Thursday Night Badinage

- In response to Dean's reply on Yahoo's canned email response:

That's the exact same response you're going to receive from Google, Microsoft, or any another website that has hundreds of millions of users per day. Reality is that they cannot reply to every feedback personally.

I don't have a problem with them not able to reply to every feedback personally. What offends me is they try to pass off a form letter response to me as from a real person, when it is very obvious that they didn't even read my response (or has very very poor listening or comprehension skills). I have had other sites tell me "even though we can't respond personally, we appreciate the feedback and it's been logged."

- Bye bye Yi! The Bucks today traded Yi Jianlian, the Chinese basketball player we drafted last year. I'm partly a bit disappointed because I was really liking the attention the Chinese community was getting from him. But I also realize the team really sucks and could use a shakeup.

- So with these gas prices, one of the solutions has been mass transit. But with mass transit comes issues, as in it takes so much longer because of all the stops. Well this was an interesting concept my parents sent me (it's in Chinese, but you get the drift from the video). What a great way to challenge assumptions and think outside the box!

Yahoo's horrible customer service response

So regarding this poorly laid out ad page, I wrote Yahoo to tell them:

Subject: Redesign

Additional Information: When your "Yahoo sports shop" ad comesup when at a player page, the formatting is all messed up (all the content is squeezed into the left column)

While Viewing: http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/players/6406/news

And here's the brilliant response they sent me:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Care.We appreciate your comments and feedback regarding advertising on Yahoo!. Our services are made available in part by the ads that you viewwhile using Yahoo!. While we attempt to choose advertisements that will be pleasing, we understand that not all ads will appeal to all of our users.We welcome user feedback regarding advertising on Yahoo!. Your commentshelp us identify which types of advertisements are well received, and which are causing concern.Please be assured that your feedback has been received.Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards, Katie Anderson

Yahoo! Customer Care

Your feedback has been received? Bull sh*t! I wonder if Katie Andreson is really even a person. This seems like a computer generated response based on some keywords I put in my email. Does the company have no pride in itself? Do they think I'm an idiot?

Something Tom would appreciate

You'd think a reputable site like Yahoo would have something like this figured out. This is something you might find on a site that I programmed. And this has happened a lot, this isn't a one time shot:

Why graduate schools are outdated

Wow, lotsa blogging tonight... Good article from Penelope Trunk's blog.

Another contrarian view and pet peeve

So I recently attended what we call a "Lunch and Learn" where we had a speaker come in and talk about his career. He was interesting because he's had a very diverse career path. He started at the plant, went to R&D, into marketing, and now back into package development, where he loves it. He's now a Section Head. One of the older audience members asked him if he knew then what he knows now, would he still take the marketing assignment... He said yes, but earlier. The person pushed some more, but he wouldn't budge on still taking the marketing assignment.

This is one of my pet peeves... this idea of you don't want to move around, stay where you are, gain deep mastery. People point to the fact that people who stayed in one place are more successful. There's a flaw to that logic. I would argue that people are more successful when their talents and their passions are aligned with the job they're in. Right out of school, you're placed in a job almost by random chance. If that job is a place that fits your passions and talents, then you'll be successful, and be one of those people who stayed in one place and got successful.

But what if you're a square peg, and placed in a forest of round holes? You hammer away and never fit. So you move to the next round hole. Never fit. Should you stick around until you're all hammered out? Or should you keep moving until you find your square hole?

The problem is first, when you're new, you don't know you're in a forest of round holes. And you don't know what that forest looks like. Plus you get all this advice about staying in one place until you gain deep mastery. Then you get hammered and hammered and never fit. Then you get rated "below expectations" and then you get even more scrutinized (and hammered even harder).

I think people need to be constantly discovering themselves, and as they do it, move around. If the rest of the people in the company would embrace that discovery process, it would help these people who lost the dice roll find their square holes faster, and improve the productivity of the company.

