Tag: work

Life Is.. Work And Love?

May 29th, 2015

(Repost from 2006)

So this film producer and I were chatting on the train back from Copenhagen and we got on the subject of working for Yahoo! and I was telling him about how I got a very unique perspective about the major news events the last 7 years. Almost 100% of the people out there hear about a huge news story and go to the tv or internet and find out more about it.

My job as a news engineer is sort of twisted, when a huge news events happens, my only concern at that moment is not about that news event, how many people died. My concern is about whether we have enough server capacity to handle the news event, what type of news articles are we getting from our wire services, and how to get those stories up to our web servers as soon as possible.

The most memorable time was sept. 11 when David Filo calmly asked me how we could satisfy infinite demand for news? I remember that day well, because I felt my blood was cold, not because of the event but my mind was completely focused, I was in the moment, trying to solve that one particular problem David posed for me.

I’ve often written about how lucky I am to be working for Yahoo! How I am part of a team here at Yahoo! News who touch the lives of more than 30 million users every month. If I infer from our data, over 7 years, what we’ve done here at Yahoo! News has touched the lives of over 100 million users. How many people have that opportunity to work in a job where that little bit of cyber dust gets distributed from your fingers tips to that many users? I count my blessings.

Now back to the film producer: he looked at me and said that he is very happy for me. For finding that peace, able to look back at my career and reflect on what I’ve accomplished.

He said “Life is really just about 2 things. Work and Love” I infer from what he said: work is how you fit into this world and how you define yourself. Love is what’s in your heart and what’s in your soul. I got slightly wet at the corner of my eyes as I think about whether I’ve given my love from my heart and from my soul. Most probably not.. more to work on.
What Makes Us Happy And Motivated At Work?

March 9th, 2012
It’s that time of year for me to reflect on why we are here working everyday. Please chime in with your thoughts.

What motivates us to be happy and motivated at work?
- Money
- Recognition
- Being valued
- Making a difference in the world and self motivation
Money is a great motivator, it’s an enabler for future security, giving our family what they need and want and a validation of our worth in society. There have been a lot of studies online which show that incremental increase beyond your basic needs do not increase happiness.

From personal experience, throughout my work life, I have received large bonuses, increase in pay, stock option pay outs. The increase in happiness has lasted at most a few days. Surprising even myself. I told myself to enjoy the increase in monetary longer, but it fades quicker than you expect.

Recognition by your peers and your upper management can have a much long lasting affect on your happiness. As more people recognize your good work and actually regularly make comments about it, this can contribute to your long term happiness because it contributes to your sense of purpose in society.

Being valued by others as a source for advice goes beyond the output of your work. You are being seeked out to help others to grow their own career. This will have lasting impact to the people you affect. Sometimes this will even create life long bonds after both of you leave for different companies.

Making a difference in the world and self motivation would be the highest level of sustained happiness. When you feel like your work is your life calling, then your happiness is fueled by the opportunity to work. Your work increases your happiness. Your happiness makes you want to do better work. And the cycle fuels your growth of happiness.

Keep in mind this doesn’t mean you have to work more hours. A balance between work and personal life will lead to happiness long term.

T
Solution Architect: 2nd week iteration on my job at Yahoo!

January 21st, 2011
(Jardin des Tuileries)

It has been an exciting 2 weeks for me in my new role as a Solution Architect for Yahoo! Media

I have been meeting with a few of our customers which has helped me firm up my thinking of how to approach this role.

I break it down into 3 areas. How am I measured? What are my daily duties? What is my approach to my job?

1) How am I measured?
- First and foremost, I represent my team and the product. I am first point of contact for my customers. I am measured by customer satisfaction. I need to understand the customer expectation, whether those are realistic, manage the expectations, and then deliver to those.
- In order to do that, I need to find a way to measure cust sat on mailing list, the various team’s customer sat number and the overall engagement. Take a baseline, set a target, get support from my executive team, and measure iteratively.
2) What are my daily duties
- I will break down requirements into queue items for my teams.
- I will prototype.
- I will troubleshoot and unblock the developers
- I will document architectual changes, facilitate architects to reach a decision in an SLA that the customer expects.
- I will identify large gaps early on and feed only important items to my teams.
- I will document solutions, communicate them internally as well externally.
- I will provide training to new engineers, editors, product managers
- Feedback to the executive team on large pain points, proposal for process improvements, known short coming of the system.
- I will plan ahead for my customers and my development team.
- I will fix and write new documentation
- I will be an evangelist
- I will document the current process, measure, set target and figure out who needs to improve the long pole.
3) My approach to the job
- measure and iterate on customer expectation verses what we are delivering
- encourage dark launches of sites, so that when something is good enough, we launch and iterate. Don’t do huge 3 month long projects
- answer a question with a link to the document or write it and send a link to it
- hand the customer a working environment. Do the grunt work, and if it’s painful, then automate it
- feedback to my team, and make sure my feedback is small in volume, big on importance
- figure out a way to have peer feedback for my self, my teams, and even my customers to build in customer satisfaction one of the key feedback loops and measurement of success
Why Am I Still Working At Y! News After 8 Years? (2007)

January 8th, 2011
I have been getting the same question recently. Wow, you have been around for 8 years at Yahoo News? What makes you stay?

