The Power of Technology

A 7.9-magnitude earth quake attacked Wenchuan, Sichuan Province in southwest China at about 2:28 p.m. Monday (6:28 a.m. GMT), May 12. It’s just 200 kilometers (124 miles) from my home town, Chengdu, the biggest city in southwest China.

I was waked up a phone call from my father in law Monday morning at my home in New Jersey. He briefly told me about the earthquake. It was quite a shock. Fortunately, my parents came to U.S. to visit me several weeks ago and they are still stay with me here in New Jersey. But, I still have many relatives back home in Chengdu including my 96 years old grandfather. We became very concerned and started to make calls to my relatives in Chengdu. The first half a hour was extremely tough since the communication channel seemed to be broken. Eventually, the phone was connected. On the other end, came the familiar voice of my aunt. She told us every one was all right. It was quite a relief to us!

My 96 years old grandpa is okay. He felt the earth quake also. But obviously he was not scared. When my aunt hurried home to see him, he was quite calm and still said to my aunt in a smile, “I think we just had an earthquake”. When my aunt urged him to leave the house, he simply reply, “Everybody has his destiny. You cannot run away from your destiny. I will stay in my bed to face it”. That’s the typical spirit of a “Chengduese”, calm and optimistic.

Two of my aunts are working in the hospitals in Chengdu. They are now handling a huge volume of patients from the towns close to the center of earthquake.

My parents and I have been watching the news closely as well as making frequent calls to my relatives in Chengdu. We can watch CCTV4, the official TV channel from central Chinese government, at home here in New Jersey. Looks like my home town will be all right and there won’t be more big earthquake coming.

It’s very sad to watch all the students and kids buried under the debris. We prayed for the people who died in this tragedy. Hopefully, the rescue team can save as much lives as they can. Fortunately, I saw our Prime Minister Wen Jiabao went to Sichuan just 5 hours after the earthquake. It’s very touching to see him working at the front line leading the rescue efforts. With him there, I am pretty sure the best efforts will be made to rescue people and settle the survivors. It’s also touching to see the soldiers were marching by foot to reach the impacted towns since the roads were totally blocked from all directions. I am so proud to have such a leader and such a good army with us at this tragic moment.

Unfortunately, I cannot participated in the big movement of saving lives in my home province. The only thing I can do here is to donate some money to the China Red Cross Fund to support the people in need and pray for them.

All the best to people who suffered in this tragedy.

My best regards to the courageous people who risk their own lives in saving the survivors in this earthquake!

If you would also like to help, here are some donation channels specific for this tragedy:

• China Red Cross Calling For Donations For Sichuan Earthquake
• How You Can Help from China Daily
• Donate to China Red Cross Fund (Chinese)
• Donate Channels by Chinese Consulate in New York(Chinese)

Recently, I am involved in a hibernate performance tuning project. We used to use Oracle Toplink as the Object-Relational mapping tool for our application. Several months ago, we decided to switch to the more popular JPA/Hibernate.

However, after the switch, we experienced wide-spread performance slowdown. To tune the performance of Hibernate, I did a thorough research in related articles. The more I dug in, the more I realized that performance tuning is a systematic effort. There are a lot factors contributing to the performance of Hibernate. I would like to list our experience here as a reference to everyone who use Hibernate.

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I talked about the two most important cultures for a development organization, Goal Oriented and Innovation in my previous two posts. For a development organization to survive, it must satisfy the goals of the business it belongs to. It must align all its activities with the business goals and strive to achieve those goals. If the development organization would like to play a more important role in the business than just providing “commodity” technical services, it must continuously innovate in technologies and processes, in development process as well as the business processes.

But how can a development organization achieves its preset goals and how can it innovate? What’s the ultimate strength of a development organization? Not the thousands of computers it possessed and managed, not the technologies it embraced, not products or services it delivered, or the intellectual properties it possessed. I can be one hundred percent sure to say that the core competitive advantage a development organization has is its people. People are the most important resource that a development organization can draw upon to meet any ambitious goals it may have. Innovations are like springs, flowing freely to all directions. But, if we seek its origin, we will always find one or several highly educated, talented and engaged persons. Thus comes our third ideal culture:

Ideal Culture Number Three: Humanism

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In my previous post, I mentioned the reasons why I would like to write down the ideal culture in my opinion and explained the most important culture for a development organization, “Goal-Oriented”. It’s deeply embedded with the purpose of the existence of the development organizations.

