tzlee.com/blog

Category: Society & Education

  • Blogging Revival

    Haven’t been blogging for some time, maybe I should revive it.

    Also trying to figure out how to have this RSS feed on Facebook.

  • The ladder

    A friend of mine was unhappy with his work and asked when he would make it up the corporate ladder. I shared the following with him and thought it makes a good blog post.

    Maybe I’ll elaborate on the corporate ladder part. Big companies (in your case) are big enough that you are actually insignificant. Not just you, everybody else is dispensable. These companies have stood the test of time and will stand even if the key people leave. This is what makes a company – it’s structure. CEO leaves, so what? There’s still many people under working despite his absence. People now know that if you throw a stone, you’ll hit a degree holder.

    “There’s many others that can do your job,” says your boss. Sad but true.

    The fact is that the corporate ladder is overrated and nobody should sit around a company waiting years over years to climb it. It just does not happen that way. Climbing the corporate ladder in a large corporation is mostly politics. Nobody I know sits around a company for a few years and gets promoted without meddling with some politics. Most who just stay put and “do their work” get at most a measly pay raise and hardly any promotion.

    Don’t think about the ladder. There’s a closed door at each floor. You need to convince the person staying there to open it for you. There’s usually only room for one on each floor, and that person has to go up as well. If he doesn’t move, you don’t move either.

    The alternative? Either work in a smaller company where your value is greater, or work for a company who would pay you more, or go start your own business.

  • Urgent to you, not urgent to me

    I guess society has gotten used to the term “urgent“. It’s pretty annoying that people send you e-mails that make requests to be completed in a day or two, citing them as urgent. I guess these people don’t realize urgent doesn’t involve the entire world and applies to their context and not mine. Don’t blame others for your own lack of planning and foresight. I have a lot of other urgent things to do too.

  • Qualifications Speak for Nuts?

    http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/what-do-school-tests-measure/#comment-127279

    Busy at the moment. Will blog later. Link for your reading pleasure.

  • Causes App Critique

    Before I joined the CS3216 class, I promised Prof. Ben I will do his homework, so I decided I should really do it. Here’s my critique. To save him the agony, I have decided not to write a thesis and keep it short. 😛

    Anyway…

    So what is Causes?

    Technical description. It’s an application in Facebook that allows a user to make a difference by donating to a cause.

    Non-technical description. It’s something in Facebook that allows people to make a difference by donating to a cause.

    Hokay, enough of rubbish. So Causes aims to solve some problems, and in my opinion it is well positioned to solve what is known as the Social & Economic Injustice.

    Socially and economically, we have created great disparities of wealth. A minority of the world’s population (17%) consume most of the world’s resources (80%), leaving almost 5 billion people to live on the remaining 20%. As a result, billions of people are living without the very basic necessities of life – food, water, housing and sanitation.

    If the top 20% of the world’s population is 1.2 billion, then I am quite confident that Facebook users are amongst the top 5% (~300 million).

    The problem with traditional forms of donation

    The problem with traditional forms of donation are that they lack public visibility and transparency on a global scale. NPOs depend highly on volunteers to do all sorts of things like donation drives to keep them alive. There aren’t many self-sustainable foundations like Bill and Melinda Gates around. And if you haven’t forgotten the NKF saga where the infamous quote on peanuts came about, it’s obvious that we don’t really know where the money goes.

    Basic Concepts

    • The Power to Make a Difference as a Social Media. This app basically demonstrates the power of social media and that it should not be underestimated. As of this writing, the Hope for Haiti Now cause has raised US$42,930 (S$60,617).
    • The Power to Make a Difference as an Individual. Unlike traditional donations (I’m referring to the tin-can school boys and girls at MRT stations), this app allows you ample time to search for a cause that you think really matters (than somebody preaching some unknown cause to you), read all about it before you donate. The best part is that it shows you the total amount (transparency) and others who have donated (confidence).
    • Transparency. This app seems to have done a good job by naming the beneficary organization (usually registered in the US) and by reflecting the total amount donated. However, the same old problem still exists – we don’t know where the money goes.

    Technical Concepts

    • Main Navigation. Simplicity is the key. The adaptation of the Facebook UI is great, making it look clean. If you haven’t realized, clicking on Best Of brings you out of Facebook to www.causes.com which completely copied Facebook’s top bar.
    • Front Page. It seems like the front page of the Causes app has a similar concept to BOOMZcart. It recommends you potential causes and also shows the causes that your friends are participating in, but there’s some issues I observed.
      • The recommendations don’t seem to match any of my profile interests. Is it a targeted recommendation, or a random recommendation?
      • I see four causes, but they’re all the same person. It should show four unique friends instead.
    • Individual Cause Page. In my opinion this has been very well executed by mimicking Facebook’s user profile page. It provides user interaction (via Home tab), sufficient details (via About and Impact tabs), network information (via Members tab).
    • Browse Causes. Under the Find Causes navigation menu. It’s broken (returns empty page).

    Food for Thought

    • Show me the money. Beneficiary organizations should provide detailed breakdown of where the donation money went. I’m not sure if this information is easy to obtain as I’m not a US citizen.
    • Real People, Real Responses. What if somebody from the Haiti earthquake came in and said, “Thank you for your donations. My family survived the ordeal.” I would hope this to happen.

    P.S. Sorry I wrote this post in a rush and it looks abit random with broken sentences and such. Hope you can understand what I’m writing 😛

  • Wow, US is in Deeper Shit

    Two news stories on Straits Times caught my attention. You should check them out too.

    US debt to hit ceiling

    WASHINGTON – THE US debt is on track to hit a congressionally proposed debt ceiling of 14.3 trillion (S$60.6 trillion) by the end of February, the Treasury said on Wednesday, a day ahead of a key vote to raise it to that level.

    AIG to pay US$100m in bonus

    NEW YORK – BAILED out US insurance giant AIG, now 80 per cent government owned, will distribute about US$100 million (S$141 million) of bonuses to employees on Wednesday, a person close to the matter said.

    Wow, maybe the US should be charged credit-card rates for the money they owe and the Treasury folks should contact our National Council on Problem Gambling.

    And whatever the rest of the story is about justifying the $100m in bonuses is just pure BS.

    US is going downhill. Some other country will take over the world soon. They are in shit. Deep, deep shit.