Entries Tagged 'Careers' ↓

Recently I just read this list of “recession-proof” jobs on CNN. They list the following sectors as still growing in the current economy:

1. Education
2. Energy
3. Environmental sector
4. Health care
5. Security

Looking at this, it seems that my family has the bases covered. I am in a software security firm, my mom is in education, and my dad is in the non-profit environmental sector. We all switched jobs in the last two years to our current positions and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

I used to work for a company that focused on retail shopping and mortgage leads. Last year everyone’s bonuses were cut drastically because of the mortgage fall out and I sort of knew that it was going to get worse. So I looked for a new job, and I specifically looked for companies that I thought wouldn’t be affected by real estate very much and ended up in this software security firm last November. I think it has been a good move because this company is doing well despite the current economic atmosphere.

My mom used to be in commercial real estate, and all of the properties managed by her company were sold by the owners and her management company basically shut down completely. She was given an extremely generous severance package and after looking for a couple months she landed a lower paying job in a university this January. She complains about the bureaucracy sometimes, but she seems to be adjusting to her new job.

My dad has always worked in non-profits, and decided to take a new job after working at the same place for almost 10 years. He seems to be very enamored with his new organization’s goal of combating global warming around the world, and I think that’s pretty awesome.

The fact that we have jobs in these sectors now shows that these types of companies are still hiring in a downturn. I think if you are working in an industry that is suffering the effects of the economy now you could still move into the better sectors as long as your skills are fairly transferable. You do not have to wait for a layoff to start looking because the job seekers who have a job already usually have better bargaining power and have a better chance at landing a new job. As long as you have a job throughout a recession life should go on normally, and it doesn’t hurt to be prepared for a recession by moving into a growing sector.

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This is a continuation of my family’s immigration story originally written by my dad in Chinese. For more of my dad’s narrative see the category marked Fifteen Years in America. If you can read Chinese you can read the original at my dad’s Yahoo blog. He has just finished Chapter 8. Enjoy!

Continued from Part 2

I told Jane that I was familiar with work in the kitchen.  She asked me if I had guaranteed hours for working and I told her that I was a student at the college and I can guarantee that I would work 2 hours a day and 10 hours a week.  Later I found out that the cafeteria is extremely busy during the lunch hours and they must have people that get there on time and guarantee the smooth operation of the cafeteria.

After listening to me Jane handed me an application, and told me to fill it out and bring it back.  Additionally, she asked for a copy of my last health checkup.  I think that is because I would be handling food and they need to guarantee that I am not diseased.

The next day I brought the finished application form and a copy of my health check to Jane.  She brought me to the kitchen’s grill.  There I saw a very muscular and tanned woman grilling many pieces of hamburger meat.  As she flipped the meat the oils that seeped out sizzled on the grill.

Jane said to that woman, “Morri, I found you a student helper!  His name is Jian, and now he is yours.”  Morri is one of the cafeteria’s chefs, and she was my supervisor.  Her supervisor is named Craig, and they’re both native Hawaiians and are both tall and large.  They’re both very nice and humble people.  Later I heard that Morri is actually 1/8th Chinese.  I guess  most people in Hawaii are very mixed and a couple of her great grandparents were Chinese.  However, she didn’t look Chinese at all.

Since I kept my promise and always came to work on time no matter how busy I was, Morri liked me and treated me very well.  Even though I told Jane that I know how to cook, but I never worked in a kitchen that served hundreds to thousands of people before.

–

Part 4

After I was hired by the student cafeteria, I would work there two hours a day, and I usually served lunch so I got there at 11am.  After I finished class, I would go straight to the cafeteria.  My main job was to help Morri make hamburgers.  Even though making hamburgers looks easy, it took a bit of practice for me to make them efficiently.

For example, the tomato slices in each hamburger must be even.  It is not good to have some thick pieces and some thin pieces.  At first, I was not good at balancing the tomatoes and my hamburgers looked lopsided.  Additionally, it is important for a hamburger to be cooked to the right temperature.  At that time the cafeteria made three types of hamburgers: beef, fish, and vegetarian.  Each type required a different cooking temperature and time.  The beef needed to be cooked the longest and at the highest temperature to kill the germs in the meat.  However, you couldn’t cook for too long because if all the juices are evaporated then it would be dry and tasteless.  If it was cooked for too short a time the meat would be raw and the consumers could be seriously sick.

