

With BillG, there’s this whole side of him that people outside Microsoft never get to know. I am amazed at his depth and breadth of knowledge - I’ve read stuff from him on topics as varied as database query processing techniques all the way to virtual worlds and search engines. I’m amazed at his sheer smartness and intelligence - there are a lot of stories in Microsoft of ‘BillG reviews’ which talk of how smart he is. I also love the fact that he’s so passionate about software, and of late, solving the world’s problems.

With Steve Jobs, I love his eye for beauty and perfection. And I would someday like to get his ‘Reality Distortion Field’.

Kind of politically incorrect for a Microsoft employee to admire Steve Jobs, isn’t it?

Any Memorable Things/Incidents at High School and College?

The incident at the computer institute is a memorable one. I remember all my visits to symposiums and culturals at school - they taught me so much. Getting to talk at TechED 2004 with Somasegar, one of our Corp Vice Presidents was amazing too. And of course, getting hired at Microsoft.

Quickies
Your Favorite Books
Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, anything by Frederick Forsyth and Michael Crichton. And Peter Norvig’s AI book. All of Ayn Rand’s work deeply influenced (and comforted) me as well.

Your Favorite Authors/Bloggers

Apart from Forsyth and Crichton, I loved Conan Doyle as well. I love Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham. Robert Scoble is a friend and so is Don Box - I love to read them as well. Of late, I’ve loved reading Guy Kawasaki. Closer home, India Uncut (Amit Verma) is always fascinating. Am I allowed to list myself?

Your Favorite Music

Anything by U2, Scorpions, mostly classic rock. And a lot of movie themes - I love the John Williams score to the Superman movies.

Your Favorite Gadgets

Zune - when we release it [As I said, it hasn’t been released when this interview was taken. Please prepare for extensive trolling from Apple fans –Ed]

Your Favorite Geeks

Dave Cutler. Barry Bond (he works on my team :-)[No longer-Ed] ). Raymond Chen. Peter Norvig. Rob Pike. Andrew Tannenbaum. Guido Van Rossum.

Your Favorite Software
Visual Basic 6. Python. Winamp.

If a Genie were to give you three Wishes, what would you ask for?

For an infinite number of wishes. Hey, we at Microsoft think big

What do you see on your future?

Billions of dollars, lots of gadgets and a sprawling castle or mansion with a Jeeves-like butler where I’ll watch India playing cricket in the morning and movies in the night on a huge TV, doing email on my laptop all the while.

I can dream, can’t I?

What would you like to say to the Students?

Question Everything. Never Belong.

Ask yourself ‘What can I do that I’ll be remembered for the next 1000 years’.

And work towards that.

What would you like to say to the Teachers?

Don’t teach unless you love to.

What would you like to say to the Geek Wannabes?

Stop reading these answers. Open up an editor. Type in code. Make it run. Repeat
And don’t listen to those who criticize you as nerds and geeks and outcasts. In the end, they’ll need you - to create, to modify, to invent and to discover.

What’s your Advice to Parents?

Don’t put so much pressure on your kids during exam time. Exams really don’t matter

What’s your advice to the “normal guy” on becoming a geek?

Be curious. Enjoy technology and poking around technology. Ask yourself the question ‘How does that work?’ and ‘What if X could do Y’ and so on.

Be a tinkerer!

Endin with: What would you like to say to me?:D

Don’t settle for an ordinary life

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So, that’s the softie for you. Reach him through the comments here(He’s agreed to respond to some), through his blog, or through email. And, since this is my first tech interview, flames on my technique are welcome:D