Ian On The Red Dot

I like the new company that I’m working with. I have an excellent team - great rapport with my team members and my team lead is a guy who knows his stuff. The project I’m doing is interesting. I also like the guy who got me into this company. However, recently, upper management has been rearing its ugly head.

Firstly, I understand that time management is important and part of time management is punctuality. It would be superfluous to say that all jobs are different thus the flexibility we allow our employees when it comes to time management differ.

For example, if you are in customer service and if you are not at your job at 9.00am but 9.30am, it could or rather would hurt operations. I appreciate the need for stringency in working hours for such job scopes.

However, there are some jobs like mine where we have a very well defined project schedule. Besides this very well planned schedule, the nature of our job is such that most of the time, I’m working independently from my team. This is the beauty of investing time when designing the architecture of the system as well as good modularization of code with well thought out classes and interfaces.

With my job scope, it is not critical to daily operations or project delivery to come in on the dot. In fact, I would say it is perfectly fine to come in way pass the dot.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If the company is paying a salary, they should expect results. But let’s look at this from a programmer’s perspective.

Firstly, the schedule isn’t being delayed. In fact, we are working fast enough to give ourselves a larger buffer for more unit testing, integration testing and bug fixing.

Secondly, the communication between the team hasn’t been affected when people come in at different times.

Thirdly, we don’t come in late and leave early. At worse, we work the exact stipulated amount of hours. At best, and this is usually the case, we work more than that. Why? I won’t say that everyone of us love coding till we gladly continue doing it even if it is pass the time we can go home but I do believe in such a concept of ‘being in the flow’. A lot of times once we get into it, we stay in it until lots of work do get done even if it takes us pass normal working hours.

Lastly, companies like to get us in on time and even more willing to keep us pass the time we are supposed to leave. In Singapore, there isn’t the concept of overtime pay. I think that’s a bad thing. Now, I understand one of the reasons for this - we want to make our labor force attractive. However I believe there are many other ways to do it like making ourselves more productive or more innovative.

Without overtime, and the tendency for upper management to be fixated with how long someone stays in the office, we create a situation where employees get exploited and employees just stay in the office to put on a wayang show for their bosses. Do you actually think all the employees who stay long hours are doing work at all times during the day? In fact, I would wager most people drag out their work just to fill the time leading in a decrease of productivity.

Now, some bosses will come and say they make up for the lack of overtime by awarding bonuses. After all, if you put in the effort, management will notice and compensate. Also, sometimes, work just needs to be done.

I call bullshit on all that.

Firstly, something is wrong when long working hours are a daily fixture of your job. I understand the occasional burst of effort needed but daily? Someone is being exploited. And if there is really that much work, two people should be hired and not one person pushed to do more work.

Secondly, bonuses depend on the goodness and fairness of management and owners. Do you honestly believe humans have the general capacity to be fair when in comes to monetary compensation of their employees?

They will always pay you just enough not to leave never compensate you fairly and well for your efforts.

Like I said, I like this company. But upper management has been rearing its ugly head when they started nitpicking on our punctuality which to be honest isn’t bad at all.

Friend A: The iPhone sucks.

Friend B: Why?

Friend A: The touch-screen sucks.

Friend B: Why?

Friend A: When you are talking on the phone and you press your face against the screen, the call will disconnect.

Friend B: Have you used the iPhone before?

Friend A: No. But I’ve used other phones with touch-screens and this happens. So I’m pretty sure it will happen with the iPhone.

Friend B: But you have never used the iPhone? What if the iPhone has the ability to detect when it is your face pressed against the screen and not you trying to cut the call?

Friend A: Prove to me it has it.

Friend B: I can’t. I’ve never used the phone.

Friend A: So, it doesn’t have the ability.

Friend B: No. It might have. It might not have. The point is that none of us can be sure since both of us have never used the iPhone. So you cannot say the iPhone sucks because of that unless you have used the phone or it has been documented that this happens.

Friend A: Prove to me that it doesn’t happen.

Friend B: I’m not making any assertions. You are. You need to prove it happens.

——————————————————————————-

Sounds like a conversation between an atheist and an evangelist.

Evangelist: There is a God.

Atheist: You just can’t say there is a God. Prove it.

Evangelist: Prove to me there isn’t a God.

Atheist: What? Why? I’m not the one claiming the existence of someone no one can see, touch or hear.

Evangelist: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Atheist: True. True. So you can’t prove there is a God.

Evangelist: You can’t prove there is no God too.

Atheist: Yeah. Of course. But why should I?

