Throughout my life, I’ve seen many instances of patient and impatient people, often times resulting in my standing by the sidelines being thoroughly amused. Sometimes resulting in being witness to a rare major blow-up where a great deal of friendships are lost because someone couldn’t manage to wait 7 minutes for a bunch of very apologetic friends to arrive via a delayed bus during rush hour (don’t look at me, I was not in either party). Great deal of lessons in that one incident, many which I have not quite fully figured out myself.

Being known for having seemingly endless amounts of patience, and working in a field where patience (or a lack thereof) can have a significant impact on your work, I’ve come to see patience as a holy grail of sorts. It’s always been a trait that I’ve received many compliments for, and it’s certainly served me well throughout life’s many trials and tribulations, until recently.

The past year has been quite the rude awakening on the other side of that very coin. A side that is seldom ever brought up, a side that amongst all the busyness and chaos of life, we seem to have lost as a society. A side that I still struggle to come to terms with.

Prior to moving to Taiwan in the early 2000s, I had gone to Australia to visit my mom’s godmother, who I call Grandma. As my maternal grandmother passed well before my birth, she was the only grandmother I knew growing up. In the years prior, I had pestered my mother incessantly to take me to visit the paternal side of my family, so on this trip, we finally did.

Upon arriving at the family home, we discovered that another family was living there and that the place had been sold long ago. After a lot more looking, we found the address of my grandfather’s new residence, and headed there in hopes he was home and would like to see us. Once there, my mom was very hesitant to hit the buzzer as it’d been a long time since they’d seen each other and she was very anxious. However, I was very insistent on finally meeting my grandfather and was not going to turn around and leave after having traveled this far and waited this long to meet him.

Once my grandfather heard my mother’s name through the intercom, he let us in and came down to invite us up to his condo. There we learned that my grandmother had passed just before my birth, and he had sold the family home and moved to this new one. He explained that he never knew about my birth, and expressed deep regret at all the years he had missed with me. That the family was estranged, and I was the 6th of the 10 grandchildren he had. He asked that we leave our contact information, and promised to visit and make up for lost time.

In the years following, he would visit for 2~3 weeks at a time, and we kept in close contact despite the many times we moved residences. He would fly to Taiwan, and walk the couple kilometers from our home to my school just to see me and meet my friends. He would continue to do this even when we moved back to Canada, and we would share phone conversations every few weeks where he would happily sit on the other side asking me questions, trying to get me to open up and tell him anything. I seldom did say much, but he would happily sit in silence with me, sharing that moment.

We would visit each other many times over the years, flying some ~17 hours + layovers and delays until it was too much strain on his health, and I would continue to take those trips. On each and every visit, he would remember my favourite ice cream, my favourite foods, and would make sure the fridge was fully stocked with everything I liked before I even arrived. Despite refusing to eat red meat because he had a farm with all sorts of animals in his earlier days, he would go down to the butcher’s to ask for the best cut of steak meat to cook for me. A sort of luxury I never had the privilege of experiencing before.

We would spend our time together at home, reading books for hours on the couch in silence. He would teach me any word or phrase I asked him to in any one of the 5 languages he was fluent in, no matter how silly or crude. Talk with me about anything and everything; the state of the world, my goals and aspirations, his life, his time in the Navy in WW2, all about our family, etc. Watching shows like “Border Patrol” or “Do you want to be a millionaire?” where he seemed to know the answer to every question before the options even came on the screen, or just watching sitcoms like “Two and a Half Men” which were too stupid for his liking and he would doze off some 20 times before finally calling it a night. Every year, we would celebrate our birthdays together in October. Then the following month would be my mom and god grandmother’s birthday. Then Christmas. A whole stack of cards and letters being sent back and forth.

The lounge table would always have a fancy bowl with $50 in it, way too much for any kid to have, and he would always urge me to go buy myself something I liked from McDonald’s or whatever I wanted. He’d pretend to get upset until I finally grabbed a $10 or $20 bill, came back with an ice cream cone and put all the change back in the bowl, much to his chagrin. He would insist on me sleeping in his master bedroom, while he took the small bed in the spare room. Every Saturday around 5am, we’d go to visit my great grandparents at the cemetary, where he would drop off flowers. And if I was too tired to make the early morning trip, he’d go it alone.

We would drive for 1.5 hours each way to the farm in his old 4×4 Daihatsu with me singing to annoying pop songs the whole way. Picking up throwaway produce from the grocer’s and bread from the bakery, we would make our way there every 2~3 days. Feeding the giant koi fish in the pond, burning ant mounds over a meter wide in diameter while standing way too close…watering the plants and 20+ different types of fruits he planted all over, feeding the 10 odd cows that the neighbour would leave with him till they were ready to be sold off, and eating sandwiches and orange soda from the cooler we brought. There he would teach me to chop wood, where I developed a weird obsession with chopping down every single invasive tree species I had the energy for, while almost chopping off my big toe in the process. Removing tree stumps by pouring in poison, and having to stop me from trying to burn all the chopped wood/stumps because it was wildfire season (much to my disappointment).

He’d have to make many attempts to stop me from getting myself killed by the angry mother cow because I felt a special kinship to her baby calf that was born on my birthday. We’d drive to the next street to see the lambs and horses, or arrive at 4:30 in the morning just to see the rabbits and wallabies run off in the woods. He’d wear the SAP hat I gave him many years ago, and be incredibly proud even though he didn’t know what SAP was. It didn’t matter what SAP was anyway, it was from his grandson, and that’s all that mattered.

In the later years when his doctor forbade him from driving so far to do work on the farm, he would still do his routine of picking up huge bags of bread and pastry, to haul up to the condo and share it with all the families, even going so far as to deliver bread door to door to the families that need it most. Never once did I hear him express discontentment at the lack of gratitude he received. Never once had I seen him treat anyone with less than the highest of courtesies, despite all the ways people would judge and treat him just because he chose to dress simply. He was always humble and understated, always wore a smile, the most generous, and the most patient. Never once would he talk about putting 4 kids through private school and university as the sole provider without a dime to his name. Nor would he ever mention making furniture for famous figures, prime ministers, or Queen Elizabeth II herself.

Most importantly, of all the things he would never do, he never gave up the chance to let me know that I was loved. Every phone call, every visit. 3 words that I never heard growing up with an Asian mother, 3 words that may as well not exist in the Chinese vocabulary. He always wanted me to know he meant it too, “never forget that” he would say.

Yet somehow, every single time I heard it, it felt foreign. Those 3 words are so alien to my whole being and upbringing that despite wanting to say it back, I would choke on the words. No matter how much I felt the same, the best I could ever muster was “you too”. It was okay though, because one day, I will tell him. One day, those words will come out, and it’ll feel natural, because I mean it. Phone call after phone call, time after time, it’d come and go, “you too”, “you too”, “you too”.

In more recent years, he would be short on breath, and have difficulty holding conversation for very long, yet still, he would say it. No matter how difficult it was for him to say it, he would push it out. Knowing that despite his good health, he was no longer as able as he was just years prior, I resolved to take leave from work to go see him before the end of the month. When he found out, he asked me not to visit, and begged me to promise him that I would not fly over. Between his shortness of breath, and his refusal to let me change the topic, I reluctantly promised so he could hang up and get some rest.

Finally, on July 13th 2018, we shared another phone call. Between his shallow breaths, he said “I will always remember you, and you will always remember me, I love you, don’t ever forget that. You are and will always be my favourite grandson. I love you.” Yet it just didn’t come out, I didn’t say it back. When he hung up the phone, all I felt was hatred for myself, I hated that after this long I still couldn’t say something that should be so simple. So I resolved to call him again tomorrow, and tell him no matter what. It was going to happen, and nothing was going to stop me.

There’s always another chance, always another opportunity. Another bus, another train, another flight, another job, another phone call. That’s just another fact of life, and that’s what patient people understand. Sometimes though, there is no other. It’s gone and nothing will bring it back.

