"Judge me by my accomplishments, not the number of hours I spend at the office."

Hehe nice joke :) That's why the folks at 37signals only work 4 days a week and still accomplish so much more than software companies that are double or triple its size (I think 37signals still has no more than 20 employees).

One major reason why management doesn't like this idea is that they just don't have a reliable and consistent way to measure accomplishments. Yes, if we can't measure accomplishment, this concept won't work.

However, one thing we should be crystal clear is that even if there's no such good measuring method, it doesn't change the fact that accomplishments matter much more than hours. So, the job of management is to figure out a way to measure them instead of denying this fact.

From what I know, at least Best Buy and 37signals figure a way to do this. So, I don't think it's an impossible task :P

Sales Skills 101: Give Customers an Option

A few months ago I joined a DVD rental club called Vclub located in the San Gabriel Square. The idea of the store is pretty simple:

• The DVD renting machines operate 24/7
• You use their machines to return DVDs, browse the catalog and get DVDs. No human is involved in the process
  
• There's no limit on how long you can rent a DVD, but you can only keep 1 or 2 DVDs (depends on your plan) at one time
• There's no limit on how many DVDs you would like to watch in one year (or one month, depends on your plan)
  
• You can reserve a DVD using their website

When you sign up as a member, they also give you some credits so that you can use them to trade for their gifts, such as a DVD player (not sure if this is still true though). One bad thing about it is that they don't really have DVDs for TVB's series and those are usually the ones I like to watch.

So, I thought to myself,

"Hmmm what should I do? On one hand, I really would like to get a region free DVD player. On the other hand, I'm not really interested in TV series other than the ones from TVB, so I may not end up watching that many of them, which is not worth the money..."

"There's no hurry! You can go home and think about it and come back anytime if you're interested," said the salesgirl with a sweet smile on her face.

So I left the store and thought about the deal as I wandered around the plaza. At last, I went back and signed up as a member.

And it turned out that TV series produced by mainland China were pretty good too :P

As good as the TV series from China can be, however, I would not have signed up if not because of the excellent attitude that salesgirl had when she tried to sell the membership to me.

I'm a very detail-oriented person, so you can guess that I have asked her quite a lot of questions about the plan. She patiently answered all the questions and explained to me until I got all the details right. When I was about to leave, not only didn't she give me any pressure, she greeted me happily and welcomed me to come back if I was interested.

If you are/want to be a salesperson, remember this: always, SINCERELY, give the customer an option to say no to your product/service.


This is perhaps the No. 1 rule a salesperson should abide by, and it's so obviously true, right? Believe it or not, MANY, MANY salespeople that I encountered before have absolutely no idea about it. (Or, they know about it but choose to ignore it, which is like knowing that studying will improve you grade but you choose to be lazy)

When you try to sell something to a customer, the customer isn't merely buying the product/service. S/he is also buying your attitude: the tone of your voice, your facial expression, your body movements, your smile, basically everything the customer can perceive from you. No matter how tiny it is, the customer can feel it.

You want to sell something to earn a commission, trust me, the customer knows about it (Duh, you're a salesperson). There's just no need to convey any additional message about how much you want to sell (such as frowning when the customer says no).

What the customer cares about is whether s/he needs the product/service, and, actually even more important, whether s/he is happy buying it from you.

Frown at me when I say no to you? Even I need it, I won't buy it from you; there're always some other people selling the same stuff. I'll probably ask my friends not to go to your store too.

Sincerely give me the option to buy it from you or your competitor? Even if I don't buy it from you this time, I'll definitely visit your store again and perhaps buy some other products and refer my friends to you.

If you can't even do this simple thing, that is, giving customers an option, don't be a salesperson, do something else. Both your boss and customers will thank you for your decision :P

Telling your boss about your ideas

Just read CK's post 夠膽講 and the comments there and it makes me think about the issue of expressing one's ideas to the managements.

