Increase perceived values of a company

Last time, we talked about several factors that can affect the way Tèo - a well-trained software engineer - perceives a company's image and offer. In this post, we are looking into ways to increase perceived values.

Increase the wage objective value.

Perceived and objective values aren't identical, but they're still correlated. The offer-letter numbers are similar to the tip of an iceberg in many ways. Typically only one-ninth of the volume of an iceberg is above water yet it is the only visible factor to estimate the shape of the under water portion. The number is one of few objective things in the offer Tèo can rely on to imagine a bright future ahead, the rest is basically a leap of faith. So unless a company has a good reputation in the job market, matching the going rate is for the position is the first step to get the company to any shortlist.

Give the company a personality. 

There are a fair amount of profound articles, books and university programs on company culture and visual identity, I would make a fool of myself trying to cite these numerous theories that people have formed and practiced for centuries. However, I believe people in each profession have their own niches that are not so common to find, so do software engineers. When talking about a company, a normal engineer talks about offer, product and what kind of toys he is given. That's ok, that is a basic need of a human, just that it is superficial and can't tell anything about career growth in the coming years. A trait of a great engineer and contributor is showed via his genuine interest in deeper technical and organizational aspects such as process, field of expertise, type of projects, etc. Pitching on one of these field and promoting it in technical event the company takes place give it a bit of control on how people perceive the company.

37signals is not the best project management software shop in the world, but it has personality. The 37signals team stands for something: uncompromising simplicity. Other domestic examples are numerous: Greengar is specialized in mobile applications, East Agile etches its beloved management methodology into the name, Skunkworks is applying Silicon-Valley-approved product development in the heart of Saigon, etc... Ultimately, it comes down to differentiating the company, it almost doesn't matter on what, more or less anything will do.

Link the company with its top-notch team. 

Every successful tech companies spends its resources massively to build up a team of experts in its field of expertise. Not only this matters to company's products, it also has a psychological effect on potential employees. The investment provides a reassurance that the company knows what they are doing, with high quality. A chance to work with people on top of the technology stack is a compelling learning opportunities. It directly affects Tèo growth and reflects in his CV, both eventually lead him to a better career.

And really, if it is a job a tech rock star nods his head to, why bothers?

When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.

Read more: http://read.bi/11ZOSEh

Lot of expats in the team structure helps too! For international corps, this shows a strong connection between the company and head-quarters. For others, it is a demonstration of the budget (yes, that the company is not running out of business and Tèo and his friends are first targets for layoff) and an international vision the company is approaching. This is a growing pattern of globalization and Vietnam, certainly, is not outside of the circle. (1000% bias, but Tèo grew up in the middle of nowhere. To him foreigners is a sign post of civilization and advancement)

As mentioned in the last post, Vietnamese education is sadly years behind developed countries and the country is crying for capable people in STEM. Even a big corp can't just hire a team that it wants. And when that happens, talents need to be raised, for the most vivid sample, Intel cooperated with RMIT to grow its team.

There are many ways a company can raise its tech team, but none of them is cheap.

"Quality is free, when you pay dearly for it" - Peopleware. 

Local companies are catching up with the trend in Silicon Valley by striving for an environment where every effort to master the technologies stack and get more productive is appreciated explicitly. In Cogini, we have been organizing weekly TechTalks where everyone is given chances to share about basically whatever they find interesting. Put it another way, it is like our weekly BarCamp. Leveraging that spirit, in the coming time we are having compulsory research hours and hack days, times when engineers can be completely creative, free from the constraints of their normal jobs. These research and sharing are endless source of blog posts, tweets and status updates - the first step to promote the team to the outer world. We are also sending engineers to conferences so that they can keep their skills up to date (we went to BarcampPP a few months ago). Allow engineers to buy books that contribute to their knowledge on the company’s dime. Permit engineers to express their ideas about the projects they’re working on.

Create a tribe. 

A tribe that links itself to the personality the company is building. This is an advanced form of #2 and #3. Like company's culture, the tribe needs time to grow and everyone participates to controlling - not just individuals. But once it is formed, the tribe is the driving force behind every success of the company. I was taught a classic example of this, the IBM's Black Team when I was in the Software Testing class of Mr. Quang Tran. If you haven't known about the "nefarious" team, take some time to read it. Please, I'll wait.

IBM was delighted about the team, as every defects they found was one that customers didn't. And their colleagues outside the team were jealous at the apparent fun they were having. And others too.

