Yesterday was the official Merdeka (Independence) Day celebrations for Malaysia. It marks 50-over years of independence from our colonials – the Brits. Unfortunately, I did not feel very merdeka at all – not just in terms of the celebrations but also in personal terms. I just did not feel very happy at all.

It could just be that I have been rather unhappy with a whole lot of things and my unhappiness is stacking up gradually. I seem to be running short on my happiness quotient recently. There are just too many things to be depressed about in my life, and my nation by extension.

I find myself surrounded by idiots and as you all know, I do not suffer fools gladly. That’s the crux of the problem.

Maybe I should learn to see things differently, or to surround myself with less foolishness. I think that the latter would be an easier solution to the problem. However, I will have to find some way to alleviate the stress that I am currently under. Hopefully, things will turn out better after my holiday to Japan. Goodness knows I need a break from all this idiocy.

Life sucks. People are dumb. Learn to eat grass.

Actually, this is not just applicable in Malaysia but rather, quite applicable throughout much of Asia. I lament on this issue as our nation will continue to bleed talent and brains if we continue to hold on to the age old ‘respect your elders’ mentality. The cause of the trouble is that people here tend to equate age with experience. Unfortunately, age merely indicates – being old, not experience.

Let me put it in context.

I have been actively programming for over 20 years. I have been writing production code used in products for almost half that time. Therefore, I would consider that my experience in programming would be about a decade of production code and two decades in total of active experience. However, most employers in Malaysia would consider me a fresher starting out in development because I have never held a development job in the past. What vexes me about this is that the decision is usually made by a hiring manager who has probably got less programming experience than me.

I came to this conclusion easily. Most of these managers are probably in their 40s and computers were not so prevalent during their time. So, most of them only started to code when they went to university, which was about 20 years ago. In fact, most of them cut their teeth on coding at the same time that I started coding. However, after about 10 years or so of coding, most of them end up getting promoted to a supervisory or managerial level and they stop coding then as their jobs become more people focused.

However, I have not. As a result, I have about double their active programming experience. I am stunned when they tell me that I lack experience, which is something that I tend to hear often. Once I hear that though, I tend to just walk away as the person hiring me is obviously an idiot. If the hiring manager is in their 50s or older, the situation is worse as they would already have been in management positions when programming became prevalent and probably never wrote much in terms of production code in their lives.

As another example, we were filtering a bunch of resumes and my manager highlighted that one of the freshers claimed to have a lot of programming experience and wrote lots of applications while he was a kid in school. My manager was dismissive of such ‘experience’. So, I told my manager that when faced with such a CV, we should actually probe and question this person’s work to find out if he/she actually wrote any useful or good code. If they did, then it should be considered as fair ‘experience’ even if it was done before they graduated from school.

I happily told my manager that I probably wrote better code when I was a kid that this manager and a whole host of other managers, directors and chiefs, write today. Something like coding is a craft and the quality of craftsmanship increases with experience but experience is measured in years of practicing the craft, and not years of living on the planet. This is not to say that we do not have late bloomers but we should not just dismiss the person’s experience due to his lack of age.

In addition, I recently approached a technical training company to become a part-time trainer. I am looking to supplement my income and found out that training pays quite well. So, I started exchanging emails with several of the Principals of this training company and things seemed to be going well. They must have had this image of me as a gray-haired industry veteran. Then, I decided to let them know my age because I know that age is a factor in Malaysia. After that, deafening silence.

I can understand why some people want to promote ‘experience’ as an euphemism for ‘age’. It is a defense mechanism employed by senior people who fear losing out to the new crop of young turks coming out each year. However, if we want to progress as a society, we need to recognise that although some people may be young, they may actually have spent more time in the trenches honing their skills and talents than us. Such skills and talent should not be wasted on the altar of ageism.

However, survival is the basest of human instincts. So, I don’t really blame people for practicing ageism. It’s just that I will not practice it in my organisation and in order to do that, I must make sure that I never ever have a HR department at my organisation and to have radical HR policies.

Update@2010-09-01: The silence has been broken.

Through my limited experience in life, I have come to the conclusion that there are three types of worker types in the human species – people who treat their work as: contract, career or calling. At the risk of making generalisations, these archetypes are something that I can easily categorise people into. It is also fairly easy to detect which category someone falls under.

• Contract types are people who work for a job. They have chosen to trade their labour in exchange for money or other resource. These are people who find jobs and who see it as just something to get done in order to survive. They will often find happiness outside of the work-place, either with family, friends or some extra-curricular activity. These people are workers.
• Career types are people who are out to build. They are interested in building a reputation and a career for themselves in order to increase their value. These are people who will find jobs that are in-line with their long term plans. They will often justify their sacrifices by attributing it to the pursuit of happiness. These people are planners.
• Calling types are people who do what they love. They are the lucky few who are able to turn their passions into money making careers. They are passionate about their work because they see it as something larger than life. They will not be able to survive outside of their comfort area and would take whatever risks necessary for their love. These people are leaders.

