Pay goes nowhere after 40

I have a personal salary goal for myself, in that I want to break 6 figures in my early 30's. And I've been doing some research to determine what my numbers are against other people in my age group and profession. While doing that research I've also found a rather depressing article, laying out that salary caps out in your 40's. More so now than ever, I find new ways of pushing my boundaries and climbing up faster and getting in a position to where that salary cap does not apply to me in my 40's.

CME Margins go up thus gold prices down

I've been looking at my portfolio account recently. Been doing a little bit of rebalancing because I've just had no time at all to do some real investing. Oddly enough, the date I did my rebalancing was on April 16th, right after the big drop in gold prices and parked some cash in gold because of the terrible tail spin that the yen was going through. I suggest that you don't do what I did but I noticed a mail that came in a while back on April 15th; margin requirements for commodities would be going up by about 18.5% effective April 16th.

And now there is this huge chatter about gold being cheap and all the ordinary folks are jumping into buying gold. Gold prices are up about 7% since the bottom. I am going to set a target to get a little more out of this position, get out and put cash back into equities.

Digitizing documents

One thing I've grown to have a liking for are document scanners. When I was a university student, the only kinds of documents that I ever needed to worry about keeping were my study notes.

Growing up had required me to keep track of letters of employment, rent contracts, insurance policies and more. One thing that I've noticed is that every 2.5 years, I tend to move to somewhere new to live and with that, my heaviest objects to move around are books and paper documents.

I still have my university notebooks and binders of research papers. I keep them around as a link to my past and inside them are all sorts of ideas that I've scrawled upon my notes while in class. Even though I nearly never look at my notes, I take comfort that they are with me, though I do feel that they do take up a lot of space. I've been lugging around the same book case that I've bought since living in Sendai for the last 7~8 years and the book case has become full for quite some time. I've not started stacking more documents on the very top of the book case and sometimes on flat on top of my books and binders.

Rather than solving a systemic problem by buying a second book case, I've decided to go a different route and bought a scanner with an auto-document feeder. I'll finally be able to scan volumes of documents and have multiple digital backups of these documents.

One thing that has surprised me though is that even with being able to scan so many documents is that I have yet to find a decent reader that is able to allow me to go through digital documents with equivalent or greater ease than my paper documents (going through different pages is still sometimes slow).

I think there ought to be something out there for this.

Weak links in the chain of command

It is quite famous for where I work, that our IT systems are pretty bad. We have an insane number of applications supporting a large variety of different business processes. I've never seen so many in my life. In Paris, they have a single team supporting a single application. In Tokyo, we have no such luxury and we need to support the entire business chain while Paris sleeps.

For a guy that worked in R&D in Sony, one of the miraculous things that I never had to deal with were business applications. Perhaps the only things I ever used were in house sites for procurement, holiday booking systems and career reviews. That was about it.

For where I work now, there is a system for referential data, booking, position keeping, making deals, risk management and more. If anyone of them breaks, our traders could be in for a bad time.

But from software chains there are also chains of command. The global head of IT came out from our Paris HQ and had a Tokyo onsite visit on Monday. I am part of the non-infrastructure IT team in Tokyo and we are not particularly big team-- a team of 5 people supporting over 100 people in their daily operations.

For once in a long time, this is actually the first time I met or spoke with a global boss that I was actually impressed with. Most other bosses are true management types (ie the pointy haired boss), but with this person, you could tell that there was things that were different about. He could look in your way and already understand the kinds of struggles that you'd have to deal with in great detail and we'd also listen to him and find out that even with great power, that he isn't super human and the struggles for change he is working for (which are worthy goals), are real challenges. I don't envy him but he certainly does have the right plan in mind.

I would have thought that an organization with a good leader would have great positive impacts, but as I understand now the more I learn about middle management that these people are the weakest links in this company-- because they are the biggest barriers between good people at the top and the people below that really get things done. That and a lot of things that get done at the lower levels can and do get filtered on the way up, because it is in the best interest in middle management to say that things are ok when reporting to the people higher up. It's all pretty standard stuff when you come to think about it.

How is that to change? Well, that is a good question. But the one thing that I really learned from this experience is that getting ahead in organizations like these is only part about getting your job done and knowing how to pick up the phone and convincing other people to help you.

Learning the power of soft skills is incredibly important and probably one of the strongest takeaways from the job that I work in now.

Learn to Build a Team

Everyone at one point in life stops being independent and becomes interdependent. Groups and organizations are born, resources and ideas are pooled, and then boom, off they go in some direction.


After moving from my first post University job to another it just comes dastardly obvious that if you want to really get something accomplished, then you're going to have to be a part of a team; because there is only so much that an individual can do. The worse part is the smarter that you are, the longer that it takes to come to this realization-- ie. because it is the belief that it is a matter of time and effort to make whatever you want to do a reality. The unfortunate realization is that reality is a moving target.

I should know, because I used to do R&D for the next up and coming greatest hit, but the problem is that after every quarter, management keeps on raising the bar on us. So the lesson here (without getting into too much detail) is to learn to get on an stay on the leading edge instead of the trailing edge. And yes, there will be times in life that you will wish that you could stop time simply just to catch up and that is never going to happen (so get on with it).

So instead, I have since moved on to a Financial company where I now am doing IT support. I know it sounds not particularly sexy but in all honesty, I have incredible oversight into what goes on between business and technology in a company. But enough of that and more on teams.

The speed of light is governed by the medium it passes through.

Excuse the light metaphor but it's what I'll work with. Given a beam of light, in the purest vacuum, it will move at it's theoretical fastest-- the speed of light. From there on in, the denser the medium a light beam must pass through (which is also related to it's in index of refraction) the slower the beam will pass through (though not 100% true, there are other material factors do come into play).

I like to also consider the same thing when it comes to getting a task or project done: that between any project start and end, the refractive index of the organization is the density of the paperwork, e-mails and meetings that you need to go through to get anything done. Thus the higher the density of this kind of stuff that you need to deal with, the longer it takes to get something done.

Why I like this metaphor is incidental; because in optical theory you can also talk about things like "group velocity" or the speed that a packet of waves travel (and again, incidentally waves of different frequency travels at different speeds through a medium). Ah yes, the joys of added complexity, the hall mark of being brought into the "real world."

The one thing that I have learned from having the opportunity of working in 2 large corporations is that never, never over estimate the speed of an organization. There was a time that people thought that Microsoft was the elephant in the room. So long as you weren't pushing against the elephant and you were moving like a cheetah in a different direction, you would be perfectly fine (which would be the lessons to from the likes of Google and Apple in recent history).

Because as of this moment, I am 100% convinced that with enough operational freedom, that I could dance circles around in terms of development speed, testing and deployment of new software systems on my own instead of needing 3 teams to get the thing done (possibly more). Yet some how, this organization exists with multiple teams moving at 1/3 of the pace of what I could probably do on my own.

Suppose that I found several other people like me and put us together. The results would be insane and there exists the problem-- where do I find these people and how do we make the opportunity to work together? There are large companies out there that are willing to pay millions for a small capable team and their assets.

I've already finished the "working on my own" part of life. The next stage in the road to success is to be able to build teams. The question is how and how soon can I start doing that.