If you don't know Chinese, the post is about how CK was unhappy about the dead air when he asked his employees for their ideas/suggestions. In a nutshell, no one was willing to share their thoughts because

• they're afraid that their ideas may offend the boss
  
• they're afraid that other coworkers will think that they're "saying too much"
• they only care about their salaries and not the company
  

After reading the post, I've a feeling that most people in Hong Kong think exactly like the three items I mentioned above and it scares me so much. If I have choices, I'll never work for a boss who doesn't listen to his employees and with coworkers who only care about their paychecks. It's just no fun to work in such an environment.

I don't treat the job duties of a manager (or boss) being superior to the ones of a subordinate. Instead, a manager is merely doing a different job. I'd guess that, to the minds of many people, a manager's greatest responsibility is to lead the team and make decisions. There're certainly merits in this thought but I think it's sub-optimal. Rather, I think that a manager's biggest job is to maximize the productivity of the team.

In this regard, the manager doesn't necessarily have to be the smartest/know the most about every issue that may come out from the project/work s/he manages. Instead, s/he should always think about how to help his/her team members to achieve more, for example, giving them the best work environment the company can afford.

If you think about it, actually, how can one individual knows all the details of a considerably big project? It's not just that it's unnecessary for the manager to know everything, it's infeasible for one to do so. If this is true, surely it's unwise for the manager to make decision without listening to other people.


Because of this, it's the management's responsibility to make the work place a friendly place to exchange ideas. Not only one shouldn't be punished for making suggestions, one should be encouraged to do so. If people are discouraged for voicing opinions, as time goes on, no one will speak out his/her thoughts anymore. There're two results

• People who can still stand the company will just "work for money" everyday (The company doesn't care about him, why should he care about the company?)
  

• People who can't stand will just leave the company

People who just "work for money" won't be happy about the job and coworkers around them can feel it, so in turn they won't be happy also or even be unhappy. When turnover rate is high, people will lose confidence in the company and this in turn leads to even higher turnover rate. It's just bad to the company, the boss, the managers, to everyone.

If you read Joel's post Two Stories, you'll know that the managers at Microsoft not only listen to the employees, they actually would like them to make decision themselves: (it was the old days of course, probably not the humongous Microsoft now)

At Microsoft, if you're the Program Manager working on the Excel macro strategy, even if you've been at the company for less than six months, it doesn't matter - you are the GOD of the Excel macro strategy, and nobody, not even employee number 6, is allowed to get in your way. Period.

As a conclusion, if you're

• a boss/manager, stop practicing defensive management and listen to your employees. Better yet, let them make decisions as much as possible; mistakes make them learn and grow.
  

• an employee, voice your opinions in a respectful way and encourage your coworkers to do so also. If it's impossible to do that in any way, LEAVE.
  

Be assertive guys! :)

Office Ergonomics - Part II

In my previous post I shared with you guys some suggestions on how to improve your work environment. In this post I'm going to talk about why you and your boss want to make your work environment better.

Let's talk about why you want to make your work environment better. I guess you must have saw/heard of some survey that asks you to rank the priorities of several important aspects of one's life, such as:

• Love
• Family
• Career
• Friends

However, people often omit one very important aspect of one's life: health. If you're in the ages of early twenties (or younger), you probably take good health for granted. When I was still going to ELAC (the community college that I went to), I could played four games of DDR nonstop, all of the songs with a difficulty of at least 9 feet (the most difficult songs have a difficult of 10 feet). I always hanged out at the arcade until 1 or 2 am and went to some Hong Kong cafe for midnight snack with my friend. When I got home, it was usually 3 am something already.

Ask me to do it again now? No way. Although I still play DDR everyday, I realize that I probably can never play that many games in a row anymore (well, maybe unless I practice it as a full-time job, which I won't). When I see people going to night clubs at Friday nights, I really wonder why they've the strength to do that after a whole week's work. I'd rather go home and get some quality sleep.

Basically, I realized that I can't take good health as granted anymore. To have a healthy life, one needs to put some effort on it everyday and is determined to control his/her desires.

Love, family, career and friends are all essential to one's life, but they're not as important when you compare them with health. If you're sick and have to lie on the bed all day long, there aren't many things you can do. Besides, your loved ones will also be miserable because they've to look after you and watch your suffer (For that reason, I do think that hurting oneself is a selfish act, unless s/he doesn't have a family or friends or is hated by the whole world) That's exactly why you should have the best work environment you can possibly have, which affects a great part of your health.


