Category: Problem People

PSD Drama 2011

Sigh. Here we go again – our annual scholarship drama!

I’ve gotten so sick and tired of it over the years and I blame it all on our government’s decision to give in to a particular crier in 1999 from Sungai Petani who failed to obtain a scholarship even though he was the top student of his school while his peers got scholarships. That opened the flood-gates and set a precedent that resulted in more and more mis-steps every year after that, including radically diluting the number of scholarships over the years from 200 to 2000 students.

Honestly, I feel that this is just plain stoopid and it is definitely not sustainable. A scholarship is not a right but a privilege. If you are not happy with your scholarship, then just turn it down. It is not the end of the world.

If you line up the bunch of Malaysian undergraduates at Cambridge, you will find that there are many ways in which they made it to Cambridge. Of course, some of them had parents who could afford to send them there and many others were government scholars. However, there are also a lot of others who made it there without having rich parents nor the government’s help.

There are always options and these kids need to get creative about them.

If someone asked me whether it was right or wrong for a 4A+ student to get an overseas scholarship while a 8A+ student gets a local scholarship, I will say that right and wrong is relative. It is all a case-by-case basis. If the 4A+ student is an orang asli child and the top student of his kampung school across the last decade, then I would not deny that child a place.

Let us get one thing straight – the system will never be fair to all – it is a privilege, not a right.

This is where I think things have gone wrong. Our government has been giving out too many scholarships over the years and have very little to show for it. As a result, the kids are taking it for granted that they will definitely get a scholarship if they did well in school. This was not the case in the past when everyone understood that it is a limited opportunity that needs to be fought over.

In fact, if the World Bank report on brain-drain is to be believed, the ones we send overseas are very likely to stay overseas and even if they do come back, they will be hard pressed to contribute positively to the nation. Therefore, the return-on-investment for the country is also very limited. That money could possibly be put to better use elsewhere e.g. funding post-graduate scholarships.

These kids really need to grow up. During the 1998 economic crisis, a whole bunch of JPA scholars were ‘diverted’ to local universities. They were then forced to re-sign their contracts as the government had already reneged. Some even had to repeat their foundation years. Nobody came out to complain in the newspapers. Everyone took their lumps and these were definitely better students than the 8A+ ones today.

Kids today need to grow up.

Asians in the Library

On a lighter note, let’s look at something besides the tsunami.

Nation of Idiots

What kind of society have we degenerated into when 17-year olds goad others to suicide and then express shock when it actually happens. Idiots!

According to TheStar: “Sally Lee Qian Chun, a Form 5A student, had abruptly walked out during a lesson in the Chemistry lab on the second floor of the three-storey block and gone up to her classroom.”

Meanwhile, it is learnt that Lee had posted several disturbing comments on her Facebook page since Jan 15, saying this would be her last Chinese New Year.

On Friday, the second day of the new year, she posted that she had planned to take her life last month.

On Sunday night, Lee wrote of a failed relationship and broken promises while reiterating her desire to take her life.

However, her shocking remarks only drew taunts and dares from friends telling her to go ahead with her plans to kill herself.

In her last post at 3.45pm Monday, Lee reminded her friends to keep their promises of buying her a teddy-bear and a coffin. She also told them not to miss her when she was gone and to take care of themselves.

While I understand that teenagers will be teenagers, it is a sad reflection on our society when this is the kind of response that we give when someone cries out for help. Instead of sending them for counseling or encouraging them to seek help, we actively taunt and push them over the edge.

I do hope that at least some of them tried their best to help. Otherwise, they really ought to pool their money and buy her the bear and coffin if they do not want to risk breaking a promise and anger a disgruntled spirit.

RIP.

Office Plans

I bought more IKEA furniture a couple of weeks ago and moved an LCD-TV into my office. I got some GORM shelves for storage purposes and also some MELTORP tables for the work area. The LCD-TV is being placed in the meeting room in place of a LCD projector. After some consideration, it made more sense to use an LCD-TV that costs the same price as a projector and does not require as much maintenance. I tested it out and the screen size is clear enough for displaying slides that are visible from the back of the room. I will need to make another run to IKEA to get the last bits of furniture but things are falling into place, more or less.

Now, as for the hiring, the intern who was supposed to join me in March has just written to me today to turn me down. The intern gave some lame excuse on how KL is a little too far from Cyberjaya and that the work I am doing is not in-line with the intern’s final year project title. Well, it is entirely up to the intern where to do their internship and I said so myself. Thankfully, I have not bought a new PC for the intern, which I was planning to do right after CNY.

I have another intern who is supposed to join me in May. However, that is months away and I hope that this intern would not FFK me at the last minute. If this intern turns out to be useful, I will probably offer the intern a full-time job and convert that internship period to a probation period. Then, I will hopefully be able to get my first full-time staff.

At the same time, I am now training a student to do some programming work. The student seems quite promising but only time will tell if lack of domain expertise becomes a problem. If this student turns out okay, I will probably hire this student as a intern during summer breaks if this student is interested.