Evangelist: Well, you need to if you say there is no God.

…….

I understand why people just go to war over such stuff. Killing is so much simpler then hoping that another human being has the capacity for rationale thought.

Just finished a rather heated discussion with a colleague about the US Presidential Elections. Actually, more specifically, about the Democratic Party’s nomination for candidate. And I realized why the PAP might just want the ordinary people to stay out of the way.

We (i.e. a lot of the people desiring change in our current system) assume that people have the desire to be informed, and if not, have the ability to seek out information and the facility to take that information, digest it, analyze it, interpret it and then make informed, well reasoned decisions.

But is that really the case?

Is the average Singaporean, or for that matter, is the average individual in the world like that. We all have our bias, we all have our preferences and a lot of us, if not all of us, are susceptible to let emotions overrule our logical facilities.

More importantly, none of us will ever have the complete view of the world, nor ever understand what we see even if it is everything.

And if there is one thing about people, we like to experience instant gratification as opposed to strive for long term satisfaction. This is a problem when a group, society, organization or country needs to solve problems - a lot of the times, the right solution is not obvious and if it is, it is usually painful for those involved.

So politicians pander to the worse in human nature - fear and greed. Give the people their regular goodies. Throw gold off the wagon. Make people fearful they will lose out to others, that their estate will not be upgraded and they lose out in the race. Play to the lowest common denominator, stay in power and then do what’s needed to fix the problem.

Of course, power tends to corrupt and good intentions is never a justification for bad actions, and sometimes the best laid plans of man fail.

But do we want to trust the average individual?

Are the average individual even willing to accept that arguments for any issue are nuanced - there never ever is a clear line between one side and the other. Are they willing to invest time and effort to understand every aspects of the issues that concern them. Or are they just ever too willing to just look for convenient signposts.

Or is it just plain arrogance to think that one group of people, while having themselves an incomplete view of the world and with that a incomplete understanding of the world, might just have a better view and the rest should stay out of the way.

Do we dare trust our fellow citizens?

Or is that too much to ask.

Which demands the greater price? Which gives the greater rewards?

To trust and maybe fail. Or not to trust and maybe fail.

Knowing human nature, which choice has the greater probability of failure?

Knowing human nature, is failure an inevitability in either choice?

And if failure is always an inevitability, which gives us a better chance of renewal.

I work for an IT company. We develop software for companies. What’s the purpose of software? One of the purpose of software is to automate processes. The funny thing is, like in my last company, a good deal of the developers’ time is spent preparing reports for our clients. One set of reports that need to be generated is excel sheets that detail our testing progress. So, we have developers preparing each sheet manually. The funny thing is that we could easily cut our time preparing these documents if we have a piece of script to automate the process.

We finally do. I wrote a script that generates the excel sheets based on our junit tests. No more duplication of work. No more mundane work.

More time for beer.

Over today’s lunch, my colleague asked me if I love my country. I told him I did but I didn’t like it or rather disliked certain aspects of it.

I asked him how he felt about China. His answer was the same but he added:

You only really dislike aspects of something if you love it. If not you don’t care. You don’t bother. You hate the whole thing.

My government has constantly talked about whether Singaporeans were stayers or leavers, whether we have a national identity, whether we have people who are loyal to the country …

At the same time, the government seems to want to suppress dissent and negative opinions about stuff in the country and more specifically about the government.

True, not all dissent and negative opinions are equal. Some come from people who hate the country who don’t really care if the country changes and even if they do, they probably won’t be satisfied.

But, a lot of it is really coming from people who dislike only certain aspects of the country. We still care.

Suppress the voices, and very soon, two things will happen - the voices of those who care will disappear (we don’t hate or love the country, we become indifferent) and those who hate the country will just get louder.

Abraham Lincoln:

If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.

I just started work at a new company. While there are more things to do now, I’m actually less stressed. The reason for that is because everything has been well planned by the team leads and project leaders. The timeline for the project is better documented, the tasks broken down into pieces that are easy to understand and implement. Every morning, the team gathers for a five minute session to share what we have done and what we are going to do - this really helps in accountability and monitoring of progress.

I came across Abraham Lincoln’s quote and realized sharpening the axe is something that I should pay attention to be it when executing a project or seizing opportunities.

I remember reading a quote about luck being the point where preparation and opportunities meet. Are we prepared to seize and maximize the opportunities that come our way. More importantly, are we prepared to recognize these opportunities?

