Leap Walking

I Internets, Therefore I Am

Having the internet as a big part of me is scary. It’s scary because I’ve let so much of my life be transformed by it. I don’t know how I got here, but I admit that using it has influenced me to stop watching TV, switch jobs the last few times, change the way I socialize with people, improve my domestic skills, and got me and my wife to pack our bags and move to England.

Also, it’s scary how so much of the future is going to arrive at my doorstep tomorrow. Maybe this is a curse of being a technologist, and one devoted to saving the world through it. It makes me wonder what kind of person I would have turned out to be if I read newspapers everyday, stuck with popular advice, and gone for an RM100k-a-year neck-and-tie job that would’ve made my life more cushy, if we had decided to remain in Malaysia.

It’s also scary how much I believe from the things I read.

I remember stumbling upon Penelope Trunk’s posts and being so inspired by it. Maybe because at the time, I was really feeling depressed at work, and longing for something a lot bigger than myself. That was what got me started with this blog. Somehow I had this impression that work-life in Malaysia seemed a lot worse than it seems, and I actually went around telling people to believe that and that it’s possible to achieve their dreams.

And thinking back, I don’t know if I was right. But I believed it and I still do now… but the point is, it wouldn’t have happened if I had not been living off the internet like some crazed hobo.

Is the World Really Changing?

My wife is fairly net-moderate. She’s literate, but she doesn’t feel she needs to check her Flickr or Facebook page every so often, like I do. Her inbox is filled with emails she hasn’t opened for days, weeks, sometimes months. Her job does require her to administer a Drupal site for the charity she’s working for, but it’s just a job. She’s dabbled with GIMP but that’s because it’s free and I told her to give it a try. The only thing she really relies on the internet for is streaming japanese dramas and mangas from fansub sites. If the internets died tomorrow and cellphones didn’t work, she wouldn’t give a hoot, except for maybe the lack of mangas.

On the other hand, I hang out with people who send twitter posts everytime they enter a pub. A core group of us coursemates organize events purely by @replies, it makes email look obsolete. I open up Gmail, and I get a Facebook notification from a friend who’s coming to visit the UK, and then another, and another, over a span of a week or so. No one asks for directions anymore, because it sounds silly if you don’t know how to use Google Maps. I am assimilating deeper and faster into an industry that lives and breathes technology, and will not sleep until all of creation’s problems are solved by it.

The contrasting realities are two perspectives I find hard to bring together, partly because they’re both a big part of my life.

I sometimes feel it’s like that out there in the world, too. That there’s a gap that’s moving in all sorts of directions and it’s hard to make sense where we’re going to end up tomorrow.

Being Net-Literate Doesn’t Necessarily Make You Better

I made an assumption in the past that you need powerful analytical skills and the ability to make sense of large amounts of information to survive in today’s info-rich world. Yet, I still find people who live in complete silos and have a worldview about as big as a small island. And they get by fine.

I also realized that people will gladly trade their resources for the so-called info-skilled people to do the dirty work, and just focus on managing them. This includes CEOs, managers, politicians, leaders, etc.

My dad, for example, has been running a few businesses for the last few years. I admire his reputation and his keen nose for a deal. He used to fumble so much with technology, but he’s getting better at it. By no means does it dictate the way he runs his life. He has ways of getting around that but I know it’s not about outsmarting technology.

I realize more and more that there are people out there who are successful and don’t need all that techie stuff to get there. They’re made from different kind of stuff, and it’s something I’ve only recently come to appreciate.

So now I’m not sure who’s smarter – the folks who skill themselves in technology to get ahead in life, or the folks who skill themselves in life to get ahead in a technology-driven world.

I know big things are coming ahead we’ve barely dreamed of, and I’ll probably be excited when it comes, but I can’t help but feel that I ended up the short end of a stick.

I feel that the whole getting-a-job-during-a-recession thing is getting a bit bloated. It seems that every so often, I get emails about events offering students help about how to get jobs during a recession, and people are constantly referring to it like the bubonic plague, as though jobs are impossible to come by and that you’d best be aiming a lot lower than you’d wished.

Recession = change, that’s all

While the recession is evident around us, it does not mean it’s impossible to get a job that pays well and gives you satisfaction. It just means that a lot of businesses are forced to take stock of what they have now and what they will be doing over the next few years, forcing a paradigm shift to leverage on anything and everything they can come up with.

And this is not just because everyone other company is doing it. It’s also because entire markets are changing.

The question about jobs during a recession is not about whether you can or cannot get one. It’s about asking what change is going to happen and where you feel you can provide the most benefit in such a opportunistic time as this.

What skills that was useful in getting a job before the recession will most likely apply to getting jobs during a recession. The only difference is understanding the needs of the shifting job market – and not just emerging ones but the “holes” left by people who have moved on from “traditional” jobs.

It’s not scary, it’s like a date

I can’t help but recommend Bolles’ 2009 revision of “What Color is Your Parachute?”. It’s a job-hunter’s classic, and I’ve not seen a book quite like it – because it really gets to the point, and it covers a lot of ground. The only negative comment I’ve heard about it was from some Amazon reviewer who criticized Bolles’ religious reference every now and then, which I felt was completely baseless.

