Tag Archive for 'random thoughts'

academic business management is teh suck

Published on May 19, 2008 in anything. 44 Comments Tags: , .

I am con­stantly amazed by how such a bogus sub­ject can make its way to ter­tiary edu­ca­tion. Having stud­ied in this area for about a year now, I keep fail­ing to under­stand why study­ing a sub­ject like this should be worth a bach­e­lor degree’s time and resources, because it shouldn’t. Aca­d­e­mic busi­ness man­age­ment believes that it can breed a new gen­er­a­tion of people who can be “effi­cient man­agers” instead of “effi­cient work­ers”. Wow, sounds cool. Every­body loves to be order­ing instead of being ordered. Unfor­tu­nately as it turns out, they use it as an excuse not to teach you any­thing par­tic­u­larly useful in gen­eral, because order­ing people around is actu­ally a no brainer. While bio­chemists learn about the won­der­ful cre­ations of mother Earth, engi­neers learn about how stuff works in our civ­i­liza­tion, the busi­ness guys learn how to influ­ence other people to buy into their own ideas.

Tech­ni­cal details are for those tech­ni­cally inclined, what a polite and polit­i­cally cor­rect way to address who these busi­ness guys gen­er­ally think of as nerds. What the fuck, now they are the ones who don’t know shits and they think they can order these edu­cated people around, just because they happen to be wear­ing shiny suits or whatnot.

The busi­ness suck­ers are worms. They con­sume and aggra­vate our soci­ety with self­ish intents; the school never teaches you how to con­tribute back to the soci­ety when you’ve gotten rich.

Why do Hong Kong people, or devel­oped coun­tries in gen­eral, work more hours? Because these suck­ers keep trying to “push the limits”, they see how people much bull­shit people can put up with. If I’m paying $10,000 a month and people are still coming to the recruits, let’s try $9,000 until we’ve got just one/two guy that can put up with that bull­shit. If the work­ers seem to not mind work­ing over­time, why not have all of them work over­time? Shit, they think it’s all a board game.

Aca­d­e­mic busi­ness people never pro­duce any­thing like the sci­ence people do. I was watch­ing the TV news when I was riding on a train some days ago. It was about uni­ver­sity coop­er­at­ing with some com­pa­nies to invent a new kind of med­i­cine, help­ing the human species evolve. You’d see this kind of news every so often, yet I bet you’ve seen the slight­est trace of some­thing like this hap­pen­ing in the aca­d­e­mic busi­ness field, which does zero to help the human evo­lu­tion process.

one of the best programmers

Published on April 2, 2008 in anything. 4 Comments Tags: , .

I just read Teach Your­self Pro­gram­ming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig, the direc­tor of research at Google. The para­graph quoted below was pretty gross:

One of the best pro­gram­mers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s pro­duced a lot of great soft­ware, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.

stop working, start achieving

Published on April 1, 2008 in anything. 87 Comments Tags: .

Living in the modern soci­ety is such a stress­ful thing. People work day and night in search of achieve­ments, be it wealth, rep­u­ta­tion or even a secure retired life. How many of us are already seeing a clear path to get­ting what we want?

For most people, if there isn’t a clear path to Nir­vana laid out, they’ll either give up or keep work­ing harder and harder to dig out the path.

That sounds rea­son­able, yet it is amaz­ing how many of us can’t see what’s wrong with such an approach. If what they are doing isn’t work­ing, why in the world do they keep doing it harder and harder?

When I can’t solve a puzzle by push­ing, the answer is often not push­ing it harder, but rather to pull it. The aver­age met­ro­pol­i­tan today works the whole day every day, and they “sleep back the hours” on week­ends. They rarely have time to come up with cre­ative ideas. They are trapped by the soci­ety, by the Matrix. Per­haps people call this a rat race for a reason. For people in it are often forced to become as dumb as rats.

rat-race-wheel.gif

Most people can’t answer the ques­tion “what do you really want to do in your life?” We need to have a clear goal if we want to achieve any­thing, but we are all too busy to think about that when we are trapped in the rat race.

The way out is to give your­self a break. Mus­cles don’t grow when you keep pump­ing the iron. They grow when you recover after exer­cise. To really grow, in terms of wealth, health or spir­i­tu­al­ity, stop work­ing and escape from the Matrix. Let your­self living con­sciously again.

why you shouldn’t get upset about people’s reactions to you

Published on March 10, 2008 in anything. 411 Comments Tags: .

Many times when we get upset it’s because of other people’s reac­tions. Some­times it’s because some­one is just an ass­hole. Some­times it’s because a friend gives some unex­pected behav­iors and it throws you off.

The prior case is pretty common and noth­ing to become too upset about. There are ass­holes in the world and it isn’t worth too much feel­ing bad for them.

The later case, how­ever, is often what hurts most and lasts for quite some time until we can sort of forget about it. We expect our friends to be nice to us, even though the friend may not be a really close friend after all.

Nev­er­the­less, if you really come to think of it, it doesn’t make too much sense to be upset. When a friend is mean to you, there are two pos­si­ble reasons

  1. In fact he doesn’t really like you and he sort of acci­den­tally leaked out.
  2. He is in a bad mood.

If it is case #1, and it is prob­a­bly that he is in fact an ass­hole. This is maybe one gen­uine case where get­ting upset is rea­son­able, but not for the friend’s reac­tion, but real­iz­ing that you’ll have to lose a friend.

In case #2, his mood is bad prob­a­bly due to some bad short term expe­ri­ences. Maybe he got cheated some money; maybe his girl­friend just wouldn’t be rea­son­able; maybe he stepped on cat poops in the morn­ing. All of these things you will never be able to know, let alone have con­trol over them.

In the end, maybe we are all too ego­cen­tric. The friend is prob­a­bly feel­ing him­self spe­cial and want to be under­stood about his mis­for­tunes, mag­i­cally On the other hand, we are some­times too igno­rant to notice what’s really going on and blame the friend for being rude, with­out trying to under­stand him.

The next time some­one treats you badly, think again: is he doing this because he just had a bad day? That may be the trick to avoid a sour rela­tion­ship and to turn it into a newer level.