On July 14th 2018, in the dead of the night, my Grandpa passed at the age of 92. Never to pickup the phone again. Never to sit in silence with me on the phone. Never to hear me say those 3 words I so desperately wanted to say. Never knowing that he was and is my favourite person in the whole world. And yet, my only solace is in knowing that despite having never heard those words, he knows.

I love you, Grandpa.

The post On waiting and patience first appeared on Jay Huang.

This is not entirely about that memo, but more about how statements such as these have stirred up huge storms, and have been blown way out of proportion through social media. What this post really is about, is simply a last ditch effort at bringing some calm and introspection into a disconcerting trend that’s been occurring the past few years, and does not seem to be going away. If you have not already, please go and read the memo in full. Or read it after reading this post, either way, please give it a thorough read whether or not you agree with the premise being brought forth.

Regardless, here’s a summary of his document anyways:

Page 1: Addressing public response and misunderstanding

Pages 2~3:

• A simple breakdown of left-wing and right-wing stances on equality and ideological preferences, along with a bit about where Google sits on this spectrum and how this position of catering to political correctness silences any contrarian viewpoints or ideas.

Pages 3~4:

• An overview of how women differ relative to men, “on average”. Namely an openness towards feelings and aesthetics, stronger interest in people instead of things, higher agreeableness, and higher anxiety. Along with providing these bullet points, J.D acknowledges that the higher agreeableness generally leads to women having a harder time negotiating, asking for raises, etc, but also points out there are also men with similar struggles that are unable to get support. Why? Due to gender-biased programs that focus on this issue.

Pages 5-6:

• Pointing out that men are largely status driven, and judged on status, so tend to pursue higher paying/higher stress jobs, while women, on average, tend to value work-life balance more relative to men. He then presents a few ideas to empower women in spite of these differences:
• Allow more cooperative behavior to thrive (generally displayed by women), allowing and truly endorsing part time work (more appealing to women, who generally value work-life balance more).
• Make tech and leadership less stressful (more welcoming to people who are not so pre-occupied with status as to willingly take on significantly more stress).
• Encouraging that we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine”, something that J.D clearly sees merit in.

Pages 6-7:

• I assume these two pages are where the majority of the outrage stems from. But what ideas are brought forth here? J.D suggests that in Google’s effort to have a more equal gender/racial representation to counteract discriminatory biases (conscious or otherwise), they are in many cases, being discriminatory. This includes:
• Programs, classes specifically for people of a certain gender/racial background, differential treatment for “diverse” candidates.
• Reconsidering sets of people that are not “diverse enough”.
• Setting org level targets for increased diverse representation, which again, can encourage discrimination/biases.
• He posits that these well-intentioned, but discriminatory practices can actually increase racial and gender tensions, which is counter to the very thing Google is trying to prevent by putting these practices in place. He suggests that because of the left leaning ideology prevalent at Google, programs and practices are created that goes so far out to cater to minority groups that we fail to view these issues holistically and work with all “sides” to tackle them. He includes some footnotes that points out many ideological biases both historically, and present, including summary of recent research on the salary gap between genders for equal work.

Pages 8-10:

• Here J.D mentions that the same compassion for certain groups that we so commonly focus on, the kind that leaves no room for differing opinions and healthy discourse, is complacent to plenty of the violent, shaming incidents we’ve seen so frequently over the past few years. He then goes on to clarify “I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority.” and suggests that we should instead:
• Stop alienating/moralizing differing views.
• Recognize and confront (Google’s) biases.
• Open up programs that are limited to certain genders or races, that are in essence, discriminatory and divisive.
• Stop focusing on microaggressions/other unintentional transgressions (jumping to conclusions, being quick to become enraged and place a label on someone for their ideas)
• Recognize that while gender/racial equality is important, there are fundamental differences between all of us so that we may actually solve problems
• Some changes to Unconscious Bias training for promo committees that help measure the effect (overcorrecting, backlash, political bias, etc)

Throughout this memo, the premise has been quite clear, and I believe this is very much relevant to our broader world, not just Google, or the tech industry. While well-intentioned, many attempts to “equalize” differences between groups actually end up also neglecting, discriminating, alienating, and harming other groups who may very much have similar struggles. While acknowledging fundamental differences between genders “on average”, J.D makes an effort to point out and reason about many of these points, and offer suggestions for more inclusive, introspective, holistic improvements.

Isn’t this the whole point of equality; gender, racial, or otherwise? Inclusion, acceptance, understanding, accommodating, etc? Yet from the moment this memo was under the public eye, these are the majority of the headlines: “Women are neurotic, diversity efforts are ‘bad for business’ and 10 other shocking quotes from the viral Google manifesto” (CNBC), “Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google” (Gizmodo), “One of the company’s male engineers claims that women are biologically unfit for tech jobs” (CNN), “A Google employee wrote an anti-diversity ‘manifesto’ that’s going viral inside the company” (The Verge).

In fact, an ex-Googler wrote an incredibly heavy-handed piece that not only misrepresents and misquotes (“…essentially, how women and men are intrinsically different and we should stop trying to make it possible for women to be engineers, it’s just not worth it.”) the original memo, it goes so far as to feed fuel to the flames by making blanket statements suggesting every female ever would be so incredibly offended by his memo, and that “a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face”.

I can’t help but feel that all the hate and vitriol stemming from this memo, and many other incidents in the past few years, are so incredibly counter-productive and ironic for what we as a society are claiming we value. The second someone presents an idea that deviates even a bit from the hivemind, they are fired, attacked by multiple large media outlets with huge influence and following, receive personal threats, and constantly misquoted, misrepresented, and bashed.

As someone who has worked with many of the top companies in the tech industry, I’ve seen first hand, on multiple occasions, managers that say “women are superior than men”, or made it blatantly clear to their subordinates that they only want to hire women. Is this really what we, as an industry, as a society are about when we talk about equality? Yes, it’s painfully obvious that there are significantly less women in tech as opposed to men. Yes, most women and other minority groups struggle with discrimination, harassment, more than others. Yes, there are also industries, professions, and sub-fields where men are largely underrepresented. Yes, there are areas like sports where different racial backgrounds are significantly more dominant. But is the solution really going so far in the opposite end that any mention of biased, discriminatory attempts to compensate for discrimination should be met with so much aggression? Making it so painfully obvious that yes, your opinion does matter, but only if you agree with “us”? Launching a full-scale attack on someone who did not even say most of the things he’s being crucified for?

And therein lies the problem with all of this. “We” as a society have identified that we are sorely lacking in equality, in fair treatment; that each and everyone of us have biases, conscious or otherwise. “We” want to give a voice to the groups that lack it most. “We” want to feel better about the fact we support a good cause. “We” say we don’t support oppression, that we need to fight for the oppressed. “We” are so concerned with nitpicking every single tiny thing, jumping at every opportunity to label someone else as a racist, a sexist, a bigot, an <insert controversial labels here>, that we push away tons of people. “We” shutdown people’s voices. “We” oppress individuals, and anybody who dares to think differently. People who are misguided, people who may not be the most articulate, people who are misunderstood, females, people of color, all sorts of people. People who have been constantly reassured that they’re safe to express themselves, safe to “speak their mind”.

How can “we” as a society expect to come to a mutual understanding, and work together on being equal, if we’re constantly pointing out and asserting our differences? How can “we” expect to get more people on-board with what we believe in, if we don’t subscribe and hold ourselves accountable to the same standards? If “we” divide, alienate, and push away the same people that we want to listen? Is it still “we” if most everyone is ending up hurt? This past week has hit incredibly close to home, not only this week, all of the past couple years — but this week especially. It’s once again brought something most of us hold strong opinions about, and care deeply about, front and center. And it’s that same thing, that causes all these conflicts. We all want to be heard, yet we do not hear. We all want to speak, yet we do not let others speak. Perhaps it’s about time to put down all the pitchforks and torches, and focus on the stuff that really matters — listening.

