Coding can be a huge advantage

Does Rohan Jain still code?
Rohan Jain
Rohan Jain, CSE IITK'15, IIMA Batch of 2015-17
Answered Jun 8
I don’t need to code as much now as I used to code during my B.Tech days. Not even close. In fact, for all practical purposes, I don’t code at all these days.

There is an interesting anecdote related to coding that happened during my time at IIMA though. My batchmate and I were doing a project under a professor at IIMA. Both of us had done our B.Tech in computer science.

Prof: “Generate around 50 queries, run this regression and send me the results. Let us meet again in 3–4 days.”

She was probably expecting us to manually enter all the 50 queries. Instead, we created a Python script that generated 5000 queries instead of 50, inserted them into Stata software to run the regression for each query and collated all the output and results into an Excel file in a readable format. Everything in just a few seconds.

We ran that script for 5000 queries and sent her the data by the end of the day itself. The prof. was expecting that we would take a few days, so she was surprised when we asked for a meeting the next day itself.

She again gave us some more work, expecting us to take a week for that. We created another python script and sent results for 100 times the number of queries she had requested, again within the day.

The professor, visibly impressed: “If I had worked at this speed during my Ph.D, I would have probably taken only one month to complete my entire thesis.”

Knowing how to code can be a huge advantage.