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4/05/2020

如何成為主管 (成為主管的31堂課)



一般資深的軟體工程師,或多或少都會有思考過也許自己可以當領導者- team leader, manager等等。

主管people manager的定義很簡單:就是有人直接對你報告,並且你負責直接管理團隊裡的人,包含考績評估,工作指派,以及,最差的情況下要解僱某人。

沒有人生下就會寫程式,當然,也不會有人生下來就會當主管。然而,和寫程式不同,主管很難事先「練習」。所以這就變成雞生蛋,蛋生雞的問題。

在組織趨向扁平的情況下,如果有心想要往主管方向前進,最好要做到以下三件事情:

自動擴大責任:


也就是,主動做跨出自己工作範圍的事情。這裡並不是指自告奮勇擔任福委會主委,或者安排一些團康活動,雖然這些對大企業來說也很重要,但如果時間有限,應該優先考慮:跨出自己工作範圍,但仍然還是在軟體開發工作的本質上。

這件事聽起來容易,但做起來相當難。尤其是資深的工程師常常手邊已經有忙不完的任務,自請擴大任務搞不好吃力又不討好。然而,這卻是成為主管的最必要且最實際的路。

要擴大責任範圍,最簡單的做法是先了解自己的主管現在在忙什麼,可以先幫他處理必要但是瑣碎的事情:例如,撰寫例行報告,安排會議,會議結束後的記錄和執行事項的追蹤,列出現在正在進行的風險控管等等。有些事項,表面上看似秘書類型的工作,實際上對掌握大局有相當大的幫助。

其次是針對雖然不在自己任務範圍,但是是很重要的技術事項,花額外時間的主動幫忙解決。在稍具規模的企業中,這種事情多如牛毛,問題只在於有沒有人有空去解決它。

尋找業界導師:


如果你覺得目前主管是個好主管,那麼可以主動要求他擔任你的導師(mentor)。其次是尋找在同公司中的其他主管,真的找不到再去尋求其他公司的主管。你所需要的導師最最最起碼要符合這些條件: (1). 工作經驗至少比你多5年。(2).至少在同一個組織裡有2.5年以上的管理經驗,(3).必須是樂觀進取的人。以上這三個是最低門檻,最佳的情況會是7~10年差距。超過13年可能會有反效果,最好要有數個成功的軟體專案經驗,起碼有10年以上的工作經驗,並且有至少雇用10人以及解雇人的經驗。

找一個自己的導師,聽起來難做起來相當簡單。重點在於只要去做就可以了。有幾個基本的事情要注意 (1) 誠懇地請求幫忙,並約定這幫忙的時間每週1小時而已,並也約定為期僅有6~24個月 (2) 不要一次找很多導師。一段時間(6~24個月)有一個導師即可 (3) 約好固定的諮商時間:每週30分鐘,或者,每兩週1小時都可以,聚焦於過去一兩週的實質問題的建議 (4) 誠摯的感謝和長遠的關係,比實質的利益來的重要太多,強烈不建議付補習費,遇到需要索取補習費的導師就表示你可能找錯人,但是每週的諮商時間,請杯咖啡之類的小事倒是可行。(5) 如果可以的話,最好是12個月以上,但如果可以的話也不要超過24個月

在工作上遇到的問題,尋求業界導師過去的類似經驗,是最佳的參考。

留在還不錯的公司:


這個世界上沒有完美的公司,每個企業組織都有好的地方和不好的地方。只要覺得自己現在的環境沒有特別糟糕,目前所在公司仍然願意投資資源在人才培育,自己的主管是可學習的對象,那麼應該起碼考慮未來3~5年留在同個組織發展。一般而言,內部升遷的機率是大於外部空降。尤其是,如果你現在還未曾擔任過主管職,從外面招募一個沒擔任過主管的人來當主管的機率微乎其微。

大部分的人,總有看到別人碗裡面肉比較大塊的感受。然而,一旦發現自己目前的主管非常糟糕,組織文化負面而且破碎,當然要儘速離開的好。

最後,如果連續數個公司都待不到2年,應該是要檢討自己,而非檢討環境。




6/23/2018

The history and talent market of crawler for online-store


This article contains a brief of history of product comparison of online-store and short survey of 8 TW’s organization
Crawler and full indexing of web for online store became a pretty mature technology in Taiwan. There are not much technical difficulties to build a decent crawler. The real key points are (1) patient (2) patient and mature engineer mindset (3) patient and customization on specific needs.
Almost every local companies leverage the same technology stack.

