My Journey to Japan

The development of my site has hit a slight delay due to the developer I had hired is taking a 2 weeks vacation. I’m taking this chance to start entering some contents and check out the inner workings of Drupal. But it is putting some extra stress on me due to the progress of the project being stagnant.

Recently, I’ve also started talking to my acquaintances whom I want to recruit to become my business partners. This basically means I have to “sell” my business idea / model to them. I’m definitely not a good sales person, so this is kind of tough for me. One of the people I talked to is my college friend who has been working at Microsoft since he graduated, switching from technical I.T. roles to marketing roles. So, he can help cover some business skills that I don’t possess. It was really hard selling to him, and I know he still isn’t completely sold yet, but I know if I get him to believe in my business and get him on board, he will be able to sell it 15 times better than I do! Besides, I totally understand his position as I had also been a satisfied employee at a major US technology company. I liked my job and although both he and I wanted to work on our own business, we were reluctant to give up our good jobs. Anyway, one interesting thing that he told me to beware of is to “not under-estimate the stress of having no full-time job”. It turns out his sister had tried her hands on starting her own business with her boyfriend, and during that time, they had received a lot of stress from the people around them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t need him to tell me about that, as I am already suffering from a lot of stress from my family. This reminds me of a recent interview of a web entrepreneur in the US, he had had success with his previous web business and is now starting a new one, yet even with his experience, he said on some days, when it seems like there are absolutely no progress at all, he would still question himself… “What am I doing? Why isn’t it going anywhere?!”… That’s pretty close to what I’m feeling now too. At a time like these, when everyone around you is pressuring you to give up and “just find a job”… all you can do is to re-evaluate your vision… believe in the path you’ve chosen and continue to execute your plan!!

It’s not easy, in fact, I can tell you I feel like SHIT right now! It’s definitely a lot easier to “just find a job” and become a “gear” within a machine again and do your 9 to 6. It really pains me to have the people close to me not believe in me and would rather have me submit to a 9 to 6 because of the pressure they feel from other people… Other people who doesn’t even know shit about me and my plans!!! But there’s nothing we can do about this. We all look at the world with our own set of values and we also judge other people based on that. You can’t win over everybody, and you don’t need to explain yourself to everybody. All you can do is stay focus on your vision, believe in yourself, work hard, network with the right people… and just NEVER GIVE UP! This is how all successful empires are built throughout history!

As I get closer to launch, I can feel that things are within my grasp… yet at the same time, there are so many more things that can be expanded on… I can see the possibilities that will open up eventually as the business grow and expand. But for now, from my experience in Project Management, I know better than to lose control of the existing plan. I’m staying focused on launching with the foundation and features as planned on my functional requirements.

Management that view their people as replaceable “gears” within a machine seems to be the norm these days, but that only applies to low level, mundane jobs that can be handled by robots. Obviously, this shouldn’t be applied to software developers. I would even argue that within any level of a company, it is crucial to recognize and keep your “Grade A” workers! I think I read about this in one of those Harvard Business books, a “Grade A” worker is not only more productive himself, but he also increases the productivity of those that work around him! In the case of a developer, various studies have shown that good developers can be between 10 to 20 times more productive than poor developers! But before we get to the part on how to keep them, the question should be… how to identify them during interviews and hire them?! That’s the question that bothered me the most.

A few years back, when Yahoo!’s stock was doubling every few months and we were hiring like crazy, I read a book that gave me some interesting tips on how to do that. It’s really common-sense stuff actually… First, as the person hiring, you need to identify the characteristics you expect in the person you want for the job, and develop an interview technique that will test for these characteristics. Design some questions that can highlight the desired qualities of the candidate and have HR use those questions instead of their stock ones.
Continue reading ‘How to Identify and Hire Good People’