New Trainee
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
2 months into my industrial training program, a new trainee shows up. She’s from UTP, which stands for something something Petronas. When I first heard that she was from Petronas, I was like, holly shit.. don’t play play man..
Yeah, not surprisingly, she was on scholarship there. Heck, can you believe that they get their living cost allowance, even during industrial training? Geez, it’s a whole 500 bucks, on top of what HSBC pays us..
You see, when there’s 4 guy trainees, and then a new girl trainee, they (the other guy employees) just love to poke fun at one thing.. and they always come after lunch hour..
So today I went lunch with her.. dude, what’s the big deal eating with a girl? I know they know that.. but they just love to poke fun at me.. “Oh, no wonder so long lah…”
It so happens that the girl is kinda talkative, as compare to 2 of the other trainees. Whenever I go lunch with either of them, there’s totally nothing to talk about! Just walk out, makan, then back office, all in less than 30 minutes. Dude, I value the company ok?
Heh, anyway, I went up to the CEO’s office today. Damn, even the secretary’s office space and table was so friggin huge.. it was nearly half a basketball court.. however, the decor must have been left un-touch for years, it had a antique kinda feel to it, the classic kinda decor..
Job Satisfaction vs Pay
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
How would you define a dream job? Easy: satisfying job and good pay. Jobs should be satisfying - you should be happy at work, you should get along great with co-workers, it should be challenging enough, you should be able to work the way yout want etc etc..
But, what if you have to choose between job satisfaction and a high salary?? Which would it be?
I believe most will choose a high paying job. But for my situation right now, I’d definitely go with job satisfaction - this is mainly due to the fact that I’m not in dire need of money.. Read the rest of this entry »
Unleash AJAX
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Recently, I realized a major shortcoming with Lotus Notes. As you could probably imagine, businesses deal with lotsa transactions everyday, and to get a head of competitors, they need to make sense outta these daily transactions. These transactions can be in any form, but I’ll take the simplest example: sales data.
What I’ve learned from my industry training, is that when you give a product to a client, every user of that product would have differing requirements. For the project that I was under, we spent an hour or so discussing with the client about the reporting functions of the product (implemented with Lotus Notes). Amongst the problems are:
- Existing reports need to be updated, due to changing user requirements.
- As only a few users were involved in the discussion, we were unaware of the needs of other users.
- The “reports” in Lotus Notes are basically views (tables) that are grouped according to certain criterias. As the users were afraid that there were too many views, they had to “design” views that satisfy a number of requirements. In other words, to get certain statistic, users would need to do some simple “exploration” or “calculation”. The system was unable to spoon feed them with the exact info they need.
The worst technical limitation with Notes is that it’s entirely server based. Although users can use JavaScript, but the Notes/Domino architecture was pretty server-centric. For example, if you wanted to do some formatting on fields for display on a report, it’ll have to be done on the server. JavaScript is mainly used for data validation on a web client.
Well, this is what AJAX (and JavaScript) is developed for: to shift processing away from the server. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a JavaScript client that could allow users to quickly sort and group data according to their needs? Better still, allow the user to apply filters on the results.. That way, users are in complete power over the reporting of vast amounts of data. More importantly, it will significantly reduce server load, allowing a single server to serve more clients, and of course, each user will get better response times from the server.
Tags: hsbc
Working at HSBC
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal
It’s my 5th day at work over at HSBC, the world’s local bank. Here, they aim to be the most preferred bank, by emphasising a lot on customer service.
It’s sad I don’t have a camera phone, else I can post some pics here of my workplace. Anyway, I’m sure you guys have wonderful imagination, so here’s what I’m gonna do:
[ picture of a mosque ]
As me and Yu Bin were walking towards HSBC (along the river), I pointed to the mosque and asked him, a local Ampang boy: “is that Masjid Jamek? As in the Jamek mosque??”. All I got was a shrug. So much for having a local boy as my guide. He did know some places for lunch around Petaling Street though. Read the rest of this entry »