We live in a society with two extreme forms of cults - the cult of youth and the cult of the so-old-they-shouldn’t-be-able-to-do-anything. The latter cult arises in part because of the first cult and what I see as our increasingly marginalization and disregard of those who are older - where once our old were venerated, their experience, cumulative knowledge and time-earned wisdom were recognized, we are now surprised that they have anything to offer and celebrate when they exceed our rather unjustified low expectations.

The cult of youth raises our expectations to the point where being successful isn’t really a success unless you do it by a certain age. Even if there isn’t an explicit time limit to achieve success, we push ourselves to achieve as quickly as we can and preferably as easy as possible.

You might have noted by now that I haven’t defined success. Success is a difficult beast to tame because it is different things to every individual. Whatever the definition of success, the questions I want to ask are this - are you too busy pursuing success in expense on working on the knowledge and skills that will help you achieve that success? Are you too eager to reach success that you don’t prepare and plan on how to get it?

Google’s first chef shares about his contribution to Google’s success.

my job was to create this ambience, to build this captivated audience where people wanted to come in super-early and stay super-late.

Interesting article from Forbes about the impending death of the current Indian outsourcing model.

Yet, India, for all its glory, is still the world’s back office. India’s tech industry is a “services” industry. The Indians don’t do the thinking. The customers do. India executes.

The two main problems with the current model:

1. Wage increases
2. Lack of technological innovation and product creation.

Having worked for an Indian company for the last 1 and a half years, I can attest that these are two very real problems. My company has been shifting its orientation to be a products company to address both of the above issues. The idea is that developing a product is a fixed cost. The marginal cost is in customization and deployment which is minimal relative to the initial cost of creating the product. Instead of charging for ‘man hours’ to provide the service of developing solutions, the company charges for licenses which scales must better in relation to wage cost.

The company has also implemented branding initiatives so that with the name, a premium can be placed on its products.

The writer for the article linked above is rather harsh in the assertion that the Indians don’t do any thinking. They do. However, the thinking is to provide solutions for specific problems for each client. The experience gained in tackling each problem does not translate to any long term advantage unless the problems faced by all the clients are similar - that is why certain companies like mine only specialize in certain domains. However, it isn’t just enough for the company to specialize in a domain of problems, there needs to be an efficient system in place for the transfer of knowledge between the members of the company and processes need to be established so that subsequent teams can easily solve the problems in the domain based on prior work. Reducing solutions to paint-by-the-numbers implementations can help deal with the issue of wage increases because the number of actual ‘man hours’ needed won’t need to scale exponentially, or even linearly, to the number of projects. I can’t speak for other Indian companies, but I know that is what my company tries to do. And because Indian companies have been in this game longer than the other companies from other countries now providing competitive low-cost labor, if they can crystallize that experience into process innovation, they can survive if not thrive. I do not believe everything a company needs can exist as software-as-a-service. Of course, not all companies will be able to do this. Many will still be stuck in the ‘throw-enough-people-at-a-problem-and-it-will-be-solved’ mentality. These companies will be the ones that die once Indian outsourcing ceases to be the golden ticket it currently is.

Clearing my desk. Consolidating my emails and documents to ensure that the person taking over my baby looks after it properly. When I took over the project, it was going into production with a bucket load of issues not worked out yet. The previous guy had just returned to India without resolving a couple of outstanding issues. The project didn’t die and I would like to think I played a significant part in its smooth transition to production status. Now, I can’t bear to part with it. Will the next guy be able to care for it the way I did? I’m not sure about that - he is one of those who like to ask ‘how’ instead of just Googling the information himself.

I’m moving on to something different and hopefully better, but leaving this company has been a difficult and sad decision. My time here at this company has had its fair share of frustrating moments. However, the people at this company have always made the work bearable if not enjoyable. Actually, the work itself can be enjoyable - the joy of hunting down the root cause of an issue can be frustrating but solving a problem and uncovering a root cause is an experience equal to watching Manchester United decimating Roma.

I’m leaving because I’m trying to find a work experience as satisfying as the night when my friend called to laugh that Bayern Munich was leading Manchester United in the final of the Champions League, then I witnessed Manchester United scoring twice in the dying moments of the game, and then I got the chance to call to inform him of the result.

There are many other reasons besides increasing job satisfaction but I won’t go into them now. I also want to share about how working at this company have changed my views about foreign talent / foreign labor in Singapore - I’ll do it once I clear all the handover stuff.

Today is bittersweet.

Saw the video below. Funny yet sad.

The video above reminded me of this movie which is coming up soon - He Was A Quiet Man: