The Stress Test

You see this all the time — and for some of you who don’t present yourselves for job interviews very often (and that’s a good thing!) — MTV Roadies (or the reality show of your choice) is the best approximate example.

Grace Under Fire, Grace Under Pressure

This is essentially what a “stress test” looks to calibrate. Your ability to keep your head when others are losing theirs; your ability to keep your cool when the heat’s turned up; your ability to think on your toes … you get the picture. More often than not though, stress tests are fairly ’scripted’ — inasmuch as you can script a show like Whose Line Is It Anyway.

Apart from you, everyone in the room knows what to say, how to say and what to do. The good cop / bad cop routines are fairly set. All the interview panel has to do is play it by ear, depending on the candidates responses and based on kinesic feedback. They then go on collate all that information, have discussions about your Type ‘A’ Type ‘B’ personality, map out your comfort zone, look through your Johari Window and hopefully at the end of it all, they come to an informed decision.

I’m right now on our front porch enjoying the pleasant centrally aircon Bengaluru weather. We’re down a leafy Koramangala bylane, the birds are chirping, a dog’s barking … and there’s very little or no traffic sounds at all.

Sitting a few feet away from me on another one of those cheap plastic chairs (give us good chairs, Flipkart!) is someone who’s applying for one of the open positions at Flipkart … and the candidate is filling out a form of some sort with the paper awkwardly positioned on the lap. Not two minutes later, candidate got called in, while someone else from the team came out. He then went on to call another candidate over the phone and have the initial “breaking the ice” conversation.

Barking dogs can become annoying at this point. As can the occasional auto rickshaw that barrels down the dead end road, hell for leather. Of course, none of this is intentional. We have started realising though, that inadvertently, our non-screening stress test has become what it’s not.

It partly also has to do with preconceptions of 2 things, largely — the idea of an Office and the idea of a Startup.

Offices are meant to look and be a certain way, with a degree of formality, with receptionists and with cubicles. When you’re sitting on the porch and you see the CEO dressed in jeans and a T-shirt sitting on the floor trying to get faulty generator fixed … it shakes the confidence of some people. Which brings me to this …

… Startups are cool. Ok, sure they are … but people are all the same slogging their asses off. And with most startups like Flipkart (that are bootstrapped), you are slogging your ass off in conditions that would be considered “developing” anywhere else. (Aside: “Let My Dataset Change Your Mindset” is worth a watch.)

Startups are fueled by hard work, and in the case of Flipkart, fueled by both hard work and hard physical labour. We are as much a physical business as we are a .com — books are physical, tangible, need to stocked, shelved, packed. And Sachin and Binny have done it the hard way; the only way, really. Back in the beginning, they used to schlepp around books from all over Bangalore back to their house, sit and pack, bill and label, and carry the packed books out to the courier office.

Even today if one of us complains that a book can’t be packed a certain way, they’ll gladly sit down and show you how it can. This is more or less the case with most of us who’ve been here in 2007 and 2008. We have all sat on the packing floor and packed books, stuck labels, carried cartons up and down floors … you name it. Not like we’re through with it either. If ever we find ourselves short staffed (people on leave), we jump in and find a spot on the assembly line. What matters is that the books get packed.

Fortunately or unfortunately, with some people - this isn’t the “cool” they expected to find in a startup. We weren’t wearing chinos and sipping ginseng tea or using “Web 2.0″ as punctuation (although, I use “HTML 5.0″ whenever I get a chance).

We’ve had to shoo dogs from the staircase because we knew a developer candidate was coming over. We’ve worked in candle light in the days before we could afford a power backup. We continue to work in the sauna that is our Delhi office.

Don’t be fooled. The Flipkart interview is the easiest part.

It’s the work that’s a stress test.