Join the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002983

The post About the “Anti-Diversity Manifesto” first appeared on Jay Huang.

They have problems or goals for their business and they want me to use my skills and experience to tackle those problems. Since they are paying for my time and trust that I will help make them successful, my opinions and suggestions are taken seriously. They may not always agree with these suggestions, but that’s good because it moves us forward and allows us to further test and analyze these ideas, quantitatively.

However, being used to this kind of process makes things very different in other areas of my life. I regularly visit developer communities online to see what’s going on and seek out interesting questions people have. And after all this time, I’ve found most of the people who go online looking for “suggestions/advice” really aren’t looking for suggestions.

They are looking for their views to be accepted and validated; most of them are not willing to accept differing views and will continue to ask and amass a ton of opinions until they find one that matches their own. Of course there are people who are genuinely looking for someone else’s perspective and take it into heart. Only, on the internet, there is no insight into whether or not someone has really gone back and followed through with your advice.

It’s a world vastly different from what I’m used to as a consultant, and one that frustrates me greatly. It doesn’t frustrate me because random strangers on the internet aren’t listening to me, it frustrates me because as an introvert, I listen far far more than I speak. And it becomes very clear that many people do not know how to truly “listen”.

A couple years ago, when I was in the middle of my last co-op term, my co-op instructor from BCIT visited me at SAP. He brought up that my co-op report was one of the most well written he’d seen (probably because no one who writes these reports actually cares about them), asked me if I ever considered becoming an instructor, and that he thought I would do well as an instructor. I didn’t really give him an answer because he was an instructor himself, but the answer is pretty much no; I did not ever consider becoming an instructor and I don’t think I have a desire to become one. Regardless, we were chatting happily, and he asked if I was returning to school after my co-op term. I said no because I decided to put school on hold as I had a couple full-time offers.

He then asked me if I had any suggestions for the department’s co-op program. I said not really, but he insisted, so I thought, “why not?” and told him my biggest issue with the co-op program at BCIT (as nicely as I could). I suggested that maybe, just maybe, it would be nice if we had more job postings in general, and with more reputable companies (as opposed to mostly small local shops). The fact was places like UBC and SFU had job postings in the hundreds, ranging from large corporations to small shops, while BCIT had less than 30, with half of the postings littered by EA (Electronic Arts), which was known for not hiring from BCIT. He instantly flared up and went off about how he’s been putting in so much effort to get postings for students and how I’m ungrateful for the awesome opportunities provided to me.

This came somewhat as a shock to me. I’d expected him to be upset because it was in a way, questioning his competence; but not to this extent, and it was certainly not my intent. After all, he insisted that I give him suggestions. It became apparent to me that he probably wasn’t really asking for suggestions, he simply wanted acknowledgment that he was doing a great job. Bit of a round-about way of asking for validation if I might say so myself.

This experience, along with a couple others, is the reason why when I ask for feedback, I ask for 1 thing the person likes about my work, and 2~3 things they don’t. It’s also the reason I will hesitate when being asked for feedback. Most people are conditioned and prepared to give positive feedback. It’s quite simple logic that if you have nothing to gain, there’s no point in saying something that may cause someone to be upset with you. Encouraging and acknowledging the possibility that you do not, in fact, know best gives people more room to present to you their raw, unfiltered perception of your product/work. Limiting the feedback to a small list allows you to identify the most important points and areas you need to work on.

I know a few companies where this is baked directly into their recruiting process. They will ask a candidate to try their product, and come up with areas where the product could improve. While I think this is a great idea, it doesn’t happen nearly enough. If all you want to hear is boilerplate “courtesy feedback”, don’t waste anyone’s time at all. Clients pay consultants to find inefficiencies, areas to improve on, and markets to expand to. So if you’re lucky enough to have someone willing to give you feedback, take the time and put them at ease. Make them feel comfortable enough to point out flaws. Embrace contention. And if they really only have positive feedback, don’t settle for “it’s awesome!”/”it’s great!”/”I love it!”. Be ready to ask why. Ask what makes this this piece of work awesome/great. Ask to be challenged.

The post Giving feedback first appeared on Jay Huang.

There were a few listings on their website, so I applied to a “Web Development Engineer” posting for Vancouver as I felt it was the best match for my skills and experience. I wasn’t actively looking for a job at that point, so I didn’t think much of it and pretty soon, forgot I had even applied. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by one of Amazon’s recruiters on May 24th 2013 for an interview on the 29th. I seriously considered declining it as I had just moved to my new job for a month, and was certainly not looking to leave (yet).

As many people know, I absolutely hate speaking on the phone. First of all, I’m more of a listener, and when I’m speaking with a stranger for the first time on the phone, that comes across as unenthusiastic or uninterested. Secondly, it forces me to context switch and break my mental train of thought. Whether or not it’s pre-scheduled does not matter; I’m forced to abruptly pause my work and move my attention to something else. As a freelancer, I have the option to cut myself off from virtually any environmental disruptions, and prefer to allocate small time blocks to update or communicate with people/clients. Third and most importantly, it’s synchronous communication. When I have to pick up the phone and speak to someone, not only am I making an expensive context switch, I have to be wary of tone, wording, and other things that cause the other party to misunderstand me. Aside from that, I’m unable to give any issues more in-depth and careful thought, which really defeats the whole purpose of discussing them. But in those recent months I had been looking to make a conscious effort to expose myself to more social/human interaction, so I decided I would give it a try. I had nothing to lose anyways; I was working on stuff I enjoyed and this phone call would have no effect on me other than cause a bit more nervousness.

Phone interview:

I took the morning off (and made it up later) to do the phone interview. When I picked up the phone the interviewer introduced himself as a Web Development Engineer from Seattle. Immediately I noticed the Indian accent and became nervous because I realized I already had trouble understanding him. He thanked me profusely for taking the interview (literally 5~6 thank yous), which was quite unexpected but also helped relieve some of my anxiety. Nevertheless, we proceeded with the interview. We went on collabedit and he tested my understanding of some of the key features of Javascript, the design and implementation of a type of web component, a bit about HTTP and servers, understanding and application of CSS, and an algorithmic implementation question.

The hiring team has really enjoyed speaking with you and we would like to schedule a time for you to come to Amazon for in-person interviews!

Although I was able to answer all the questions, I was second guessing myself because I felt that I must have misunderstood something between the foreign accent and the poor phone connection. I thought that was the end of it and wrote it off as a nice experience. Then on June 11th, I got an email from a different recruiter saying that they would like me to go in for on-site interviews. Weird, I thought — almost everyone who I knew that interviewed with Amazon went through 2 or more phone interviews before going on-site. I’m certainly not going to complain about having less hurdles to jump through. Upon reading the email more closely, I realize they want me to fly down to Seattle for the interviews. I was perplexed; I thought the position was in Vancouver? It was, they said. But they still wanted me to fly down.

Paid flight, travel, food, and lodging? Okay I guess I’ll take a vacation day and head down. Better not forget my passport! Oh, passport…let me take a quick look. My passport was about to expire in 3 days. I quickly let the recruiter know and started the passport renewal process. After a long 3 weeks, I finally got my new passport. We scheduled the on-site for Monday, July 8th, arriving Sunday around noon.

Sunday comes around and I’ve arrived in Seattle. I didn’t have time to prepare for any of these interviews because of my full-time job, my freelance work, and attending night school. I decided I would walk around and figure out how to walk to the building (they have 7 in the area), and just roam a bit. Returning to the hotel, I headed to sleep early so I would be well rested. Unfortunately, I got no sleep that night. Something about the nice hotel bed or the fact that I was not doing my usual late-night freelance work made me restless.

