Month: September 2010

Biggest Financial Obstacle: Your Pride

mo money mo problems

I’ve mentioned multiple times before that earning more money does not equate to financial stability. You may think that that’s just some theory I picked up in random financial books, but thanks to a certain show of internet drama last week, I now have a good example of why Notorious B.I.G. was right:

For those of you who don’t have time on their hands to read the posts and comments, here’s the summary:

Law professor and his Oncologist wife earns over half a million dollars a year. They’re going to lose the Bush-era tax cuts they have, and so he’s whining that he won’t get to pay for all of his expenses i.e. he’s going to be poor.

Before you go “WTF, I’d be happy to earn just $20K a year!” I would like to point out that the couple’s problem isn’t limited to people earning that much. A lot of middle class people also fall into the same trap as that family.

It all boils down to pride.

Say you’re a twenty-something professional earning PhP 25K a month after taxes. It’s not hard to imagine what type of people you’re hanging around with: yuppies obsessed with getting the latest cellphone models, clubbing and out of town gimiks, and looking forward to getting that promotion/credit limit increase so that they could get a car loan.

You basically have two options here. The “easy” route is to just go with the flow: spend your money like them. Get your monthly cash flow to negative just so you could appear as rich as your friends. Don’t worry about debt: you’ll eventually get promoted later and by then you’d be able to pay all of them off.

But you won’t. By the time you’re earning more, your colleagues have changed too. They’ll be spending more so you’ll also be spending more. Before you know it, you’ll be pulling in a 7 digit yearly salary but still have money problems like the good professor in the story above.

Or you can take the second option: swallow your pride.

The most glaring indication that the professor in question has no financial literacy whatsoever is his insistence to get a loan for a $1M home when he hasn’t even paid off his student loans yet. This irrational focus on appearance has ruined many relatively well-off families (including my family, but that’s a different story altogether).

Don’t think of it as “living below your means”; think of it as “not living beyond your means.” I’m not asking you to take a vow of poverty here; it’s still ok to hang around with your gadget obsessed friends, just don’t get pressured into doing (financially) stupid things.

If all of them are carrying iPhones and Android phones just for show, why should you waste a month’s worth of effort on such a device instead of putting it in better investments? You will be teased, yes, but in the long run, who’s going to have a lot less financial problems when shit hits the fan?

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Bonus:

Here’s what happens when whole nations get the “get a crapload of money but don’t know how to spend it” dilemma: The Resource Curse.

The Inefficiency Factor

Busy day so just a short post for tonight:

room full of typists

The IT industry isn’t a manufacturing industry: it’s a service industry. Whether you’re a developer, a tester, or an ops/sysad, your purpose isn’t just to code, test, or run programs: your purpose is to make sure those programs work well enough to provide tangible benefits to the user.

But what if the software you’re providing poses some problems or negative effects on the users?

No, I’m not talking about malware or crappy software. I’m actually talking about good software that makes processes and tasks much more efficient than they are.

They can cause problems because some people actually thrive on inefficiency.

These are the back room personnel that block any sort of automation process because they know they will be rendered redundant (i.e. fired) once it’s implemented.

These are the software vendors or internal IT departments that refuse to allow third party companies/consultants to fix or replace their buggy systems because the former earns a lot of profit on support call fees.

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Sadly, I don’t have any quick advice on dealing with these people. I’m just here to point out again that Software Engineering isn’t about technologies and processes: it’s always about people.

Ruby on Windows

Some posts just write themselves. Today’s post comes from my reply to a guy in PhRUG who still thinks you need a Mac before you can develop Rails applications.

windows and ruby

This is probably the biggest problem the Ruby/Rails community has when trying to spread the word in this country: the lack of interest in supporting Windows.

I mean, a typical response to the legitimate question “I’m using Windows, how to I practice RoR?” is the fanboy answer: “Get a Mac!”

And that, my dear readers, is a dick move. If I was an average college student and you told me that, I’ll immediately think “WTF?!? I just want to try out this open-source language and web framework and I need to shell out a couple of years worth of tuition?!?”

Answering “Format your hard drive and install Linux” is less of a dick move, but a dick move nonetheless.

Thus, if we rubyists want to spread the word about Ruby, we’ll have to make Windows a viable OS for Ruby development. Here are a few options available to us:

Continue reading “Ruby on Windows”

My DevCon talk

Yesterday was my third public speaking engagement for this year, the first being in Ignite Manila and the second was a presentation on Haml.

Not much of a background here. Ida just invited me to talk, and since I knew what the audience was like, I felt like talking about preparing for the real world.

My talk was delivered mostly in Tagalog, not only to allow me to convey my ideas clearer, but also to have a deeper effect on the student audience. For this “transcript”, however, I will be paraphrasing my talk to English for the sake of possible foreign visitors.

From Doghouses to Skyscrapers

“Transcript” below the cut.

Continue reading “My DevCon talk”

Beer Game

Very busy week ahead. Here I am coding at 2AM in the morning instead of playing StarCraft or something.

Might as well make a quick post before continuing with work.

Beer Game

I first heard of the Beer Game in a presentation over at InfoQ. While not involving actual beer (boo!), the simple game provides an interesting glimpse at a certain management dilemma.

This game is played by teams of 4 players, each representing a part of a beer distribution supply chain: Factory, Distributor, Wholesaler, Retailer. The object of the game is to minimize the expenses involved in handing orders, namely the costs for stocking and the expenses caused by unfulfilled back orders.

The “kicker” here is that communication between the players are limited, some variations only allow players to order from each other and nothing else, while some variations of the game only allow the players to see the inventory of the next player in the supply chain.

The common result of this is the bullwhip effect: an oscillating period of over and under-stocking. For example:

  • Retailer receives an order for 10 cases of beer. To anticipate for future orders, he orders 20 cases of beer from the Wholesaler.
  • Having received an order for 20 cases of beer, the Wholesaler orders 40 cases of beer.
  • With the same logic, the Distributor orders 80 cases.
  • Finally, the Factory produces 160 cases.

Even ignoring the expiration of the product, one can easily see the waste produced by this scheme. There’s the warehouse stocking expenses. There’s also the expense in hiring employees to meet the sudden increase in demand, as well the expense in firing employees and shutting down equipment because of lack of demand.

And so we see the importance of visibility and transparency within a supply chain. When the suppliers upstream have the same information as the Retailer, it’s easier for them to decide how much to actually produce to reduce waste.

Note that this doesn’t just apply to manufacturing. Any situation with a work pipeline (e.g. software development’s Analyst-Developer-QA-Ops) benefits from increased visibility of resource utilization and work load.