Ian On The Red Dot

I work to create systems for people who look down on the very people (my colleagues and me) who create the systems that allow them to make more money faster just by moving money here and there because they have more money than us.

WTF.

It is like making boots for people to stamp on our faces.

Who cares about productivity?

Bosses aren’t saying – raise your productivity and we will pay you more. They are saying, raise your productivity, if not, we will hire someone cheaper or someone who can do more for the same pay.

Minister Lim Swee Say:

“Job is the best welfare, full employment is the best protection for workers and productivity gain is the best driver for wage increase in the future…”

The statistics show that Singapore’s GDP has grown.
The statistics also show that Singapore’s income inequality has also grown.

So, what makes the minister think that if a worker increases his or her productivity, the company will pay the worker more? What makes the minister think that those with wealth will be more willing to share the wealth in the future?

There seems to be too conflicting messages here:

1. Raise productivity or lose your job because we can replace you with a foreigner.
2. Raise productivity so your value increases and the company will pay you more.

We know companies are doing 1. We also know they are NOT doing 2.

So telling workers to increase productivity is of no consequence in helping them if companies aren’t willing to share more of the pie. It is also of no consequence if foreign workers who are willing to increase ‘productivity’ (do more for less, do more for same by putting in more hours or taking less pay) are also allowed to be employed.

Bosses’ idea of productivity = Amount Of Work / Pay
Worker’s idea of productivity = Amount Of Work / Time

Different formulas. Think about this for a moment.

The problem is that the ministers are asking workers to bite the bullet first. Prove your worth and trust us (companies, government) to take care of you.

The correct way would be to get companies to pay more. Once you have to pay more for a worker, you as the owner of a company have many more incentives to put more systems and processes in place to get more from the worker. Or you could just overwork him in terms of hours. So the government would need to manage that abuse of overworking.

And it is not just about the company being forced to get their workers to be more productivity, for SME’s, for the want of a better word, it buys a lot more loyalty.

And what does loyalty get you?

More on that tomorrow.

@Entity
@Inheritance(strategy=InheritanceType.SINGLE_TABLE)
@DiscriminatorColumn(
name=”planetype”,
discriminatorType=DiscriminatorType.STRING
)
@DiscriminatorValue(”Plane”)
public class Plane { … }

@Entity
@DiscriminatorValue(”A320″)
public class A320 extends Plane { … }

is different from

@MappedSuperclass
public class BaseEntity {
@Basic
@Temporal(TemporalType.TIMESTAMP)
public Date getLastUpdate() { … }
public String getLastUpdater() { … }
…
}

@Entity class Order extends BaseEntity {
@Id public Integer getId() { … }
…
}

This has no meaning.

Being a monkey doing manual work just because that’s the way it has always been. Because the company, despite being around for so long has not bitten the bullet and dedicated resources to building the tools it needs to use so regularly.

Because labor is elastic, the tools are not focused on. Quote aggressively for projects and throw more and cheap labor onto the problem.

It feels like we are becoming like the Indian company I used to work for.

This is soulless.

Of course, we (i.e. the staff) could dedicate our own time outside of office hours to create the tools we need.

But why should we?

You learn a lot just by studying the work they do and asking questions.

&

Some quick thoughts – there is a difference between:

1. Go and work on something and let me see.
2. Go and work on something and let’s discuss how we can make things better.
3. Go and work on something and then I’ll contribute by saying whatever you do is shit AND then I’ll finally give my ideas.

I hate ‘blue-dress-red-dress’ working relationships. You know, the kind you get with some girlfriends. She will hold up a red dress and a blue dress and ask you which one she should wear. Either she has a clue or doesn’t. If she does, your opinion doesn’t matter. If she doesn’t, she will only make up her mind after you give your answer, and she will always choose the other dress.

If you are stuck in a team like that, time to stick a gun in your mouth. And maybe pull the trigger.

I understand the principle behind the separation of the development and testing teams – every programmer suffers from momentary lapses of judgement brought on by the ‘it is my baby’ feeling towards their code which makes them perform less rigorous testing.

It would not be presumptuous to assume a testing team incentivized to find bugs in an application will perform more rigorous testing and act as a perfect foil to the development team.

In theory.

In practice, if the testing team does not have the knowledge of the business requirements and application, if the team does not have the skill-set to track what’s going on with an application, if they have to rely on the development team to interpret results then the whole point of separation is lost.

The testing team needs to be able to operate independently from the development team when determining why a test case fails.

It is also not sufficient for the testing team to say a test case has failed. The testing team needs to be able to ascertain the point in the business process where the error occurred which is possible with logging and information from the database.

If they can never understand the ‘why’ then the chances of false positives and false negatives increase.

And seriously, Google is your friend. In case you forgot how to use Google, click this link.

Michael Lopp writes about the game Werewolf:

Werewolf is a party game described by its creator as “a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, assassination, and mob hysteria.” Understanding how it’s played is important to understanding why this game will sharpen your critical thinking skills regarding group dynamics at work.

Werewolf is a game and games are fictionalized simplifications of life that allow you to explore extremes of social interactions in ways you normally cannot.

In real life, there’s a subtle but detectable flow to how a group of people interact. People adopt standard roles and act according to discernible rules. Unfortunately, it’s an impossibly long set of rules, because the rules vary as much as each person is different.

In Werewolf, on the other hand, there’s a very small set of rules:

• Villagers, kill Werewolves as best you can.
• Werewolves, kill Villagers as best you can.
• Sleep when you’re told to.
• Survive.

Interwoven within these rules is the actual game, and therein lies the brilliance of a solid game of Werewolf: It’s a crucible of people dynamics, improvisation, and intellectual combat. In just a few short hours of game play, you realistically experience some of the worst meeting scenarios imaginable—and the motivation to handle these scenarios with care and agility because, well, you don’t want to die.

During JC orientation week (and even in university), I played a similar (actually same) game called ‘Polar Bear’ quite often. The best players were always the most popular kids. Apparently there is a correlation between popularity in school and your ability to lie.

I hate it when people start doing managing. Like managing enter and exit timings. Here is the thing – in Singapore, we don’t get OT pay. So when we work OT, we do it on the basis that you (i.e. the management) can be trusted to take care of us. Why not extend the same trust when we (ok, when I) come in late. It is not like I don’t finish my work. Plus if you want to measure time in office, I win, because everyone else leaves once the clock hits six or thereabouts.

But no…management / bosses always want to bleed first then compensate later. FFS.

The way I see it, next year pay review is going to take a hit. I should care but it isn’t the money that is pissing me off. It is the fact that I’m living in a situation where I have to tolerate such bullshit policies. The people I work with are great when it comes to writing code and working on software. But when it comes to these sort of management stuff, damn FFS.

The power of inexperience or rather the lack of power due to inexperience – you don’t realize that there are better tools to do the job.

I’m pretty sure my team lead knew I was going down the wrong brute force path when he saw what I was doing. I guess if I didn’t feel the pain of what I was doing, i wouldn’t have realized the stupidity of that path as well as appreciate this.