06/23/2006

Up at 6 and over to Caffee Manya for a hot breakfast. I ordered an omlet (which

is scrambled eggs unless you specific something else), potatoes, sausages, and

a latte. Dave and I talked about the previous days events and enjoyed watching

the people.

We arrived at Isilon about 9:30 – the first to arrive. We had a 10 AM

interview with Denis, who is a kernel programmer at SWSoft. Andrey considered

him a practical mid-level programmer who didn’t have good algorithmic skills.

That last part was an understatement. He did horrible on my question – his

solution was completely wrong and he believed it could be solved in constant

time (clearly incorrect, given the input was variable and unknown.) I cut that

problem short and didn’t actually get to see him write code. He did better on

our other questions and Andrey felt satisified that his analysis had been

correct. I remained quite skeptical; I can understand someone having difficulty

with the problem, but to be so convinced when you’re so off – that trait

scares me.

We interviewed a recent graduate that Dmitry and Artem had recommended. He

didn’t speak English so Vladimir led the interview. It was enjoyable to watch

– I really like the way Vladimir interviews (and some of that is just personal

bias, as I have great respect for academia.) The kid did great on his first

quesiton but not so well on his second. I asked two questions through Dmitry

and Andrey (who showed up later) and he answered them reasonably well for

someone with no experience. In the end, Vladimir said that he expected more.

Dmitry must have also been tired of pizza, because we headed out to Moo Moo for

lunch. It was good and I asked Dmitry lots of questions about Soviet Russia. It

is amazing to think that 15 years ago the country was a completely different

place, with children who had a different mentality and everything was

government owned and controlled. Now I can’t find any two people who wear the

same clothes and growth and competition are everywhere.

Dmitry suggested that we take the metro to a different stop so that Dave could

get some Vodka. We did so, I bought some chocolates for Eriko. Seeing a

supermarket was pretty interesting – it didn’t look much different from those

in the U.S. (except it was slightly smaller). Their was plenty of food, meat,

and other goods. Dmitry said that in the Soviet era, goods were scarce and not

nearly as good.

Back at work, I continued working on TreeDelete. The team spent some time

talking about TSM design (in Russian) and I said my goodbyes. I feel much more

comfortable about some aspects of the team and more nervous about others.

Andrey, Dave, and I headed out to the metro to have dinner and chat about first

impressions.

Andrey knows a lot about a lot of things. Sometimes it is difficult to

determine how much depth is there, but I enjoy asking him questions just the

same. Andrey walked us home after dinner and we were in bed by midnight.