To be honest, I think that if you have never been in various types of jobs, or have never faced the reality of being assessed for employment, then the whole process can be daunting and scary. But seriously, it doesn’t have to. Simply because it’s all about people searching for each other. Like a romantic date, it’s always scary the first time.

It takes a lot of verbal exchange, thinking, manners, courtesy, inquiry, exploration, patience and good old-fashioned friendship. But you never stop doing it. It’s just something that you constantly have to keep working on.

And if you want my opinion, the internet job application process doesn’t quite help with that. Simply because buttons and websites don’t talk back. They’re just lazy ways to send a resume off. There are much better ways to find opportunities for work… and not just any kind of work, but the kind of work that’s the stuff of dreams. The solution? Just keep talking to people, and be open about your needs and wants.

In fact, even if you’re already IN a job and fear for your life so much so that you never ever want to consider moving even though you’re so sick of where you are now… I think you should reconsider. Simply because there are a lot of exciting things happening right now, that have not been happening for the last few mundane years. You just need to keep your eyes peeled and look in places you haven’t thought possible.

Recession – a melting pot of opportunists and scammers

What pisses me off are companies like TheLadders.com who charge an exhorbitant amount of money to “fix” your resume, baiting on people who are in a need for that “one golden interview”. There are better ways to spend that cash. Seriously. Just search Google for “theladders scam” and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s kinda like Swoopo. Not quite scammish, but getting there.

During the recession there are two camps – people who are scared shitless they will do anything to salvage whatever’s left of their potential future, and then there are people who understand that the changing seasons just means renewed perspectives and look forward to a refreshing start.

The good news is that you get to choose which camp you’re in.

Related: Business Week Article – “Help Wanted: What That Sign’s Bad”

It’s been officially 8 months since I left home and settled down in greyish London, although the sun has been bright these days.

A typical week for me in London

A typical week involves making sure I get my gradschool work done, which is mostly just writing papers which are due over the next few weeks, thinking what to eat or cook for dinner, anticipating the next meetup with friends (usually coursemates, occasionally Malaysian friends who now live here, and sometimes industry people from the user experience community), or working on web development at my part-time job.

Now that just seems mundane, but I find it a novelty to wake up every morning in my tiny studio (which about the size of my previous bedroom in KL) in Islington (Holloway Road, not posh Upper Street), make myself a meal in my tiny kitchen, surf the web and see what’s happening on twitter, get dressed and head to campus to get some work done in the Main library. I don’t do this every day, of course… to avoid the mundane cycle.

Sometimes I just stay at home and write my papers there. I like to get work done at night so sometimes I work all night and sleep through the day.

Recently, on Fridays and Saturdays, I’ll hop on the 91 bus and take it to Crouch End, to Nathan’s (the guy who hired me), and Rey (the front-end developer), Sonia (the graphic artist), Nathan and I will all sit around his kitchen table and hack away at the system for a good day, with the sun overpowering our laptop screens through the big kitchen skylight.

I’m familiar with numbers like 29, 253, 254, and 91 – all buses which ferry me back and forth from home to the tube stations or school. 12 is common for the price we’d pay per person per meal in £ for dinner at Pizza Express. 592.70 for the amount of take-home pay I get after 2 weeks of coding part-time.

Life in the in-betweens

Life in London involves little pockets of activities during the in-betweens. In-between paper writing, libraries, buses, tubes, code, lunch, weekends and weekdays, and seasons.

I don’t know how we did it with my crazy random schedule, but my wife and I have managed a day out at Hampstead Heath, sips of coffee at Monmouth, several trips to Pizza Express, and occasional shopping along the high streets. It all happens in the in-betweens.

Like when a core group of my coursemates decide to head to the Duck n’ Dive for a pint or two. And cheap pizza at Icco’s, or grabbing a quick cheapy indian takeaway lunch from Poppadoms.

It happens sporadically.

Like back in KL?

It’s quite like it was back in KL. Except that it involved a lot of eating – often in different places. It was always a different place. You never went back to the same place the next day, unless you were desperate.

And instead of walking everywhere and taking the bus and the tube, we always went everywhere by car. It would’ve been almost impossible otherwise. Imagine walking all the way from Midvalley to Brickfields in the hot sun.

And I didn’t drink as much beer and alcohol back in KL. I liked my Kilkenny on tap at La Bodega, but it was expensive so I could only afford one per visit.

Nights out with my good friends in KL were a lot more fun, maybe because we had a lot of good old stories to tell, and there was interesting stuff happening with each of us. It was like a support group, except that you’d get teased and joked about and told off when you were being a gnat.

There was really nothing much happening at work then. The offices were dull. Occasionally there would be interesting projects. But I’d tend to forget than remember them. The only ones I really enjoyed was the ones outside of the office, like the DTAC project that took me to Thailand for three weeks.

The common numbers were 7, which is about the time I leave the office in the evening; 3 for the number of dishes I’d order for my wife and I for taichow on a typical weekday dinner out; 2000 for the average amount of ringgit I’d spend every time I visit Bali; 1.5 for the price of a teh si peng, which is by far my most ordered drink; 83 for the average amount of ringgit I’d spend on a full tank for my Alfa Romeo 146; 2 for the time I usually go to bed in the a.m.

Yes this post was pretty pointless, but at least you get a sense of where things haven’t changed.