Why would a boss give his/her employees the best working environment then? Yeah, all those ergonomics keyboard trays and chairs cost a LOT. The chair that the ergonomics office of UCLA recommended to me costs around $400, which is much more expensive than the ones you get from Staples or Office Depot. A good keyboard tray with an adjustable arm costs over $200 also, which is not cheap either. If I tell my previous bosses to buy all those stuff, they probably will think that I'm crazy and kick me out of the office.

As a long-time Google fan, I strongly believe that one of the keys of their success is providing the best environment they can afford to their employees. How many companies provide free food to their employees? Except those in the dining industry, I really can't think of any. The thing is, investing in a good work environment results in at least four advantages:

1. Employees are happier
2. Employees are healthier
   
3. Because they're happy, the turnover rate is low
4. Because they're healthy, they work more effectively

The problem of most bosses (especially Chinese bosses, sigh) is that they're very short-sighted and shallow. They see the immediate and obvious revenue generated by a sales guy when he closes a deal with a big customer, but they don't see the money he loses in training when people leave the company. They see how fast the new Pentium Core 2 Duo workstations run compared to the old ones, but they don't see that John becomes much more effective after he gets his ideal chair. If your boss would rather spend money on buying a brand new BMW M5 for himself instead of replacing your tortoise-like Pentium 3 machine (which costs a damn lot less), you can probably tell how smart he is.

One friend wondered why my supervisor would spend so much money on getting a good chair for me as I only worked there for four months. Wrong wrong wrong!!

You deserve the best work environment just because you're hired and you perform your job.

If only your old fat ass coworkers (who've worked in your company for over 20 years) got a good work environment, LEAVE. You don't have 20 years to waste :P

Office Ergonomics - Part I

Recently I've done some research on office ergonomics and noticed there's quite a good deal of working habits that one should be aware of at work. I was quite surprised that I've been ignoring most of them in the past. Let me share some of them here and hope that they'll make your work life happier :)

(Disclaimer: I'm not an ergonomics expert so you're advised to seek opinions from the professionals if you're serious about it. In general, however, I believe my advice should be pretty useful :P)

Eyes, Neck

• Your eye level should be aligned with or a little bit above the top of your monitor. As a result of that, your eyes gaze should be a little bit downward when you look at the screen.
• The monitor should be an arm-length or a little more away from you. In other words, you should be able to just barely touch the screen when you stretch your whole arm.
• You should tilt the monitor so that the screen doesn't have any glare coming from the light in your room. To better avoid the glare, the monitor should have a flat screen.
  
• Blink more. People fail to do that when they're too concentrated on their work, but it'll dry your eyes and make them tired.
  
• Your neck should be straight up but relaxed. If your chair has a neck rest you may lie against it when you're taking a rest. When you're working, however, you should be away from it.
• If you need to type while you talk on the phone (like a technical support person), you should never cuddle the phone between your face and your shoulder. Instead, use a headset. Use a wireless one if you need to walk around to get stuff to answer your customer's questions.
  

Hands, Arms, Shoulders

• Your shoulders should be relaxed. Your arms should be touching the sides of your body when you're typing. No, you shouldn't be resting your arms on the armrest of your chair when you're typing. You may use it as a pivot when you use your mouse though.
  
• To make it possible for the armrest to be a pivot when you use your mouse, the armrest should be adjustable in width and height.
  
• Your forearms should be around 100 degrees from your upper arms. That means they're a little bit below sea level.
• Your fingers, wrists and forearms should be all aligned in a straight line. If you're bending your wrists upward it's not a correct posture.
• The make the above statement possible, you will need a keyboard tray with an adjustable arm attached to the bottom of your desk like this one. Those horizontal sliding keyboard trays won't do the job.
  
• Wrist rest is good for, as its name says, resting. When you're typing, your wrists shouldn't be touching the wrist rest. This will make you type faster and more accurate. (My personal experience!)
• Your keyboard should be right in front of you. The letters "G" and "H" should be aligned with the middle of your chest.
  
• This one is kind of obvious but quite some people can't do that: touch-type. If you can't do that I recommend a game called Typing of the Dead. This game greatly improved my typing posture, speed and accuracy :)
• Learn more keyboard shortcuts to minimize the use of your mouse.
  
• Your mouse should be as close to you as possible. You shouldn't need to stretch your arm to reach it. A good keyboard tray should have a turnable mousebridge that covers the ten-key pad (which you don't really use that often) and minimizes the distance between you and the mouse.
• Move your whole arm when you move your mouse, don't twist your wrist. Your forearm and wrist should stay on a straight line. Bend your elbow if needed.
  
• What if you need to use the ten-key pad all the time? If you can touch type, you can actually use the numbers in the first row of the keyboard instead of the ten-key pad. Experience tells me that using those numbers are just slightly slower than using the ten-key pad, especially if you need to type combinations of letters and numbers, in which case your right hand will need to move right and left if you use the ten-key pad.
  

Back, Hips, Feet

• Your chair should have a comfortable lumbar support. (The thing that support your lower waist) Ideally, the lumbar support should be adjustable in height since the the position of the lower waist differ from one person to another.
• You should be able to tilt the chair backrest and lock it at a certain angle. The angle between the chair backrest and the seat should be approximately 100 degrees so that you are leaning a little bit to the back.
  
• The seat should be horizontal. The depth of the seat is good if there a one to two inches distance between the back of your knees and the edge of the seat.
• Of course, the seat should be adjustable in height. The height of the seat is ideal if you can rest your feet horizontally on the ground.

Taking Breaks

• Remember to take breaks. You should at least take a 30-second break every 30 minutes. Every hour you should stand up and walk around. Go use the restroom or get yourself some water. Do some stretching exercises, focus on those that move your body joints.
  
• If you're very concentrated on your work, you will forget about time and taking breaks. So, there's software written for this purpose. Scirocco Take a Break is a very good and free software designed for this purpose.
  

Wow, that's such a big list there. I know you may say that I'm being unrealistic; why would there be any boss willing to spend all those money on providing such a perfect work environment to the employees? Well there is, my supervisor at UCLA is one example. I'll talk more about that in my next post, stay tuned :)

Best Resignation Letter

If you're going to quit you job, you better write a professional resignation letter so as not to burn any bridge. The following is the best resignation letter I've ever seen and I truly believe that if you follow its style and format you will greatly enhance your chances of receiving a good reference in the future:

Dear Mr. Baker,

As an employee of an institution of higher education, I have few very basic expectations. Chief among these is that my direct superiors have an intellect that ranges above the common ground squirrel. After your consistent and annoying harassment of my co-workers and me during our commission of duties, I can only surmise that you are one of the few true genetic wastes of our time.

Asking me, a network administrator, to explain every nuance of everything I do each time you happen to stroll into my office is not only a waste of time, but also a waste of precious oxygen. I was hired because I know how to network computer systems, and you were apparently hired to provide amusement to your employees, who watch you vainly attempt to understand the concept of "cut and paste" as it is explained to you for the hundredth time.

You will never understand computers. Something as incredibly simple as binary still gives you too many options. You will also never understand why people hate you, but I am going to try and explain it to you, even though I am sure this will be just as effective as telling you what an IP is. Your shiny new iMac has more personality than you ever will.

You wander around the building all day, shiftlessly seeking fault in others. You have a sharp dressed, useless look about you that may have worked for your interview, but now that you actually have responsibility, you pawn it off on overworked staff, hoping their talent will cover for your glaring ineptitude. In a world of managerial evolution, you are the blue-green algae that everyone else eats and laughs at. Managers like you are a sad proof of the Dilbert principle.

Seeing as this situation is unlikely to change without you getting a full frontal lobotomy reversal, I am forced to tender my resignation; however, I have a few parting thoughts:

1. When someone calls you in reference to employment, it is illegal for you to give me a bad recommendation as I have consistently performed my duties and even more. The most you can say to hurt me is, "I prefer not to comment." To keep you honest, I will have friends randomly call you over the next couple of years, because I know you would be unable to do it on your own.

