Tinker, Tailor

I don’t remember how we started talking about breastfeeding during the meeting. No, the new department head wasn’t there of course.

“I’m sure I could do a presentation on breastfeeding,” I mused.

“Yeah but you wouldn’t be able to do a demo,” countered a colleague.

“Sure I can!”

They gave me this you-gotta-be-kidding wide-eyed look, before shifting their focus to my chest, and slowly shaking their heads. They were not impressed.

“I could act as the baby, and I’d volunteer someone to be the mother!”

They almost died.

Note to self: Do not go for a run after giving 4 hours of presentations especially if you’re gonna play basketball after the run for the next 2 hours, because you’re a guy and you’re straight and thus you don’t have a nice strong boyfriend to carry you home.

Poor non-existent boyfriend.

I’ll keep this short cos I have to prepare something like 7 presentations over the next 2 weeks. And I’m not finished with preparing any of them yet.

Anyway, since my post on how to hire me, and since my meeting with the coming head of department where I spent a good part of the time debating and challenging her old-school management philosophy (rather unsuccessfully), an article which a friend sent to me strikes a chord.

It talks about why top employees quit large companies.

Since I’m not quite ready to leave at the moment, I’ll just talk about an issue raised in that article: money - one of the reasons many top employees quit because they’re not paid enough.

Here are some possible problems of the company (”we”) that may cause it:

- We are not watching the market rate for these positions closely enough - our “pay potential” might be way too low

- Our pay scale doesn’t increase at the same rate as the market rates

- Star Employees know their value. If you won’t compensate them for it, they will look elsewhere in a heartbeat

- We are not doing a good enough job at drawing the line towards advancement. If the employee actually sees advancement as a sure possibility as opposed to a pipe dream, it may slow their decision to jump to another company.

I was telling my friend that this article is not radical enough for me. While the author has some great points, they’re still stuck in the large-company track of thinking.

If you got the impression from my “How to Hire Me” post that money isn’t the top priority for me, you read me right.

What resonates better with me would be Joel Spolsky’s article “A Field Guide to Developers” which I only read a couple of days back.

Under the section “one thing that programmers don’t care about”,

They don’t care about money, actually, unless you’re screwing up on the other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that’s usually a sign that people aren’t really loving their job. If potential new hires just won’t back down on their demands for outlandish salaries, you’re probably dealing with a case of people who are thinking, “Well, if it’s going to have to suck to go to work, at least I should be getting paid well.”

(He goes on to clarify that you shouldn’t underpay either, but I’ll leave that out. )

I’m not a programmer, but I understand the programmer’s mindset, and I’m definitely a geek, and Joel is completely right.

Also, Joel probably has the smartest and most rational HR policies know. And because it’s so smart and rational, it’s also so different from what we’re used to, that I can’t even begin to imagine this company I’m working for adopting even half the mentioned strategies.

Talking about how a software company should treat its own programmers (developers):

Are they hotshots or typists? Is company management made up of engineers or former programmers? When developers go to a conference, do they fly first class? (I don’t care if that seems like a waste of money. Stars go first class. Get used to it.) […] All else being equal, developers are going to prefer an organization that treats them like stars. If your CEO is a grouchy ex-sales person who doesn’t understand why these prima donna developers keep demanding things like wrist pads and big monitors and comfortable chairs, who do they think they are?, your company probably needs an attitude adjustment. You’re not going to get great developers if you don’t respect them.

Maybe I should send the coming new boss this article. Then maybe she’ll stop liking me.

I was supposed to have a meeting with the new boss tomorrow at 10am.

Then today I get an email from the secretary, asking if I’m ok if it’s shifted to 9.30am.

Being emboldened after getting away with my last email, I reply:

No choice lah. Breakfast provided?

Maybe I should ask for lunch as well.

I’ve was given a happy problem not too many days ago. In fact, this is the 3rd of my happy problems over the past 3 or 4 months.

This last happy problem came when someone I knew gave me a call. He’s running this company on his own which is doing really well with lots of projects, except that he needs someone to help him take on the projects.

You know where this is going - he wants to hire me. Oh, and he’ll pay lots more than what I’m getting now. (But that’s because I’m grossly underpaid.)

Anyway, these happy problems made me start thinking a little harder about what I look for in a job. Or what it takes to hire someone like me. Other than paying me lots of money. And giving me a nice office without cubicles. And a really fast Apple computer. And a nice Aeron chair. And a personal handpicked secretary cum masseuse…

Other than those minor details, here are some of the larger issues that I look at before I sell my soul.

Meaning

Remember how Steve Jobs convinced John Sculley to leave his CEO post at Pepsi to join Apple? He reportedly said to Sculley:

Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?

Even Pepsi CEOs eventually want to do something meaningful and change the world.

I can last in a job only if there is meaning. This means that I must find it meaningful, and believe that what I’m doing is changing the world, albeit in a small way. This means that if you can convince me that cleaning the toilet will change the world, I might just do it (subject to the other criteria as well). Come to think of it, I used to clean toilets, but that’s another story.

Creativity

I believe that creativity is the highest expression of human intelligence, and I won’t be happy in a job that is not intrinsically creative.

This means that you won’t find me doing purely admin work. (No offense to those doing admin work - it’s important work, just that I can’t stay sane doing it.) Sure, there are opportunities for creativity when you’re doing admin, but the proportion is too low, and that’s really not enough for me. This also means that I don’t see myself cleaning toilets as my next career move, since it’s not intrinsically creative either.

Some jobs may seem intrinsically creative, like ‘marketing’ (I know so many people in ‘marketing’), but they often turn out to be uncreative - liasing with the ad agency, figuring out which magazine to place the ads and how big the ad should be - that’s nothing more than specialised admin. If you’re just there to keep the status quo and not rock the boat (let alone capsize the boat), you’re just a glorified clerk. Again, no offense to clerks out there, but the only time I ever wanted to be a clerk was when I was in the army.

Freedom & Flexibility

I’ve been spoilt. Although my company officially has fixed working hours (I believe it’s 8.30am - 5.30pm), I’ve always assumed that my job has flexi-hours (no one ever complained about it). I normally arrive at my cubicle around 9.30, but once in a while my sleep pattern gets disrupted and I arrive slightly later (10.30? 11.30?). But of course I’ll be on time when I have meetings and presentations since I’m really very responsible

But freedom and flexibility isn’t limited to just rationalised working hours. I look for management and culture that is open and reasonably flexible, meaning that they are open with different perspectives and unconventionality as long as things get done and the larger objectives are being met.

A job can be intrinsically meaningful and creative, but given an inflexible management and culture, much of the meaning and creativity gets asphyxiated.

Take teaching for example. Teaching can definitely be very meaningful and creative. But I’ve talked to teachers where the lesson plan has already been micro-defined (down to the minute - I’m not exaggerating) by some higher-up, and they’re somehow expected to follow it. I’d rather be cleaning the toilet - at least they didn’t tell me how exactly to clean it, as long as it was clean…

Learning

This is probably the biggest reason why I’m still around in my current job, despite the crappy pay and the crappy computers and the crappy cubicle and no personal secretary cum masseuse. I have this insatiable lust to keep learning; I want to know and understand (almost) everything, and I’ve so far had very supportive bosses who let me do things that I was never qualified for or things that I’m obviously not good at, but I’ve learnt through those things. Maybe they know I love to learn, and I generally learn fast. Then again, I haven’t learnt to love my cubicle.

Let’s hope the new boss coming in doesn’t mess up the great culture we already have.

* * *

I’m sure I can come up with more criteria if I have more time (I’m supposed to be at work now after all), but I really shouldn’t, otherwise I might end up unemployable. And unemployed.

Now back to work!

The secretary just sent an email informing us that the head of department who’s soon to take over wants to have a meeting with the whole department some time next week, just before she takes over the helm.

The meeting is scheduled at 4pm. And this new boss is known to stretch meetings forever.

So I just sent an email reply to the secretary:

Is dinner provided?

My ass is so fried.

[Note to self: never send emails when drowsy.]

Update:

The secretary saved my ass. She replies:

Do you want to stay back so long???

Seems like she doesn’t like the marathon meetings either. Phew!

I’m in a lousy mood today. But that doesn’t mean you should forward jokes to me.

Looks like not everyone in China knows Mandarin. In fact, almost half the Chinese population in China don’t know Mandarin (the official figure is 47% in 2004).

Bah.

(via Pinyin News - At least 40% of people in PRC can’t speak Mandarin: official)

A friend and I were sharing a bowl of Mango Sunrise - a variation of the Ice Kacang. The Mango Sunrise is just a pile of ice shavings with the usual Ice Kacang ingredients like red beans, jelly, etc. buried inside. The ice pile itself is coated with mango bits and resting on the pinnacle is a scoop of mango ice cream (the “sun”).

When eating it, some people like to dig a hole in the side of the ice to access the buried ingredients, like that friend of mine, which eventually led to some interesting conversation snippets…

“Nice hole you have there…”

“Stay out of my hole!”

“Your hole is getting reeeaally wet…”

“Yours is kinda hard…”

“Yours is so frigid…”

“Oh no the cream is dripping into the hole!”

“You swallowed my cream!”

Don’t worry - we watched a movie after that.

From the buzz that’s been going round the blogosphere, I’m starting to get the feeling that I’m the only one who’s never heard of Steve Irwin before he died.

Ah well, at least I don’t feel any sadness about it, even though it’s probably a great loss.

I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I seriously think their typography site (Microsoft Typography) is really informative, and some parts are even cool!

Like their “disagreeably facetious type glossary” which is created “for the amusement & edification of people beginning a love affair with fonts.”

Take one of the definitions for example:

BARS
are where you go to drown your sorrows. They are also the horizontal strokes that run into verticals in H and A.

A little corny, but hey, it’s better than nothing. I bet the typography department is housed in a small building in some deserted corner of the Microsoft campus, away from Central Command, so they get a bit more freedom to do fun things. Maybe they don’t have cubicles either.

One of my favourite articles there which I read some time back is “The Science of Word Recognition“:

Evidence from the last 20 years of work in cognitive psychology indicate that we use the letters within a word to recognize a word. Many typographers and other text enthusiasts I’ve met insist that words are recognized by the outline made around the word shape. …

The goal of this paper is to review the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model, and to help others to come to the same conclusion. This paper will cover many topics in relatively few pages. Along the way I will present experiments and models that I couldn’t hope to cover completely without boring the reader.

I don’t even know exactly why I’m interested in this stuff since there’s probably little practical use. But who cares - I’m not your typical pragmatic (or PAPmatic) Singaporean anyway.

Just felt like changing the tagline of this blog. The last one was:

an obscure blog by an obscure blogger

which isn’t really that meaningful anyway. Which is okay, since I just realised that my current blog design doesn’t show the tagline (those viewing from RSS readers like bloglines would have seen it though).

Anyway, here’s the new and more honest one:

There are three types of liars - liars, damned liars, and bloggers.

inspired by this quote:

“There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

which I found really amusing when my secondary 4 English teacher mentioned it. I was the only one in class to laugh. But that was usual.

Come to think of it, the evil high cubicles can be useful at times.

This flash of inspiration came to me the other day as my colleague walked past my cubicle and he must have caught my look of horror so naturally he looked over my cubicle partition and caught me with my pants down.

Yes, literally.

(The “pants down” part is literal; the “caught me” isn’t. Luckily he’s not gay.)

P.S. In case your imagination goes hyper, I was changing into my shorts to go for a run.

