寫給自己︱Lionel.

Kind of on a whim, I decided to spend some time on reading the headcount report cut off Jan 14th yesterday afternoon. Segment HR will send the report on a weekly basis, but these sorts of reports just went unnoticed by me before :- (

Some random thoughts occur to my mind after reading the report & thinking of those people I have more or less contact with during work, here I summarize as follows:

1) So many people didn’t get promotion ever since they began working here, and they still don’t choose to leave;

2) So many people have been working here for more than 5 years! Can't imagine how they endured @ this damn place;

3) So many people look so young while they're already married and probably parents for long(their kids maybe attending elementary school now!)

4) So many people, esp. in engineering dept, on the whole got a slower promotion within their long term service compared to those in business or material dept;

5) the stuff mobility in business unit is much stronger compared to other departments…I don’t know the exact reasons, maybe it’s because the people of this dept feel more pressure and are easier to get burned out; or maybe the people of this dept(usually majoring in humanity/language/social science subjects back in university) are more ambitious and harder to satisfy...or maybe they just don't fit well(generally speaking) the manufacturing industry, the work in this industry sometimes is just too trivial and boring...

We're having a messy situation this week after the ten days long shutdown. Things almost went screwed up, the daily output and shipment missed our target and failed customer's expectation every day, why?  

I'm still haunted by the first three days of this week, when our senior manager Kent called us for internal meeting after 17:30. The starting time is already horrible enough, you know at 17:30 we're supposed (or allowed) to leave office, but that seems just nothing to mention when compared to the meeting itself. In the meeting, Kent kept asking us two questions: 1) what are you going to do? 2) what have you done? Usually the questions would get answered after a long embarrassing silence, and the answers sometimes just sound so unpersuasive, under that kind of embarrassing environment every single reason spoken out would sound unpersuasive actually, even it's sadly true.   

As a relatively new and inexperienced guy who still doesn't take over truly important tasks, I guess this sort of meeting makes me feel less uncomfortable than that it does to other members, like Ken, Jason or Ryan, who have their own models and businesses to be responsible for. But i felt bad too, esp when i looked at Ken, who has coached me and rendered great kindness and support to me since i came. I'm supposed to help him in many ways, but up till now i'm still not helpful enough, the reasons are mainly that i myself am not very interested in the job and he as my coach is too busy to teach me and assign me tasks. And probably one more reason: our team members (except Anny & Jancy) in general and Ken in particular are so down-to-earth that they'd rather do many things themselves, which to some extent sacrificed our opportunity to grow faster and more independent. 

The morale of each dept is not so high these days, esp under the world economy crisis circumstance. Our company has adopted many new policies to reduce cost, such as OT control or even cancellation, which's definitely a bad new for DLs, who receive 1000 or some basic salary on average and expect to earn more by working overtime(that's what OT stands for). For us IDLs, the quarterly bonus we enjoy is affected by the overall grooming economy as well, according to some, their Quarter 2(July ~Sept) bonus received at the beginning month of Q3(that's December)is even less than their monthly wage, which never happened before and made them really disappointed. On a micro level, where our nVidia project is concerned, the demand from customer is always changeable and hard to forecast; the CS team and our project team are having a long lasting subtle relation; and sometimes we as PAs are not proactive and aggressive enough to follow up and push things, as Kent put it, we're too tolerable and considerate of others...and last month IBM project was segment-internally transferred to us and we began to have two projects running with the total manpower resources remaining unchanged ---sounds a little bit unreasonable but it's true, there're simpily no new PAs or engineers added. 

Things began going better from yesterday on, but based on the previous delay and newly-added POs from customer, plus the IBM production, our spring festival holiday schedule have to be postponed. Per the review meeting this afternoon, where all functional dept representative or even managers & directors attended, the optimistic estimate to finish all the backlog and new build will be 23rd(2 days from lunar new year!). No one is feeling good about this, everyone wants to go back home asap for the holiday, but the damn work things are keeping us occupied in this damn place! 

I don't want to complain much, as i've got approved to go back, but the date has to be changed from the previously planned 18th to 23rd, and the transportation has to be switched from train to plane! Wow, i'm now quite cost sensitive actually, I planned to buy a train ticket before, but now i have to fly home, good sounding but more RMB spending= =!Lol. 

I never expected to have two flights before and after the short CNY holiday. I booked an air ticket from Hangzhou to Guangzhou online on the last day of Dec, taking the then reasonable price and my would-be first flying experience into consideration. But two flying experiences within such short time are way too much, at least for the current me, still a poor guy hoping to apply for more credit cards...

Photo taken @ Dec birthday party, Shanli Palace, South Campus of Flextronics Zhuhai.

It's my Lunar Birthday today!  

The 1st Day of the 12th Lunar Month. 

Actually i decided last year (or more specifically, right after my last birthday) to set and celebrate my birthday by solar calendar, as the traditional lunar one is a little bit complicated and seldom used in our life. So you can imagine how pleasantly surprised i was by the fact that two old friends still remember the lunar date, without their phone call and text message, i'd have spent the whole day today totally unaware it's possibly kind of a special occasion for me.  

And i'm again so pleasantly surprised that the company monthly birthday party falls on today! Our company has a tradition to hold birthday parties on a monthly basis for its employees, and this December party happened to meet  with my lunar birthday. Such a coincidence!

45K PO that will bring us approx $12 million in additional revenue suddenly pulled in…then…

1)  We took it as no big surprise, demand intractability is traditionally a characteristic of our nVidia project;

2)  Ken is busy with planner Sandy and others working out the build plan, and again I feel like being an outsider…I don’t need to get involved, which I almost take for granted, as these kinds of things are too complicated and boring for me---the only point is, I’m afraid I’m getting Ken more and more disappointed.(Remark: Ken is my coach) 

3)  Some fellows, me included, are worrying the shutdown will be ruined. Yesterday I was even told we’d have no holiday at all, which I find really a bad news. But per Kent(our senior manager)’s mail this morning, our holiday schedule will largely remain unchanged; we just need to work two more extra days. The bottleneck is material shortage, my estimate is right this time, haha;

4)  Hope the build plan as attached in Kent's mail will be fixed, I don’t want to see any change that will ruin my long holiday to happen anymore.

All in all, I'm not customer-oriented at all, because I'm getting more and more bored with my job...

I enjoy reading the magazine. The first day I came to the office, our clerk Jancy handed me an issue of the FLEXcom.Asia (hard copy) to read, which I find pretty informative and…readable (how to say 可读性强 in English?). Later I happened to see many archive issues in PDF files on company public folders (the earliest dating way back to the year 2004), so you can guess what--- all of them found their way to my own computer via my newly-bought oppo MP3…

Nowadays, soft copies are always much more readily available than hard ones, Jancy has only that issue, which I asked her to give me for memory not long ago… Where reading is concerned, I still prefer the hard copies, though I’ve got to admit reading soft copies on computer has become more and more dominating in my daily life…