2. I have all the passwords to every account on the system and I know every password you have used for the last five years. If you decide to get cute, I will publish your "Favorites," which I conveniently saved when you made me "back up" your useless files. I do believe that terms like "Lolita" are not viewed favorably by the university administrations.

3. When you borrowed the digital camera to "take pictures of your mother's b-day," you neglected to mention that you were going to take nude pictures of yourself in the mirror. Then, like the techno-moron you are, you forgot to erase them. Suffice it to say, I have never seen such odd acts with a ketchup bottle. I assure you that those photos are being kept in safe places pending your authoring of a glowing letter of recommendation. (And, for once, would you please try to use spellcheck? I hate correcting your mistakes.)

I expect the letter of recommendation on my desk by 8:00 am tomorrow. One word of this to anybody and all of your twisted little repugnant obsessions will become public knowledge. Never f*ck with your systems administrator, Mr. Baker! They know what you do with all that free time!

Sincerely

David Blocker

Network Administrator

Yeah I know it was posted in many places before, it's just that it's still funny to read it again :)

How to Do What You Love

The following links to a very good article from Paul Graham about how to do what you love

How to Do What You Love

I think this is a very good follow-up on my previous post. Enjoy :)

Happy at work?

After I got my master degree from UCLA in 2004, the only thing in my mind is to look for a full-time job. If you are a foreign student, you would understand how difficult it is to even get an interview when you don't have much work experience. Most of the companies will just trash your resume if they know that your need sponsorship to work in the US.

As desperate as I could be, I finally got a job at a software company that turned out to be the most horrible working experience I have ever had in my life. Actually, I'm pretty confident that I will not have a worse experience in the future, since they were just extraordinary.

I remember on my first day of work, I was told by my boss to modify a little part of their software and it has to be done by the next day. Their software was written in a unknown variant BASIC called dL4 BASIC. I had never touched any kind of BASIC before, not to mention that piece of crap. So, I just tried by best and I think luckily I got it finished, not sure if it was the next day though. I felt that something was not right and later on realized that it was the beginning of my nightmare there.

The boss there was as toxic as you can imagine. Every day after he came into the office, he would check whether you were grooving on something every hour. The back of my chair faced the corridor so there was no way I could tell that he was standing right behind me and looking at my work. Besides, when he was mad (and he got mad easily), he would actually cuss at his employees. (Could you imagine your boss cussing at you??) He was impatient and conceited. The pay sucked. The computers were crappy (Pentium II) and there was not even an inkjet printer there. He actually got a printer that printed monospace character on papers with two columns of holes on the sides. (You know what I'm talking about right?) And the damn code, can you imagine that they got variables named "a1" or "b2"? I actually thought that his ex-programmers revenged on him by writing code that only compilers can understand.

Very soon, I realized why he told me that his employees kept leaving the company, and apparently he had no idea that why it was happening. I didn't expect that I would be even more desperate in looking for a job after I got a job, and as soon as I got an offer, I quited without even giving them a two-week notice. (Well I did have bad time in that new job also, maybe I will talk about that in another post)

I always thought that high salary should be the first thing people look for when they are trying to get a job. Now when I think about that experience, I can assure you that I will not work for such a toxic company even they pay me 200K a year. Well, yeah maybe you can work for them for a little while and then quited later on for the purpose of getting a high pay for a few months, but what's the point of doing that? The reason we value money so much is that it can satisfy most of our material needs, which ultimately leads to happiness. If you hate your job, is that worth the high salary?

If you need to sleep 8 hours a day, you got 16 hours left. Half of that is spent at work, and in the remaining 8 hours, maybe you spend 2 hours in the traffic, 1 hour for lunch, 1 hour for dinner, 1 hour for breakfast, brushing teeth, shaving, changing and shower, 1 hour on listening to your girlfriend's/wife's complains, and you got 2 hours left (to watch TV?). And weekends you probably need to do some housework, laundry, go to the bank, deal with some bills, go to supermarket, go get the car fixed, go shopping with your girlfriend/wife, etc. I don't see there's much time left for which you can really do something you like to do. If you are unhappy in that 8-hour period at work every day, most of your life before retirement is miserable. What good do all the greens do then?

