Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s inspiring letter to his employees at MS

Team,

I believe that we can do magical things when we come together with a shared mission, clear strategy, and a culture that brings out the best in us individually and collectively. Last week I shared how we are aligning our structure to our strategy. Today, I want to share more on the overall context and connective tissue between our mission, worldview, strategy and culture. It is critical that we start the new fiscal year with this shared vision on what we can do and who we want to become.

Mission. Every great company has an enduring mission. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. I’m proud to share that this is our new official mission statement. This mission is ambitious and at the core of what our customers deeply care about. We have unique capability in harmonizing the needs of both individuals and organizations. This is in our DNA. We also deeply care about taking things global and making a difference in lives and organizations in all corners of the planet.

Worldview. We must always ground our mission in both the world in which we live and the future we strive to create. Today, we live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers to thrive in this world. It’s important to note that our worldview for mobile-first is not just about the mobility of devices; it’s centered on the mobility of experiences that, in turn, are orchestrated by the cloud. That is why we think of these two trends together. What we do with our products and business models has to account for this fundamental transformation.

Strategy and ambitions. Our strategy is to build best-in-class platforms and productivity services for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Our platforms will harmonize the interests of end users, developers and IT better than any competing ecosystem or platform. We will realize our mission and strategy by investing in three interconnected and bold ambitions.

1. Reinvent productivity and business processes 2. Build the intelligent cloud platform 3. Create more personal computing

These ambitions utilize a unique set of assets that span productivity services, cloud platform, our device platform and our family of devices. There is an explicit path dependence on how we achieve the “inter-connectedness” between the various elements of our strategy to gain momentum.

· First, we will reinvent productivity services for digital work that span all devices. We will also extend our experience footprint by building more business process experiences, integrated into content authoring and consumption, communication and collaboration tools. We will drive scale and usage by appealing to “dual-use” customers, providing productivity services that enable them to accomplish more at work and in the rest of their life activities with other people.

· Second, all these experiences will be powered by our cloud platform – a cloud that provides our customers faster time to value, improved agility and cost reduction, and solutions that differentiate their business. We’ll further provide a powerful extensibility model that is attractive to third-party developers and enterprises. This in turn enables us to attract applications to our cloud platform and attach our differentiated capabilities such as identity management, rich data management, machine learning and advanced analytics.

· Finally, we will build the best instantiation of this vision through our Windows device platform and our devices, which will serve to delight our customers, increase distribution of our services, drive gross margin, enable fundamentally new product categories, and generate opportunity for the Windows ecosystem more broadly. We will pursue our gaming ambition as part of this broader vision for Windows and increase its appeal to consumers.

-Satya

Credits: Times of India & Geekwire

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Is CSE really the most useless stream/department? (Non-technical post)

I think I have heard enough from engineering students of Civil, Mechanical & Electronics on the ‘uselessness‘ of computer Science and Engineering?

So, my main question is:

Why do you search for CSE / IT jobs when you don’t find one in your own department? 

You are very fond of boasting about your own department (no offense) and take every opportunity to pull down CSE.

But when you need rescue you come to us like puppies with wiggling tails. Really?

O.K. Let’s come to the more important discussions.

The ones I have problems are those CSE students who speak bad about their own stream/dept. Seriously? Why are you even in CSE?

All you do is eat and sleep and discuss negative stuff about your own stream and continue it on repeat for the rest of your life.

‘Useless being in this dept.’

‘No proper jobs at all!’

‘Romba moka-da!’

‘Oiroiraba da!’

First of all, are you even acting like a Computer Engineering student?

I might as well point out reasons why you are not getting jobs (which you probably know already):

1. You eat, sleep and bunk. 24x7x4x12x100.
2. You think classroom lectures are useless (I wanna agree on this but there are plenty of subjects which can shape your career like Data Structures, Data Base Management Systems, JAVA, WebTech, & Algorithms)
3. You listen to other dept’ students too much.
4. You have painfully poor communication skills. That’s not a bad thing but what’s bad is that you never try to improve it. Why learn English, right? “My culture is the best! No need of learning English!”
5. You never try to think. I repeat T-H-I-N-K ! LOGIC IS WHAT DRIVES CSE! The brain-work of all engineering streams.
6. You succeed yourself in convincing that you know everything when all you know is basic definitions.
7. The ones good in verbal communications think ‘personality’ alone is enough and that you can speak random stuffs in your big vocabulary to impress the HR. All the best with 21,000 salaries.
8. Bad placement team. All right, they might lack placement teachings but would you rather cry and see your life go to waste or try something on your own instead of depending on them alone?
9. Indians are too good in copy-pasting. Agreed that there are many real brainiacs around but the remaining 90% focus on ‘getting a degree’ alone . No sign of innovation! So why should HRs choose you?
10. The fact that you read all the previous nine points yet you don’t feel regret.

So basically you sit at home and talk about how “useless” CSE is when at the same time many students are getting 2-Crore packages in Facebook. CSE is dynamic. To many it’s a disadvantage but to those who are adaptive to changes, it’s a survival of the fittest. So the next time you call MY department useless, think twice! Nothing personal, darling!

Just the bitter truth!

– Rajesh

What does it take to become a good data scientist?

