Enhancement of performance management

 Triviality  No Responses »
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.

How many mails I received everyday?

 Triviality  No Responses »
Mar 302010
 

I started collecting this information since Nov 2004, and here is the graph:I got ridiculous number of mails everyday while I was working for mail (which makes sense since it’s mail team, everything is a mail), which is around 10K daily, and after I move to current team it dropped to (sort of) reasonable number which is couple of hundreds per day.

re-org

 Triviality  No Responses »
Mar 252010
 

Re-org time again, let me see if I can make things clear, I know I’m not good at it anyway :D.

  • My boss’ boss will no longer be a people manager, he’s going to work for my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss to be a chief architect, definitely a promotion
  • My boss will have a new boss who’s not on board yet, and the new comer will no longer report to my boss’ boss’ boss, instead, he’s going to report to another VP which is the same level as my boss’ boss’ boss
  • Nothing else changed yet, but could be, however, who cares ๐Ÿ˜€

To make things clear, I composed a org-chart shown on the right. The left part of the diagram is what’s now, and the right part is what’s going to be. Note that “Director R” at the left changed to “Chief Architect R” on right, and a new “Director C” is added to the right.

Any questions please comment to this post, I will try my best to answer any kind of questions.

But why do you care? ๐Ÿ˜€

TurboTax and e-filing

 Triviality  No Responses »
Mar 232010
 

I had e-filing problem last year and even customer support people could not figure out what was the problem (BTW, it was the first time I saw people doing remote desktop thing for support which is pretty cool), so they end up with refunding my money paid for e-filing.

I tried e-filing again this year and same thing. Reading the help articles and discussions on the web doesn’t help too much. I tried to change SSL/certificate setting in IE, nothing helped, I’m on wired LAN so wireless problem should not be an issue to me, I tried on both Vista and XP but neither worked so …

I thought it could be because I’m using Chinese version of those Windows, so I installed everything on my corporate-issued laptop (thanks for the download version, easy to install anywhere you want), things are working like a charm.

I still need to dig out if it is network issue (such as TurboTax or IRS blocked Comcast which seems less possible), or it is actually Chinese edition problem – I would like to say the 2nd one is more reasonable.

However, I may only get the answer the coming year, since I’ve filed everything …

10 years ago

 Triviality  No Responses »
Mar 232010
 

I was downloading something (in my office) just now and found the speed was pretty fast, and this reminds me 10 years ago …

It was my first trip to headquarter, whenever I hook up my laptop and start downloading something (I think it was Messenger), it was … super fast.

I talked to my colleague and asked him what’s the bandwidth between office and outside internet, he was not sure and said could be Giga.

Man, GIGA!!! I think most Chinese Internet companies at that time are running 2X100M for IDC, and offices used to use 64K (DDN) or 128K (ISDN).

Things changed a lot in the past 10 years, and something will happen in 10th year :), stay tuned.

Finally Thunderbird fixed its problem

 Triviality  1 Response »
Mar 222010
 

It seems 3.0.3 is a good version, at least to me.

I think I was one of the first batch that tried out TB3, however, it seems my mailbox does not fit into TB3 – I have ~600 mail folders, with ~110K mails and the biggest folder has about 8000 mails. Obvious old version of TB3 cannot handle this – it popped up error message window from time to time and every time I started TB3 I have to wait for pretty long time to get everything sync’ed.

Thanks 3.0.3, it works now.

As a side note, corporate IT seems force me upgrade to TB3 for whatever reason I don’t know, so I put a shortcut on my desktop to downgrade to TB2 – I believe I’ve run this “downgrade” close to 50 times in the past 3 months, luckily I no longer need to do it.

 Older Entries