Death and Destruction

Reflecting back on the 8 years since my graduation having being devoted to the defense-industrial complex, it amazes me what inventive ways humans have to kill each other. If only such effort has been made to solve everyday problems, such as automating housework, we wouldn't have the need to hire domestic maids. To me that's like modern day slavery.

Management

What really piqued my interest is an article I've come across while reading other people's blog.

http://www.theunrealuniverse.com/col/2007-08-25-Knowledge.pdf (scanned weekend TODAY article)

Overglorifying technical skills. The writer probably lives in a well.

When I was halfway through university I used to think like that. Then... of course something happened.

Linux was in all in the rage and there was no setup available for students to try it out. I did some asking around and found out that it had been attempted before, but the previous person who did it ran into some problems with the university network administrators and they canned the project. Incomplete stories from affected parties accusing each other of ignoring each other concerning security / network conflict issues. After some effort, I did manage to piece the story together.

In the end I managed to deconflict the issue by promising the administration to link the username/password login to the same authentication server that the students use to access their email through the microsoft outlook system. They would also have their own local account so that they could compile, run stuff (that's what open source is for right)

Then I discovered that the tools available online were buggy and I had to break into the source code and fix several things. In the end I was able to make two computers (that's all the space they had) available for people to try out Linux and associated components.

It was a one man job, but this one man could objectively weigh the contributions of the management and technical aspects of this challenging mini project.

Without MANAGEMENT yeah, without my doggedness in chasing down the parties involved, it wouldn't have happened. Why was my predecessor not able to make things work? He was even more technically capable than me. Why was the student council so reluctant to let me do it?

In real life, the most difficult people to deal with are the customers. Can you convince the customer that your cheap sounding solution is worth the money they're paying for? When the people under you deliver a sucky solution (yes there are sucky technical people too), how do you bring the project to a closure?

Putting on a tie and getting a haircut is the easy part. Wait till you try to reason with lunatic monkeys wielding kitchen knives. You'll think that working on buggy code was alot better.

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p.s. eventually there was a LUG (linux user group) which took over the promotion of linux within the campus, and the student council went back to provide basic e-mail, websurf services on microsoft windows platform.

Inspiration for business

When I was still studying in NTU there was this requirement to attend a few seminars in the final year. One of them was by two entrepreneurs giving their experiences.

The first one claimed to have won some award from MIT and pretty impressive credentials from all over. He basically gave a talk replete of catch phrases, jargons but very little substance. A few months later it was discovered that he lied about pretty much everything about his past. A fraud.

The other guy was more into the practical aspects of business and gave one good example of one of his friends who started up a small clothing store. Being a technophile his friend spent a big chunk of his capital on an automated inventory, cash tracking system when a shoebox could have done. We all had a good laugh at the lack of common sense, but perhaps it is a lack of experience in the industry? That friend of his wouldn't be making the same mistake again...

I thought, wouldn't it be fun to set up a business?

Of course, the real trick of the game is to find out what business to go into. In the beginning I was wondering, what are the kinds of businesses fresh graduates can go into. Internet Services? (mocca? another ebay?) Foods? (remember the graduate who sold chestnuts?) Selling aquarium related stuff? (one of my ex-colleagues). But I soon realised that something is wrong. You don't need a degree to do this stuff; If you really wanted to become a hawker, you should have quit at secondary school and sought apprenticeship with a master. Are people doing these things because they can't find jobs outside?

In any case, I needed capital, so why not look for a job outside first? Well, actually I didn't look for a job. The job found me. One of my supervisors whom I worked for during my Industrial Attachment during my uni days called me up. Well, he had a startup and it seems that he had problems finding people to work for him. I had nothing to lose so I joined him.

Well, that turned out to be quite a tumble, but it really gave me a big insight on running a business. To cut a long story short, it didn't turn out well, so I quit after a year or so.

I still hadn't found my idea yet, so after a much needed break of about 1 year, I contacted one of my friends in NTU for a job recommendation in one GLC. I turned up for the interview and immediately got an offer. Strange. Oh well, I was to stay there doing military projects for the next 3 years.

After a surreal experience in the business of killing - after all, machines of war (especially those expensive ones) tend to give out some sort of aura that stimulates awe in people. Having experienced an actual 500lb aerial bomb dropped from 4km away during a live fire excercise during my National Service (you could feel the shockwave even from there) the work felt a little addictive.

But military projects are cyclical. Projects don't come on continually, and if you're not on a project, chances that you'll be tasked to do support marketing and sales on bidding work. Come up with pricing, work schedules (now you realise why time estimates for completion are so wildly off).

Actually, that's where you find that, hey, you could do this component for cheaper than your vendors, or that the GLC could outsource certain things to you (non classified stuff). I had one business partner who complained that working with people there is such a pain due to insufficient information, but I remarked that the only reason why we're eating from their ricebowl, is their inability to get the thing done on their own. If their HR had spent more money to get more talented people, we'll be out of a job... In addition, GLCs have huge overheads and there are some small jobs that is not worth their time, and if you've maintained good contacts, you'll get something to eat from them.

So, with a contract in hand, I held my breath and jumped.

I don't see fresh graduates suddenly popping out to be my competition. My reputation is built up from years of slogging through crazy problems.

