An Eulogy To A Lost Friend...

Recently, we lost a good friend to the dark side. The following is a touching eulogy written by another friend, who is still struggling with the rest of us on the path of the light.

My Brothers,

Just recently, on the first of November, we lost a friend and colleague. The Rager succumbed to the dark side after an intense struggle lasting only six months. He was twenty-six years old.

I trust that all of you are aware that he forewent a promising career in the United Kingdom and his pastime of freestyle rock climbing in a grand gesture of patriotism and idealism, returning to his motherland so that he could cultivate the next generation of technical people.

The Rager showed extraordinary focus when he rejected favors from several large multinationals to join instead, our company. This is something all of us feel a great sense of gratitude towards, for following his tumultuous arrival he was instrumental in growing some legs for our department, without which, we surely would have outsourced the design of FPGAs.

He was a pillar, nay, a bastion of technical knowledge in these troubled times, a shining LED in the darkness of the FPGA world. It was no mystery that he rose to the exalted position of God and gained the respectful worship of many peers.

But of course, being a man of many talents, he is not only remembered for his technical prowess, but also for his colourful antics that have brightened many a working day. One cannot deny that The Rager was a man full of zest and life.

His lunch buddies will no doubt take with them vivid memories of wild but honest rages on the asphalt: The destruction of the pink car, the frequent visits to the knocker's yard, his incessant raving about Michelin tires and the various aggressive confrontations with the arrogant traffickers. He certainly understood, that feeling of heart in the mouth and sweaty palms, telling us that we are alive.

His sexual preferences, while not common, show a startling predilection for variety. From his hip shaking body swaying performances on the public stage, his wicked references to the sodomy of men, masturbating to the voice of male colleagues, to his penchant for soft, flowery white skirts and skinny women, and the activity of cock sucking... he was someone who enjoyed life to the fullest.

Male colleagues who have spent time with him will fondly remember his smelling of powder at night, and of his playfulness in the washrooms.

But most importantly, he was one of the brotherhood, that secret covenant of wise and powerful men who fought daily to stamp out the corruption and depravity that threaten the fabric of the universe.

In this, he was a stalwart defender of the Truth, a vocal member of the drive against cronyism and idiocy. Everyone here will surely attest to his hatred of the common ignorance of metastability and XOR gates, and his constant swearing even in meetings where his reporting superiors are present. The open, no-holds barred, to-hell–with-the-management mentality was one of his key signatures, and certainly one of his most memorable ones. His passionate and unwavering drive still serves today as an exemplary model of the dedicated brotherhood member.

While his passing has left a gaping hole in our ranks, we shall always remember and honour him by finishing the crusade he started. As a final parting salute, allow me to shout his favourite battle cry, the one that sends shivers down the spines of every idiot, ass kisser, lying bastard and SOB:

TIU!!!

The Rager, we will miss you.

First Visit to "The Curve"

I went down to KL this weekend. A good pal of mine, limy, brought me out to The Curve. It's a new hot night spot near 1 Utama.

The two of us guys ordered a jug of beer and started babe watching. It wasn't as good as last weekend's babe watching (Yeah, I went to KL also). Our perch wasn't at a major junction or pathway. It wasn't bad. Saw a lot of short skirts.

We also talked about the usual stuff, from politics to work to the elegence of exp(i*pi) = 1.

Later when I told my wife about the babe watching part, she asked if I saw any cleavages, or "Curves". I'd mention that we were disappointed in that department, as the girls we saw try hard to show their cleavages, but just aren't equipped.

Who is Wind River?

I like these little stories. It makes my time in office much more amusing and easy to pass. Of course, all these are true accounts.

There is this FW manager in our department. He's not the same as I previously blogged about a week ago. He came to speak to my team's FW engineers.

FW Manager (FWM) : Do you use an OS in your product.
FW Engineer (FWE) : Yep.
FWM : Who wrote the OS?
FWE : Umm...Wind River.
FWM : Is that a group here in [our company]?
FWE : Uh...no...They're another company.
FWM : How do you download your program into your CPU?

At this point, a lot of mental forehead slapping was going on with the engineers. Disbelief was abound with the engineers that this guy actually made it to manager. A manager in charge of a FW group no less...

Software Engineers Who Dunno Nuthin

As most of you who read this blog, you know me. As for a stranger who just happens to drop in, he might not understand the background of my content. So some of it will be provided here.

I'm a designer of a product made by my company. (vague :)) This product is sold to our customers as a stand-alone product. Sort of like your off the shelf electronics goods like cellphones or TVs. But our customers aren't the usual consumers.

The product also allows quite a lot of automation that can be done with it. So our management decided to kick off a project to create a software application to sell customers, that interfaces with my product so that users can do things they normaly do with the product from a PC environment, as well as do further value added things using the application.

The SW project has been running for quite awhile. So far, nobody from that SW project team has engaged me and asked me about my product and how to use it. I naturally assume that they're a bunch of great engineers and can figure things out themselves...

But...yes, there's always a but, or else it wouldn't be in this blog, the situation was not so. Two situations has caused me to view the team in a completely different light. I hope they don't screw up their project royally.

