When did you “pass out”?

Of late, we’ve been getting a huge number of mails from freshers/final year students looking for jobs. Though we are not in a recruiting mode now, we encourage people to send their résumés. But, most of them fail to make even a basic impression with the covering letters they send.

Take a look at one such:

Dear sir/madem,
Im ***********, persuing final year MCA in ********** (VTU affilated)
I will passout in 2009.
I here by request u that give an opportunity to work in ur company.
Plz Inform any openings.
I attached my resume here.

Thank you,

This person has studied throughout in urban schools and is from an urban background and even his academic credentials look good. But it is pretty obvious, he cannot communicate properly.

To be honest, my prior experience tells me that lack of communication/language skills, doesn’t really stop people from being innovative or hardworking. But the initial impression doesn’t allow these persons to get a chance in most cases.

I sincerely believe, switching the communication mode to the language in which they are most comfortable with – ಕನ್ನಡ, for example – might make a difference.

How do we test/do a study? Anybody interested?

R Project covered in the NY Times

There is an interesting article in the NY Times on R. It’s heartening to see that free and open source tools like R are getting noticed for their worth. Mainly because free and open source tools do not have any PR firms pitching for them nor do they have any marketing droids peddling stories to the mainstream media.

So, something like this sort gets noticed when there is an undercurrent of adopters and influential users. This story also gives an idea to the naive about the power of open source development and its advantages. Good!

The article also has a proprietory competitor dismissing the *popularity* as saying “it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code”. She also says

“We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

Hilarious!! I was literally ROTFL when I read that.