For the last 3 days, starting on Wednesday, I was on an orientation retreat; the HR team at Sony wanted to imbue the new employees with a sense of "character" of what Sony is. If there was one thing that I took away from the orientation was that the company was "unconventional," which might be a good thing for a Japanese company.
Sony does face some serious challenges right now. My opinion is that the company is stagnating and the current environment doesn't really breed creativity, nor does it seem like it gives opportunities for new ideas (from what I've seen so far), though the upper management people keep telling this is exactly what they want, but I some what digress from the title of this article.
Many of the new grads coming into the company, after this retreat seemed to have a lot of anxiety about their jobs. From one of the promotional videos we saw describing the company as having a long history of innovation, the new grads seemed to feel like they had big shoes to fill. I wouldn't blame them, especially coming out of the Japanese educational system, where encouraging creativity not is one of it's strong points.
For the majority of these new grads, working at Sony will be their first job and most of them are quite worried if the jobs they are given is something suited for them. I for one had a very crappy first job doing incredibly boring work, cutting clouds out of satellite images (I studied how long for a boring job like this!?) after my undergrad in Canada. On top of this, most of them aren't really sure about the kinds of jobs they would be really be suited to since they don't really have any working experience.
Personally, there's been a lot of uncertainty in my life. I would never have imaged that I would come to Japan to study nanotech, then getting hired off by Sony after graduating after considering that I started off with a really pathetic first job. In the future, I really have no idea what kind of work I will be doing and where I'll be working. But I think the most important thing is developing the skills to deal with whatever comes up. Say if you got fired tomorrow and knew that you could just setup your own little company or just hop ship to do other things, I think that most people would have very little worries.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Will rent prices go down?
Given the current foreclosures in the US housing market and the state of the US economy, more and more people are looking toward renting as an alternative to owning a home. it would be interesting to see if rent prices in the US will go down, which is something that I've never really seen happen before.
Logically speaking, with falling housing prices, it becomes cheaper to buy a house and if one was a landowner, then it would be possible to rent a home for less money to encourage people to move in. Given this line of thinking, I would think that rent prices in the future to go down, which would be a good thing for most renters out there, though I would expect that it would require a move out of your current residence or a negotiation with your current land lord to get a reduction in rent prices.
Logically speaking, with falling housing prices, it becomes cheaper to buy a house and if one was a landowner, then it would be possible to rent a home for less money to encourage people to move in. Given this line of thinking, I would think that rent prices in the future to go down, which would be a good thing for most renters out there, though I would expect that it would require a move out of your current residence or a negotiation with your current land lord to get a reduction in rent prices.
I do better when I don't pay attention in class
I am in a microprocessor class right now; a course setup for the new employees that got into Sony to learn a little about microprocessor programming. The class level is more introductory than I was expecting so I am ending up having a lot of free time. As a result, I've brought a spare laptop and currently surfing the web and doing some misc reading while the teacher blabbers on about the fundamentals of electronics and microprocessor programming.
The interesting thing about this experience is that I fare better than the rest of the student that pay attention. I'm really just half listening to the teacher, just catching the main points about what he's talking about and then when it comes to doing an assignment, I just look at what needs to be done and go about doing it on my own. The good thing about not paying attention to everything is that it forces me to think on my own to solve the assignment instead of following some contrived program the teacher has setup to solve the problem. The fun part about thinking on my own is that I'm usually thinking a few steps ahead of the class and finding some bugs in the example code (which I've caught the teacher on).
The other good thing about thinking on my own in class is that I tend to be more creative than just listening to what the teacher has to say. I've been plugging the outputs of the microprocessor to a LED light display while making the lights dance around instead of just at the data through an oscilloscope. Apparently, I've gained some notoriety for not paying attention and going my own way at doing my own things.
On an interesting side note, I do believe that people become more creative when they do more thinking on their own instead of being told what to do, as that shuts down the creative process and hence I think the idea of managers telling employees to be "more creative" to be somewhat paradoxical in this sense. My 2 cents. I'd elaborate on it more but the lecturer just gave us a new circuit to build and I'm off to go build it.
The interesting thing about this experience is that I fare better than the rest of the student that pay attention. I'm really just half listening to the teacher, just catching the main points about what he's talking about and then when it comes to doing an assignment, I just look at what needs to be done and go about doing it on my own. The good thing about not paying attention to everything is that it forces me to think on my own to solve the assignment instead of following some contrived program the teacher has setup to solve the problem. The fun part about thinking on my own is that I'm usually thinking a few steps ahead of the class and finding some bugs in the example code (which I've caught the teacher on).
The other good thing about thinking on my own in class is that I tend to be more creative than just listening to what the teacher has to say. I've been plugging the outputs of the microprocessor to a LED light display while making the lights dance around instead of just at the data through an oscilloscope. Apparently, I've gained some notoriety for not paying attention and going my own way at doing my own things.
On an interesting side note, I do believe that people become more creative when they do more thinking on their own instead of being told what to do, as that shuts down the creative process and hence I think the idea of managers telling employees to be "more creative" to be somewhat paradoxical in this sense. My 2 cents. I'd elaborate on it more but the lecturer just gave us a new circuit to build and I'm off to go build it.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
A short hiatus from writing
I've been quite busy recently with work, participating in activities, exercising, reading and resting that I haven't had much time or energy left over to do much to keep this blog up-to-date. I will return to posting more frequently later on.
As of current, I have been somewhat tired and have not been in much of a mood for human interaction. As a result, I haven't been logging into any of the social network sites I used to frequent or any of my internet messengers as of late. Actually, I've started to find more solace in reading than I used to find in chatting online for some strange reason.
I attribute this to the many interesting and well thought out articles I've been reading online, offering compelling and well thought out ideas. I am starting to find normal conversation to be somewhat boring now that I can't seem to find conversations that "go anywhere." Perhaps my character is taking a somewhat of a shift towards "less talking and more action" but this requires some more exploration.
Anyways, I will probably have more to say (well, I have plenty) after I have some time to kick back and relax. But for the time being, posting might be a little bit sparse.
As of current, I have been somewhat tired and have not been in much of a mood for human interaction. As a result, I haven't been logging into any of the social network sites I used to frequent or any of my internet messengers as of late. Actually, I've started to find more solace in reading than I used to find in chatting online for some strange reason.
I attribute this to the many interesting and well thought out articles I've been reading online, offering compelling and well thought out ideas. I am starting to find normal conversation to be somewhat boring now that I can't seem to find conversations that "go anywhere." Perhaps my character is taking a somewhat of a shift towards "less talking and more action" but this requires some more exploration.
Anyways, I will probably have more to say (well, I have plenty) after I have some time to kick back and relax. But for the time being, posting might be a little bit sparse.
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