Thursday, October 21, 2010

Engineering job... but not in SG?

quoting => http://forums.salary.sg/education-personal-growth/646-engineering-technology-careers-not-valued-singapore-high-cost-low-tech-4.html

"After reading all your comments, I really do feel compelled to chip in my 2 cents worth.

My stand is that Singapore doesn't really pay that well for its engineers and scientists (techies). While I agree that while techies cannot expect hefty bonuses like the bankers (as they are usually not directly involved with sales), too low pay will cause your tech people to worry and be distracted and not focus on the job. Thus the quality of work is likely to deteriorate.

I have a close friend who just completed a PhD in the defence engineering industry. He's starting salary in Singapore is only 5k after slogging so hard, and that is one of the highest around. I have heard horror stories of other companies paying even lower than that. With this kind of mindset from employers, how can Singapore ever encourage its people (who are super practical and kiasu) to ever go into science and engineering?
Compare this to overseas engineering companies in Israel, where the starting pay for an undergrad (yes u-grad) is $6k SGD. Not absolutely fantastic, but good enough. I have also seen adverts for engineering teachers in Dubai with a 200k+ salary tax FREE.

So my advise would be the same as with many others:

Do engineering and get out of Sg. Stay in Sg, get out of engineering.
"



"I have been in Software Engineering for 10+ years and I can tell you that it is a lot of hard work , late nights and below average pay when compared to the people in the financial section. But we had our good days (remember the dotcom bubble), when everybody wants to be in Software (even actresses) and salary was rocketing. 

Last few years, globalization has made Software Engineering not so attractive because you have to compete with Engineers from cheaper Asian countries and thus limit your salary. If Singapore engineer pay go up, it has to be justified with higher productivity (which may mean longer working hours) and better innovation (which is easier said than done).

The statements about demand supply is correct, as it more or less sums up the situation I described above. The only silver lining I see is that Singapore has highly motivated and skilled engineers compared to the cheaper Asian countries and many MNCs are aware of that, so they still depend a lot on us to provide their IT solutions.

One question, will the finance and banking industry one day face globalization like IT ? I remember reading that it was already happening with Accounting jobs going to India , but anybody can comment on this?
"

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Magic of the Bidet

Imagine you are eating a chocolate cake on a plate. Naturally, some yummy chocolate would have dropped onto the plate. Once you have finished your yummy chocolate, its time to do the dishes. As we are all familiar with, we will rinse the plate (+detergent) under the sink. This gets rid of some of the chocolate, which we proceed to scrub away with a kitchen sponge.

Now... apply the process to wiping the butt after you shit. In a country without bidet, you may use the toilet paper to wipe the butt. If the paper is still dirty, repeat the process. This cycle will go on maybe 5~10 times, depending on how sticky your shit is.

BUT WITH BIDET... it is like rinsing the chocolate off the plate before you wipe (scrub) it. The water jet sprinkles your butt with 3~5 levels of intensity, and with the option to oscillate forwards and backwards to "hit the correct spot". So statistically, after rinsing off the chocolate, you may require 2~4 wipes for your butt, for the same level of stickiness of the chocolate.

(Although I might digress at this point to comment that some individuals might opt to skip the wiping process after rinsing of the chocolate.... I beg to differ and view the wiping process as a necessary routine.)

AND AMAZINGLY, the success is even more evident when your shit is even more sticky! In the event that you have ate something really bad and requires around 20+ wipes to clear... it takes <10 wipes now!!! This is absolutely fabulous because the butt is always so painful after 20+ wipes. And you feel weird if you don't wipe it 99.99% clean.

Oh... why am I writing this? Because I have just engaged in the services of The Bidet, and I am in a happy, songbird-lalala, dancing mood. And I am currently pondering on whether to purchase The Bidet to bring back to Singapore. Comments are welcome.


Coming Up Next:
How The Bidet Seat-Warming feature relaxes your butt and thigh muscles to make you shit better.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Being a nerd made me a sucker for neatness

Refactoring. Whats that? Its a computer term for tidying up code, improving efficiency, renaming user-friendly names, etc. Today, when I saw some code that was like this, I was flabbergasted and fricking tempted to refactor and clean it all up. And I did.

Original:

void SortByColumnA()
{
    (blah)
    (blah)
    (blah)
    MergeSort( start, end, originalArray, finalArray, SortTypeColumnA);
    (blah)
}




void SortByColumnB()
{
    (blah)
    (blah)
    (blah)
    MergeSort( start, end, originalArray, finalArray, SortTypeColumnB);
    (blah)
}

void SortByColumnC()
{
    (blah)
    (blah)
    (blah)
    MergeSort( start, end, originalArray, finalArray, SortTypeColumnC);
    (blah)
}



...(D, E)...

void SortByColumnF()
{
    (blah)
    (blah)
    (blah)
    MergeSort( start, end, originalArray, finalArray, SortTypeColumnF);
    (blah)
}




And so I took all the five... (or was it six) functions, kept one, deleted the rest, and tidied them up. Viola! Pleasant for the eyes. No more feeling like taking out a chopper to find the culprit who did this. Magnificent. Kon-kon.

After:


void SortColumn(SortTypeColumn sortTypeColumn)
{
    (blah)
    (blah)
    (blah)
    MergeSort( start, end, originalArray, finalArray, sortTypeColumn);
    (blah)
}


And I never thought i would write a techy-blog post like this.
Just needed to get it out of my system. I really wanted to tear out my hair when I saw functions A, B, C, D, E, F, with 98% similarity, and only a different variable/function name. Obviously the result of a quick copy-and-paste, modify name, submit and check-in operation. RRRRGGGH.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

鼓動:声殺して

異国ゾラの下、僕は盲唖の役演じてた。
骨まで冷える風が、何故友の顔懐かしいだろう