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So far we have looked at some humble opinions of the silly me about talents acquisition in Vietnam. Hopefully, you have got some ideas of how job market works here. But there are some pitfalls to watch out for. Stay tuned. Check it out

So I attended Barcamp PhnomPenh 2012

Barcamp Phnom Penh 2012 was organized in September. The blog post wasn't published until now because its owner was busy cranking the code and .. lazy for the rest of the time.

So I attended BarcampPhnomPenh 2012. The main purpose was simple because many dudes in my company made it last year but I didn't and it sounded like they had real fun there. The other purpose was to employ an Cambodian geek, because we are having a project with a major ISP of Cambodia and it is nice to have someone on-site. And in general, I always welcome diversity in my team.

A Vietnamese at Cambodia

My friends described their experience at the previous Barcamp as "just like celebrities". Cambodian loved to take photos with them and treated them really nice. From what we were taught about the Cambodian-Vietnamese war, starting from 25 December 1978, the communism government of Vietnam erased Khmer Rogue's Democratic Kampuchea. And as Khmer Rogue is described as such a rotten government, responsible for death of million Khmer citizens and the trials to judge its leaders occurred till a few years ago; the act of Vietnamese government seems to be a pretty good thing, doesn't it? Given that piece of historical knowledge, I found the nice treatment my friends received understandable. 

However the same treatment didn't happen to me :) It wasn't not nice, not at all, the Cambodian we met were friendly to us as to any random foreigners. Just that I was curious about the difference in my friends' description and my experience. After reading this article, I was glad that we were treated well as any other foreigners. Vietnam and Cambodia have a long lasting political relationship, and no matter how do I look at it, it is completely a  ugly mess. Under certain aspects, the relationship is similar to that between Vietnam and China. The idea of celebrity Vietnamese was erased from my mind shortly.

Meet local people, for real

The Facebook stream of the BarcampPP page was very lively. I took it as a reflection of a healthy community. Turned out, I was not really impressed by the quality of the people I met there, technically. I had two talks, one about advanced JavaScript, the other about entrepreneurship. Despite some tiny incidents such as the organizers misinterpreted the word "entrepreneur" and tried helping by changing it to "enterprise" or I had to load my slides using a 3G dongle, I think I did some good speeches and made the message clean. However, the developers attending the JS talk didn't know JavaScript. They seemed to be familiar with C/C++, pretty old-school and low level stuff. And they barely spoke, so no discussion was generated. The entrepreneurs in the second talk were a bit more talkative, but they were not really into sharing their thinking, ideas and resources. Somehow I had a feeling that few people there actually were carrying out their plan. Anyway, as there was a big language barrier, any judgment is hardly justified.

Another mismatch, not only at Barcamp PP but also Barcamp Saigon, is the expectation of the organizers and mine. I want to meet brilliant people and listen to astonishing speeches, learn from them and share the knowledge. The size doesn't matter, as long as good discussion can be found. But the organizers aimed at a large event, with thousands of people (it must be 1k+ attendants in the first day). Most were students, who didn't know many things nor know one thing well. And the sharing spirit was definitely lacking. It was more like lecturing (I'd not even call it educating because there were limited communication from the two sides).

A glare at Cambodia-Vietnam economy

Despite of its rapid growth in recent years, Cambodian economy is still relatively weak compared with most neighbouring countries. The shadow of uncontrolled inflation in the past is still haunting the country. Although Cambodia official currency is the Reil, the sign of dollarization is strong here. USD is used widely for all kind of transactions. Outside of Phnom Penh, VND and Baht are used at areas close to the border crossings.

A prospective and well-paid career in another country has always been interesting to me. At the very least, it is a great travelling experience. I had high hope that many other young Cambodian share the same idea. We placed our posters at the job board, and I had already had two talks (about technology and economy) but that didn't make a clean hit. Thinking that we could explicitly raise the interest of the attendants about a career in one of the most dynamic city in South East Asia, my colleagues presented the last talk of us in the event, "Job opportunities in Vietnam". Any nothing has ever surprised me like what happened there. Before any talk was made, few people showed up in the room, and 70% of them are expats living in both Cambodia and Vietnam. It wasn't because of the bad speech, nor useless information, the people just actually had little interest in working in Vietnam. And at that point, perhaps you might also have realized, all my expectations at the beginning of this trip failed desperately. 

Conclusion

There is no conclusion. I am glad that I came to Cambodia. That gave me a chance to feel the country by my own senses rather than having my mind stuffed up with pre-judges and stereo-type thinking. I'm glad that once again I am reminded about how big the world is and how much left out there to learn.