

What's it like to intern at an Indian startup - from an IIT student - lazy_nerd
http://dnihitunplugged.blogspot.com/2011/05/day-from-startup-diary.html

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chintan100
I was recruited as a fresher at Infosys and had to leave the company after
training in Dec. 2008 due to recession starting to set in by the time i
completed my 6 months training.

I thought finding a new job would be very hard as the market was not so good
but to my surprise, i found a new job within 1 month and started working at an
Ahmedabad based startup as an iPhone Developer and now after 2 years, i have
developed more than 15 iPhone apps and have learnt enough at my company to
start my own.

It was painful to leave Infosys then but looking back, i can say that it is
the best thing that has happened to better my career. My friends at Infosys
who joined along with me now have mixed reactions about the company as not all
of them got into desirable roles and many ended up doing support work and they
often tell me that you got out of the company at the right time.

So yes, from my own experience, i can say that a startup is a much better
place to work even if the salary is low (the learning experience more than
makes up for it) than some large MNC where you wont even know how the module
you worked on is being used (or not used at all).

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radq
I'm digressing a bit here, but with regard to the last paragraph:

> __we were writing a gender classifier to categorize people as males/females
> based on first name and last name (this forms an important part of any
> social media monitoring product). The most common way to achieve this is
> through Machine Learning approaches. Gunaa tested his algorithm on a random
> data set (~22000 unique names if I recall correctly) and achieved 62%
> accuracy on the classification (awesome!). although THAT meaning might seem
> less apparent from the conversation above :P

Isn't 62% ridiculously bad? I would expect a naive Bayesian classifier trained
on first names to do much better than that. Am I missing something here?

~~~
lazy_nerd
Yes, it is really bad. Turns out, the test data we were using was not clean
and correctly categorized and that's why such low accuracy.

~~~
rrrazdan
The para now, is different. Did you edit it? Its always good etiquette to
write that this is an edit. Good luck with the names, and the girls.