And yes, my career at P&G is a perfect example of this.

Value of college education, Part 2

I wanted to respond to Kathy's comments:

So what are the stats that show that not having a degree is going to put you on par with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

I'm not arguing that not having a degree causes greatness. I'm arguing that having a degree correlates with success but isn't the cause of success.

I'm fairly certain that they are the extreme exception rather than the norm of non-degreed employment/success stories (which makes them outliers in the study...)

I would disagree here. An outlier is a data point that's far away from what is expected with no apparent reason. I would argue that there's a bimodal curve, with a subset of people are not savvy, intelligent, nor driven and they don't make a lot of money.

They probably also have a different level of dedication to their own success and sought education on their own in other non formal institution ways.

YES! Then there's another curve of people who were too smart for school, didn't need school, or didn't have the opportunity. Exacerbating the issue, IMO, is a self-fulfilling prophecy where people who don't do well in school are shunned by society, lose confidence in themselves, and end up in the lower range.

That is a safer risk to assume when someone has a degree than when they don't...

Agree there. A degree does CORRELATE to higher intelligence. I just there's a lot of missed opportunities for people who don't have the learning style or ability to go to college who aren't given the proper encouragement or training. I also think there are a lot of people who pay a lot of money for very little payout. Instead of spending $50,000 in school, why not lose that money starting your own business and learning from it? I refer to Steve Jobs again... in his speech to the Stanford graduates, he talks about why he dropped out of school... he felt really guilty about his parents spending all of their income so he could go to school.

By the way, I'm sure there are thousands of examples of people who never went to college and are doing very well.

More ripping on our education system

I read this article on the Freakonomics blog... The author apparently did a study and tried to correlate which majors resulted in the highest income. The article follows (warning... do not try to read his actual paper, it's way over our heads). One of the lines in the article fits very well with my previous speech to the Organization of Chinese Americans:

"Many of my students, and often unfortunately too their parents, believe that unless they major in business or engineering they are doomed to lives of poverty."

My take: I remember hearing on the radio once for an ad for a local college that people who have college degrees made 42% more than people without. That's such a dubious stat. My theory is there are two reasons why this stat is so:

1. There's a self fulfilling prophecy. Companies only higher people with college degrees, so then people with college degrees make more money. Companies don't hire people without college degrees, so then people who want to make more money get college degrees. Ask Bill Gates and Steve Jobs if they needed college degrees.

2. There's a subset of people who don't have college degrees: Ones that are your stereotypical dropout who does nothing all day but collect unemployement, and ones who learned their skills outside of college. See Gates, Bill and Jobs, Steve above. The non college degree stat is all lumped into one grand average.

So the following article talks about theory #1: Certain college majors are a correlated to more money, but does not cause more money. It's really smarts and intelligence.



June 11, 2008, 10:35 am

Which Majors Make the Most?

By Daniel Hamermesh

When we choose a major in college we are to some extent choosing a series of future wage rates. The amount of human capital in which we invest is to some extent linked to our college major — different college majors generate different wages.

Many of my students, and often unfortunately too their parents, believe that unless they major in business or engineering they are doomed to lives of poverty.

I just published some research I’ve done on University of Texas graduates. While differences in earnings by college major are huge, once you account for longer hours worked by business and engineering majors, by the fact that they often have higher SAT scores, and other factors, the differences are much smaller; indeed, over half of the variation in earnings by major disappears.

In other words, the amounts of human capital generated in college by different choices of major are not so different from one another as most people believe. Liberal arts majors don’t do that much worse than business majors; and economics majors do as well as business majors do.

Violins

On Saturday I went over to the Baroque Violin Shop (get it? Baroque?) to fix up a few things on my violin, since we're in the off-season for the orchestra. Just for the heck of it, I asked what an upgrade would look like for my violin. They owner, who's a former member of the orchestra I played in, basically said anything would be an upgrade over what I was playing... said it was a "student violin." Which made sense, since I got it back in HS.