I was told by a colleague in my team that he was approached by a couple of guys on the SW project team to solve a problem they had. To his horror, he found out that they didn't know the difference between Watts and dBm! They also didn't know the conversion between these two units. They were doing stuff in one unit while it should be done in the other!

Then yesterday, I walked by their cubes and heard them discussing loudly about a certain operation of my product. I got curious and walked up to ask them about it. I also had to know whether they really were a bunch of idiots or not. Turns out they are. They didn't know the most basic functions of my product. All these while, they were hacking around in their code to get their SW to work with my product without understanding what is going on...When I explained it to them, it seems like they need a major architectural change to their code.

Sigh...that's just one of the many problems we have here. Technical people who don't know technical things, or not willing to learn. I'll talk about the Kirchoff's Law one next time. That's an interesting one.

A Shift of Focus...

Damn...it's still early in the morning and I'm feeling depressed already, mainly from reading these:

1. Brain Drain
2. Idiot Astronauts
3. Malaysia Bodoh!

And quite a few Putra lines are closed at 12:00PM
http://www.putralrt.com.my/last_train.htm

Great. This reaffirms my belief that my long term plan to leave is still valid.

The Golden Ratio of Corporate Pay...

Everyone has heard of the golden ratio used by artists and architects, even in math and science, but have you ever heard of the "Golden Ratio of Corporate Pay"?

Today over lunch, my colleagues and I stumbled across this crucial ratio. It was a mind bending and life altering epiphany. I will describe it next:

First, find out how many people are in between you and your CEO. Mine looks like this:

L.Bear ...> DottedBoss -> Boss -> BigBoss -> VP -> Senior VP -> Super Senior VP -> CEO

Then next, our conjecture:

Everytime you go up a level, the pay is doubled. Or if you go the other direction, every step away from the CEO, the pay halved. This is also a classic case of geometric progression.

So our CEO's pay and compensation is 1.3 million USD. This is found in Forbes.com. CEOs are given a LOT of bonus and the pay usually doesn't reflect how much he really gets in compensation. There are also disputes on why badly performing companies still pay their CEOs loads of money. If you're interested in that, Google it. Plenty of articles online on that.

1.3 million USD is roughly RM 400k per month. Using the conjecture, my monthly pay calculated is:

400k * (1/2)^7 = 3125.

With this number, my dotted line manager is 6.25k and his manager is 12.5k. That's not quite close to reality. My pay and the two people above me. So let's instead, solve for the ratio itself. A slight error in ratio can cause a big error on my pay because of the ^7 in the equation.

My company's minimum pay for a senior engineer is RM4.4k. So using this number, we solve for the ratio, R.

400k * (R)^7 = 4.4k

R = 0.525

Wow! Quite close to half. Not bad. So now my dotted line manager is 8.38k and his boss is 16k. That's much closer to reality.

There we go, I've found the Golden Ratio for my company. Why don't you look for yours?

Story of Candidate Interview

Today, a hiring manager in my company told us a story. This manager is one of the only managers I respect in my company locally. He has a technical track record and knows what he's saying. His story is about one of the interviews he had.

Manager says: Earlier this week I interviewed one FW candidate from [an MNC in Penang]. He is the classic case of engineer with shaky FW foundation but good talker.
Manager says: He claimed to be a USB expert, so I ask him what he does ?He said he did everything USB, from USB firmware to USB WDM driver and SW application.
Manager : OK, describe what you did in USB firmware, what device classes you implemented ?
Candidate : Oh, I wrote the USB endpoints, bulk in/out, transfers.
Manager : How about device class ?
Candidate : I am the key person in USB, the USB communicate through bulk-in/out.

Manager says: It seems that he doesn't know much about device classes.
Manager: What end products are you making ?
Candidate: some multimedia streaming products.
Manager: So to make the multimedia product work with PC, both must agree on a set of protocol & FSM behaviour, what is it that you implemented ?

Manager says: When pressed, he told me the truth.
Candidate: Actually once we signed the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), the semiconductor company gives us very good & working USB drivers.

Manager says: I guess he is more like a coordinator.
Manager : In our case, doing USB drivers is not a simple matter of signing NDA.
Manager : What did you do in WDM driver ?
Candidate : I have to modify/enhance Microsoft drivers, there are a lot of bugs in MS drivers.
Manager : So how many team members do you have in your USB project ?
Candidate: 3.
Manager : What are these 3 doing ?
Candidate: 1 HW, 1 SW app, 1 driver.
Manager : You claimed to be the key person doing all thing USB, but now you tell me there are 2 other persons doing SW app & driver ?

Manager says: This guy is not even a good liar.
Candidate: Oh, they do it, I do follow up and fix some bugs.

Manager says: Maybe he is a Project Manager pretend to be a technical expert too ?
Manager says: His good attribute is that he can laugh even when I placed him in awkward situation.

There we go. The helpless situation of local talent. This guy is employed! The unemployable ones are even worse. They probably don't even know what USB is.