I guess its surprising that it does not cite a official press release from the company, (which is what you would normally expect), but to another news site. Also if one of your products faces such a crisis situation, would you want your users to read the company's reaction in such dispassionate, unapologetic language?
I still see that Yahoo is hiring paranoids. There seems to be a team of paranoids at Yahoo still. Even if the login process of this particular subdomain was not monitored by paranoids, I doubt if yahoo uses separate login systems for each domain - and if there is a central code/library that handles logins, I seriously doubt if passwords are handled in plain texts and SQLs are not sanitized.
Let me summarize the problems of India in my very limited capacity.
1. India is a very very old civilization. Hence, there are way too many ideologies, religions, castes etc in the way of a focused progressive thinking.
2. India ceased to be offensive long back - history is very clear about what usually happens with a non-offensive civilization - they get captured, robbed, systematically destroyed. It took 600 years to rob India from Moghuls to the British. In this very long process of invasions and slavery, something very critical to human survival broke down completely. We Indians do not care of our own well-being. We are happy with getting away with minimal suffering. We just do not care.
3. As India spent most of the modern time in slavery, India became fatalist - none of our actions are relevant - finally the destiny/wish of God/karma takes over. So, we do not care about our actions. There is no causality.
4. Post independence from the British, India fell into the hands of a very corrupt political system. Please understand this, to survive in power the Governments in India need poor people. How can you govern and control 1.2 billion people? - by keeping them in abject poverty. This is a very simple mechanism (read Orwell's 1984) proven and tested the world over.
5. India has a class of enterpreneurial people. They make money for themselves and help their own. India has no sense of public distribution of wealth or enterpreneurship. An Indian will NOT help a man living in his own street if the other guy is from a different caste/religion/etc.
6. Poverty is the worst form of violence - but India has no plans to eradicate poverty. Politics is usually the tool for the rougue to make quick money and loads of it and as I mentioned earlier, poverty is necessary for the political class to survive.
I have 100 other points - perhaps I will write a blog about it and share with you people.
This article talks about something that hurts me a lot on personal level - trust me, every Indian has tried atleast once to change things around him. Most have failed. Even Gandhi failed miserably - he never got the India he dreamed of.
I think if Yahoo came up with Hadoop at this point of time, people would have ridiculed it too. Just a herd mentality to feel superior by hating Yahoo.
Other problem is that interviewing is a lost art. Most companies ask their developers to interview from a set of predefined algorithm/DS questions - there is no way to know if the candidate answered from his own thought process or just knew the answer. So most of the tech interview become a game of chance. I liked this article which says "let the interviewee impress you" - let the candidate show what he can do - give him a problem to solve on computer during a whole day or perhaps a week - see the results ?
Why the hate? Its an interesting read. Thinking about and discussing awful systems like this can help in figuribg out how to better make non-awful systems.
And why exactly is it relavant that he is a college student?
Awful system ? yes, but a massively scaled. think about the scale of the system. One single backend is serving kiosks at thousands of railway stations, lakhs of booking counters and several agent terminals. True that there are downtimes and slowness - but consider this system as a classic usecase and study of how massive a system can be. The student who wrote this rant just talks about the downsides and how bad the whole system is. I would appreciate a few ideas on how he in his great might would do to fix this massive system. Are there any constructive ideas in this article ? do we learn from this article ? It is very easy to rant about everything...if you don't like my views and downvote my comment, you are free to do so.
Awful is still awful :) And from that description it is a truly awful system. And saying "if your so great why don't you fix it yourself" is a really stupid response to criticism. Why be so defensive about a bad system, YOU didn't write it, right?
Oh come on, your originally comment was a nasty little dig at someone for writing up their experiences and a suggestion that they don't count because they're "just a college student". You made that comment from a new account so you either are new here (in which case, what's with the complaining about the discussion going down hill?) or you where not prepared to stand behind your comment so used a throw-away account.
I have no idea why you consider the Indian internet rail booking system a subject above criticism, it just seems bizarre.
