Archive for the 'Work' Category

Road to Entrepreneurship is Long and Lonely and Full of Stress

Published
by
cloneofsnake
on August 16, 2008
in Work and management
. 0 Comments

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.

How to Identify and Hire Good People

Published
by
cloneofsnake
on July 21, 2008
in Work and management
. 0 Comments


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.
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太子 英文會話，電腦，保習 ～ 香港，九龍，油尖旺

Published
by
admin
on June 16, 2008
in Work and tech
. 1 Comment

My first post in Chinese!! (Well… the title anyways…) This is basically a test of how good my site is optimized for search engines (SEO), or rather, how poorly are Chinese sites out there optimized. :P

It’s not just a test for SEO though, I do want to tutor (English and Computer / Technology) and get a little income on the side… Education is part of my interest too… besides working on my “environmentally conscious restaurant menus” site, I am also looking into working something out with online learning. One of my favorite online learning site is JapanesePod101.com, I discovered it when I got my first iPod (5.5G Video… Yes, I didn’t think iPod was “ready” until it hit this generation!), and I had listened to it everyday for over a year when I was commuting to and from the Yahoo! office in New York. I absolutely loved (still do) their podcasts and it had definitely improved my Japanese skills by multiple folds! Because of it, I was able to engage in interviews in Japanese over the phone with one of the managers from Yahoo! Japan!! Even after I stopped listening to it (due to lifestyle changes), I still retained so much of what I had learned that I was able to score very close to a passing score on a mock JLPT Level 2 exam. (which from what I was told, is harder than the actual exam!) Once I’ve launched my current project, I will try to see if I can work something out with Jpod101 and may be create an EnglishPod101 for Hong Kong.

Phew… long story… anyways… if you are interested in hiring me for tutoring, then please contact me at 6603-6127, or email clone {dot} of {dot} snake {at} gmail {dot} com, or simply leave a comment below. My name is Nick. A brief summary of myself if you haven’t read any of my other posts on this blog, I was born in Hong Kong, spent my high school / college years in the US, worked for internet giants like Microsoft MSN.com and Yahoo.com after I graduated. I just moved back to Hong Kong in beginning of this year after 16 years of absence, currently working on my own web project, hoping to create something meaningful with my life / time, (because life isn’t just about work and making money)… I hope to create something that Hong Kong people can be proud of to called their own.

Interesting insight into Crowdsourcing at App?e, from their Asia regional Head of Web Marketing

Published
by
admin
on May 20, 2008
in Work
. 2 Comments

Since the planned move to Japan has been delayed to possibly the end of the year, I have started to send my resume out to local recruiters since early May. Almost immediately, I was contacted for a possible new role at App?e Asia.

Hint: App?e is a fruit. The company is a major consumer electronics company which I have recently become quite fond of. So I was happy to learn from my recruiter that they were planning to add a new role in marketing + data analysis, and they are interested in my skills.

The phone interview from Singapore went very well, we actually started by chatting about current events, how we each felt about the recent Olympic torch relay, the worldwide demonstrations and the Chinese nationals’ reactions. I told him that I found it sad that during the relay in Hong Kong, the crowds booed and yelled at and forcibly tried to stop a small group of protesters trying to raise concern for human rights in Tibet. Also, I found it ironic that Chinese nationals who grew up watching and reading state owned media / propaganda, are now protesting that Western media are “twisting the truth about Tibet to slander China”. (I should stop here, else I’ll go on for hours!)

So anyway, this company is hugely popular all over the world, but it doesn’t have any official stores in the Asia region, hence the need to web marketing as they are selling through their online stores. We spoke briefly about the company’s need for marketing data and my past experience, and things seemed to match up quite well. So well that we could move on and talk about other things again. I told him about my interests in conservation and the environment, and how I’m trying to create a web community that will help steer customers to environmentally friendly restaurants. He asked me if I think App?e is a company that is environmentally friendly! Honestly, I think the company has a great image, but I don’t know how serious they are about being “good” to the environment. I also said that at this point in time, this whole “green” thing has turned into somewhat like a political tool. It is now bad for your company if you are not “green”!

