Working in Two Timezones

Since I’ve been back in Singapore, I’ve had to continue working in US time as well as Singapore time. It’s not fun, because of the irregular sleeping hours.

So here’s how it goes on a typical day. I stay awake from about 10pm to 3am, which allows me to straddle US East and West coast working hours. I keep in touch with the team using Yahoo Messenger or the phone, and it’s normally OK. It’s a little harder to make an impact on bigger face-to-face meetings so that’s a minus.

After the midnight session, I sleep until the early morning, and wake up at about 7 am. This allows me to join in some of the teleconference meetings between Singapore and Sunnyvale. I might head into the Singapore office for some discussions with my colleagues there, but that’s optional.

After that, I finish at about lunchtime, and have the afternoon off. I normally catch up on some sleep before dinner time, where I catch up with my fiancee or go get some exercise (swimming or cycling).

That’s just a typical day – most days I have exceptional schedules. It is highly dependent on the meetings that have been scheduled, which in turn revolves around projects that are being conducted at the moment. At times, I feel very much like I’m permanently jet-lagged.

An Irregular Startup Company

We had a company meeting today, with the usual corporate updates and questions from the audience. There were the usual questions about when were we expected to go public (as all startup companies aimed to become).

What was notable was the answer. Our CEO himself declared that if we did make it to IPO, that would be the beginning of our work, NOT THE END. It was heartening to hear that the executives were indeed looking out for the long-term sustainable growth of the company. He commented that any rush to IPO might enrich a few people (including himself no doubt), but a subsequent price collapse after the lockup period might disillusion many and that was not the expected outcome that he’s like to see.

It was a very good answer. And I’m proud that he stood up to the question and avoided any speculation.

This was a far cry from my days at TFC. September, 1999 – just before the peak of the Internet bubble – when everyone in the company basically talked more and more about stock prices and how much their options would be worth. It was mere luck that the lockup period ended just before the peak in March 2000 and a lucky few were able to retrieve their money before the prices sunk. The company and its employees never recovered from the disappointment of our vanishing revenues and broken promises. Layoffs followed, and the company finally folded a few years later. It was a tragic story, typical of the Internet boom and bust, and I’m glad my current place isn’t like that.

A Guest in Sunnyvale

I’ve been in Sunnvale, at the headquarters of Savi Technology, Inc., for the past three days. My visit coincides with the Singapore Engineering team and we’re here for a week. My schedule is filled with meetings and discussions, but it was a wonderful opportunity to meet new faces in the office as well.

It was such a pleasure to travel with a company with a proper travel budget. A decent hotel (Four Points Sheraton), a mid-sized car and meal allowances that don’t limit my meals to takeaways – a great improvement from the stringent policies at GridNode.

It has been three hectic days of meetings, one after another. The schedules are made worse because the end of the workday here coincides with the morning in Singapore. That practically means that our meetings often drag into the early evenings to allow for participation from Singapore. The whole atmosphere of Savi was filled with a sense of purpose, such as I have never felt before.

Avarice and the City

I was invited to join in a game called Cashflow by the author of the well-known book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It was interesting, something like a more advanced form of monopoly, except that the game was designed to help people learn about the key points that the author made in his book about how to achieve financial freedom.

All in all, this was an interesting game – learning about passive income and how financial freedom can be defined as having a passive income that exceeds your expenses.

This game was played fast – it started at 8, and ended at 9.30 p.m. There were several facilitators who were not directly playing, but assisted as bankers, and to move the game along. Naturally, the presence of these people made me wonder why. If they were not playing, then why were they there? And why was it important for the game to complete on time?

I was not surprised when the organisers summarised the lessons learnt, and introduced this business opportunity that costed very little in capital. Aha! Another network mareting (or Multi-Level Marketing) scheme. I’ve encountered this often enough, and perhaps I should list my objects on record.

First objection is the market saturation – the entire success of the scheme is based on rapid market saturation. The successful ones will not have achieved that without the associated failure of most recruits. The entire structure of the scheme is targetted at recruitment instead of at the product. In fact, the only way anyone can be successful is by recruitment.

