2026 1

Thinking Beyond Automation to Safeguard Tomorrow’s Software Talent

Or, Why I Now Prefer Interns Over Senior Developers Ankor runs a company of several thousand people. After a bunch of calls with one of our interns, Varun (a student at IIT Madras), Ankor messaged me: “This guy is fantastic. How is he doing it?” This is what Varun was doing: he records calls, feeds the transcript to Claude Code / Codex, and delivers results. That’s the whole process. He doesn’t interpret the content. He doesn’t apply domain knowledge. He gets out of the way. ...

2025 2

Tools in Data Science Sep 2025 edition is live: https://tds.s-anand.net/. Major update: a new AI-Coding section and fresh projects. I teach TDS at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras as part of the BS in Data Science. Anyone can audit. The course is public. You can read the content and practice assessments. I fed the May 2025 term student feedback into The Sales Mind and asked: What are the top non-intuitive / surprising inferences? What are interesting observations? What are high impact actions? Full analysis: https://lnkd.in/gVWVqaxN: summary, outliers, and action ideas. ...

Tools in Data Science course is free for all

My Tools in Data Science course is now open for anyone to audit. It’s part of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras BS in Data Science online program. Here are some of the topics it covers in ~10 weeks: Development Tools: uv, git, bash, llm, sqlite, spreadsheets, AI code editors Deployment Tools: Colab, Codespaces, Docker, Vercel, ngrok, FastAPI, Ollama LLMs: prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, topic modeling, multi-modal, real-time, evals, self-hosting Data Sourcing: Scraping websites and PDF with spreadsheets, Python, JavaScript and LLMs Data Preparation: Transforming data, images and audio with spreadsheets, bash, OpenRefine, Python, and LLMs Data Analysis: Statistical, geospatial, and network analysis with spreadsheets, Python, SQL, and LLMs Data Visualization: Data visualization and storytelling with spreadsheets, slides, notebooks, code, and LLMs ...

2024 1

Why don't students hack exams when they can?

This year, I created a series of tests for my course at IITM and to recruit for Gramener. The tests had 2 interesting features. One question required them to hack the page Write the body of the request to an OpenAI chat completion call that: Uses model gpt-4o-mini Has a system message: Respond in JSON Has a user message: Generate 10 random addresses in the US Uses structured outputs to respond with an object addresses which is an array of objects with required fields: street (string) city (string) apartment (string) . Sets additionalProperties to false to prevent additional properties. What is the JSON body we should send to https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions for this? (No need to run it or to use an API key. Just write the body of the request below.) ...

2009 4

Lee and Shiuli

It began in our second year at IIT Madras (1993). Shiuli Ganguly was an M.Sc. mathematics student, and Anand Thomas Lee was my classmate. And Lee (along with a lot of other people) had a rather high opinion of the lady in question. (He still maintains it. I got a mail in December 1996 saying that he’d tracked her down). However, the same opinion was not held of my computer abilities (understandably so). He bet that there was no conceivable way I could get a photo of Lee and his sweetheart together - by means fair or otherwise. Actually, I lost the bet due to the time constraint, but I did have my revenge. ...

Nandu in Vizag

Nandu, Tangi, Jani and myself (four IIT-M guys, class of 1996) went for a seminar (Ripples) at Vishakhapatnam. Nandu lives in Vizag, BTW. On our first day, we went in and registered, and couldn’t help noticing the gorgeous tall bespectacled dame who filled our forms. We thought no more of it until Nandu walked in to register, and coolly struck conversation with her for quite a while. It bothered me to no end. ...

The Superstar and I

I was watching the shooting from a distance. You must have heard of the film "Muthu" being directed by K.Balachander (he's KB to us). KB was explaining the shot to my husband, but he seemed to be shaking his head in confusion, so I decided to have a look. "Rajni, you cannot throw up a cigarette and catch it in your mouth this scene. Your father has just died. Your eyes are blinded by tears." ...

About me

You may know me as S Anand. You may also know me as Prof or Stud at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, as Anand Subramanian at IBM India, Bhalla at Alakananda hostel, IIT Madras, and Bal at Vidya Mandir. LinkedIn CV (2024) History 1974-1978 at home I was born on the 23rd November, 1974 (a Saturday) at Tirupati. I flew back to Madras (now Chennai) in a few days along with my parents. I stayed at home for 4 years, thoroughly enjoying myself. My mother would feed me while telling me stories while I was perched on her hip looking at the cows behind our house (it was no mean feat — I think I weighed 20 kilos). Since I was the youngest grandchild in our family, no one was permitted to get angry with me — especially if I sat on them and hit them with whatever they wouldn’t give me. ...

1999 1

Lehman Brothers interview

Lehman Brothers was recruiting Sales, Trading & Research in Tokyo, and Investment Banking in New York. If that sounds like greek, read Vault’s report on investment banking. They seemed disappointed at the number of questions that came their way during their pre-placement presentation. There were hoping for a lot more, and agressive, questions. The people who came included Alan Cutter, Pamella, Isabella, Sarab Bhutani (all from New York), Dalip Awasthi and Sumant Gupta. They shortlisted 21 people for New York and 9 people for Tokyo. Rajesh Dalmia and I were on both shortlists. ...