Next, I told him about my research into Crowdsourcing, I explained to him what it is and I told him about my friend Nishiyama-san’s company in Japan. I was really excited because I think App?e customers are known to be quite passionate about the company, and I thought we could really utilize crowdsourcing here to harness the power of their fan base to help the company! This is where it got interesting for me! He told me that although their company’s image seem to be quite open and innovative and user friendly… the fact is, (and we all know it), it is actually quite tyrannical. They like to keep things proprietary, controlled. Part of the reason is because it is run by the founder of the company, and whenever you have a company founder, it is hard to wrestle the control away from him. So, he basically told me, although it would be nice to have their fans help design their future products, it will most likely not happen any time soon.

When I thought about the possibility of working at App?e, I was really excited about how I could get an inside scoop and make more connections for a possible partnership with Cuusoo.com in the future. His response just showed me that it may not be so easy for Cuusoo.com to break into some of these “old style” corporations. Still, I told him that although App?e may not officially embrace customer participation… as part of marketing, it is still good to utilize your fan base to help evangelizing. Besides, crowdsourcing isn’t restricted to just official products, at the minimum, we can still provide “official feedback” to crowdsourced designed after market products!

We ended our ran overtime conversation with my view of an ideal role, their “not so sure if this position will materialize” (budget?), and more save the planet, use less plastic bag talks. (He mentioned that Ikea started charging for plastic bags and its usage dropped by 80%! That sure was impressive, and I would highly suggest supermarkets do the same, however, I think the typical Ikea customer only has to roll their shopping cart to their cars, so shopping bags are really quite useless! I doubt supermarkets can achieve the same results. Still, even a drop of 30% is better than nothing yeah?)

Seems like all the jobs that can get me excited are not based in Hong Kong… sigh… Hong Kong… don’t you have anything exciting to offer?

Hong Kong only cares about money, lacks innovation

Published
by
cloneofsnake
on April 11, 2008
in Work and wisdom
. 2 Comments

(Rant!) Generally speaking, that is. I’m sure there are some innovators in Hong Kong too, but from what I can see, Hong Kong people and businesses can be summarized in the following few points:

  • Most people either work in (or want to work in) banks, insurance, or sales
  • Most people only care finding a job that makes more money
  • People would spend that money in foreign brand name goods
  • Local goods are seen as “cheap” and therefore can only command a low price
  • Businesses are either small retail shops, textile manufacturing in Chna, or cell phone / mobile phone, laptop covers (they have covers for everything!) (Sarcasm)

It’s really quite sad. Today, I went to meet with a company’s owner whom I thought may be a good local partner for future web development and retail supply logistic. However, I was disappointed to learn that he really doesn’t have a direction for this company. His main concern seems to be to just hang on to their biggest client, and continue to support their intranet, which they developed.
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Developing Crowdsourcing Community with Drupal

Published
by
cloneofsnake
on April 8, 2008
in Work and tech
. 0 Comments

In the recent months after I’ve moved to Hong Kong, I’ve been working with my former school mates from College to revamp their existing e-commerce pet apparel store and to launch a new business. For that purpose and in preparation for my new role in Tokyo, I’ve been devoting my time to 3 things, 1) learning to develop web sites with Drupal, 2) catching up with the latest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) topics and 3) brushing up on project management skills I learned and used at Yahoo. This post will be about part 1 - Drupal.

I had learned of Drupal a few years ago, I was looking for an open source CMS to be used at work internally as an information sharing portal, and Drupal caught my attention because it received support from Google! I didn’t pick it at that time because it didn’t fulfill our functional requirements. However, I did tested it out and honestly, I found it “not very user-friendly”. It was obviously aimed more toward web developers than the regular Joe. What I realized was this: if you just want an easy to use web site to put up contents for yourself and your friends and family, then Drupal is not for you! (Use wordpress instead.) If you’re a business however, and you’re looking for quickly building a highly customizable, highly scalable web site, then use Drupal!
Continue reading ‘Developing Crowdsourcing Community with Drupal’

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