Ian On The Red Dot

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:

My work requires me to talk to many people from different countries over the phone.  Some of them are users who need support and it can be extremely frustrating at times to communicate with these individuals because it is really tough to guide them if you cannot see what they are doing.  Yet I’m lucky - I don’t think my life is as bad as this guy who wrote a blog called ‘Call Center Purgatory‘.

Then there are those who are virtual teammates, people scattered across the Asia Pacific region, working together to get the job done.  The difficulty in communication with these individuals is that English is not their first language.  Actually, come to think of it, the problem isn’t that they aren’t good in English, the issue is the accent when they speak.  I’m sure my Singaporean accent with the sprinkling of Singlish can’t be much of a joy for them either.

There was one night when I had to stay back in the office till about 2am to get some issues resolved over at Korea.  There was this Korean lady who had just returned from her maternity leave working together with me to fix the stuff.  Because I can’t speak Korean, we had to communicate in English which was much easier on me than it was on her.  She wasn’t well that day and her cough was really bad (either that or she was hinting to our bosses that it was time to go home).  I could hear it over the phone but I couldn’t do anything about it.  There was a certain sense of helplessness that a colleague, albeit one that I haven’t met in person, was suffering.  I have stayed back to finish work when I was sick and I know that the feeling isn’t too awesome.

Anyway, that night a bunch of us was on a conference call so she had some of her Korean counterparts on the line too.  When she talked to them in Korean, even with the cough, you could sense the joy in her voice - it brought a smile to my face.  The minute she felt free to speak in her native tongue, there was no trace of stress or frustration in her voice.

Outsourcing of business operations isn’t anything new but it is something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit ever since I started working.  One of the things I wonder is that has anyone ever considered the effect of communicating with overseas colleagues on stress levels.  While costs for a company might have gone down because of outsourcing, has there been any consideration for the costs on individuals to work in such globally connected environments.  Some reading on my part is in order to understand this.

One of the other things I’ve been wondering about is the forming of emotional connections with these individuals you do not see.  I haven’t met this Korean lady but I have already started wondering how her kid is doing and whether she had enough rest before returning to work.  But such a connection is an illusion (not least because I think she isn’t a least bit concerned about my health) and I wonder how people cope with these sort of disconnected connectedness.  Actually, is it even something that needs to be coped with?

I wonder what sort of connections will be made between individuals if outsourcing of consumer services  takes off.

The kind of company I would love to work for is mentioned in this post by Polly Labarre.

The best bit:

Old version: work hard (for a very long time), achieve success, earn freedom (to retire and do all the things you missed out on while you were working)

New version: find work that affords you freedom = success

via: sethgodin

The worse thing than not getting an award is getting an award you do not think you have deserved.

That fate just happened to me.

For some unfathomable reason, my manager saw it fit to nominate me for the employee of the month. I got it. And along with it, the congratulations that make me feel like I’m a fraud.

But I guess my manager saw it coming. Even before the winner was announced at our month’s end gathering, he called me to his table to inform me about the possibility of me winning and advised me not to say ‘err..i really don’t know what i did. how come i get award?’.

But how can I stop myself from saying that. All I have ever done at work, is just my work - I just do what needs to be done to fulfill my responsibilities. There are people in this company with greater responsibilities who do their best to meet them too. I mean…

I feel dirty.

I can’t help but feel that I’m experiencing some sort of reverse discrimination being one of only two Singaporean Chinese in this company. Oh well… Got to justify my manager’s confidence.
I guess the good thing that came out of this is the $50 Isetan voucher which I’m sure my gf will find useful.