Well mannered, really hard to understand his accent, smiles too much. A bit on the older side, though that's usually not a problem for me. The big problem I have here is that every question I ask him he does not answer straight. He always goes into this long spiel about this or that aspect of his job, and he says it almost as if he has it memorized. He has led a couple of projects in his last job, but the team was geographically distributed, so it's not the kind of experience that I would imagine would be useful here.

Naturally I ask him what he wants to be doing in five years at Oracle. Like everyone else he says something about quickly working his way up to management and being an integral part of Oracle. I can't imagine this person being a good manager and he's too advanced to start out at a lower level. Here's one of the few cases where the guy seems to be overqualified. But that's not exactly right. He has too much management experience, not enough experience that I think we could use right now. And he was really starting to annoy me so I really didn't think he'd fit into the team. I was glad to pass him off to Sushant (and later on I found out that he refused to take Sushant's quiz and nobody liked him anyway so it's not great loss).

I talked to Rosalia after Jiandong (Prasad hadn't talked to her yet due to some scheduling conflicts). After Jiandong, Prasad didn't want to interview Rosalia and Sushant and I agreed that she was underqualified. But I still feel bad to have to tell her that the interviews are over, especially since I had told her she still had one more interview. It's always a bad sign when your interviews are cut short. So eventually I had to confess and tell her at least why I couldn't recommend her. She took it well but it was still not something I want to go through again.

After they're both gone I talk to Prasad. It's been a long week and other than the first three interviewees, we probably won't hire anyone else. Even those three are suspect because Prasad has heard that we won't be allowed to hire even those three. It's the way Oracle works sometimes. It's really up to Mark to say if we can hire people and with the impending hiring freeze he could just change his mind and say no new hires starting now rather than starting in a week.

Personally, I don't think we could have absorbed three new hires. There's just a certain amount of handholding and training and time that it takes to get each candidate up to speed. It requires some amount of contribution from the other team members, like for when Aravind joined the team. Three people I'm not sure we could have handled. One would be nice, though once again I'll say that none of them really impressed me. But I was kind of sick and maybe in just that kind of mood to be critical rather than accepting.

So that was about 16:00 when we were done with the interviews. I have no recollection of what I did afterwards. Probably goof off and relax for a few hours until I went home, doing some work but not much. I feel tired after a day of doing stuff but not getting anything accomplished. I guess it's more of a morale thing rather than mental fatigue. You pour your energy into your work and at the end of the day you're still back at square one. Pretty much how the whole week has been going for me.