I think I’ll have to write it down to clear it up for myself.
1. The grass is not always greener over at Google, Amazon, the next startup. Look yourself in the mirror when you start to complain about the company. You are most likely the culprit.
2. There is a certain amount of trust and influence I can leverage because I’ve been around for so long.
3. There is still so much more to do at Y! News, the game is just starting to get interesting as we scale up the number of engineers and number of users
4. I’ve been through ups and down of being on call 24×7, working my ass off coding, launching products, mentoring new engineers, influencing and convincing others to follow. It’s always been challenging in different ways. Now my job is less about coding, more about helping other succeed and it’s even more challenging. I think I take pride in being able to stick to something long term and seeing successful outcome of my commitment
5. The goal of reaching 100 million users in 5 years?
6. It’s odd, but I can find enjoyment in the various parts of my job. From the mundane, to the heart pounding excitement of launching a product, troubleshooting an urgent issue, figuring out a solution to a long term engineering problem. I simply still enjoy my job.
7. I see a bright future for Y! News and Yahoo!
Since I’m a Yahoo! Employee… (from 2008)

January 7th, 2011

1. there is so much potential upside to the stock and for the company. It’s still the #1 (2008) web property in the world and lots of new projects and direction changes only can mean good things in the future
2. there is so much to do, for someone who can take the initiative, he can still make a lot of contributions.
3. the founders are getting their hands dirty and building safeguards in place to keep their key employees happy
4. the microsoft deal is just a validation of how valuable Yahoo! is. Whether the deal go through or not, it’s really not important. Yahoo! is very valuable as a standalone entity or as a part of any other company.
5. users still love love Yahoo! it’s been proven over 13 years, period. People vote with their clicks.

You should read If I were a Google employee and ‘My Perspective On Working‘
Perspective On Work

January 7th, 2011

I worked for SGI from 1993-1999 and was bleeding SGI blood. I was the cheerleader for the company and our group. I left SGI when the company just couldn’t deliver the financial results it promised.

A friend from SGI mentioned to me that when I left SGI, I swore I would not be emotionally involved with a company again. I don’t remember saying that, but I’m sure I did. Now looking at where I am, I’m very positive about Yahoo! and many words have been used to describe me. the lifer, old timer, company man, ancient timer, true yahoo.

My perspective on work is that whatever company I am in, make the best of it. Don’t complaint too much, put my energy towards something that I can make a difference. Look at the mirror when I want to complaint and see if I am making things better. Find something I want to change and keep on pushing for it.

Like Chris (co-worker) says, it’s like pushing jello uphill. But if I don’t tackle it, no one else will. While I’m getting paid good money, I vow to keep on pushing the jello. Until one day for whatever reason I part with the company, my next company, I’ll be pushing jello again.

Read ‘My Perspective On Working‘
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask The Question

September 30th, 2005

Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want in life or at work, you will be surprised how many times the answer is YES or even maybe. Just prepare for the NO answer, and that is ok.
Work To Live or Live To Work?

September 28th, 2005

It’s an age old question and people have different perspectives on this.

Of course there is your family and friends who see a completely different side of you for like 4 hours a day and weekend time and of course those are the people who will always be there for you and they are the most important people in your life.

A simple question I ask myself is what if I didn’t have to worry about money but I’m not filthy rich, would I continue working?

We spend 1/3 of our best waking hours at work. Interacting with people from all walks of life, people with similar skills, people with better skills whom we admire very much. We all try to work toward a common goal, some short term, some very long term. It’s usually a very fullfilling job and rewarding (hopefully).

I was thinking of people who are defined as human beings by their work, great artists, entertainers, politicians, writers, professional sports players, humanitarians.. so on.. They have their families whom they can always count on, but I believe they lean on their work to give them satisfaction in life.

I live to work because it’s so rewarding for me. I’m not a workaholic. I try my hardest not to do overtime, I don’t think about work on weekends. However, when I dive into a project for Yahoo! and eventually finish it up and the world sees it, the feedback is immediate, the satisfaction is immediate. It’s almost like a drug. I think much of it has to do with working on live web sites , where things are so dynamic, where user behavior is unpredictable.

So do you work to live or live to work? Are you happy with your situation which ever it is?