I just went through a letter to Amazon Executives from Kivin Varghese. It’s quite long at 29 pages. You may read it here. Here’s a summary: Kindle team wrote buggy software and Kivin’s manager, Munira, didn’t listen to anything about improvements. Personally, you can get an idea of her incompetency from the fact that she didn’t give priority to fixing delay of 5+ seconds on an ad. Kivin tried multiple times to bring this to her attention. “JEFF BLACKBURN, THE SVP OF THE GROUP AND DIRECT REPORT OF JEFF BEZOS” points out the delay. Munira still says it is hard to fix. When Kivin has a plan already. Kivin talks to higher authorities. Munira’s starts criticizing him after this. Kivin asks HR for transfer. HR is friend of Munira, tells her. He’s put into a training program that stops transfers for 12 months. Kivin figures out a bug in ad program that causes an advertiser to overspend. Basically, $10 gets credited to thousands of people who didn’t even see ad! Kivin wants to be transparent. Munira asks to spin this as good news. Kivin refuses, tries everything, gets fired with 2 week severence package and 18 month non compete clause. Kivin sues. Now is the best part: Turns out Munira had falsified her education. Her resume said she had Bachelors and Masters from Stanford. Number of actual degrees she has from Stanford: 0. Apart from the dramatic tale, the key lesson is something I found in Hacker News dicsussion: ...

There was a rumour about Apple reintroducing iPhone 4 in India a couple of days back. When a friend told me, I was hoping this would not happen. Today, I woke up to the news of Apple reintroducing iPhone 4. That too on the front page of newspaper. A full page advertisement showing iPhone 4 and iOS 6! And on the back side, iPhone 4S (forgetting to even mention the 5S and 5C!). ...

Jason Kincaid recently wrote Evernote: The Bug Ridden Elephant. This post made to top of Hacker News and echoes lot of thoughts that I have about Evernote. I know it is heartbreaking to see something like this said about your product, but this is what many users think, just see the comments on Hacker News. I consider myself a not so heavy user but I too face quite some issues. And instead of fixing them, you go on making new products and adding new features. I am not against new features but please improve a few things. ...

If you are not making relations online, you are failing.

The moment you hear this, get out of the organization. I have no idea why people have this strange idea. Maybe it came from management, maybe it came from the society at large. Wherever it came from, it is toxic! Recently, I have had a few incidences where this came up. First, a small project for college. I developed (as in programmed, not designed) the website for college. All well and good. When it came to about us page, I wanted to have a little bio and 2 links under my image (I did not charge anything, so this was fair enough). ...

Paul Graham found out why politics and religion tend to have such useless discussions, because one does not need a set amount of knowledge to be an expert. There’s nothing required except a strong opinion to participate in religious and political discussions. And once you have a strong opinion, you don’t need anything else. You can convince yourself that you are right and those who disagree are completely wrong. Result is a wastage of time and energy. ...

As a developer, you will find 4 types of clients. The CEO, the manager, the semi designer and the angel. Learn more about them in the post.

If you want to be productive, there’s one simple thing you can do: Disable all notifications right now. Notifications can be really distracting and break your workflow. And while you might be thinking that’s not the case, just try it for a day or two and you’ll realise. Unless you are in a job where listening to each and every notification is very important, drop them off. But that will mean that you won’t be getting to know when you get a mail or tweet. Here’s a good balance, turn off the ringing/vibrating for push notifications but allow apps to display a badge for notifications (iOS). ...

In India, there’s a certain mentality that seems to be there. And it’s not customer is always right! It’s about providing service. And unlike many companies who are totally head over heels about providing fantastic customer service, Indian companies are about providing least good service. Just a bit better than the competition. Latest example I have seen is Infibeam. They are an old player in online shopping in India. They’re more like Microsoft on online shopping, without deep pockets. Outflanked by competition and playing catch up. (Flipkart outdid them with better design. They have recently started improving.) ...

Free to Play is one category of games that I stay away from. No matter what, I like my games the classic way: I should be able to play them offline. They should not stop me from playing unnecessarily. I should be able to play without an online account requirement. I should not be banned from a significant portion of game just because I am not paying. And if you take a look at the games I play, there is no free to play title in there, except one: Injustice: Gods Among Us. It is an iOS game that I downloaded because Batman was in there. And to my surprise, I like it(unlike that Zyanga crap!). ...