Archive for the ‘opinion’ category

Focus

November 28th, 2011

Some time ago, I wrote a post hypothesizing that “the cure for procrastination” is to become a busy person. With a constant stream of deadlines, the theory goes, one will not have the time to procrastinate.

I was wrong. It works, sure, but it’s the wrong thing to do. It forces you to schedule frivolous activities between the important ones. As Steve Jobs would say, if you want to do anything great, “cut the crap”. Focus on the one or two things that matter, and stop doing all the other crap that doesn’t matter. Jobs gave this advice to Larry Page, CEO of Google telling him to stop simultaneously working on hundreds of mediocre projects and instead focus on the ones that matter most. I’ve realized that this advice applies just as well to personal development. Doing hundreds of things at once will make it harder to become good at any one of them. Stop working on a hundred different projects and just work on them one at a time; Stop trying to please everyone and focus on the ones that matter most; Stop reading 6 different books at once and finish the one you’re reading before starting another one; Stop trying to learn eight different habits at once. Just focus.

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Internships and Grad Jobs Overseas

March 16th, 2011

This is a cross post from Beta, a news letter for CSE students written by CSE students

If you’re a second year cse student or above, it might be time to start thinking about what you want to do after uni. A great way to get started is with an internship. Several companies offer internships in Sydney, but I hope to convince some of you that doing an internship overseas or even taking a grad job in the US is a good idea.

First, a bit of background: If you’re a good software developer who is about to graduate from a computer science (CS) or software engineering (SE) degree, your job opportunities in Australia are quite limited compared to a student with similar talents and skills in the US. Google is probably on top of your list, and then possibly Atlassian, and if you’ve done a bit of research, a few smaller companies that you like (and that’s a big if because they sure are hard to find. Ever heard of micro-forte? OKLabs?). Your other options include doing a PhD to further delay your entrance into the real world in the hopes that conditions will be better when you’re done, or self employment which includes being an indie or freelance developer and starting your own company; anything to make a decent living without ending up at a bank or any organization that doesn’t appreciate recursion or python’s clean syntax as much as you do.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are the big 4 of technology companies, and then there are some you might not have even considered, such as Amazon, Nintendo, Nvidia, and Adobe. Out of those companies, only Google hire software and CS grads in their Sydney office. If a PhD and self employment are off the table, then Google stands above the rest as the best place to work, whether as an intern while you’re doing your degree, or as a graduate when you finish. Google Sydney is a great place to work (just ask anybody currently working there); but they can’t hire everyone and for one reason or another, you may also not want to work in Google Sydney.

What you may not realize is that the big 4 tech companies (as well as many others like Amazon and Nvidia) all offer internships and grad jobs to students all over the world, including Australia. Since they’re all competing for the same pool of excellent CS students coming out of American universities, they treat their interns and employees very well, and this is reflected in their salaries and working conditions. These companies treat their interns very well. They will sort out your visas (even if you’re not an Australian citizen), fly you to the US, pay a decent salary, and subsidize a lot of your accommodation costs. A good CS or SE grad in the US can expect to get at least 75k USD as a starting salary plus benefits and bonuses, and often more. This figure was a lot better when the exchange rate was was favoring the USD, but it’s still a pretty good figure. A good CS student in the US will have done some internships at these companies and receive several offers from different companies, which make starting salaries even higher. In comparison, the same CS or SE grad in Australia will often have to work at a bank to get close to that salary, and the work conditions for software engineers will almost certainly be worse. If you’ve seen the recent cse email about starting salary statistics, the highest and many of the above-average salaries are paid to people going to work overseas.

I just returned from an internship at Microsoft, and overall it was a great experience. They had intern social events every two weeks and many of us got heavily subsidized rental cars to drive everywhere. Interns even got free gym membership like full time employees.

At Microsoft, the work environment is great for engineers. Most engineers get to work at around 9:30-10am, and leave at 5-6pm, most full time employees have their own office to minimize distractions, and an unlimited supply of free soft drinks, milk and coffee.