Winners ignored, 5th placers lauded?

Disclaimer: I am one of the judges for the Malaysian level, and I actually interacted with the students from SK Wan Ibrahim during their preparations for representing the country.

That is the title of a letter to MalaysiaKini, which just pissed me off. The author is just as bad as the reporters that he/she claims to be twisting the story through creative editing. First, some facts – while the team were 5th placers, they were awarded the Most Creative award. So, they also did the nation proud and achieved something for themselves.

Now, for my rant. Let me put it this way.

The tiny school from sleepy town of less than 20,000 (with a sizable orang asli population) – Kuala Lipis – deserves to be lauded. If it was not for me being a fan of Siti Nurhaliza, I would not even be aware of the existence of such a rural town. Think about it for a minute. The fact that such a rural school was able to beat all the schools in Pahang and representatives of other states, to earn the right to represent our country at the World Robotic Olympiad, already deserves heaps of praise.

It is exactly this kind of achievement that we need to highlight – to show that even a rural school is able to scale heights, when the teachers and students work hard at something, with full support of the PIBG and the parents.

During the preparations for the WRO, the school headmaster accompanied the students and took down copious notes as we were busy dishing out advice. As the students had problems speaking English, we even advised the HM to get the school’s English teachers to give the students personal coaching and drilling, to prepare them for the international arena. I am quite sure that the school teachers threw their support behind the team, which has been given the rare opportunity to represent the nation.

Win or lose, I am proud of the school and the team.

Internship Woes

TLDR: Locals do not want to work for me, and I cannot hire foreigners who do. Sigh.

I’ve been trying to hire some interns to help out with work in my company. However, I have had problems – serious ones.

I get applications from several local universities. As a standard, I will get them to answer a list of 15 screener questions. I remind them that getting the answer right is not important as I only wish to understand how they think. In fact, most of the questions have no right answers at all. Unfortunately, most of the local university students do not even attempt the questions, finding them too difficult to answer. The ones who try to answer them are foreign students at local universities.

So, I have offered internship positions to almost everyone who actually attempts to answer the questions reasonably. Unfortunately, the locals whom I have offered, tend not to want to work for me once they find out that I am a small shop. The foreign students at local universities usually end up doing better and get offers from multi-nationals and so, I cannot compete.

As a result, I have difficulties hiring local students.

Then, out of the blue, I get applications for internships from foreign nationals at one of the world’s Top 30 universities. As usual, I send them to my screener and all of them impressed me with the depth of their answers. So, I was happy and looking forward to taking all of them in. Again, I mist reiterate that these are really good students from one of the top universities in the world – one even has two papers being published this coming year.

So, I contacted the Immigration Department and told to visit the local office for the forms and checklist. This is when disaster struck again. I was told by the officer that my company is too small and will not meet the requirements to hire foreigners as interns. I can understand the logic and rationale behind such a policy but it is a little disheartening to find out that the quality people who actually want to work for me, cannot.

So goes my hiring woes – the locals whom I want to take, do not want to work for a small company; and I do not qualify to hire foreigners from a top university who want to work for me. I’ll take this in my stride, as part of the growing process. I am now more determined than ever to build my company into a really large one so that I can happily hire the foreigners who want to work for me in the future.

PS: The locals do not seem to understand the adventure that is interning at a small company doing cutting edge work. It’s much better than arranging name cards or photocopying in a local multi-national.

Team Player

I have managed to join and leave a number of project teams this year, outside of work, doing all sorts of random teams. Often, the main reason that I leave the team is because I cannot get along with some of the team-members. Instead of staying and causing problems, I decide to leave. Typically, the problem revolves around the fact that I find some problem with the other team-members who I feel are idiots in my book. This does not necessarily mean that they are mentally challenged, but rather just people whom I cannot reconcile opinions with.

So, I wonder to myself, if this made me a difficult person to work with. If it did, it may cause some problems in the future for my business. I think that if you asked around, many people would say that I am problematic. I sort of agreed with it as well, until I realised something.

I have managed to work on a number of projects with several teams of people recently including, organising a prestige lecture, an annual dinner and a green conference. All these were activities that I was part of, either as organising chairman or treasurer or member. In fact, I have been very actively involved in the IET, which is a professional engineering institution. I have had so much fun working with the rest of the committee that I have decided to run for a second term. If you asked these people if I was a difficult person to work with, I doubt that they would agree.

I think that this probably boils down to personality.

It just so happens that most of the committee members of the institution are professional engineers. Maybe this means that we can understand each other easily and we are able to work on the same wavelength. Therefore, I can easily gel with the rest of the team and get things done. In most of the other teams that I dropped out of, I am probably the only qualified engineer in the team and I find it difficult to understand how other people can think and act the way that they do.

Sigh.

So, I guess this means that I can get along with other engineers but cannot get along with other people in general. Well, this is surely far better than being a difficult person. Good thing is that I would mostly be working with other engineers only, which saves me a whole load of grief.