Thinking about that, job satisfaction is really important. If you got a toxic boss like I did, or your job is boring like hell, go get a new job and work on something that amuses you every day. Life shouldn't be painful :P

Professionalism

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am going to write an article about what I think the word professional should mean. I think it is worth some time to talk about it since this term is so abused that one can accuse another person as unprofessional without giving any reason these days. Looking up the definition of professional on Answers.com, it gives the following definitions:

1. Of, relating to, engaged in, or suitable for a profession: lawyers, doctors, and other professional people.

2. Conforming to the standards of a profession: professional behavior.

3. Engaging in a given activity as a source of livelihood or as a career: a professional writer.

4. Performed by persons receiving pay: professional football.

5. Having or showing great skill; expert: a professional repair job.

Let us skip definitions 2 and 4 and talk about the other three definitions in the following. Definition 2 is pretty vague as the "standards" of a profession can be anything and definition 4 is actually describing some activity, not a person.

Definition 1 basically describes someone who works in a certain profession for a living. But what does profession mean? Answers.com says that it is "An occupation, such as law, medicine, or engineering, that requires considerable training and specialized study." According to this definition, any job that does not require considerable training and specialized study is not a profession. Well, there are jobs like that, such as being a janitor or an office assistant. You do need to be trained somehow to perform as a janitor or an office assistant, but I guess most people would agree that one does not need considerable amount of training to do that. Following that logic, some people can never be professional, no matter how well they perform on their jobs, since their jobs by definition are not professions!

Definition 3 is pretty easy: if you gets paid by working as a XXX, then you are a professional XXX. This can coexist with definition 1 in the sense that if you work as a lawyer but you don't get paid, you are not a professional lawyer.

Definition 5 is probably the most common concept in most people's minds: to be an expert in what you are doing.

Now, my turn to say what I think about these definitions.

I am sick of definition 1. Although it doesn't say it directly, it does imply that some jobs are more superior than some other jobs. So, some jobs, like doctors and lawyers, deserve to be referred to as "professions" and others do not. Since I was small, I always hold a strong belief, which is an old Chinese saying:

There is no difference in dignity among all careers

No matter what a person does for a living, as long as s/he does not violate the laws and contribute to society in some way, s/he deserves respect. Trying to refer some careers as "professions" and some other careers as "jobs" seems to be a result of some "professionals" trying to please their own egos.

Definition 3 is common enough but I disagree with it. Those doctors who help the poor in developing countries without getting paid are still professional. To my mind, they are even more professional than the ones who get paid.

Definition 5 is right, you got to be good at what you are doing. That is kind of like one's responsibility, even we are not talking about the meaning of professional.

My definition of professional is simple enough:

1. To be good at what you are doing.
2. Respect what you are doing.

The first point is just definition 5 above, so it does not need any explanation. The second point, however, is ignored by lots of people.

Have you ever scheduled to see a doctor and you actually got to see the doctor at the time of your appointment? If you do, I am surprised, because, as far as I can remember, I have never been able to see a doctor at the time of an appointment in my whole life. (In Hong Kong it is a First In First Out system, so there is no appointment) Waiting for at least an hour in the doctor's office is pretty usual to me. If they can't make the time of the appointments, what is the point of setting up the appointments in the first place? To torture the patients and waste their time? Or they are just not competent enough to make "rough" estimate of the time it takes to see each patient? (By "rough" I mean +/- 15 minutes, I can live with that) To respect what you are doing, you got to respect your customers, if you have any. I don't feel that my time is respected at all in this case. Are the doctors professional in this case? Ah, I don't think so.

To respect what you are doing, not only do you need to respect your customers, you also have to respect your coworkers, your boss and take responsibility in whatever you are doing. Besides, take pride in what you are doing. I worked in a few Hong Kong cafes before, got minimum pay plus a little tips and got yelled by the boss all the times, so what? I take pride in that. If you look down on your own job, how do you expect other people to not look down on you? If may not like your job since it is boring or the pay sucks or the boss is a dumbass, but there is absolutely no reason that you should be ashamed of it.

Are your professional? :)