History


Price comparison requires web crawler and full text indexing search engine as foundation. Therefore, this brief of history shows not only the evolution of technology in past 23 years (#1) but also the overview of talent market in Taiwan.
Taiwanese started to build web crawler since 1995, the earliest local crawler is yam (1995) and kimo (1997). Kimo was acquired by yahoo in 2001. During 1995~2001, the technology of crawler was limited by environment itself. Meaning, network bandwidth and data-center cost were the main reason to limit crawler. Full index search engine was still task which need sophisticated knowledge in both data structure and file structure. Talents at early internet stage sometime worked more on infrastructure and basic implement of algorithm. For example, almost all EC need to host their own email server (#2) In university, the algorithm, math, protocol or conceptual classes were major thing students need to learn.
After 2000 dot-com Bubble, crawler and product listing in Taiwan grow slowly. However, many tools and platform emerged during 2000 to 2010. Firstly, stable version Python 2.0 released at 2000, Lucene (search engine) became top leave Apache project at 2005. However, the most critical service should be “google” in this period of time. Soon google’s service started to impact Taiwan, just a few years google became the most biggest crawler and web indexing around the world. It is still the best crawler and indexing service at this moment. Gradually PChome, yahoo store grows their own store-hosting during 2000~2008. Talents in this stage had more changes to focus on business requirement. There were more and more students in University learned application development, software engineering and software project management, those are the keys in eBiz to make things happened. Google, FB and AWS started impact the web development world since 2005, there were some interesting free service opened for example google shopping API(#3) In 2010, the elasticsearch’s first release created a whole new world. Although elasticsearch was just leverage Lucene as search engine and focus only on how to make this engine scalable and easy to use, it did help all engineers to focus only in building application, instead of reinvent the wheel. So does other big-data platform/tools, for example hadoop. The talent markets of software engineers also changed in Taiwan after 2010. There were more and more open positions purely looked for software engineers. Most engineers could easily implement their idea and to test their idea toward real world in an amazingly short of time. This also drive eBiz startups. Since there are useful and dedicate tools which make internet technology not rocket science anymore. The only drawback here was that some talents engineers will look for “more interesting” job in commercial world for example machine learn or AI. However, only very few engineers will do the cutting edge task, most of them on those “more interesting” job are actually try to invent the wheel not the business focus.

Talent position in history


Nevertheless, engineers’ skill set and how to be handy with tools and not limited in tools are the major difference between talent and normal engineer. It is also critical to have a few engineers’ leader who had went through different stage of internet and also some young talents who can make things from existing tool soon. It seems a 3-4 engineers team size could fit our target. One is pretty senior and lead 2-3 young talent or even just graduated. Companies in Product-Listing

The 8 organization


The 8 companies we survey shows to build a fair product comparison website is not secret anymore. However, to build a good one still require patient and fine tune on every detail. Feebee has more engineer resources, however, the visits numbers is not a target which NO2 to NO3 can’t reach. After interviewed with ezprice engineers and also gather information from Linkedin. We could easily understood that current crawler (python), full-indexing (elasticsearch) and NLP (jieba or others) are pretty mature. A team with 2-3 mature engineers and has 2-3 months to leverage tools could build a decent product.


URL
Visits (4month)
Names
38M
firstweb 第一網站股份有限公司 ( http://sitetag.us)
20.8M
樂方股份有限公司
Funmula
17.2M
ShineWant Tech. Co., Ltd. 嚮網科技股份有限公司
11.2M
環通資訊股份有限公司
UCS Inc.
9.2M
億普媒體股份有限公司Eprice Media,Inc
2.4M
EZpriceCo.,Ltd. Taichung
2.38M
Personal website
0.5M
Reddoor Media Group Co. 紅門互動股份有限公司 (dotmore.com.tw)


Comments 


#1. 23 years is from 1995 to 2018. 1995 was the year which first “easy to get” consumer OS (Windows95) released.

#2. Email server hosting was never easy and it did make trouble for EC in early internet age. However, that also created opportunities for mail hosting service around the world. Gmail should be one of the best but mail.com and zoho.com were also good.

#3. https://www.programmableweb.com/api/google-shopping-search

#4. at 2005, Apache Lucene became a top-level apache project and latter on it almost become a core of all free full-index engine.