Siu Lun

I’ve been searching through the webs of the Hong Kong government and banking websites the past few days. After realising I forgot to change my registered office address with 1 of the 2 agencies that you must inform when you change address. (First of all, I don’t understand why they can’t talk to each other. It’s so dumb, but that’s out of context.) I also ‘forgot’ or more like, I only recently established that no matter whether I get paid, my company, as a seperate legal entity has to register for MPF. (which means I have to apply for an MPF scheme – which is a mandatory retirement savings plan).

So… as I set out seeking information like I would do. I found that the websites information are incoherent, hard to understand, and in some cases, (word to describe language with 2 or more meanings). After spending almost an entire night reading through those websites. I found that actually reading the cantonese make a little more sense sometimes, but at the end of the night. I came out of the tangle of web with more questions than I first started.

The next day, I actually had to phone those departments up and ask one by one to clarify, but you know what. I still only half believe them. One thing I found in Hong Kong, many of the people who’re behind those phone lines doesn’t really care about you or what they’re doing. I wouldn’t go to the point to say they tell me false information, but often, their information is misleading. The majority cause of this I believe is because of a lack of information coming from them. i.e. They’ll tell you one thing, but don’t tell you other important pieces of associated information. Why?

Is this down to the people’s personality here or just because they don’t know any more in-depth than I do? Who knows.

In any case, this is exactly the type of problems that should be avoidable by putting information on the web. But why do people still have so many troubles getting info? I believe this is because the content provider is not aware that even though the ‘core’ piece of information maybe avaliable, but additional pieces of information to close any potential gaps or holes are not. At least, that was the problem I was having. After reading through about taxes, company laws, bank product and services pamhlet, I’m left with a big sour head cause I managed to find a lot of holes and gaps in their information.

If I had a choice between a company that gives good concise information vs one that dosen’t. I would be going to the one that has better information. But unfortunately what I’m dealing here are all the same. All bank websites and product information is either WAY too complex to understand or not enough information.

talk about frustration.

I’ve been looking at job posting in Hong Kong again today on jobsdb.

One thing that struck me today is that a web developer or any programmers in fact requires fairly good knowledge of english, if not at a native like level. Yet, why are the wages still so low? A quick look at wages for english teachers reveals that actually… teaching english in Hong Kong would earn you twice as much average wage.

WTFBBQ?

My hyposis is that there is a huge number of people who claims to be able to make website so supply of web developers becomes ‘huge’.
Bosses are either taking advantage of this situation by lowering wages, or they’re actually usually too old know that you need pretty good english skills to actually be good in web development.

Just thought I’d share my thoughts, not that I care that much. In fact, being an employer myself, I welcome the fact I can get cheap labour. Though I think I would be more generous if I can.

I think the Hong Kong needs a web advice/standards agency where local businesses can actually get information on what a good website consist of and how to actually use the web to increase sales and revenue. Actually… I kinda think Hong Kong businesses needs advice on how to make use of advertising. I’ve spoken to a lot of new startups at the local youth business society thingy and they all say they don’t want to give money to others to do advertising, promotion or websites.

Whatever, enough thinking for today. Later.

Well, just to update a little progress tbh. I’ve just finished configuring a working EC2 server with full backups etc… I’ve had to deal with a lot of issues as I went along and this is actually my 3rd/4th attempt. Previous attempts I messed something up while configuring which meant I had to restart from scratch.

Took long enough but I’m starting to put all my sites over there now.

Later