Sybreon Ones Nought

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Mesmerising – “Human beings with super-human strength and abilities” – indeed.

Just so you know, I decided to divorce my technology posts from this blog and move them onto another blog. I will keep this blog to personal postings on whatever random stuff amuses me from time to time. You may still find some technology posts on this blog from time to time but they will be simplified.

So, wish me luck. For those readers who like my technical stuff, please subscribe to the new blog and heavily comment. Let us start some technical intercourse!

I have just recently been informed that as part of the cost-cutting efforts at work, I will no longer be entitled to business cards.

!!!

Well, it is not that I have a great need for business cards. However, I do sometimes wonder how the management goes about selecting things to cut. A set of business cards do not cost very much. Let us say that two boxes cost about RM30 at normal prices. If we factor in a 100% markup in order to support our affirmative action policies, let us say that it costs RM60 for each person.

Now, let us say that there are about 500 people who are affected by this decision (I’m not sure of the numbers but our company is under 1000). That means that our company would be able to save about RM 30,000 but the question is how is this money spread out.

The thing is, the bottom feeders like me are unlikely to give out many business cards because we do not normally meet lots of customers or vendors. That is probably the logic driving the decision to cut this cost because it does not apply to our senior management who are free to print as many cards as they want (talk about leading by example).

Let us say that us bottom feeders give out a card each week. So, two boxes of name cards would last us about four years each. So, that’s a savings of about RM 7,500 per annum. Wonderful, I can hear our finance department screaming in ecstasy now. I wonder which bright spark came up with such a brilliant idea to save the few thousand each year.

As the saying goes – “Penny wise, pound foolish” – let us shave off a few pennies here and there while the pounds continue to leak out various pipelines.

Moral of the story is: just be glad that they’re not cutting jobs… yet!

PS: I think that we spend more than that on toilet paper. I wonder if they would be cutting that too.

As the letter says, I have been recently appointed as a judge for our local LEGO robot competition league! It is something like the Integrated Design Project that we had at Cambridge, where students worked together to build a robot to accomplish a certain task within a certain time frame. However, these are students between the ages of 9-16 and have got LEGO kits to play with.

I like working with kids – done about a dozen years of teaching. I also like working with robotic kits like the LEGO Mindstorm kits. Actually, I am contemplating getting a set for my nephew in the future – the one who is showing signs of being a natural engineer. The whole shebang costs about RM5,000 and it would be a good investment if it helps build interest in engineering.

At Cambridge, the students worked in teams, with different people tackling different aspects of the competition. The mechanical people would work on the chasis and try to solve some of the tasks using mechanical means. The electronics people would design and build circuits to control actuators and sensors while the software people would end up writing the control system that ends up running the robot. I would expect the school teams here to do something similar, though probably at a lesser scale.

Our organisation had at first wanted to sponsor a local school but we changed our minds after considering the amount of resources we would have to devote not only from a monetary stand point but also from the amount of effort we would have to put in if we wanted the team carrying our logo to win. I had at first volunteered to be a mentor but since it did not materialise, I would have to be satisfied with being a judge instead.

Anyway, the competition runs over three days and the last day would be the most exciting, with robots conquering the central atrium floor at our National Science Centre. I do believe that it is open to the public and lots of noise will be expected with schools cheering on their teams. I am hoping to be plesantly surprised by the ingenuity in the robots.

I have recently come across a couple of situations where people have expressed their frustrations at the lack of expertise and skilled workers in Malaysia. I have some thoughts about this issue and I would like to put them down here.

Mismatch of Skills
In one case, I visited a semiconductor foundry (those places that manufacture the electronic chips) and was told that our government had already identified a shortage of local talent and expertise in the areas of integrated circuit design (IC design) at both front-end and back-end work. Since a huge chunk of our GDP comes from the electronics sector, it was important for us to maintain an edge in this industry in order to protect our exports.

This reminds me of a story – about a government scholar who did a PhD in integrated circuit design at one of the premier engineering institutions in the world. However, after returning to Malaysia and reporting for duty, he was not assigned to work in the IC design area at all. He was instead assigned to work in the area of software and then eventually moved to working in information security. One wonders why.

He told me that he was interviewed by a certain director in this area. The director asked my friend a question that was wrong and so my friend (being severely lacking in social skills) ended up correcting the director and pointing out to him that the question was not correct. At first, the director tried to assert that he was right but in the end had to back down and admit his fault.