Data scientists lare a combination of modern day archeologists and oracles. They poke holes, identify problems and discover mysteries that lies underneath heaps of all kinds of data, while also giving a trailer of what is possible.

For instance, data scientists at Flipkart discovered that people in Andaman and Nicobar Islands showed a high affinity for heeled footwear, whereas people from Kerala did not.

“A big part of our job is to figure out stories that numbers have to tell,” said Prashant Bhattacharji, a 31-year-old data scientist at HackerRank, who went on to design a new challenge, which involved varying levels of coding for participants. Bhattacharji played around with the data for two weeks until he fully understood what was happening: Professional coders were dropped out of challenges while college students completed full responses. The reasons were not their intellectual capability but just lack of time.

With this nugget in hand, Bhattacharji directed the management to rework the platform’s content, eliminate the need to type lengthy repetitive code, and offer multiple choice questions in some case.

The result turned things around for HackerRank. Bhattacharji says the platform now records about a 100% increase in submissions from all category of participants, a significant milestone for the Vinod Khosla-backed company.

Data scientists are a growing and sought-after tribe in India as new-age companies like HackerRank, InMobi, and Snapdeal pump resources to finding new ways of solving problems and doing business.

The pay is great: A rookie data scientist pockets an average Rs 5,38,250 a year, according PayScale, an online salary information company. According to data science website KDnuggets, a poll in 2014 showed data science managers in the US and Canada earn average salary around $165,000 (Rs 1 crore) about 22% higher than data scientists ($135,000 or Rs 85 lakhs), who earn almost twice as much as data analysts.

Experts, however, say a large part of the job for data scientists is grunt work, trying to glean information from data that can come in the form of comments on a website, likes on Facebook, public government records, and more.

“You have to clean the data, structure it, even before you make sense of it,” said Gaurav Vohra, CEO of Jigsaw Academy, a Bengaluru-based data analytics training institute. “You should have a lot of patience.”

Data scientists are also expected to be able to switch across at least half a dozen technologies. Qualifying skills include an ability to code in any of these popular languages – Python, Java, Perl. They should also have at least working knowledge of the Hadoop platform, and be able to execute queries on the SQL database and work with unstructured data.

And the must-have attribute – curiosity. One that experts say is missing in Indian data scientists.

“Most of the data scientists today are asking what, not why. Therein lies the problem,” said Shailesh Kumar, who works on Machine Intelligence at Google.

Bhattacharji said the Achilles heel in his profession is in confusing correlation – where situation A leads to situation B – with causation – where situation B happens solely because of situation A.

“We sometimes tend to look at data to suit our theory,” said Bhattacharji. “The challenge is to learn to maintain neutrality.”

(Credit: Times Of India)

How will you implement a Queue using Stacks?

First things first!

How many stacks will you need to implement a queue?

Answer: 2

That was the one thing you must keep in mind which I drew in paint for easy understanding.

(Below is a deep explanation from http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/queue-using-stacks/ )

Now , let there be two Stacks  S1 & S2 , we need to use these two stacks to implement a Queue.

Consider the following :

For enqueue operation : 

•  If Stack S1 is full , thus an overflow has occurred , we throw an error message
• Else , we push the value into S1

Thus following multiple enqueue operations , the scenario would be like :

 

 

User View  Actual View

 

For dequeue operation : 

 

• If stack S1 is empty , thus an underflow condition has occurred , throw an error
• Else , we copy all except the last element of S1 into S2 , We return the last element.

• We then copy all the element back from S2 to S1 , that is :

Check out this easy Java Implementation:

http://www.algo-faq.com/Stacks-and-Queues/How-to-implement-a-Queue-using-two-Stacks.php

(Rajesh’s suggestion: Java has inbuilt ‘pop’ and ‘push’ operations along with functions like ‘isEmpty’ and ‘isFull’ hence it’s best implementing this using OOPs concept)

C Program to add two numbers without using + and ++

#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
int a,b,c;
a=4,b=6;
c=a-(-b);
printf(“%d”,c);
}

Output:
10

(Very simple but I doubt you would know the answer before you tried!)  🙂

Welcome to Next Gen!

I created this blog for helping my friends with technical knowledge and to give them the much needed exposure for survival in the IT sector. Having created this on my mother’s birthday (July 16) this is very special to me.

In an age when everyone is heading for a rat-race towards opportunities, we need that one trigger-point which can push and catapult us towards our success. And for Computer Engineering students, that comes in the form of having in-depth knowledge, meticulous application skills, good thinking ability, and strong common-sense.

Aim for the best, because the sky has no limits. You can aim high and for that you need to be well-equipped with good problem-solving skills.

This blog is created by the webmaster in mutual interest of his classmates who have this urge to learn more and make it big in life.

Hope you love this effort from his site and ‘bookmark’ it to keep up with the things I am learning everyday.

Thank you.

About Author

I am a fun-loving, energetic and straight-forward guy who lives life to his fullest.

Mostly jovial but I have my serious moments too – it’s like two different shades of me. One moment I can be wild and in the next very prim and proper.

Highly ambitious, having learnt to live with the hard facts of life, and it’s a do-or-die attitude for me. Either you know in depth, or you know nothing at all. Hardworking by nature, but only after figuring out what’s worth my effort. I choose my domains wisely and give my 150% in what I love. And someone who is not afraid to take risks in life for the better.

“The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.”