Second objection is that the process disclaims responsibility for the product. Here, you are interested in expanding the network, without sufficient attention to the product or its side effects.

Third – the moral risk that I face is that relationships are being subverted into the sales process. Well, this is not unique to the MLM economy because sales of consumer products (like insurance) build on relationships as well. This is a personal reason … although I would not hesitate to endorse a product that I liked, I would not knowingly introduce an associate into a business in which the failure rate is 99% (in the hopes that I would be in that 1%).

Fourthly (and most important) – the primary motivation factor behind agents of this industry is the search for financial freedom. In fact, this reason becomes of primary importance – in the associates they meet and in the targets they set for each other. The primary success metric is how big the downstream can grow.

Enough said. Here are some links to other sites:

• http://www.mlmwatch.org
• http://www.vandruff.com/mlm.html

The Quiet After the Storm

Things have quieten down. Towards the weekend, NN gave me a list of 9 tasks to complete before I am relieved of my duties.

Part of his list asked me to compile a report about why I felt the software was not ready. I was taken aback. Why would he still want those reasons, especially if he feels that my decision had been made out of emotional duress?

Still, the end is in sight and is indeed a blessing. I estimate I should have everything completed by the end of this week if not earlier. Some of the documents I have completed haven’t been reviewed yet, so I’m hoping that won’t slow things down.

Monday went relatively smoothly, and SL does not appear to be aware of my impending departure yet. I don’t feel I owe him an explanation, except out of courtesy, but I will leave that to NN.

Slowly, my concerns will move towards the future job prospects instead of this current scrape. Its still a competitive market out there and I can imagine that for every position I qualify for, there will be hundreds of other applicants. So far, these are advertised positions, so competition is to be expected.

Given the uncertainty with RM at this time, I will not approach personal contacts until I have completed the necessary formalities in RM. So far, I’m quite sure that NN will not react if I join anyone else other than GN.

First Impressions of RM

My first day at work for RM. Their office is located at Suntec City, Tower 1 at #17-02. I had previously been there for interviews, but was cooped up in their claustrophobic meeting room.

The layout was cramped. There were two rooms – one for the CEO, and the other for the finance / administrator. Connecting these two rooms to the waiting area was a corridor with cubicles lined along its side. I was allocated a tiny niche by the corner, with two servers underneath the next and a flickering 14 inch monitor in front of my nose. I did not spend much time in that seat, but I can’t imagine how I’d be comfortable working there for long.

NN and AS arranged sessions for me and SL the whole day. It was a good way of inducting us into the application suite, but I felt I had covered much of the ground during my interviews, albeit with more depth today. They discussed about product positioning, scenarios, strategies… good stuff.

Tomorrow will start with an 8 a.m. conference call in the morning. Ouch – that’s an early call.

There’s much I’d like to change, but I’ve resolved to grit my teeth until the first two weeks have passed. Its mostly the environment, but I’ll need to feel out NN before asking for any changes.

Bidding farewell to GN

Leaving a job is a rare experience. Especially for one in which one has contributed significantly, and when the team has worked closely to achieve much.

My colleagues threw a farewell lunch for me. It was a simple affair – everyone trooped to the restaurant of choice and had a good meal. No ceremonies were called for, and the table paid a little more attention than normal to the one who was leaving. A Last Supper of sorts.

It was after lunch that I packed everything up, handed back my notebook, and made my rounds. It would have been an appropriate time for last words with others, but I’ve already started doing that over the past two weeks. In retrospect, I should have organised it a little better to spend some time together with them. Besides, many were busy at work and there would be the inevitable lack of privacy.

I did not know until recently that others had tendered their resignation. The SL told me a couple of weeks ago. Earlier this week, I found out that HS was going to share a farewell lunch with me. Then today, I heard about KM’s decision to leave as well. An unfortunate coincidence. But yet not wholly surprising.

