Tanya Khovanova's Math Blog

I started my Yellow Road a year ago on February 9, 2013, when my weight was 245.2 pounds. My system worked for eight months. I lost 25 pounds. Then I went to two parties in a row and gained four pounds. According to my plan, I was supposed to eat only apples after lunch. It was too difficult to stick to that, and I got off-target. My target weight continued decreasing daily, as per my plan, while I got stuck. The growing difference between my real weight and my target weight was very discouraging, so I lost my momentum.

I decided to reset the target weight and restart the plan. I changed my plan slightly to incorporate the lessons I had learned about myself.

On February 9, 2014, I started my New Yellow Road. I weighed 223.2 pounds. So I reset my target weight to be 223.2 on February 9. Each day my target weight goes down by 0.1 pounds. I weigh myself each morning. If I am within one pound of my target weight, I am in the Yellow zone and I will eat only fruits and vegetables after 5:00 pm. If I am more than one pound over my target weight, I am in the Red Zone and will eat only apples after 5:00 pm. If I am more than one pound below my target weight, I can eat anything.

I want to tell you the story of my “successful” salary negotiation. The year was 2003 and I had a temporary visiting position at Princeton University. I wanted to move to Boston and my friend showed my resume to Alphatech. The interview went well and they offered me a position as Lead Analyst with a salary of $110.000. This was particularly good news considering that the tech job market was very weak in 2003.

At that time, I was working very hard on building my self-esteem. I read lots of books and was in therapy for two years. I decided to practice what I had learned to try to negotiate a bigger paycheck. While speaking to the HR guy on the phone, I was standing up, as I was taught, and projecting my voice firmly with my chest opened up. I could hardly believe it when I heard myself ask for a $10,000 increase.

Despite my wonderful posture, the human resource person refused. However, he remembered that they had forgotten to give me a moving bonus. He asked me about my living conditions. I told him that I lived in a four-bedroom house. I didn’t elaborate: it was a tiny four-bedroom house made out of a garage. I made a counter offer: forget the moving bonus, but give me my salary increase as I asked. He agreed.

For the first year, there was no real difference, because the salary increase was equal to the moving bonus. But I was planning to stay with the company for a long time, so by the second year, my clever negotiation would start to pay off. My negotiations were a success. But were they?

Things change. The boss who hired me and appreciated me stopped being my boss. The company was bought by BAE Systems who were not interested in research. To my surprise, I started getting non-glowing performance reviews. Luckily, by that time I had made a lot of friends at work, and one of them not only knew what was going on, but was willing to tell me. My salary was higher than that of other employees in the same position. Salary increases were tied to performance. They wanted to minimize my increases to bring my salary into the range of others at my level. So to justify it, they needed a negative performance review. After one negative review it is difficult to change the trend. A negative review stays on the record and affects the future reputation.

In a long run I am not sure that my salary negotiations were a success.

There is a famous puzzle about three light bulbs, that is sometimes given at interviews.

Suppose that you are standing in a hallway next to three light switches that are all off. There is another room down the hall, where there are three incandescent light bulbs—each light bulb is operated by one of the switches in the hallway. You can’t see the light bulbs from the hallway. How would you figure out which switch operates which light bulb, if you can only go to the room with the light bulbs one and only one time?

This puzzle worked much better in the past when we only had incandescent light bulbs and so didn’t need to specify the type of bulbs. Unfortunately, the standard solution only works with incandescent bulbs and the word “incandescent” nowadays needs to be stated. But the use of “incandescent” is a big hint. Indeed, incandescent light bulbs generate heat when they are on, so the standard solution is to turn on the first light switch, to keep the second switch off, and to turn the third switch on for five minutes before turning it off. In the room, the light bulb corresponding to the first switch will be lit, and out of the two unlit bulbs, the one corresponding to the third switch will be warm.

It’s a cute solution, but there could be so many other approaches:

• You can ask a friend to help you. You can come to the room with the light bulbs and shout to her which switch to turn on.
• You can place mirrors from the room to the hall, so you can see bulbs through the multiple reflections. You might not need to enter the room at all.
• Before playing with the switches, you can place a video camera in the room to transmit the scene in real time. You will not be allowed to enter the room again to get the camera back, but what the heck: the job will be done.
• You can put timers on the switches and set them to turn on at different times.
• You can attach strings to switches and turn them on or off from a distance.

I invite my readers to invent other methods to solve this problem. Be creative. After all, if I were to interview you for a job, I would be more impressed by a new solution than the one that is all over the Internet.