Network, Grades and Meritocracy

As someone taking CS3103 this sem, which is the nightmare known as networks II. I actually understood quite a bit of the stuff that zit seng was talking about..

Understood, yes.. But how to apply? No idea..

Sigh... Like Prof say, what he's doing is an art, quite hard to learn over 2 hours.

The second part of the lecture is much much more interesting. dealing with meritocracy, one of the 5 cornerstone concepts our wonderful country was built upon.

I don't know why but I felt there was a little contradiction in prof's arguments.

1) He has reached the apex of the academic system through his mad studying abilities

2) He believes grades don't matter, except for the first job.

3) He hires people based on grades first, ability second.

So can we conclude that

1) Regardless how good one is in his respective field, we still need decent grades? Like how our athletes need certain grades to enter a SPORTS school.

2) Our first job will determine our second job, our third job, up till the point you decide that being hired isn't worth the time and make your own living. So then your grades will affect your first job, which then cascades down. Eg. If I have straight Bs and end up in a semi-decent job in a semi-decent company, as opposed to getting straight As and ending up in the same job in an excellent company, then the difference in prospects is still huge regardless of personal abilities.

What I feel is that, although our system is still meritocratic somewhat, it is only based on the academic skill, someone NOT a government scholar will never rise up to ministerial level.

Making up for lost groud...

So I promised to write something regarding the VC lecture, but apparently my procrastination got the better of me..

In retrospect, now is probably a much better time to reflect on the lessons I learnt from the VC team, considering now is when I actually have to factor in so many issues with team dynamics.

First and most important lesson, recognize your limits. There are some things in life that are impossible, eg. Marrying Keira Knightley. However, most other things in life are not difficult, give some effort and time. Correction, given ENOUGH effort and time.
In a project scope with very limited time and when members have limited technical skills, clamping the feature creep is crucial to the final success. The problem with VC is that they keep coming up with new and cool features that end up requiring repeatedly rebooting the project from step 1.

Second lesson draws directly from the first, the team morale will suffer if there are too many functions that cannot be implemented, or when they have to frequently restart at square 1.

So that brings me to my third lesson, iterative design, which all of you reading this already know. Start small, always make something deployable, and then slowly expand. Even if you have to rewrite everything to incorporate an extra feature. You still have a working version deployed that you can fallback on.

Thats all for now. Stay tuned for the next installment on google wave.

Settling old debts

So I need to do either a blog post on microsoft guy or VC..

Hmmm..

Actually, its going to be: why I'd rather blog about VC over microsoft guy, then I'll write another post on what I learnt from VC.

Now.. Back to Chewy, first impression he gives me is that he's a salesman, and not just any salesman, but a pyramid scheme salesman, don't ask me why, it's just a gut feeling.

His lesson of "other people are not the same as you are" is not anything groundbreaking or new. He just packaged it nicely with his stand up comedian act. Lets look at things from a different perspective.

When microsoft just entered china, they sold their chinese products with similar prices with that of their american counterparts. Guess what, you could buy a full copy of windows 7 for 4 RMB, fully cracked, bugless, guaranteed to work, and a much better 1 to 1 product exchange service microsoft ever imagined. Needless to say, Microsoft got owned, and they adapted, to significantly reducing their prices to levels affordable to the chinese public, but setting the language packs to chinese only(meaning you were stuck with win7 that said 我的电脑 and you can't change it to My Computer), this was prolly to ensure others won't exploit the price difference and sell them overseas.

Guess what, it still didnt work.

So what does this tell us? Other people are NOT the same as you are. What works in the states and europe will not work in a completely different demographic. Well we get that. So whats the point of complaining that marketeers are not putting in effort???

/aside What is a Marketeer??? Is it like a musketeer? Except with a marker? /end-aside

I'm pretty damn sure there have been companies that have tried lowering prices aggressively to try to get an edge in the market, someone would have tried something already if something is wrong. Either that or it just didn't work. Yes, I agree if you wanted to beat the field you need to do something special. But hey, I sure as hell don't see microsoft doing anything agressive with their marketing strategy..

I understand that coming back from the states, he must be really bewildered by how our market works, but here's something you need to learn from bush. You canNOT force what works for you down other people's throats! Bush tried that with his version of freedom and democracy and justice and tried shoving it all in one go down Iraq and Afghanistan. Guess what, it DIDNT work. So you don't get to take whatever "aggressive marketing strategy" you have to asia and come and judge us. Because you have no idea how the population here think and live.

Remember, others are different from you.