Interview #1:

My first interview was at 10:15am and a 20 minute walk from the hotel (note that Amazon pays for your interview transportation expenses, which includes your flight + taxi to the interview should you need it). I headed out at 9:35 and arrived 20 minutes early to check-in, sign the non-disclosure form (which means I will not be sharing interview questions in this post; just a broad overview), and sit there to calm my nerves. I wasn’t nervous so much about the prospect of getting an offer or not as much as I was about sitting in a small room with a stranger and writing code on a giant whiteboard. There was a sudden change of the first interviewer, so it took him some time to come get me. Immediately upon sitting down, I was presented with a problem that was an integral part of Amazon’s marketplace websites. It was an algorithmic problem that the team had run into and solved, and on the front-end. I wrote the algorithm in Javascript.

Interview #2:

The next interviewer came to pick me up and go to lunch. He introduced himself as a developer on the team, but was acting temporarily as the manager because the previous one left recently. I didn’t have a specific preference in mind, so he took me to a small local sandwich shop where I ordered chicken ciabatta and he paid with a company credit card. He asked if I was interviewing for a position in Seattle, and seemed confused why I was flown down to Seattle when the position was for Vancouver. I was asked a lot of questions about my previous technical experience, technical challenges I faced, asked me to elaborate on some of the more interesting architectural solutions I’ve implemented and discussed trade-offs between other solutions. We had a pretty good discussion, but responding to his questions left little time to finish lunch, so he gave me the last 10 minutes to eat while he answered a few of my questions.

Interview #3:

This interview did not involve writing code. The interviewer was the manager of a major team within Amazon. He gave me an algorithmic question (also very relevant to Amazon), and I came up with a solution fairly quickly, but he noticed I was still deep in thought. I explained that it was the best solution I could come up with, but I was wondering if there could be a better way to do it. We ran over some of the details together, discussed potential trade-offs in a different algorithm, and decided my solution could not be any more efficient. I was also asked a behavioral question specific to Amazon’s business and core values.

Interview #4:

For this interview I had two interviewers; one of them was shadowing as he was fairly new to the company. They tested my understanding how browsers handled various things in HTML/CSS, then gave me a screenshot of a new release about to be pushed live, and asked me to write the HTML/CSS for the whole page.

Interview #5:

Here I ran into my interviewer from the phone interview. He asked me to explain the differences between two implementations in Javascript, and use cases of each one. I also wrote HTML/CSS/JS for a webpage component, with a focus on modular code. He then tested my low level understanding of how browsers handled the DOM, and I had to implement that from scratch. I was pretty tired at this point, and had some problems understanding his accent, but I think I did okay.

Interview #6:

When I send you the offer on Wednesday…

The last interview was with the lead recruiter from Vancouver (apparently he flew from Vancouver to Seattle to interview me, a candidate that was in Vancouver and had to fly to Seattle for the interviews…). He asked if I was tired after such a long day, and then counted 7 interviews. I only remember 6, but he had the official list so I guess it’s 7. Maybe he was talking about interviewers. He mentioned I had received great feedback and that they were excited to move forward. He then spent the remaining 35~40 minutes drawing on the whiteboard the compensation details of the position, including the signing bonus(es), equity options, performance bonus, how I could choose between more options or cash for the bonus, the benefits of choosing one over the other, the base salary, etc. He said “when I send you the offer on Wednesday, you will see _______” on a couple occasions. Then he walked out with me and explained that the team in Vancouver was very diverse and full of cool people, how it was much like a startup, and that I would love it. He then said “once you accept the offer, we will fly you back down around 3 weeks later to do the training here, because the Vancouver offices are still quite small and we don’t have many hires that week”.

After not hearing back from him, I emailed him to follow up. I didn’t hear back so I emailed him another two times, with no response. It’s been months and he has yet to reply to me either with an offer, or a rejection letter. I guess it didn’t work out after all.

Aside from the lack of response from the lead recruiter and the weird logistics of sending me to Seattle to interview for a position in Vancouver and having all the interviewers puzzled, the interviews were pretty interesting. Each interview during the on-site tested a specific skill/topic required for one to be successful in the position, ensuring that there are no glaring gaps in knowledge. I would say it was one of the best interviews I’ve done for a front-end position in terms of getting a full picture of the candidate’s knowledge and experience.

Edit: I’ve received some questions regarding reimbursement; Amazon does provide reimbursement for travel and other expenses. You are assigned a daily budget for each category (food, transit, etc), and are asked to keep the receipts and send them in as long as they were for the purpose of interviewing (not for your personal leisure). They also paid for my hotel, but did not pay for damage deposit. Your situation may differ but it’s good to keep that in mind should you be asked to pay before getting your room.

I received a cheque covering all receipts I sent in (I forgot most of the food receipts) after about 6~8 weeks. Rental car wasn’t offered, but taxi receipts were reimbursed, up to the daily limit as well.

Join the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7040382

The post My Amazon interview experience first appeared on Jay Huang.

I decided to give it a try and just push anything onto my GitHub account. But soon the realization that I will never be able to showcase any of my biggest accomplishments on GitHub settled in and my curiosity and eagerness to break things took over.

Let’s backtrack a bit. Due to our financial situation, I never really had any toys as a kid. I have fond memories of assigning myself the impossible task of persuading my mother to buy me one of the huge bouncy balls at Superstore. For years. In the end, mom won; Superstore no longer sold the bouncy balls, so I would be unable to beg any further. Then, one day, a family friend came to our place and brought me a little mechanical dog that would bark and spin in circles. It was probably more expensive than any toys that I had up to that point combined. It didn’t matter, it was only a few months past my 4th birthday, I did not yet possess a firm understanding of money, and I was intrigued. I raced into the bedroom and immediately began systematically tearing the dog apart — screws, rotator, gears, plastic bands, batteries, etc. Once I had figured out how everything was working together to create this dark magic and it was time to put the dog back together, I never bothered to. A couple years later when I would finally get my first computer and learn how to create websites, I quickly moved on to learning how to break them. I always had an eagerness to break things, but I digress.

I didn’t try to break anything, but I had discovered a peculiarity. I was able to push code to GitHub as Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git (or you may know of him from something called Linux…). While I was using my own SSH key to push to a repository that only I was allowed to push to, GitHub showed ‘me’ as ‘Linus’, effectively making one of the most highly respected programmers in the world a contributor to my project. (Yay!)

Here is one such commit:

What’s more, clicking on the author of that commit takes you to Linus’ GitHub profile, where he is a frequent contributor to the Linux kernel source tree.

Note: This has been accomplished without compromising anyone else’s GitHub account. Read on for the details.

All I had done was setup git with my SSH key for Github, then changed my git user.email to the same email that is being linked to Linus’ account: torvalds@linux-foundation.org (note that this is publicly available).

It seems after I have already authenticated myself against GitHub, it just tries to grab whichever user is associated with the email I’m using in commits, and voila!

It’s occurred to me that many people already know about this, and was probably by design on GitHub’s end. Nevertheless, although it did not contribute to the compromise of any accounts, and did not open up any unintended privileges, I thought the behavior was incredibly misleading and disruptive. Any user in the world is effectively able to push commits (to repositories that they already have permission to contribute to), as any other user, potentially using the reputation of someone like Linus to cause mischief and malice. So I decided to report it as a bug to GitHub anyways.

They got back to me 4 days later, on October 17th, and explained it was in fact, by design as I had suspected.

Hi Jay,

Thanks for getting in touch.

It’s important to note that this is not a security concern or a bug – impersonating another GitHub user in this fashion doesn’t grant you access to any of their repositories or give you any privileges you didn’t already have.

Rather, this is a feature of GitHub that can be abused. We take abuse very seriously. If someone is wrongfully impersonating you, please let us know and we will remove the impersonated commits and deal with them as quickly as we can.

