Jul 212011
 

Actually it was not that long, but I was super busy thus I guess it made me feel like long.

Alright, back to the topic – I’m trying my best to sort things out and obviously I’m making progress although it was not that fast. OA team is going smoothly (thank my boss who took lot of effort to babysit OA), and wireless team is hiring (I guess this could be the only thing they can do at this moment, may last for a month or so), the manager of infrastructure team finally got on board and I’ve already thrown everything to him, and the manager of mail team will be on board soon so pretty much I can hand over all routine stuffs to him.

What’s next? Focus on products. Mail and Mailing List are two products are under heavily improvement, and they have to be successful to make the mail team survive. Infrastructure team needs to think about what kind of products they are going to deliver, and what’s the working model with other project teams. Architect team’s task is to set up a proper workflow for architecture review, architect community, and so on, and wireless team, for sure, is hiring those die-hard Android and iPhone gurus.

I was no chaos in the past 6 or 8 months, I wish (and I believe) things are getting better now.

Apr 192010
 

I cannot believe there are so many people leaving, from different teams, different position, and heading to different companies.

Outside world may not be able to know all these since these are not that senior as our CTO, however, this is a bigger problem to me as all these are experienced people, staying here pretty long, so losing them is a real lost.

Mar 312010
 

New policy is coming out regarding the performance management, that is, manager will review performance (and maybe setup goal as well) with employees in a quarterly basis. It is an important enhancement, definitely, which can help people understand how he/she was doing and what’s the expectation from management, and this is the enhancement that we tried couple of times in the past ~10 years …

So every time people started complaining about goals are unclear, or feedback is not timely, the company triggered this kind of “enhancement” but soon people (may be another group of people) started complaining that there are too many paperwork or B.S. meeting and that’s annoying, then, you know it, right? Company would move back to annually review.

Let’s see how long it can last this time. I would to say this is a bad idea since it just adds more paperwork to good managers who keep good communication with their team members, and it doesn’t help those managers who don’t share their idea with their teams. Management, especially people management is not something that can be “formalized”, i.e. make it formal policy/process, it is more about basic human interact.

Anyway, that’s my understanding, and I could be wrong.

Feb 222010
 

It’s a big day to some of people in the company – it was said some of us will get notice of “you are going to M$)”.

I haven’t got anything and seems I won’t get anything like that, same to other people in my team. The most interesting thing today is, the team sitting beside our cube gathered together (20 or so people) and list all the names on a whiteboard into two columns – one is green M$, and the other is purple. People laughing, discussing, taking photographs, and so on, it seems like a big party.

Well, enjoy, in the coming months groups like this will be split into two, and people who used to work together will then work for different companies.