“Inspiration is a conscious choice where you want to spend your energy and time…”
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3 Key Steps in Leading Change
Some wise man once said, “The only constant in life is change.” and this is such a profound understanding of how one can not avoid change in life. So with this understanding, what should you do? Another wise woman once said, “Change before the change run over you!” There you go… but easy said than
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A Small Dose of Stakeholder Management
In my early management career, I was told that stakeholder management is one of the most important skills to develop and master. At the time, I did not even know the word stakeholder (English was not very good back then, particularly some colleague in his email wrote stakeholder as steakholder 😂🤣). So what really is
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What Makes a Workplace Cool?
A few years ago, our industry was going through downturn and our company as well had difficult time. There were lots of pressure from the top management down and people on the ground were not very happy. On top of that, hiring has been extremely challenging as the image of the industry on the campus
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Savor the Large Mission-Critical Legacy System
During the first 8 years of my career, I was working on an extremely interesting, super large (more than 8M LOC), mission-critical and legacy system (so much for adjectives). It was a real-time data acquisition system the company invested to build to replace two old systems – a plausible ambition, state-of-the-art technologies, top-notch talents in
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Do Not Forget to Smell the Roses Along the Way
In the early stage of my career, I worked really hard (sometimes 20 hours a day). I clearly remember the days of sitting in front of the computer, in the tool lab, debugging that large mission-critical system. I also remember those nightmares of stack overflow causes M$ tool falling into well and needing to be
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Thoughts and Practices on Building a Data Science Team
Recently as the rise of ChatGPT popularity, it reminded me my short but valuable experience of building a data science team in large cooperation, so I thought a blog on it would be beneficial and on trend 😎. Few years ago I got a rare opportunity to look after a data science team that just
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Tips of Conducting Performance Reviews
Every company has a way to evaluate their employee’s performance against expectations. They come in the form of 1-1 or panel, 1 directional from manager to employee or 360 all-around, quarterly or yearly. Whichever mechanism that is, it is an important moment for employee to be recognized and developed, so take it seriously. Being a
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The Myth of Retirement
When I was in university, I had a few extremely talented classmates who have set out their ambitions to retire at age X (some says 30, some says 40). Since then, retirement seems to be this glorified life goal that everybody should aspire to – a picture of drinks on the white sandy beach with
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How to Create a Sustainable Environment Fostering Innovation
Innovation is at the core of any technology company. It is not that shiny new idea that fades quickly, it is the engine that drives the company to continuously outperform itself and sustain its success. However innovation is always somewhat considered given and easy for small startups, but “mission impossible” for large established cooperation. It
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The Essence of Agile Transformation
Many years ago, I was assigned to lead an amazing software technology center, where teams were on the journey of Agile transformation. I remembered clearly a senior engineer passionately gave me a dose of Agile Manifesto right after I took on the role, and it makes a lot of sense. Then teams showed me how
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The Power of Reflection
In today’s fast moving society full of social media blasts, it is getting harder and harder to have some quiet time, do nothing and just reflect. Luckily, I have had the luxury to do a lot of that recently as I do have plenty of quiet time…😋 I realized how powerful this small but intentional
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The Top 3 Qualities of Inspiring Leaders
In my 19 fantastic years of career with my first company, I have (luckily) had 16 managers with 5 nationalities, and 3 of whom are ladies. Each one of them has played a crucial role in my growth in the professional world. Over my unique experience working with them at different stage of my career,
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