Over the past several years, millions of people have used this feature to collaborate with colleagues and strangers successfully. Yet rarely, if ever, has anyone used it to abuse another user. Usually, we find that people impersonate others by creating a fake account with a similar username and your avatar, then they leave offensive comments on issues.

The sad truth is impersonation is rampant on the internet and removing legitimate features won’t stop an individual with malicious intent.

Rather than make this feature less useful for everyone who uses it responsibly, we strive to make GitHub a fun and safe environment by swiftly dealing with bullies and giving you ways to ignore them.

If you are still concerned about this, your team can choose to use Git’s built in options to sign with a GPG key. If you are concerned about having a verifiable identity on your commits, you should check into the `git commit -S` command.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Petros

Well it’s certainly their decision whether or not this is a “feature”, but I do feel it’s quite misleading. Sure the internet is rampant with people creating fake accounts with a similar username and avatar in an attempt to impersonate, but in this case, the impersonator has the help of GitHub. Exact same username, exact same avatar, even exact same profile link. The commit doesn’t seem to show up on the “victim’s” commit activity, but it’s certainly real enough. Rather than getting reports of this behavior and then removing commits and “dealing with” the user, perhaps this feature should be better refined to reduce this support overhead and chaos.

I understand this feature has the benefits of allowing people to push commits with emails they don’t own, such as ‘example@example.com’ that I occasionally use, but having your commits attributed to a different user is a whole different issue.

It may be a nice feature, but it’s also quite the design flaw.

Join the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6918343

The post Pushing code to GitHub as Linus Torvalds first appeared on Jay Huang.

In fact, the first 800 words or so were already written a month back, hence some of the “flow” in the writing seemed broken. Writing that blog post was an attempt at finally allowing myself to find some closure and write it off as an experience that will make me better equipped to deal with (heaven forbid) similar issues in the future.

As it’s probably quite apparent, I quit that job without having another lined up. And for some reason, I’m perfectly at peace with that. In fact, I’ve made very little effort to look for another full-time job; I’ve done an on-site interview with Amazon (rejected), a phone interview with Facebook after solving their coding puzzles, and a few others which I decided wouldn’t be a good fit (I’m much more wary of potential red flags now after that experience).

The time since leaving that company has been mostly a recharge, reflection period, sprinkled with continued freelance work with my clients. I wasn’t aware at the time, but I’ve felt the burnout hit long after I quit that job, and I finally feel “well”.

Now, about actually hitting #2 on HN. I’ve always been curious what being top 3 on HN looked like, and I will say the response to my post has been mind-blowing (336 points, 201 comments as of this writing). I expected a few people to skim through it, write it off as another typical poor experience in the industry, then fall deep into the abyss where posts never get past the “newest” section. For the first hour or so, the post was stuck around 2 points. By the second hour, it started to pick up and sit around 30 points, with still no comments. At this time it was already #10, and I thought that would be the end of it. I left to go play badminton with some of my friends from my previous-previous job at SAP.

That’s when the post started shooting up. I received texts from friends saying my blog post was #4 on HN (I don’t have a data plan). “Well, it’ll die down soon, kind of wished it would hit top 3 though”, I thought to myself. I couldn’t be more wrong. 3 hours later, my post was sitting at 80 points and 23 comments, and I was starting to worry if my site would crash while I was away.

When I got home a couple hours later, it had already accumulated more than 200 upvotes, and a ton of helpful comments to look through. A bunch of comments on my blog (yes, even the one saying I sound like a boring wanker), and some tweets from bots and actual readers. My inbox had exploded from HNNotify, along with some nice people who reached out to see if I would be up for coffee/looking for a new job at their company. The new comments were coming in so frequently that I had to install the hckr news Chrome extension to help my eyes filter the new ones. I’d been looking for something to help me track new comments in HN threads, and this time, I had enough incentive to.

For most of the night, my site had ~300 concurrent visitors; the most I saw was around 349. From Thursday night (the time of the post), to Friday night, my site received 31,960 unique visitors and 79,447 pageviews. This traffic was more or less all from HN, I don’t actually have many humans reading my blog. I haven’t seen this many people reading my writing since my Windows7Center days!

Alexa ranking jumps by 21 million.

The response on HN has been tremendous, not only in helping me recognize the different options available to me at the time, how other people may have dealt with it, and the stories of many people who have been in (or are currently in) similar situations.

I have received many requests to expose the name of the company/PM. I do not wish to reveal that information because:

1. I do not wish to start a witch hunt, and I do not wish to taint their name forever as there’s a possibility they will change (I hope).
2. For reasons jacques_chester has pointed out. More trouble than it’s worth.

That said, I understand there are people who may live in the area and would like to avoid a similar situation. Contact me privately and I will let you know, your discretion is appreciated.

And with that, I can say I have found my closure.

P.S: If you or your company is hiring, or you just want to have a chat, feel free to reach out.

The post The HackerNews effect: Hitting #2 on HN first appeared on Jay Huang.

One would mean I would be moving to Palo Alto, California, where I would be joining a well-known, highly successful, technology company. The pay was great, and working there would make any future job hunts virtually non-existent. The only possible downside to it was having to move. A few weeks prior, I had just completed the final steps of becoming a homeowner, and moving to Palo Alto would mean having to put my place back on the market within a few short weeks. Nevertheless, I was not too concerned. Having lived for extended periods of time in Taiwan, Australia, and Canada, I’m very open to moving and even embrace the thought of living in a different country, with major differences in culture.

The other offer would mean staying in familiar old Vancouver, in a company that had one claim to fame (a relatively impressive one at that), and noticeably lower pay. If that were it, I would have moved to Palo Alto in a heartbeat. But that wasn’t all. The product that I was offered to work on was something that I was extremely excited, and passionate about. In fact, it was something that I had been giving a lot of thought prior to hearing about, and not only was I excited to hear about its existence, I was even more excited to be one of the two developers working on it.

After weighing my options and deciding that I didn’t really want to pass up the chance to build something I was so passionate about, I happily took the lower pay (and prestige) to join the team. I was not too concerned about money because it was something I had been dreaming to build. I certainly did not think about much else at that time, I just couldn’t wait.

The team consisted of 5 people. The PM, copywriter, UI/UX designer, myself, and the other developer. Everyone else in the company was working on other products. In terms of the executives, they were very much detached from the operations of the team.

And so began my short 9 weeks at the company. Within days, a big red flag was placed in front of me, but I was still so oblivious and excited that I shrugged it off and pushed it aside. Two unfamiliar names were mentioned in passing a few times. Curiosity kicked in, and naturally, I asked who those two people were. It was always glossed over with something like “they used to be here”, and very little more. After a couple meetings, I was able to slowly piece together some information about those two people. One had worked for around 3 months, the other worked for around 5 months. No one was able or willing to drop hints as to whether they left or were fired. But either way, after the first one left, the second one came, then when that one was about to leave, the other developer I worked with came along.

It seemed weird to me at the time, that for whatever reason, people were coming in and whether quitting or being fired, leaving a product that was solving a big problem, with quite the market — so soon. But I didn’t worry too much about it, as all I could do was speculate and probably come to the wrong conclusion.

Soon after, there was an “optional” beer party. It was a Friday (I believe) night, and this beer party was from 5~9. My mother being in poor health, I stayed for maybe 45 minutes, spoke with a few people so as to not leave so abruptly, had some water (I don’t drink), and left. It was a pretty tame party anyways; there were maybe 8 people sitting at the kitchen table (including our PM), talking loudly about random gossip, 2 or 3 people re-filling their beer cup, 4~5 people around the ping ping table, and the rest were just sitting at their desks browsing whatever they were browsing, and looking bored. After all I thought, it was an optional beer party, it wasn’t celebrating anything within the company in particular, and I already saw some other people leave. Surely it was perfectly fine for me to leave around 6 to look after my sick mother? Apparently not. A few weeks later I would find out that this party wasn’t quite “optional”, but more on that later.

