Hiring Staff

After long last, I have finally managed to hire a full-time staff at AESTE. We did all the statutory registrations today and my company has now got an official account number. This is a milestone as it indicates that things are getting serious.

I have previously relied on an army of interns to get things done. I had a lot of difficulty getting full-time staff even though I have been trying to hire for more than a year. Work still needed to get done and therefore, I relied on interns.

Now, I hope that the new staff that I have would be able to contribute positively to AESTE’s growth. I think that he can be trained to do a lot of the work that is needed. In fact, I am already helping him chart his professional growth.

I’ve already advised him to register himself with the Board of Engineers Malaysia (BEM) as soon as possible and to target to be a C.Eng or P.Eng in about 5-years time. I think that this is essential even for electronics engineers, as our local engineering services becomes liberalised.

So, I hope that things will continue to progress well for AESTE in the coming months.

Past Glory

What is the big deal.A sure sign of a troubled company is when it starts to focus on past glory and achievements. Applied to politics, it is a sure sigh of trouble when a government begins to focus on the past, instead of charting the future.

In recent weeks, our politicians have exhibited a fetish for revisiting the past. First, we claim to have never been colonised by the British, which begs the question of why and whom did we gain independence from then. Now, we have a state Chief Minister claiming that the Melaka Sultanate predates the Melaka Sultanate.

The Malacca Sultanate began in 1262 and not 1400 as widely believed, said Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Mohd Ali Rustam.

Seriously.

I mean, while it may be of interest to historians, I would think that our government and political leaders should be worried about where this country is going rather than where it has been. Our debt is closing on 53% of our GDP. I think that is cause for more concern than a 10% margin of error in the date of establishment of a past sultanate.

As an engineer, I can tell you that the difference is insignificant in the larger picture of human history taken as a whole. The Melaka Sultanate was a small dot in the timeline of human history stretching back ages. We have more pressing concerns like how the next generation is going to pay our debt.

Unless of course, they’re going to tell me that this planet is only 6000 years old!

Hiring Blues

My top three enemies in my hiring process are (in no particular order): multi-national companies, local immigration, and old-fashioned parents who have a pre-conceived notion of what a company should be. The last one is hurting me bad.

Academic Accreditation

I’ve recently been involved with some work on programme accreditation at a local university. While the exercises were extremely useful in the sense that I learned something about the accreditation processes, I have also learned that there are some problems with it.

Personally, I think that the biggest problem with the accreditation process is that there is too much focus on the processes involved and not enough focus on the content. I think that it would do better if we actually focused more on the content rather than the process.

The reason is that if the content is not good, even with the best delivery mechanism in place, the result would still not be good – garbage-in-garbage-out. We need both a good delivery mechanism as well as good content.

However, I do realise that trying to accredit the content would probably be 10x more expensive than just looking at the processes involved but maybe it would be worth it to spend that extra effort to thoroughly accredit a programme and then give them a longer-term accreditation instead.

Unfortunately, I also realise that this is Malaysia and that it is easier to blindly follow processes and procedures to get things done than to do things correctly. But we should not let something like this make us lose sight of the ultimate aim – to deliver quality education both in terms of content and process.

We need to simplify the accreditation mechanism to answer a simple question – whether our graduates are able to contribute to society. It doesn’t matter if they come from a 5* university with full accreditation if they are unable to do the work.

Therefore, content is king, not process.

Secretary Problem

I learned about the secretary problem recently and found it extremely profound. 🙂

Imagine an administrator willing to hire the best secretary out of N rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one-by-one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be taken immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator can rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants. The question is about the optimal strategy to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant.

The solution is 36.9%

In my case, I have applied it to my hiring process. I think that I have found someone to hire as a full-time staff and I have made the offer. Extrapolating the problem further, it means that every hire that I make from now on, will need to be better than the last.

I think that this is a good policy to have as it will inevitably ‘raise the bar’ when it comes to my hires. Hiring continuously better people will result in an upward trending average capability within the company.

One might think that this problem can be applied to the problem of finding a mate.

At first inspection, it seems like a good idea but it fails on one assumption – that the person who applied for the position actually will take the position if accepted. In the case of a mate, that may not be the case as an offer made can often result in rejection.

Interesting little bit of math though.

Disorganised Thoughts

I do think that some things are going off the track, in my life. Certain things are getting derailed while other things seem to be steaming ahead. I need a break. Some time for reflection. However, there is too much work that needs to be done. Frak.

Polls Reforms?

Interesting that our Parliament Select Committee on polls reforms seems to be working really fast. According to an article in TMI, they are scheduling public hearings in multiple locations nationwide in a mere month or so.

Wow!

I would certainly like to attend the hearing in KL on the 11th of November as I will be busy on the 12th. It would be extremely interesting to see how it is run and to hear what people have to say. I might have a few things to contribute, myself.

On another note, maybe this is indication of a possible GE in early 2012?