There was a collective sense of frustration with the remuneration and corporate benefits. Pay increments had been small and did not reflect the growing experience of the software developers. Those that had joined with low starting salaries had not had their pay adjusted to reflect the market demand for their skills.

Perhaps the depressed economy over the past two years had suppressed the attrition rate. And now that the outlook was brighter and employers were hiring, it meant more opportunities for those who had planned to leave before, but perhaps did not find the right opportunities.

I had a final chat with TY before I left. He asked for my candid opinions on certain aspects of the company’s operations. I shared how I felt about the state of the department, on how GN lacked the leadership to tackle the issues they had with staff morale and how they would meet the long term goals with the current resources. I had opinions on how things would have been done differently but they should remain opinions. Too many and too trivial to describe today.

I think he realised that even though we were certain to keep in touch, our next meeting would be under different circumstances. After today I would be an outsider, no longer privy to the happenings in the office.

And so I close the door on another chapter in my journey.

Last days at GN

In the last week here, I’ve had little email. It was a little disconcerting at first, this feeling of not being busy and useful. Thankfully its no going to be for long – the end of the week is rapidly approaching, and I’d better start cleaning up.

By the end of this week, I will have left GN and everything I’ve worked for behind. While cleaning out my old files, I was struck by the amount of ground I had covered. Everything from RosettaNet to ebXML (though that one didn’t take off), from the latest hype in technology to evaluating mundane projects. I’m grateful for having had this opportunity, but I have made my decision to move on.

My final tasks are to provide training for others who will be assuming my responsibilities. I’ve completed a basic introduction to Perl as a “quick-and-dirty” means of script writing for our consultants to extend GT. The response was lacking in the enthusiasm that I had expected and a minor disappointment.

Over the next two days, I will be handing over the training material for Web Services. I’ve conducted this course twice, and others will replace me in the future. The difficulty would be to impart the background knowledge for Web Services to others, as much of the material is not “off-the-book”. Each module has to be understood in its context and not so much as in its specifics.

Web Services not a critical a skill for GT implementors, but more of a basic technology requisite for future work. In fact, Web Services will play an increasing role in future IT projects, although its been severely over-hyped by some of its major proponents. Nevertheless, its deployment today lays the foundation for future integration work.

Jet Lagged in Orange County

Over the weekend, I boarded a flight from Singapore to LA via Taipei. China Airlines is not a bad airline, although Taipei airport is a real let down. A four hour transit in Chiang Kai Shek airport was really bad – the shops were pathetic, and didn’t accept non-Taiwanese currency. The waiting room was dusty and their furniture belonged to another decade. Ughs.

At LAX, the immigration queue for visitors stretched for hundreds of yards. By some chance, it seemed that flights from UK, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan were all landing at the same time. It took me an hour to clear the formalities, and another hour to drive from LAX to Santa Ana.

Is there a better way to fly than this? Well at least I have Monday off.

Two Years at GN

If I haven’t mentioned this before, well, here it is.

I started working at GN in May 2001, after a two-year stint with another startup, TFC (more about that another time).

What were the highlights? We built software that enables the proliferation of B2B standards the main focus of my efforts. This included messaging standards such as RosettaNet, ebXML, various EDI dialects (AS1, AS2). There were lots of requirements and many disparate heterogenous systems to integrate with. This made for challenging schedules and impossible features.

During the first year, we had implemented a bare-bones RosettaNet system, which had to be polished and refined many times. By the end of my second year, we had a pretty stable system which supported the RosettaNet standard as well as any software in the market today.

In retrospect, I supposed it was empowering to be part of a movement that was going to change the way people did businesses. We were making fax machines obsolete, a thing of the past. That was the ultimate intention, but the journey was fraught with challenges.

Inevitably, technology remained complex. XML, encryption, Internet – it was still relatively new. We had just completed our first RosettaNet interoperability tests with 9 other companies. It was a painful job, to wake up early in the mornings to attend conference calls, to run tests, to debug log files.

Next month, we will move from our current office in Martin Road to Bencoolen Road.