That’s what I think anyway.

Love the song sung by my favourite Glee characters – Kurt and Rachel.

Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I’m through with playing by the rules
Of someone else’s game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It’s time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes and leap

It’s time to try
Defying gravity
I think I’ll try
Defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye
I’m defying gravity
And you won’t bring me down

I just finished the book today and have to say that Obama is better at giving speeches than he is at writing. However, that does not diminish the effect that the book had on me. It drove me to tears towards the end because it mirrored many of my own hopes, feelings and thoughts. Even now, writing this entry is a little heady.

Obama has changed somewhat, over the course of his Presidential election – for obvious reasons. However, the gist of his message has not wavered, since his student days and early life. He comes across as someone who has a great sense of social justice and the ability to differentiate right from wrong without policing anyone’s morality or values.

That is not something easy to accomplish.

There is no way that we can ever steer ourselves out of our current down-spiraling trajectory unless we all possess the audacity of hope. While I don’t think that an Obama will be able to solve all of America’s problems, that is not his role. His is to gently nudge his people across the precipice so that future generations have a strong platform and clear vision to solve their own problems.

What we need in Malaysia is just someone like that – a leader who can convince enough people to trust in ourselves, trust the future, and not place our trust in him. For the moment, I am still awaiting such a leader to appear. Obama went from convention gate-crasher to President in 8 years. Maybe such a person does exist in our own future and is currently still gate-crashing political rallies.

Smile. Hope is a potent drug.

In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism here — the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I’m talking about something more substantial.

It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!

After reading this article and having gone through the process myself, I have to agree with all the points raised. I also end up giving similar advice to my friends, if they ever tell me that they want to do a PhD and I have complained similarly on my old blog about it. Read this thread on a lot of similar advice.

I’d like to just quote one section of the entire piece:

To escape with a Ph.D., you must meaningfully extend the boundary of human knowledge. More exactly, you must convince a panel of experts guarding the boundary that you have done so.

You can take classes and read papers to figure out where the boundary lies.

That’s easy.

But, when it comes time to actually extend that boundary, you have to bunker down and figure out how. A lot of Ph.D. students get depressed when they reach the boundary, because there’s no longer a test to cram for or a procedure to follow. This is the point (2-3 years in) where attrition peaks.

[The classic 2nd year slump. Ouch! - Shawn]

Finding a problem to solve is rarely a problem itself. Every field is brimming with open problems. If finding a problem is hard, you’re in the wrong field. The real hard part, of course, is solving an open problem. After all, if someone could tell you how to solve it, it wouldn’t be open.

To survive this period, you have to be willing to fail from the moment you wake to the moment your head hits the pillow. You must be willing to fail for days on end, for months on end and maybe even for years on end. The skill you accrete during this trauma is the ability to imagine plausible solutions, and to estimate the likelihood that an approach will work.

[Finding the door in an infinitely dark room with no walls! - Shawn]

If you persevere to the end of this phase, your mind will intuit solutions to problems in ways that it didn’t and couldn’t before. You won’t know how your mind does this. (I don’t know how mine does it.) It just will.

[Bashing your head against the wall until the wall breaks! - Shawn]

As you acquire this skill, you’ll be launching fledgling papers at peer reviewers, checking to see if others think what you’re doing qualifies as research yet. Since acceptance rates at good venues range between 8% and 25%, most or all of your papers will be rejected. You just have to hope that you’ll eventually figure out how to get your work published. If you stick with it long enough and work at it hard enough, you will.

For students that excelled as undergraduates, the sudden and constant barrage of rejection and failure is jarring. If you have an ego problem, Ph.D. school will fix it. With a vengeance. (Some egos seem to recover afterward.)

[Not quite sure, but I hope that mine has. - Shawn]

This phase of the Ph.D. demands perseverance–in the face of uncertainty, in the face of rejection and in the face of frustration.

That is the reason why Google hires PhDs and that is the same reason why I am going to do the same. The PhD is not a stamp on how smart a person is – there are plenty of idiots who finish a PhD. It is merely a stamp on how disciplined and determined a person is to completing a goal.

I met up with some committee members of my IET local network today and we had a chat about membership. I raised a question on why there are so few local university students as our members as I felt that this was a bad thing for the future of the society. The answer invariably led to the UUCA and that caught me by surprise at first. Then, it made sense.

