Siu Lun

Today I want to document my views and plans on assembling a world class team over the next N years that can produce some outstanding work with little or no trouble.

First of all, I would like to discuss what personalities I believe I need.

Ordered by my preference

1. Honest
2. Frank
3. Willing to learn
4. “Gets on with it”
5. Friendly / Easy going
6. Communicative
7. Unfazed
8. Responsible
9. Considerate
10. Time management
11. Intelligence

I think I can only think of these much at the moment. Now I’ll explain why, lets start from the bottom.

Intelligence
Intelligence is always a requirement, I need people to be able to think. However it is at the bottom of my priority when choosing a team member. Why? Simply because I believe there are more important things than being intelligent.

Time management
Time is money. In one way or another, that statement is true. Without the ability to manage time, your team could lead you to lose money. However, this is again not a high priority characteristic, as most of the time the individual will be working as part of a team, and if their team working and responsibility skill is high, I believe time management comes automatically. This is only a requirement when an individual will work alone for an extended period of time.

Now the last two characteristics I’ve mentioned while it is on the list, I would not say they’re of the utmost importance, but from here on, if I am able to put characteristics in parallel, they’re all high priority characteristics I would look for.

Considerate
Being considerate is important, without the ability to be considerate, or essentially, put yourself into another’s shoes. I would say they are less likely to be polite to others, be courteous and the general liklihood is, they’ll make bad personnel to be shown to your clients. In addition, they’ll be less likely to be able to make useful/considered contributions to creating a solution for your clients. However, this characteristics is not as important as what’s coming up next, the reason being, while in an ideal world, it would be great to have a team of superman/woman, this does not happen, and in a development house, the liklihood is that if only part of the team is considerate, that would be enough.

That’s it for part 1.

Website owners take note.

“A Dutch website has been sued – and sued successfully – for the way Google summarized one of its pages.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/02/google_snippet/

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.