So the next week, it was more code, code, code, preparing a working demo for our investor, code, code, code, racking my brain and its terribly short term memory on what I worked on the previous day for our daily morning scrum meeting. Near the end of the week, we had another push from the development to staging environment. After doing some testing and resolving some bugs, I came across a XSS vulnerability in the product. Now, depending on the vulnerability, XSS may or may not be a huge issue. However, our product was dealing with large amounts of money from customers’ bank accounts, and this vulnerability made it possible to break large portions of the application. Most importantly, it allowed the transactions of users to be skewed, allowing malicious users to cause other users to essentially lose money, or worse yet, put them in a potential dispute, and ultimately, cause our product to lose customers.

“Stop fucking around and get shit done.”

I brought up the discovery of this vulnerability, how critical it was that we resolve it, and the horrifying impact of it. But no one seemed to really care. The other developer said we don’t really have time to fix it, but it was clear he also recognized the potential dangers (and at the same time, the PM was pushing us hard to make more “pretty stuff”). The PM said “stop fucking around and get shit done”. Those were his exact words. Another red flag just whacked me in the face. At this point, I was frustrated, but what was I supposed to do? If I went ahead and allocated time to fix it, I would have to deal with an already ticked off PM who seemed to think fixing critical vulnerabilities is “fucking around” and non-productive. I decided to put it on the back burner and bring it up again when an opportunity presented itself.

Code, code, code, demo, meeting, code, code, code, meeting, code, code, code. On it went. Deep down, I felt that something wasn’t quite right, but I continued to ignore the red flags that seemed to constantly appear. But hey, at least the work life balance seemed okay. I mean everyone was leaving after 8 hours a day, and sometimes I would work a bit longer than everyone else, but that’s okay, because it’s on my own will and it’s usually a feature or bug that I just have to get done.

“You are not 100% committed.”

A few days later, the PM says he wants to speak with me. What I thought was going to be a nice conversation turned out to be anything but. One subjective issue, and 3 questionable points. “You are not 100% committed”, he said. Weird, I don’t understand how that can be. Surely I am the best judge of whether or not I’m committed? And it’s quite apparent to me that I am 100% committed and truly care about the product. He would repeat this 2 times before finally enlightening me on why he felt I was not 100% committed:

1. Apparently, I wasn’t committed because I had not updated my LinkedIn profile since starting this job a mere 8 weeks ago.
2. My website is still up, and my website is (still) selling my freelance services to clients.
3. I also haven’t been working overtime on a regular basis (aka every single day of the week). “I’m not saying you should be working 80 hours a week, but 70 is not ridiculous to ask, and if you were committed you would do more”.

I didn’t understand this at all. I asked him if he felt my performance was lacking. No. So somehow, these 3 points are telling him that I am not committed. Here’s my problem with these “points”:

1. I hadn’t yet bothered to update my LinkedIn, because it takes up more of my time, something I’m not yet ready to do, and I’ve been told that updating your LinkedIn tells an employer you are on the hunt for a job again. I definitely did not want to give that impression. Furthermore, being a co-worker, he stalked my profile multiple times yet never added me? That seems more of an issue to me than anything. The other developer, who I worked quite well with, added me the day I accepted the offer. I’m not saying adding someone on LinkedIn should be a requirement, but if you’re going go off worrying about my profile, wouldn’t it make sense to send me an invite to connect? To each their own I guess.
2. Why would I take my website down? It’s part of my brand and it gives people easier access should they need to contact me. As usual, it hasn’t been re-designed for a while, because I simply do not have the time. The simple truth is I do work with clients as a freelance developer, so why would that not be on my website? The funniest part about all this, is when I was discussing the offer with the HR lady (the PM was also present), I brought up the topic of side projects outside of work, and my freelance work. As I do have some clients on retainer, it would be impossible for me to suddenly end my agreement with them. They both said “Oh no no, we definitely do not want you to stop your freelance work, in fact, most of us in this company have side projects outside of work, and that’s something we love and embrace”. I’m not kidding. That was part of the reason I didn’t move to P.A too. Yet in a short 8 weeks, that’s suddenly a problem.
3. I’m not new to this industry. I’m well aware that overtime happens, and in fact, it’s quite common. I’ve worked till 10:30 PM once or twice when I was at SAP. And sometimes some critical bug or release has to be finished at all costs. I get that. There is a reason for the overtime, usually a good one. But what my PM was talking about, wasn’t about any release in particular. It was simply “you’re not committed because you’re not working 70+ hours a week”. It’s been proven time and time again that constant overtime produces less value, and in fact, may even cause you to break more than you build. It’s simply impossible for someone to code for 70 hours a week and not break things and eventually shutdown due to burnout.

I tried to address these points with him in an amiable manner, but it was impossible. All he would say was “well…” then go back to talking about how I am not giving him the impression that I am committed. He also brought up the fact that I left the beer party early and that further reinforced his idea that I wasn’t committed.

A few days prior to this incident, I had already been thinking about that job. And the red flags I previously mentioned, plus a couple other things, made me wonder if it was even a good fit for me at all. It’s against my nature to not work at resolving issues, but in this case it seemed he wasn’t receptive at all to my opinions, or simple logic, for that matter. After this “discussion”, I went home and thought a long time about it. I would speak with him the next day, and try once again, to resolve the issue. If he was still not receptive, I would give notice to leave.

The following day, I worked hard to make sure that if I were to leave, I have left my work on the product in a good place, then I went to speak with the PM again. He was completely unwilling to discuss anything, and repeated the same accusation of me not being committed and the 3 feeble points to back up his statement. At that moment, I submitted my resignation. He was indifferent. He said “well if you don’t hand off your work, some people are going to be fucking pissed”. I told him that I had every intent to make sure all of my work was accounted for and that there would be no difficulties to progress without me. I had already documented large portions of my work, and it was all very transparent. He said come in tomorrow to do a knowledge transfer.

That night, I was going through my email, Trello board, and JIRA issues to see if there was anything I still needed to hand off to the other developer. While I was looking through my email, I was suddenly disconnected from all services (Google Apps, Trello, JIRA, Bitbucket). This left me a bit confused as to whether my fob still was able to get in the door, I did not want to travel 1.5 hours just to realize I was locked out. But I went the next day anyways, assuming he was just trying to protect company resources.

The next day during scrum, he announced to the team that I would “no longer be working here”. I did not care much about it, but it brought me back to thinking about the 2 previous developers on the team. I guess that would be how things would be explained to the future developer too. When I sat down at my desk, he told the other developer to make sure I didn’t make any code changes. At that point, it really felt like he was giving the impression that he had fired me. But I chose to remain as professional as possible, doing my knowledge transfer, not causing any drama explaining to people why I am no longer working there. Around noon, everything was done, and he told me to leave, and give my (personal) password to the other developer. I told the other developer that I would like to wipe the desktop myself (with his supervision of course), and change the password, then give him the new one.

It was time to leave, and the HR lady came to me and said I would have to sign a release letter and send it back within 2 work days (the following Monday was a holiday), otherwise I would not get any of the remaining pay, including my “stock options”. Apparently instead of full-time as stated in my offer letter, I was a “Contractor” and the agreement between us was “terminated”. I guess that’s to protect them somehow. And the “stock options” that she said I would be paid amounted to $0 (as expected).

To this day, it remains difficult to explain to people why I left that job after a short 9 weeks, and I make sure not to paint anyone in a bad light, and not name the employer or anyone else. Yet somehow, I feel that everyone else besides the PM thought that I was fired instead of leaving. I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s been telling people anyways. Oh well.

Join the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6693066

The post A culture of beer and overtime first appeared on Jay Huang.

She was on the brink of suicide and had cut off all communication to the outside world. Cell phone, dead. Emails, no response. Facebook, no response, Skype, offline. Apartment, nobody.

