As of April 30th, 2012 I have resigned from my R&D position with Sony and will be pursuing a new career opportunity (more on that another time). It's been 4 years since joining Sony and doing R&D related work with them. I'd say more about my work but some of it is still confidential stuff and I would rather not want to get myself in to hot water for saying more than what's publicly available. I've learned a lot through this project (especially in my most recent years).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I would want to say about me leaving. I've had many thoughts recently and the problem I face is turning it into a "from there to here" kind of story. As with many things in life, decisions are the result of multiple factors.
Before resignation, I have had held several posts within my R&D department, the interesting thing about my work is that I am one of the most versatile member of my research teams. I've done semiconductor processing, some process automation (and equipment automation), programming (which was later used for optical simulation) and then went on to write software that would slash one of their defect detection processes from 7 days down to 2 days.
I practically held 2 offices, one in Tokyo and another at a factory in Kagoshima where I flew out a few times a month to check on how things are going, see if there have been any design changes and reworked my software to deal with those changes. Considering the amount of value I was providing to the company of doing things in house (and out of my own initiative) it was easy to for me to justify nearly $3000 worth of flights and travel fees per month to make sure that everything was running smoothly. The second that everyone knows that you're the person that produces results wherever they send you, getting access to financial resources becomes easier and easier.
I managed to clear a new laptop purchase through what was once a rather stingy manager and another manager decided to buy me a new monitor so I could to code better.
I also had plenty of freedom as so long as I was producing results, I had practically free reign to do as I wished, which included spending copious amounts of time studying interesting programming problems and making applications for other users within the research group that needed help crunching data. You know you are important when people are coming to you to help them get things done. There were times when work was incredibly busy, where I would be going in really early in the mornings or working really late at night. But the thrill of hitting milestones and seeing a project get closer to a finished product is exciting. I thoroughly enjoyed it and the engineers that I've collaborated with are a pleasure to work with. To be honest, I've seen challenges and technical problems that would be close to impossible for other companies to solve. Even with the economic rise of power house technology companies in China and Korea, I am quite certain that it would be nearly impossible for those companies to come close to mimicking the technology that we've been working on... though their technical prowess is growing quickly (which I will discuss later on in this post).
Suffice to say, I had a great time working Sony, working on challenging technical problems and seen the future of several technologies.
Understanding Non Technical Problems is Important
I've been working for the last 4 years, tirelessly on technical problems. How do we make something better, with less defects and in a shorter time? What is the best process to make it? Does the process actually work and if now, what exactly do we need to tune to make it work? I've been running through this loop for quite some time. Despite the pace of technology, the semiconductor world is high technology with a low tech development process-- in that so much man power and time is required to create new processes. There are lot of things that would lend themselves to automation but most process engineers don't have those skills.
The other challenge is the past pace of the technological market. Trends change relatively quickly and getting a process line up and running takes a considerable amount of time. If you wanted to build a new factory, develop a new process and then have a product out of the door, it will takes years of research and if the nature of the market changes within that time frame, you could end up developing something that no-one might want. Understanding market risks are very important.
Just as it is important to understand market risks, it is also important to understand the non technical aspects of technology. I've been working on the technical side of things for so long that it was not until we got close to commercialization running demos that there were many "non-technical" things that we needed to consider-- like product design, user interfaces and understand the fuzzy parts of specifications. Suppose that you wanted to build a new smart-phone. Where do you draw the line at the speed of the CPU? At 900 MHz or at 1 GHz? How much memory should it have? What should the resolution of the display be and what about pixel densities be?
There are also important things that can't be quantitatively defined by specifications like the impact of the color of the device or user interface design. Non-quantitative factors like these can either make or break a product and unfortunately they cannot be represented neatly as simple numbers or decision matrices that management of large companies seem to like so much.
Just today, actually, I was out shopping for a new keyboard and while I was considering how nice a keyboard felt to my hands as I was hitting the keys, the girl beside me was more interested in getting the "cutest" one instead. The same goes for a whole variety of other products, especially brand name products that have been so fascinating as brand name items may have the same functionality of another product but they command such high prices. This in itself is a very fascinating topic and I have started looking into it which could make for an interesting post, but suffice to say, understanding non-technical problems are important.
So what does this have to do with me heading to leaving? I've spent 4 years dealing with technical problems and I've come to the realization that there are more things that I need to understand and consider.
Don't wait forever for a promotion
I don't know if this is common for western companies but for Japan, some companies divide up their employees into "Grades" where a upper and lower bound for pay is defined. Only during a promotion can you make a jump into a new pay grade. One problem that I faced during my time is hitting the upper bound of my pay grade really quickly and unfortunately I've been pulled in so many different research teams that I've really never had the same supervisor for more than a year. This also made it rather tricky for my supervisors of short terms to recommend me for a full promotion though I consistently got good reviews.
The other problem is that the review process for a promotion is done once a year... I was never aware of that and I had just missed the opportunity to ask for a promotion. I also made the mistake of expecting that getting a promotion would be a top down kind of thing, though that it partly true, it is just as important to ask bottom up so they keep you in mind. The other thing is that I doubt that managers have access to salary information, meaning that they also probably don't know at what timing to arrange for a promotion.
As of last year, resulting from a short-turned long stint in Kagoshima after writing some software that produced huge results. My colleague over there told me that it would have easily cost them $80k to write that software, not to mention the human costs I managed to save. My rough estimates come to about a $250k savings for the company as a result of the company. Unfortunately, my bonus for that term was only +$500 to what I would usually get. That was rather unfortunate, but at the same time I came to the realization that if you want to be paid for what you're worth then you're going to have to work for an organization where value creation is more easily recognized.
The problem with getting setting bonus amounts for large corporations is that human resources is also involved in the evaluation process. Unfortunately, they can be fairly poor at evaluating high impact results. Which was another important thing I learned, if you don't properly compensate your A-players or they will eventually get hired off or find new opportunities.
A New Job Comes my Way
As luck would have it, I have a headhunter friend in Tokyo whom I had a serendipitous meeting with years ago before he was a headhunter and through him, I was introduced into an IT related position that needed someone with a background in programming and could speak both Japanese and English. The person that this company would eventually choose as their final candidate would end up being me and I'll be doing backend application support for a foreign financial firm, something that I've been fascinated about for a long while. The other great thing is that I'll be closer to users and understanding their needs which is sort of the perfect break that I needed to get away from the R&D world.
I am not 100% sure exactly what I will learn though my experiences at my next job, but I have some ideas on what I'll be looking out for. How will it all play out to the long term development of my career? I am not sure yet but I am certain that there will be some interesting things to learn (while getting a decent raise at the same time :).