Well before I know it he's pulled out 6-7 new violins, and it felt like when I went to pick out Bucky the beagle... All of a sudden there were all these Beagle puppies running around creating chaos in the room and I had to choose one. Playing them was like going car shopping, where you got to test drive nice new cars. These violins were fully polished and shiny and barely used.

Next thing I knew I was walking out with 4 violins to test out. He sent me home with a special case that holds 4 violins, and with nothing but filling out a form I put $15,000 worth of violins in my car. I was actually heading down to Newport to see Indiana Jones with some friends, so I was a little nervous to have these in the trunk. I left them in my friend's house and had him lock the door, but they all made it back to my place safe and sound. Plus it made be feel better that if his house had been robbed, the thieves probably would not have known to take the violins.


So today I spent a good hour testing out the violins. And of course, I couldn't tell the difference between them. They all sounded great. I only wish I had my violin with me (I had left it at the shop because they had a couple of follow up things they needed to do on it) to compare to. Needless to say, I probably will be putting an investment down and trading up. After all, I am still playing and it's probably long overdue.

As an aside, this reminds me of a funny line... My dad took me to an American Chemical Society meeting once when I was in HS, and the topic was the chemistry behind violins (people have started to learn that the polish of the violin plays a significant role in the sound). They randomly found a professional player to play a few of the sample violins they had there, and asked him what he thought of them. He said, "It's a little hard... it's like comparing your wife to a one night stand."

Asian Americans

So I'm back in town, in the middle of the second session of the APA Ladder training that started at Hueston Woods back in February. We took a couple of other "personality tests" and I'm pretty well calibrated now. Someone asked me if my lack of "green" (which was planning, following procedures, etc) made it hard for me to be in my engineering role. I said heck yeah! I hate all the processes we think we do. So it got me thinking... I assume I'm an engineer because I was conditioned to be one from my parents. What would I be doing if I started over? I came to some conclusion that I might have some economics in me. But who knows, I could still be an engineer.

Speaking of Asian American type stuff... The speech went over very well on Sunday night. They left me to the end as the "featured speaker." I brought people back to 1996 with the stuff I blogged about last time, and all the requisite stuff about following your passions. The good thing is the speakers before me, who had graduated maybe 1-2 years ago, talked about the same. So I got to reinforce it, and bring up the point that I think 10% of the stuff I used at work was learned in school. I even got in the line about not necessarily needing a PhD or being a doctor to be successful. Then I asked each one of them why it was awesome to be Chinese American and made them answer on the spot.

Couple of funny tidbits... They were recognizing past OCA presidents at the dinner, and they had left off my dad. So in my speech, I took a second to recognize him by asking him to stand up. He was talking to someone at the table and didn't hear me, so it was one of those "Bueller... Bueller..." type moments. I mentioned how he wasn't even listening to his own son speak!

There was a running joke that all 5 of the graduates played the violin. It only made it worse when speaker #1 also played the violin. So I got up there and said "Hi, I'm Dale, I also play the violin." I wonder if it's because Chinese people are genetically predisposed to play the violin because of our physical structure, or if it's the "monkey see monkey do" syndrome.

All 5 graduates not only all played the violin, but were all girls too. I chatted it up with them afterwards, and got some pictures taken. One of them said something about me taking pictures with all these girls... and I said "Too bad you guys are all 12 years younger than me." So how many years would I need to wait for them to be in my age range? Thanks to Winston for providing the algebra. Recall the right age is my age divided by 2 plus 7.

x = their age
y = my age

x + years to go = (y + years to go)/2 + 7

18 + ytg = (30 + ytg)/2 + 7
11 + ytg = (30 + ytg)/2
22 + 2 ytg = 30 + ytg
ytg = 30 - 22 = 8

So, in 8 years, they will be in my wheelhouse. I will be 38, they will be 26. Hmm, sounds about right.