Engineering or Not?

Updated Nov 11:
The news just broke Ericsson will spend less on its R&D, therefore shut its UK site by next year and whatever remains will be relocated to "lower cost-base countries"

This is totally not surprising because Ericsson is for-profit and has shareholders to report to. Those shareholders care only their return of investment, nothing else. This kind of stuff happens at UK now, and it will soon happen in Singapore.

Hence what should engineers do NOW? I will say we should have more breadth in more fields, especially business. Nowadays everything centrals around money, and often times, a profitable tech product is not necessarily solid technically, examples abound: IP (The one in the TCP/IP suite), NTSC standard, and yes, the MS Windows as when it first appeared.

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" -- Steve Jobs
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Nowadays my usual topic with Mr. Snail will be about the prospect of engineering in Singapore, and despite I tried my best to be optimistic, the future of engineering here still doesn't seem so bright.

A few days ago I grew curious and searched google on this topic, and found a few discussion threads with hundreds of replies from former and current engineers, all venting fumes on more or less what I and Mr. Snail talked about.

Here are two of the threads I found: one, two.

If you don't have the time to plow through them, here is the gist (all currency in SG$):

• Engineering pay is pathetic in Singapore, with fresh grads starting around $2.7K (manufacturing) or $3.5K(R&D). The money seems much better in finance and banking, which can go around $5.5K for fresh grads while five digit salaries are very common in banks.
  
• One person even boasted an annual salary of $300K + stock options doing sales
• A lot of engineers want to exit engineering and jump ship
  
• Those who remain in engineering are damn bitter

Some people reasoned banks only employ a few people for trading but rack in millions, ergo each of them can get a significant amount of money after dividing the loot. While in engineering, there are a lot of overheads (RnD, raw materials, factory spaces, machinery, etc.) and the profits are divided thinly among number of staff. Therefore banking is the best occupation in terms of benefits and money.

But what I don't understand is: what those bankers do are NOT adding values to the economy, there is no real outputs and basically banks are just fucking with other people's money and grow things from nothing! What are the contributions of the financial sector and banks nowadays? except charging some exorbitant fees on basic banking transactions, giving meager interests on our savings but charging an arm and a leg for the loans. When the loans go bad, poof, they are written off and the government will use OUR money to bail those banks out.

No wonder everybody wants to be banker.

If you really wanna enter the banking sectors, I was told these two websites are compulsory readings:

Mark Joshi
E. Derman

Leaving on a Jet Plane and Fooled by Randomness

I confess, the title is misleading, because it consists of (kind of) unrelated items.

First Cuppa is having his holiday with his parents for 2 weeks and will be back in late June. I have deferred this holiday for years and until early this year, I made up my mind and gave a go to the plan, ignoring all other issues on hand. It seems a Just Do It approach is mostly correct, and I will take this break to ponder upon if I should Just-Do-It on other areas of my life as well.

I know you gonna miss Cuppa, so I will leave you with a top ten list by Nassim Taleb for your reading pleasure. Although I don't agree on all the list items, I do think they are interesting and serve as good stuff to think about.

Taleb is pretty well-known in the quantitative finance analysis and derivative trading circles. From my limited knowledge, he has been an avid advocate of the concept that randomness cannot be predicted, neither randomness can be modeled and thus managed. His theory has obviously irked people who do risk management and risk modeling for a living. If Taleb was right, then those people will lose their jobs and go wash dishes or toilets.

Taleb attains celebrity status after his book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" was introduced just slightly earlier than the string of events which more or less match what he describes in the book.

Events like sub-prime crisis, delinquent trader, sky-rocketing fuel prices, natural disasters in various countries had literally shook the whole world. They all share similar traits of being highly-improbable, highly unpredictable, but darn high impact. Some people may say since fossil fuel is non-renewable, and therefore its price hike should be of no surprise. Well I do agree in principle this argument, but look at the world now, how many companies, or even countries are well-prepared??

Some info about him is here.

Taleb's top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Money Lost is Money Lost

I am referring to the recent CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) fiasco that has sent the global stock markets to roller coaster rides. Even central governments have injected a lot of money to increase liquidity and Fed even went further one step by reducing the main interest rate.

Here is my take:

Imagine there is a hole in your pocket and you lose money as a result. How much will it help if I offer to lend you money with lower interest rate? Definitely it will help, but in the end of the day, there is still loss which affects the bottom line.

In other words, there will be definitely a bumpy ride ahead.