A whole slew of problems, compounded with having a massive mortgage, being newly unemployed, unable to find a job, while living with a narcissistic parent. Long story short, someone ended up getting in touch with her, and decided it would be a good idea to call the police.

Soon, 2 RCMP officers were at her apartment. They entered and started asking her about the report that she was thinking of taking her life. Her mom, not having an advanced understanding of the English language, started freaking out and blaming her for doing illegal stuff online. While she refused to say anything, her mother asked the RCMP officers why they were there.

We got a call that your daughter wants to kill herself.

The mother smirked and said “Kill herself? I should be the one killing myself. Who does she think would care if she killed herself?”. The whole time, my friend was quiet and declined any accusations of looking to end her life. Meanwhile, the mother went on a whole sob story about how she’s been supporting her worthless daughter her whole life, etc, etc, how awful of a daughter she’s been “blessed with”, and how all her friends have amazing kids.

From what I know, none of this is true. Before becoming unemployed, the daughter worked a full-time job and did work on the side. She may not have always been there every hour of the day for her mother, because she was working all the time and giving all her salary to her mother. Of course, I am biased as a friend of the daughter, but I’ve known a lot about her work before this incident.

Grow up you piece of shit.

Anyways, one of the two RCMP officers turned to the daughter sitting still and quiet in the corner, and said something along the lines of “grow up you piece of shit” (emphasis on “piece of shit”) and stormed out. The officer was a tall Caucasian male with a rectangular face and short cut hair called Mehmer(?). She didn’t get a chance to get his badge number before he stormed out.

Now that the officers have left, all she got was jeer from her critical mother.

Really? You receive a call saying someone is contemplating suicide, you go to the apartment, and call someone who is already mentally unstable, with her whole body shaking uncontrollably, a “piece of shit”? What is wrong with you? What in the world is your problem? You became an RCMP to abuse and bully the weak? Someone needs to grow up, and it’s certainly not my friend.

I’ve come to believe police/RCMP officers in B.C either have zero training dealing with mentally unstable people, or they completely disregard the training they should have and let their emotions and hot-bloodedness take over (even with mentally stable people). For some incidents of the ridiculous acts of RCMP and VPD, read this (Robert Dziekanski tasered to death by RCMP), this (Asian man wrongfully beaten by VPD, oh an apology? Lovely, that fixes everything!), and a recent case in Yaletown (guy punched in the face by police). You can easily find more abuse incidents online. Police abuse cases really need to be looked at more seriously. First it’s punching people, abusing tasers, and now it’s giving a suicide victim more reason to kill herself? Wow.

Obviously, she is still alive at the moment, as I had the chance to hear this story, but she is still in a lot of emotional conflict and all the RCMP did was make it much much more difficult for her. Great job guys.

PS: She is in urgent need of moving to a new place, but she only has enough left (~$450 CAD) for a cheap/crappy apartment for 1 month. Please do contact me if you know of any places in the Vancouver/Burnaby area. Please remain confidential about the situation, thanks.

The post RCMP need to stop dealing with mentally unstable victims first appeared on Jay Huang.

During this time, I have had the fortune to establish great relationships with some great people. On a few occasions, these relationships have forced me to overcome my anxiety when it comes to public speaking, and have an audience of 200+ listen about my (boring) work and (faulty) advice. Yet somehow, the confidence I established by producing consistent and high quality results for clients have failed to shine through my interviews for full-time positions. I have been massively underselling myself.

“If you can get 99%, why can’t you get 100%?”

You see, despite my mixed heritage, I grew up with an Asian mother in an environment where 99% was a horror. All my life, I have been competitive. Not in the sense that I was smarter than everyone else, but in the sense that I just had to win at everything. It no longer became something that was expected of me, it became something I expected of myself.

When I was 9, I placed 2nd in the Canadian National Chess Competition U-12 Division (2001). That’s amazing, wow! Was the reaction when adults found out. To me, it was a failure. A big black mark on my perfect scorecard in this life that had just begun. In that same year, my soccer team placed 1st in the B.C Junior Boys Soccer U-12 Division. Surely I was happy? Nope, I expected this of myself, and all I had done was accomplish what I should have. A few years later when I moved to Taiwan to learn Mandarin, it was dreadful. I didn’t know the alphabet. Yet these adults placed me in 5th grade. “You should be grade 5 in Canada, there’s no point starting from scratch again”. This was the time where I first learned how to fail, and hard. As a 10-year-old kid, I was already studying late into the night, till around 2~3 AM everyday. Still, my marks barely hit 60%.

If I remember correctly, this is the time where I transitioned from a somewhat energetic, outgoing, and chubby kid, into someone who was anxious, shy, and not-so-chubby. I was a failure. The marks that were commonplace were impossible now. I begged to return to Canada. To this land where I could feel normal and at home again. To this land where being 50% white did not make you look like an alien to other Asians. But it didn’t happen. I was to stay in Taiwan indefinitely. Eventually, I did get my report cards back to 100%, and I returned to shrugging off being 1st in a competition, and I returned to Canada, but I was no longer that smiling, outgoing kid.

Back in Canada, the friends I had in elementary were now also in high school. But they didn’t remember me, they had their own group of friends now. This was also the time I touched a computer for the first time. And despite judging myself for every imperfection, this thing never judged me. It let me experiment, it let me break things, it let me fail, anonymously. I spent huge amounts of time learning how to will this thing to life. At one point, I got involved with the “wrong” community of internet users, but that’s a story for another day. I was later introduced to my co-founder. This would be the first person on the internet who knew my real full name. Even during the early days of Windows7Center, no one knew my name.

3 years later, due to personal difficulties, I left Windows7Center. A few months later, my co-founder shut it down. Once again, I had failed. I’ve worked on this thing for 3 years, and we ended up shutting it down. I wrote it off as a failure, hidden away from everyone in my personal life, and tried to move on. But instead, I went back. I went back to my pseudonym. The handle which many more people in certain communities have come to recognize. The handle where I already had somewhat of a reputation, and a few people who looked to me for advice. They didn’t need to know my age, where I lived, or my name. All they needed to see, were the articles I had written, the tools and experience I brought to the table. The late nights breaking things, and learning how things really worked. It was all exhilarating, and comfortable.

Then I realized the path I was heading down had no great future for me. Sure there were successful people who shared a similar past, but how many of them ended up staring at the same 3 walls day in day out? As much as I hated to, I decided to leave it behind, and cut off any contact with people who may tempt me to go back, or bring back exciting memories. I focused on finding some part-time jobs to make me more employable, school, and instead of freelancing under a pseudonym, using my real name.

I still remember getting my first full-time job in this field. Some major software company with 3 letters. I remember how hard I tried, to show what I knew. To show the value I could bring to the table. But all that went through my mind was how to not let slip the things I worked on before. The 3 year long failure that was Windows7Center. A few exciting but frightening encounters with the law. My sweaty palms and my stuttering. Oh and “don’t forget to smile!” the interview prep articles advised. I went home knowing I had bombed it. Once again, I had failed…
I still got the job. From what I later learned, one of the people who interviewed me saw a lot of similarities between myself and him a few years prior.

My contract was to end after 16 months, and I was ready to move on. At that time, a few clients knew I was on a job hunt and offered me some positions. I was happy to work with them as a freelancer, but I wanted something new and different for my full-time job. So in the last 3 months working there, I applied to a lot of companies I was interested in. What made me special compared to all the other talented applicants? Nothing. Windows7Center was a failure, so I left that off my resume. The experiments and projects I worked on before that was something I was ashamed to be associated with. Freelancing was included, but I was unable to disclose many of my clients due to NDAs. Essentially, my resume told the story of how I am an average person who wants a job but has nothing to show. No one called me in for an interview.

Well then, I guess I’ll just return to school and figure it all out later. So up until the last week upon leaving my job, I had no plan. Returning to school was only a temporary solution, and an escape. If having recommendations from my co-workers and clients could not get me a job I wanted, I would still face the same problem once I leave school again.