It was totally understandable that the director then tried to pass my friend away from IC design work and onto software. That is how one of our expertise in the area of integrated circuit design wound up doing software debugging and testing. Unfortunately, it did not turn out to be the last time my friend had a difference of opinion with the director, and his team. That is probably how my friend found himself moved to the information security department to write web applications.

The moral of the story is that my friend did not end up making coffee.

Mismatch of Expectations
Then, we have the situation where we claim to have a lack of skilled labour in Malaysia.

I had a meeting with a director of a certain educational organisation in Malaysia and this issue was raised – on the lack of engineers to meet our country’s demands. I pointed out that we definitely do not have a shortage of engineers because if we did, the laws of supply and demand would dictate that these engineers would be paid highly. Unfortunately, our engineering wages in Malaysia are barely enough to live by.

For some engineers, it is a matter of survival and most end up doing something other than engineering simply because the pay is better elsewhere. However, for those die-hard engineers who want to work in engineering, they also find it difficult to get a job – particularly for those skilled engineers who graduated from one of the top engineering schools in the world.

You see, most local companies would not be interested in hiring my friend who graduated from a top engineering school. Firstly, the local companies would prefer to hire the 75th percentile rather than the 95th percentile because they would make better workers as they would be easier to control manage. Secondly, they would feel that highly skilled engineers would ultimately leave because they would not be paid a commensurate salary. So, it would be in the best interest of the company to hire and train up a good worker who stays.

I agree that both of these are fair reasons. Particularly if our industry does not have the demand for a large number of highly skilled engineers. We tend to outsource to overseas consultants and contractors when we need to hire in certain expertise.

However, if you are unwilling to pay for the best, you will not get them. As the saying goes – if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. A colleauge of mine pointed out to me today that – there is no reason to get a PhD in Malaysia because people here do not recognise the additional training and knowledge that you have gained – even if you do end up getting it from a premier engineering school. I would have to agree.

The moral of this story is that my friend got a good tan at the beach.

PS: I have many friends in engineering from top universities.

I had dinner with a bunch of Cambridge friends this evening – three of whom were economists and one a biologist. This is the second time that we were meeting up in a week. Some time during dinner, a thought occurred to me – I am mixing with an odd bunch. Odd because I don’t really have much to say.

I once told my colleagues at work that I am a sociable geek – a geek whom can attend parties and engage in small talk, regardless of how much I dislike socialising. However, this does not change the fact that I am a little out of my element with most of my Cambridge friends. This is because most of my Cambridge friends are not from the engineering/computer fields, which is rather surprising.

On the one hand, it is good to know people who think and see things from a different perspective. On the other hand, it is sometimes quite difficult communicating with people who are not used to the exactness and preciseness of technical language. I am not complaining about my friends but rather complaining about the lack of people whom I can share difficult technical conversations with.

In an ideal situation, I would have some friends whom I can share technical conversations with on an even field. However, there is some difficulty in finding such people around. There are just not that many people with my kind of expertise and experiences around. There are plenty of technical people at work, but I spend much of my time teaching and imparting knowledge rather than learning and discussing.

That’s not to say that I don’t want to do the former, but I have begun to realise that I have an unfulfilled gap in my life. I really need to either adapt, or find another alternative – such as writing a technical blog.

You know what, I did not realise that anything untoward was happening within our opposition coalition. In fact, even after everyone started making a big fuss about MPs quitting and aligning themselves with the ruling coalition, I still did not feel like anything special was happening. Then it dawned on me – I have become politically numb with all the random sandiwara that happens and am no longer able to respond as expected towards political news.

On one side, people are painting the picture of a crumbling opposition coalition – fraying at the edges after being attacked for so long by so many people. However, I see the very same thing happening with our ruling coalition as well, also fraying at its edges after being worn for so long by so many people. So to me, crumbling political coalitions seem to be the norm in Malaysia.

On the other side, people are screaming like victims – victims of their own devices. They sowed the seeds of political expediency and are now reaping the harvest. I have often harped that our people do not have much of a choice when it comes to electing their representatives. That is why I have been trying to drum into people’s heads that there are four possible outcomes on a ballot sheet with two boxes.

Personally, I see these games as all part of a war of attrition, that all sides will lose in the end.

On a more exciting note, I had to fill up my personal evaluation form today. It was fun filling it up because I got to rate my own performance, which was naturally exemplary. However, I found it vexing that I could not rate my boss. I believe that performance evaluations should go both ways. Otherwise, the bosses would never know if they were a good boss because the people under them have no voice. Any honest evaluation, that is.