The UUCA makes it illegal for students to not only join, but also limits their support and participation for any society, body or group outside the university. Everything else has to be done with the permission from their vice chancellor. I suppose that this is an unintended consequence of the UUCA. As a result, it is illegal for these students to directly sign up as IET members.

Without the support and access provided by the IET, these students are just losing out on their peers in other countries. For one, they would be denied access to the local networks and international links. There are so many things that these students can learn from senior engineers in the industry, from the network of young engineering professionals and also each other.

Sigh.

The UUCA sucks ass. No wonder our local graduates have so much problems finding jobs. If they were IET student members, they would gain direct access to various engineering companies. They would also have access to all the publications produced by the IET, all the conferences organised by the IET and all the other academic material released by the IET.

It just does not make much sense to me that the stifling of freedoms within the universities, resulted in not just stifling political activity, it also ends up stifling good natured engineering and academic activities.

Sad.

I like this quote from a NY Times article about how a lady went from working for a management consultant, to working for venture capital, to starting her own business – successful or otherwise.

Exciting as it may be, however, the entrepreneurial life is far from easy. Stress is a regular part of the day. Money is tight. There are frequent emotional highs and lows, and the desire to succeed can become all-consuming. Underlying all of this is the knowledge that failure is the most likely outcome.

That’s the very essence of entrepreneurship – the delusional desire to succeed in the face of clear and present failure.

According to an article in TheStar, “The Kelana Jaya Wanita Umno division has passed a resolution calling for the Penal Code on baby-dumping to be amended to include penalties for men who fathered the children.”

This is just dumb.

It is a lose-lose situation for the father. This law can only be upheld if the position of the father is legally recognised. However, in our legal system today, the father is defined as the man whom the woman is married to. That is why the JPN requests for a marriage certificate when registering a child’s birth for a birth certificate.

I think that we can safely assume that in most of these cases, the baby that is dumped is as a result of an unwed pregnancy. The man is probably not man enough to own up to the act or the woman does not want to marry the man – maybe it was a casual one night stand thing for the both of them.

However, it is a lose-lose situation. If the baby gets dumped, the man gets recognised as the father and gets penalised. If the baby gets nicely delivered, the man is not recognised as the father and loses all parental rights. I don’t even want to imagine the situation of an extra-marital affair where the father is not the father and so on.

It is about time that the law is changed to recognise the father as the biological one.

Our country seems to have recently been wrecked by the death of a student at a local college. The primary cause of death is supposedly the treatment that the student received as part of a ‘ragging’ exercise by the senior students. As a result of which, there was plenty of outrage with government and university officials coming out to officially ban ‘ragging’ exercises at universities ahead of the beginning of the academic year for a lot of students.

My opinion on the matter – bad move. Banning the exercise will never stop it. Ragging is often a rite of passage that everyone goes through at university. If done correctly, it can build valuable bonds between seniors and juniors. However, when taken to the extreme, it can definitely cause physical and psychological harm, possibly leading to death either directly or indirectly associated with the activity.

Banning the time tested activity is just going to drive it underground, making it far more difficult to regulate and control. What should have been done is to ban extreme ragging and release guidelines on the limits of the activity. For example, any form of direct physical contact should be banned and any senior who assaults any junior should be caught and charged to the full extent of the law for causing grievous bodily harm.

Students may think that they were put through hell during their freshers’ week – until it becomes their turn to organise things. I missed quite a lot of sleep during my orientation week, and got quite pretty grumpy because of it. We were also put through a lot of seemingly stupid and dumb activities. We also had to put up with inane requests from our seniors to get things done.

However, when I became a senior, I lost even more sleep when I was involved in organising fresher activities – we had to make sure that the freshers were back to their rooms and wake up early to prep the things organised for the next day. Also, we spent weeks in advance, sacrificing our semester breaks to get things ready for welcoming the freshers. Trying to torture freshers in the nicest way is not easy to do without advance planning.

Also, because I was involved in organising these activities, and making the juniors do all sorts of silly things that they did not want to, I became quite well liked. Until today, I still sometimes run into people randomly at work or while shopping and have them come up to ask me if I was Shawn, their senior at university. While I have to politely tell them that I cannot recall their names, I can still recognise their faces. We end up having an amiable chat after that.

Now, looking back at my university days, I dare to say that I look back at things nostalgically. My history with ragging goes way back to secondary school, where I can still remember doing a hundred push-ups when I pissed off some of my seniors. I can still remember the song Buli, Buli, Buli that we were all forced to sing along doing various disgusting things. The coolest thing that my seniors ever did was to enact a serious ghost story that was so good, that some people pissed their pants.

Ah, those were the days.