Google of course is famous for their free buffets, gaming rooms (and even laundry services in their Silicon Valley office), and I’m sure Apple and Facebook have their own perks as well. Mark Zuckerberg used to take interns out to lunch!

Even if your eventual goal is to have your own company, or even if you don’t want to move overseas, doing a 3 month internship in the U.S. at one of these companies is still a great experience, and unlike anything you’ll find in Australia.

Your peers might site Macquarie bank or Deloitte (two of the biggest recruiters of CSE students) as good options, but these companies are not technology companies. The best marketing student will want a job at Proctor and Gamble, not Microsoft’s marketing department. Similarly, if salary is equal, the best CS student will take a job at Google over a job at Macquarie’s IT department any day.

Of course, the focus of this article is about the benefits of working at big companies overseas. If you don’t want to move overseas, or prefer to work in smaller companies that move fast, allow you to use your favorite open source tools and decide which tools and frameworks to use that, look out for an article by me in the next few issues of Beta! I’ll be profiling some of the hidden gems of great places to work in Sydney that don’t quite have the recruiting budget of a big co to tell you about themselves.

 

Update:

I should also point out that the cost of living a fair bit lower in most places in the US is also lower than it is in Sydney, in addition, some states like Washington (where Microsoft headquarters reside) don’t have an income tax, hence you would only pay the federal income tax, which is much lower compared to the income tax in Australia.

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Valuations Based on Partial Purchases are Almost Certainly ‘Overvalued’

January 17th, 2011

There’s a lot of talk about Facebook and Groupon being valued at $70 billion and $15 billion respectively, and there is a common wisdom from booming real-estate industries that says that the best properties almost always look too expensive initially. But let’s get back to basics. The value of an item in a free market is defined as the price someone is willing to pay for that item. In the case of real estate, a house being worth $400k means that someone is going to pay (or take out a mortgage for) $400k to buy the house.

In valuating companies however, the valuation is entirely based on investment for a fraction of a company. That valuation is extrapolated based on the partial purchase. For example, if an investor decides to pay $1 million for 20% of a company, then that company is said to be “valued” at $1 million / 0.20 = $5 million. As someone with a basic understanding of economics would know, not everyone is willing to pay the same price for an item. Hence, the investor who invested $1 million for 20% of the company might be the person who is willing to pay the most for that company (presumably he’s the most excited about it), and he may not want to pay that price for the next 20%. In fact, it might be that no one is willing to pay more than $500k for 20%, and if everyone else only wants to pay $500k for 4 parts of 20%, then the total value of the company is worth $1 million + 4*$500k = $3 million, not $5 million.

The investor is of course looking for a return on that investment and would therefore expect that someone else is willing to pay a higher price in the future. This is usually based on growth. If a company is growing very fast, then it’s expected that the company will be worth a lot more in the future. Therefore, the premium price they paid today is based on the expected future price of the company, the present value is lower, much lower for a high growth company like Facebook.

I’m not saying that Facebook won’t be worth $70 billion some time in the future, but until you find enough people willing to pay that price for every share of the company, it’s not currently worth $70 billion.

Update: Here’s a list of companies worth less than the current facebook valuation: http://larrycheng.com/2011/01/12/the-companies-worth-less-than-facebook/, and a comment on HN that relates to what I’ve said here:

It’s important to note that stock valuations are derived from the expected future profitability of a company. Stock is a claim on future profits. Compared to a company like Halliburton, who has to build billion-dollar oil rigs before they make any profit, a technology company like Facebook is a lot more lucrative and thus its stock can inflate quickly if the profits expand faster than costs. And generally technology costs go down over time while profits increase exponentially. So you have a powder-keg scenario in Facebook if, and only if, they find a profitable business model based on their enormous userbase. And they better find that business model or the stock will crash like it’s the year 2000.

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Gripes with Android

January 9th, 2011

As little as a month ago, if anyone asked me what phone to get, I would have told them to get an Android phone. Today, I’m not so sure. While I’m still a big Android fan, there are a few things missing or broken in Android that should have been there a long time ago.