At this point, a friend from one of the teams I worked with as a freelancer brought up the name of this one company in Palo Alto. He seemed to have quite a few good things to say about them, and he was definitely someone skilled, someone I trusted. After doing some research, I decided that company would be an exciting place to work. But my problem still persisted. If none of the major companies I was interested in even wanted to interview me, there was something I needed to change. I was underselling myself on my resume.

After 16 months at the 3 letter company I worked at, I noticed some people who sell themselves really well, even oversell their skills and accomplishments. People would gravitate towards, and support these people without any hesitation. There was no proof of their skills, no indication that these accomplishments they brought forward were true. Yet people embraced it and, for some of these over-sellers, their claims (lies?) became a self-fulfilling prophecy. For me, I feel like over-selling is the equivalent of lying. However, I didn’t have to oversell myself. What if I presented myself and my experience more accurately?

I decided to ignore all the insecurities I had about putting my 3 year long failure of a start-up on my resume. Since it was already the last week before I left my company, and had already registered for classes as a backup, I gave my job hunt one last try, having my mind already set on returning to school. I found 4 more companies that interested me (along with the one in Palo Alto) from Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, and applied. 3 out of the 5 companies ended up interviewing me and giving me offers. Surprisingly, what I thought was a major failure was one of the topics they were most interested about. We spent more time talking about my work on Windows7Center than almost anything else (aside from technical tests). 1 of them turned out to excite me a bit less in terms of the culture and work, but the other 2 (including the one in P.A) were very exciting to me.

Despite wanting to try something new and move to Palo Alto, I ended up picking the other one. The product they wanted me to work on just happened to be similar to an idea I had been giving some thought lately, and so I was willing to take a pay cut (compared to the other) and join the team.

After that week of interviews, I realized the value in my experience with Windows7Center. The qualities and knowledge I took for granted were not as plain and common as I had imagined:

• to continue with something that showed no results after 8 months
• to work on a project for 3 years, not jump to something new and shiny
• to identify what is most important to users, and put that on the forefront
• to monetize and live on a project
• to drive down costs
• to grow a project and find ways to sustain that growth
• to connect with users and to develop closer relationships with them
• and much more…

We all have valuable experiences and skills that someone, somewhere needs. Underselling is not only detrimental to yourself, it can be a major loss for many many people around you, including those you haven’t met yet. Do everyone a favor and don’t undersell.

The post The cost of underselling first appeared on Jay Huang.

The trip from Vancouver to San Francisco was average, there wasn’t any food and the flight attendants almost never came by, but the flight was short and it was only around dinner time, not an issue for me at all.

I landed in San Fran safely, and walked around to explore the airport. It was around 7pm, dark outside, and the lights on the runway were quite the sight. Always wanting to get things done as soon as possible, I proceeded to buy some stuff friends and family asked for. That used up all the American money I had brought along with me, and I was very hungry. Currency exchange was 0.79 USD to 1 CAN, the Asian in me refused to be ripped off like that so I decided I was either going to eat with Canadian dollars or just wait for my plane food. I spotted a sushi restaurant, went in and asked the Chinese owner if I could pay with Canadian money, he shooed me away, saying “Dis is America, you sink your Canadian dolla enough?”. I had just pulled out a $50 bill, but turned and left after seeing his attitude. When he saw the $50, he shouted back out at me “WAIT MAYBE WE CHANGE FO YOU, 50 FOR 20 OKAY?”. Yeah, thanks but no thanks.

I went to find the gate where my flight to Australia would be, and hung around there. I had forgotten to take my laptop charger in my carry-on luggage, so after the last hour of battery was used up, I sat in front of the gate with some other passengers(?) waiting. 4 hours is quite long when you don’t have much to do. As I am a heavy sleeper, I stopped myself from snoozing off in fear of missing my flight.

The clock was now around 11pm, soon I’ll be on my way! Nope, not a chance. About 30 minutes before the scheduled flight time, United Airlines informed us that the flight would be delayed for another 2.5 hours. Turned out it was a bit more than 3 hours, but I was just glad to be on the plane as it was already 2AM.

Little did I know, the excitement was just about to come; 15+ hours of frustration and physical pain. When I got on the plane and went for my seat (47G I think?), I noticed a baby in my seat with a couple beside. Before jumping to conclusions, I double checked the numbers of the seats nearby, but it was the right one. The second I pulled out my ticket and asked the parent if maybe she was in the wrong seat, she and her husband got up, and started shouting very loudly, saying that the seats were hers. A flight attendant came by to see what the commotion was about, and they pulled out both their tickets for the seats next to my seat, but not for my seat.

Apparently they did not book a seat for the baby, but were very rude about it. The flight attendant decided the best resolution would be to move me to a different seat. I had no problem with that, and she told me to wait by the washroom. I stood there waiting for about 10 minutes, when some other flight attendants asked me what I was doing and told me to sit down. I explained that I needed a seat, but they didn’t care and told me I was in the way, and to move into the emergency exit/wheelchair area.

We were taking off, the plane was ascending, I still did not have a seat, and the flight attendant was nowhere in sight. A few minutes later, one of the flight attendants who said I was in the way became very frustrated and gave me an aisle seat on the right side of the plane, beside an elderly couple (60~65ish). She quickly disappeared before I could ask for the pillow and blanket missing from that seat.

I noticed the seat was unbelievably straight, on a 90° angle, so I tried to adjust it. It wouldn’t budge, the seat was broken. Almost no flight attendants walked by that seat during the whole 15+ hours of the flight, but I got up multiple times to look for an attendant and ask for 2 things: my pillow/blanket, and a seat change. Every time, the response was “okay, let me go get that for you (pillow/blanket), please sit down.”, or “let me see if there are any other seats available.” and never came back. Whenever the food carts came by, I brought it up to them too, and it was always the same thing.

There should be no reason for a passenger to have to sit in a defective seat for the duration of any flight, long or short. The person in front of me had their seat slightly tilted like everyone else, so my space was extremely limited and painful. There’s this outward bump on the seats at the head area, which meant that my back was hunched for the entire flight. Any attempts to sleep were impossible, and within the first 2 hours of the flight, my back was already in pain. From what I could see, the flight in my section was quite full and there were not any seats I could switch to. The couple beside me ordered wine, and drank for most of the flight, taking turns going to the washroom. So not only was I stuck in a defective seat, I had to get up every 10~15 minutes to let one of them out to take a washroom break. The couple’s lack of bladder control was definitely not United’s fault, but they did put me in that seat, it was broken, I was in pain, and my needs were not being attended to. Ever.

I won’t even talk about the small “breakfast” they served just before arriving in Sydney. Frozen bread, still with small pieces of ice in it. Maybe that’s a legitimate meal and it’s just too foreign to me, oh well.

I spent the next 2 out of the 4 weeks I was in Australia with extreme back pain. United has provided by far, the worst experience I have ever had on an airplane. I didn’t even think something like that was possible. I would be hundredfold happier paying $300~$500 more for average or even good service with another airline.

After I arrived in Sydney and got some rest, I phoned United with my complaint. Their response was more or less “we don’t know” (don’t know what? I never asked them a question), and “we don’t believe you”. Fed up with their attitude, I stopped bothering and went off to see my family, and tried to enjoy my time in Sydney with back pain. I’ll just remember never to take United again.

I’ve been on over 30 flights in the past year, and never has a company come close to this. Well done United. My suggestion? Don’t take United, and let the people you care about know that too. Waste of money, waste of time, a lot of disappointment, an all around nightmare.

Oh yea, take a look at some of United’s other awesome works: United Breaks Guitars (Youtube), Thrown Off a United Airlines Flight for Taking Pictures

The post Why I won’t be taking United Airlines again first appeared on Jay Huang.