There was this inexperienced (but ambitious) engineer who thought that he could do a job that I had specifically mentioned that only less than a handful people (excluding him) could do in a reasonable time frame. The management gave him the benefit of doubt. He gave up in less than two weeks.

Okay, I found my lifeline, but I thought, there must be some form of innovation. That's why I wanted to start up a company of my own right? Not to eat from someone else's bowl, but to grow the durian tree until it bears (and drops) the fruit of my labours!

However, the inspiration was to come from a highly unlikely source. And that was after being rejected by a lady colleague. She was talented, hardworking, brilliant. Something you don't see often in GLC. Her language skills wasn't perfect but her technical skills were.

Of course I was upset, but then after one of those post-trauma self-reflection sessions I had, I suddenly hit upon a great idea. It was certainly not easy to implement, much research had to be done, but all the basic technical components are now mature. All it needs is a master to combine the elements together, a skill that I have honed to a bleeding edge. Again not suitable for fresh graduates. It's a secret.

So to end this monologue, it's all about getting to where you want to. Some people go for those iron rice bowl jobs and don't take any kinds of risks at all. I don't look down on those people, there are some jobs which require such a mentality, particularly in the QA and maintenance side of things. Just make sure that it's really what you want.

Research in Singapore

Oh well, since I've prepared to talk about this anyway...

Any discussion of R+D in singapore has something to do with Phillip Yeo, so for the reader's information I'd like to make things clear.

1. I've never worked for him before.
2. I'm not a scholar. I don't have a PhD, only a "basic" degree. However, I don't wash test-tubes for a living.
3. I don't have a good opinion of him, based on what people have said about him, as well as what he says about himself on the media.

Since we got that out of the way...

I've worked for a Government-Linked-Company(GLC) solving "impossible" problems with "limited" budgets with "partial" solutions for more than five years. While I haven't forgetten the "Cheap, Fast and Good" adage of engineering I've come to realise that with my inherent lazy attitude, abhorrence for manual labour and knack for automation I've come to realise that the three parameters C + F + G = K, that K wasn't constant but a function of the amount of tools and talents available for the job.

Now talents are of course human beings, which are fickle creatures. Sometimes if you're lucky, you get someone who's good. I happen to be very good. Really. I say this not because I have an oversized ego, but because the years of trying meet someone of my calibre within the organisation has always led to some measure of dissappointment. I have to go and solve their problems. I never had to call someone to solve my problems... The more promising ones leave for overseas employment in the US. Is it a pay issue? That would be HR... Perhaps I'm being paid below my worth? I've met plenty of people who are paid more than their worth... In any case, new people take a generation to grow up, and if innovation takes that long...

So what's left is the tools... But of course, you can't give someone a tool and expect that person to magically become an expert. The function of a tool is to save the person using it some time. The person still has to know the intricacies. The relationship is somewhat like:

time_taken = time_taken_to_manually_do_job * tool_used (skill_of_user)

Now I was thinking, isn't improving the tool the easiest way to improve the capability of an organization? Shouldn't we spend money doing R+D to improve the tools rather than hiring big name researchers?

Why shouldn't we buy the tool off the shelf then? Sure you get immediate resuls (it wouldn't be cheap though). Great item for VIP visits. Here is a excerpt from Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! that beautifully illustrates the whole issue.

MIT had built a new cyclotron while I was a student there, and it was just beautiful ! The cyclotron itself was in one room, with the controls in another room. It was beautifully engineered. The wires ran from the control room to the cyclotron underneath in conduits, and there was a whole console of buttons and meters. It was what I would call a gold-plated cyclotron.

Now I had read a lot of papers on cyclotron experiments, and there weren’t many from MIT. Maybe they were just starting. But there were lots of results from places like
Cornell, and Berkeley, and above all, Princeton. Therefore what I really wanted
to see, what I was looking forward to, was the PRINCETON CYCLOTRON. That must be
something !

So first thing on Monday, I go into the physics building and ask,
“Where is the cyclotron–which building?”

“It’s downstairs, in the basement–at the end of the hall.”

In the basement ? It was an old building. There was no room in the basement for a cyclotron. I walked down to the end of the hall, went through the door, and in ten seconds I learned why Princeton was right for me–the best place for me to go to school. In this room there were wires strung all over the place ! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open.

Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete, absolute chaos!
It reminded me of my lab at home. Nothing at MIT had ever reminded me of my lab at home. I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew where everything was, they knew how everything worked, there was no engineer involved, except maybe he was working there too. It was much smaller than the cyclotron at MIT, and “gold-plated”?–it was the exact opposite. When they wanted to fix a vacuum, they’d drip glyptal on it, so there were drops of glyptal on the floor.

It was wonderful! Because they worked with it. They didn’t have to sit in another room and push buttons! (Incidentally, they had a fire in that room, because of all the chaotic mess that they had–too many wires–and it destroyed the cyclotron. But I’d better not tell about that!)

I'm sure those in the know, know what I'm talking about. That concludes what I have to say.

Someone has locked the door!

Well, I discovered that google's spam blocking machine has locked my other account just as I found some time to start writing for it. I had earlier created the blog a few months back.

I wonder how the spam blocker works? Too little content over too long a period? Plaguarism? Matching set text?

I wonder how the information theory can come in here... But then again there are plenty of kids on the internet complaining about trivial things...

Yep, my house's on fire and I'm sleeping in a tent right now...