If the purpose of a development organization is to help the business serve the customers, to grow the revenue and to improve the margin by cutting cost, how can it achieve that goal? The answer is sound and clear, through innovation. Thus the second ideal culture:

Ideal Culture Number Two: Innovation

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I thought a lot about the ideal culture for a research and development organization recently. Since I graduated from school, I have been in different development organizations. In each organization, there was something I like and others I dislike. Well, life is always like that. You almost have to swallow the sweetness along with the bitterness because they come together.

Although any organization has its pros and cons, there is nothing preventing me from imagining a perfect organization which has the ideal culture, with my own standards. It can serve two purposes for myself.

First of all, it can serve as a benchmark for me to evaluate any organization I am part of or will be part of. Since, in my opinion, the culture is the most important factor that affects one’s effectiveness in an organization, everyone should seriously consider the culture if he or she considers job satisfaction and career achievements important in his or her life.

And even better, I can carry the culture with me. No organization is perfect. But, at least I can change myself to follow the principles that I deeply believe. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the World”. By practicing the culture I desire, I am able to create a environment/atmosphere around myself anywhere I go. After all, it should be we change the environment, not the environment changes us.

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After working 7 years in one organization, I finally made the move and joined another team. I am still working for the same company, but different location, totally different project and different colleagues. It’s like a new company to me.

It’s always hard to move into a new environment and start to work with new team mates. I need to learn the new project, new technologies and new ways of doing things. The worst part may be that I have to rebuild my reputation. I need to earn my credit again as well as make new friends in the new organization. In the first several days, I really missed my old work place and my old friends.

However, after I thought it over, I considered the current situation a new challenge for me. As we all know, only challenges make one grow. If one always stays at the familiar spot and never goes out to the adventure land, he/she will never grow. It’s the response to the challenges that brings the best out us!

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As a developer and later a technical architect, I have been doing software development for almost nine years after I graduated from school. I witnessed the fast evolvement of new technologies, for example, from Java Applet in the early days to AJAX recently in front end field and from EJB to Spring in the business logics field. However, the process we do software development changes much slower. In one organization, the same process is usually used for all types of projects, from new and complicate multi-year projects to simple and repetitive bug fix releases. I feel the knowledge we have in software development processes are way behind the knowledge we have in technologies. To me, the software development process and methodologies are more fundamental and important than specific technologies. Because it affects the entire lifecycle of software development project, the entire software development team and every aspects of the software product.

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I started to work for a new manager last year. The first thing my new boss asked me to do is to buy this book, “StrengthsFinder 2.0“, and take the test online. He assured me I would like that. Obviously, he took the test himself before and it has been tremendously helpful to his own career growth.

I bought the book, certainly. The introduction section explained why they think people should focus on their strengths instead of their weaknesses.

Their reasons are simple:

• No one is perfect. We are all naturally good at something and fall short on other things.
• It’s our talents and strength that makes out standout, in a good way. Not the shortcomings.
• We are more engaged and happy when working with our strengths than working with our shortcomings.
• It’s more efficient to develop our strengths than to remedy our shortcomings.

By the way, they are a group of psychologists working for Gallup, holding Ph.D and Master degrees in Psychology.

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In the summer of 2002, I was promoted from a senior developer to a manager leading a four person team. I was thrilled.

As other technical managers, my thinking was really natural. Since I was promoted, that means my way of doing things was the right way. Now, I just needed to require everybody to behave like myself and my team would be the best!

I failed in no time. It’s impossible to require everybody to behave like myself. I was young and single. Just got my master degree of computer science from a good university. I can adapt to new technologies easily. I can work 12 hours everyday including weekend. All my team mates were married and have family to take care of. They were much older than me. They couldn’t frequently spend their after work time working over time and learning new technologies. And they had their own ways of doing things and learning.

Fine. I would take all the work. Whenever they didn’t know how to do the job, I took over. Gradually, I found this wouldn’t work either since I barely have any free time left. The output of the team was not satisfactory.

I was very strict on every one’s job, maintaining a very high standard. I constantly criticized my team mate’s work and asked them to redo it multiple times. Eventually, I found that they started to ask me for very specific instructions and wouldn’t start the work until they get the instructions. I felt I was exhausted and couldn’t handle it anymore.

Why didn’t they listen to me? Why couldn’t they do the good jobs as I did? Why did they keep asking questions? Why cannot they work independently by themselves?

At my darkest moment as a new manager, I started to question myself. Maybe it’s because ME? Maybe I am not a good manager?

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Wish everybody a very happy and prosperous Chinese New Year!

In Chinese Zodiac, this year is the Year of Rat. It’s the beginning of the 12 Zodiac. So, this year will be a good new start for all of us. Rat is a smart animal in Chinese culture. We believe the Year of Rat will bring wisdom and success to our life.

May all of you have a happy Year of Rat!