non-computer

I'm asked many times when would I like to move up from programmer's job. Most of the times this question came from my friends who are also working as a programmer. It seems that most of the local programmers are hoping to move levels up within the organisation's ladder. It also means that most of the local programmers consider their current job some sort of ground and temporary work. Am I thinking too much or it is actually a fact?

This is the typical job position hierarchy in most of the local software companies (in terms of power, pay and authority):
Project Manager
|
System Analyst
|
Solution Architect
|
Programmer
|
Tester

Many of us strive for the project management role merely because of the mentioned factors (power, pay and authority). How many of them looking for project manager position because they like to manage customers and programmers? If they really do, will they be still enjoying in such position if they have lesser power, lesser authority and lower pay comparing to what programmers have?

Will this hierarchy possibly be changed where programmer can also be a very influential position? It indeed happens in US, but somehow, it just seems impossible for Malaysia.

I did not have to make a request and the company just gave me a new optical scroll mouse and no signature required. This incident made me questioned myself that why had I been filling forms just to get a tiny device, like a mouse. I understand that most of us feel not safe working at small company, or we don't choose small firm for a more valid reason, low pay and
financial unstability. There are two kinds of big company: good and not-so-good. Do you think Google will require their top coders filling up form just to get a keyboard or mouse while they're competing with Yahoo!, Microsoft and etc. into the extent that they release new feature almost every week?

"How can everyone get new hardware as they like, we must follow procedure". Sounds familiar?
Over here in the company I'm working at, we fix a bug only if it is reported in the issue tracking system, we must follow certain application building and deployment procedure and we verify articles before posting to our internal knowledge portal. But we don't have to do anything to get our 2-button mouses replaced.

PS: we should define, obey and follow those procedures which really offer benefits.

Glad to know that I have one more friend just entered the Blogosphere. It's quite a big surprise to me because he's been giving me the impression that he isn't the kind of person who would like to express feelings about anything to public. Anyway, I found out that he'd probably focusing on the topic of photography and as I know from him that he's trying extremely hard to master all kinds of skills and techniques of photo shooting. I'll be more than happy to follow his posts as often as I can, hopefully he will keep his posting short and often.
I'm pretty sure that there will be a lot of nice pictures coming on his blog. Enjoy!


PS: Finally I won't have to ask him "Why don't you blog?" anymore

Ever since we started using a new issue tracking system, I was sometimes being asked to change some PHP codes to suit our needs better or customize the look and feel. It seems like we'll be maintaining and improving this open source software as time goes.
The good side: I just realized that PHP isn't that hard to learn
The bad side: It wasn't my initial intention to make any modification of source code

The moral of this story: Tell everyone you're only downloading the binary of any open source softwares.

I and some fellow colleagues were attending a briefing on an web application. The presentation wasn't so attractive and even somewhat boring, the application features were being describe from tab to tab at the menu bar. At one point the presenter asked "Which one do you guys want to know next?"

Everyone of us answered "Logout". It's rarely we could achieve this kind of consistency.

I was trying to figure out if language use is the only different between this blog and my chinese Weblog.
But surprisingly I find that the rather significant different is about sense and sensibility, which this blog is about sense and the chinese one is about sensibility. I just realized that my command of written English wasn't as poor as I've been feeling since I came out to work.
At least I can write spec, doc or manual which people can understand (don't think it's easy!). Now that I'm even able to elaborate something about my working's life which I've got reader find them funny. But very sad to say that, my level of written English will never reach the level of the written Chinese that I'm having now. I can easily express my feeling of very sensible things like love relationship, friendship and so on in chinese. Those are the stuffs which we cannot fully understand no matter how hard we try, for example you just couldn't yell at me and say "It doesn't make sense!" if I said I don't like to
see that pretty and sexy girl but instead I'm pretty interested in another brown-color girl with small eyes and dry hair. When thing came no sense, it's just harder for us to describe it. That's why I can use English to blog the things that make a lot of senses.
So, should I try harder to improve my written English? No. I'd prefer to use chinese in personal life and english for work. I'm pretty satisfied if anyone who need to read my writing for some working purposes can totally understand what I try to say.

In fact no one has asked me why I blog before, seemingly everyone knows the reasons I blog (of course most of them simply don't bother). I'm going to tell the reasons I blog, if you're not at all interested to know, feel free to skip this post
(don't worry about further posts as I'll only tell once).

The only one major reason: This is the ONLY place I can say whatever I want to say and yet, people can read.
For those who follow my posts will know that most of my writings are coming from an employee's perspective and relating to software development. I'm a programmer, therefore I think this nature is forgivable and inevitable. Some of the thinking over here are too risky for me to tell my superior face-to-face in the meeting room, but I just couldn't keep it myself, I can't wait to express it out, this is where this blog comes from.
Of course, I want as many people as possible to read what I'd written, therefore I write something non-IT related and put
some attractive photos occasionally for those who are not from IT background or totally not interested in reading software related stuffs. I feel that if getting more readers isn't important, I might as well keep a personal diary in my drawer.

And a few minor ones:
1) practice my command of written English - I once asked a friend of mine why he doesn't blog, and the answer I got was "My English isn't good".
I have a total opposite answer for that, I blog because my command of English is poor. If you think you can still improve your writing skill by just writing something which nobody can read, then you're fooling yourself.
2) I like to write since I was small - Only a few of my close friends know this secret. Therefore I wasn't upset when my friends said "you don't look like the kind of person who can write", "are those written by you?" and something similar. Actually I prefer to write in chinese, but sadly to say that I don't have much audience in that market.
3) I want to make the conversations with friends more meaningful - Ever since I had enough volume of posts, I like to answer some trivial questions from my friends such as "how's work?", "what do you think about open source?", "do you know J2ME?", "how's the business trip?" by saying "didn't you read my blog?". Can you imagine how meaningful my conversations with friends will be if we can skip those trivial questions? (of course I'll still answer directly if I know the person doesn't have Internet connection either at work or at home)

So, does it justify to you for spending time reading my blog? Hope so.

PS: My chinese blog didn't have, and probably won't have IT stuffs.