1. Support for proxy settings for wireless networks. This wasn’t an issue until recently I started working for a company with a proxy authenticated wireless network. While there are ways to enable proxy settings on some rooted devices, they only work for simple proxy firewalls and doesn’t support authentication. While I work at a large software company with a mailing list of hundreds of self described Android enthusiasts, no one seems to have found a way to get on to the corporate wireless network consistently across devices.  This has to be the most complained about missing feature on the Android since release. My friends with iPhones and Win7 Phones do not share my pain as they both have proxy settings built in. If Android is going to take any market share away from Blackberry users, this has to be a high priority feature since many corporate wireless networks, and even many university wireless networks use proxy authentication. It’s such a basic feature for a wireless device that most people I’ve met, and myself included are surprised that it doesn’t exist when we have to use it.

2. Fragmentation of devices. This isn’t an issue with the majority of developers with CRUD apps that don’t have fancy graphics or hardware requirements, but many developers of games and widgets complain about the lack of standardization. While most Android devices are powerful enough for most developers needs, they still have to support the lowest end devices because they’re the ones whose users are going to leave one star ratings when they discover that the app doesn’t work. iPhone is the most consistent device to develop for and despite Android numbers overtaking iPhone numbers in the US, it’s still by far the most profitable. The recently launched Win7 Mobile has put some very high requirements for handset manufacturers intending to run Win7 Mobile. This will ensure that developers will be able to spend more time creating powerful high quality apps and less time worrying about device compatibility. There’s no doubt in my mind that this decision was made after seeing the problems with Android, and after seeing the device for myself and what others have thought of it, this is Microsoft’s shot at coming back into the smart phone market after the massive failure with the Kin phone.

3. Fragmentation of markets. This is not yet a huge problem, but every few weeks, I hear an announcement of some new Android market that is going to be launched promising to be better than what Google offers. In the US, phone carriers have began launching their own markets and some even won’t ship devices with the Android market built in. Amazon recently announced their developer preview of their Android market that will be much more like Apples Appstore with an approval process and quality standards for apps. Handster recently contacted many Android developers about their Market which from the looks of it might eventually support some new business models for apps. This is not strictly a bad thing, Google has said that “Android is an open platform” and people can do what ever they want with it, and no doubt there will be a lot of innovation from third parties trying different business models, and app distribution models to see what sticks, but this will hurt the users who will be overrun with choice about where to get apps. Apples innovation with the AppStore simplified how people bought software for their phone, they put everything in one place to reduce the amount of time looking for software, and put a quality standard in place to ensure that users where at least getting quality apps with a consistent design. Android seems to be doing the opposite.

4. The sorry excuse for a web interface for the android market. During Google IO 2010 in May this year, it was announced that there will be a Android Webstore like the iTunes store for the iPhone where users could browse and purchase apps and have those apps installed automatically on your phone. 7 months later, there is no word of this webstore. The closes thing we have is AppBrain, a third party app aggregator and app with a subset of the features of what the android web store should have been, including click to install on your phone.

5. Spam apps and the lack of quality requirements for Android apps. The android market is flooded with spam, junk and porn apps. Just take a look at the “Just in” section and you’ll see what I mean. The barrier to entry for publishing an app is almost non-existent. It’s completely inline with Google’s culture of giving users the power to decide what’s best, but it also detrimental to user experience.

I expect many of these features will be added or fixed over time, but it’s frustrating to see how slow things are moving. While a few months isn’t a long time, and Android certainly has improved a lot over the last few months, it’s still slower than the pace I would expect Google with the best Software Engineers in the world to go. Google’s fast moving startup days are disappearing and with so many products on the market, they’re just beginning to turn into a slow moving but very profitable tech company joining the ranks of Microsoft and IBM. I miss the days when the “don’t be evil” Google was young and quirky where everything they did was golden. And while they’re still the best company in the world, they’re losing their midas touch and as a Google fan, I’m starting to lose hope.

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