How do you pronounce Javier Solana? (He’s the European Union foreign policy chief.)

It doesn’t really matter. But since young, I’ve been quite particular about getting my pronunciation right for some reason, so BBC’s Pronunciation Unit’s blog helps feed my obsession. I can’t believe it but I actually read through every one of their posts.

And oh, Javier Solana is pronounced khav-YAIR sol-AA-nuh (-kh as in Scottish loch, and loch isn’t pronounced lock). Hope that helps

If you see an ang moh with a Chinese tattoo that you can’t make any sense out of, it may not be because your command of the language sucks (like mine).

The tattoo parlour they visited probably got their translation reference from this site: Chinese/Kanji & Egyptian Flash/Design Sheets. Click on any of the images and scroll all the way down - you’ll even find the Chinese alphabet!

(via Hanzi Smatter: Gibberish Asian Font Mystery Solved)

I was reading an old Tom Peters piece called “Pursuit of Luck” (pdf, via Pursuit of Luck post in his site). It’s a list of 50 strategies to help you be more successful (or lucky) in business.

Here are some points I found interesting, followed by my thoughts…

5. Read odd stuff. Look anywhere for ideas.

Yup I’m doing quite a bit of that.

6. Visit odd places. Want to “see” speed? Visit CNN.

OK I could do more of that.

7. Make odd friends.
8. Hire odd people. Boring folks, boring ideas.

I’m the odd friend and employee

9. Cultivate odd hobbies. Raise orchids. Race yaks.

Fine - blogging ain’t odd enough. Come to think of it, I don’t have any odd hobbies at the moment.

11. Ask dumb questions. “How come computer commands all come from keyboards?” Somebody asked that one first; hence, the mouse.

I try to do that quite often.

18. Listen to everyone. Ideas come from anywhere.
19. Don’t listen to anyone. Trust your inner ear.

I like that pair.

20. Get fired. If you’re not pushing hard enough to get fired, you’re not pushing hard enough. (More than once is okay.)

That’s one of my favourites. I’m trying!

29. Take sabbaticals.

I really want to!

30. “Repot” yourself every 10 years. (This was the advice of former Stanford Business School dean Arjay Miller—meaning change careers each decade.)

Nowadays people do that every 2 years. I need to do something about that soon.

31. Spend 50 percent of your time with “outsiders.” Distributors and vendors will give you more ideas in five minutes than another five-hour committee meeting.
32. Spend 50 percent of your “outsider” time with wacko outsiders.

It’s really hard to find wacko outsiders.

33. Pursue alternative rhythms. Spend a year on a farm, six months working in a factory or burger shop.

I should try that. Would you like fries with that?

34. Spread confusion in your wake. Keep people off balance, don’t let the ruts get deeper than they already are.
35. Disorganize. Bureaucracy takes care of itself. The boss should be “chief dis-organizer,” Quad/Graphics CEO Harry Quadracci told us.
36. “Dis-equilibrate … Create instability, even chaos.” Good advice to “real leaders” from Professor Warren Bennis.

Cool.

37. Stir curiosity. Igniting youthful, dormant curiosity in followers is the lead dog’s top task, according to Sony chairman Akio Morita.

I’d love to see more of that.

38. Start a Corporate Traitors’ Hall of Fame. “Renegades” are not enough. You need people who despise what you stand for.
39. Give out “Culture Scud Awards.” Your best friend is the person who attacks your corporate culture head-on. Wish her well.

I’m somewhat of a renegade where I work. Looks like it’s not enough.

41. Take off your coat.
42. Take off your tie.
43. Roll up your sleeves.
44. Take off your shoes.

I’m probably one of the most informally-dressed in my organisation. I swear I’ll go around barefooted more often. Gotta avoid stepping on worms though.

45. Get out of your office. Tell me, honestly, the last time something inspiring or clever happened at that big table in your office?!

Yay - I get out all the time!

46. Get rid of your office.

They got rid of my office and put me in a cubicle…..