The fish and vegetarian burgers were different.  First, these two types didn’t ooze oil like the beef so they didn’t create big oil  flames on the grill.   They were quite easy to cook.  Finally, there was quite a bit of skill involved in wrapping these burgers after they were cooked.  At first, I wrapped them extremely slowly and my products were quite ugly and the wrappings fell off easily.  After quite a bit of practice, the hamburgers I wrapped finally had the right shape.

Each day when I went to work, I would cut up the tomatoes first, and then prepare the lettuce.  Then, while I cooked the patties, I would lay out pieces of the wrapping paper and split the buns.  On each sheet of paper I would prepare the buns and place the tomatoes and cheese.  At the same time I would flip the patties.  After the patties were done I would put them on each of the buns and start wrapping.  When the students start to come in it gets extremely busy and my hands and feet were constantly moving.

Besides making hamburgers, I would sometimes help with frying the French fries and onion rings.  The hot oil often splashed onto my hands and body and it hurt like needles.   However, this bit of oil is really small potatoes compared to the heat I experienced in the steel factory I worked for during the Cultural Revolution.  At that time, I was only 15 and I lifted molten steel measuring thousands of degrees and passed many months chanting the mantra of “defeating heat and compete for the highest production”.  In that seven years of physical labor and training, I lost a lot of time for education, but in that environment of  “thousands of hammers and hundreds of purifications” I acquired an extremely strong will.  Another slogan that the Communists often taught was that “people need a bit of spirit”.  This will or spirit is what gave me the power to conquer the trials of starting over again.

After one month, I became a hamburger making expert.   However, I really wanted to bring the real “Yangzhou Fried Rice” to the cafeteria.

To be continued! 

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When I tell people that I am a release engineer I usually get a blank look. Then I explain the aspect of my job most people understand and say that I make programs that you double click to install software. Then most people say something along the lines of “oh you’re a software engineer”. I suppose that’s true, but a release engineer’s job is somewhat more specialized and it involves duties that are quite different from most software engineers’ daily routine of fixing bugs. So I decided to write a list of things I love and hate about my job, and I would love to hear what other release engineers think.

Here are the things I love about my job:

1. I am given a lot of responsibility and trust – Release engineers handle a lot of the critical systems like builds and version control in an engineering organization. Any screw up in those systems could potentially destroy a lot of other people’s hard work. So I learn to tread carefully and be an expert in these systems.

2. I learn a lot of random stuff - When you have to package builds for a bunch of different operating systems and programming languages you have to learn a bit about everything. I admit that I’m not an expert in any one programming language, operating system, or database, but I’ve picked up enough in the past few years to at least answer interview questions about a broad range of subjects.

3. I have an idea of the “bigger picture” – In my last company I was the sole release engineer, and now at my current company I am sort of moving into that role. This means that I have to be aware of all the product releases and the plans for these releases. Generally I like knowing what’s going to happen in the grand scheme of the company I work for.

4. I know what my purpose is - Release engineers serve a specific function so the job isn’t that ambiguous. As I have written before, a lot of people are disastified with their jobs because they don’t see the fruit of their work and they feel that it is pointless to work. Generally, I know what my deliverables are so my efforts don’t seem so useless.

5. I work with a lot of different groups – Release impacts a lot of groups including support,documentation, QA, and development. This means that I have to talk to a lot of people to get a good release. This makes the job less boring in a way.

6. I am special - When you search for software enginering jobs online most of the job descriptions are “software engineer” and the responsibilities section basically say that you will be a code monkey. There is nothing to distinguish one software engineer from another besides that they code different things. There are usually less job listings for the title of Release Engineer, and that usually means less competition and better compensation. So in terms of my career, I like being more specialized.

Now here are the things that are annoying:

1. The system administration aspects of the job – I hate setting up machines and monitoring their disk space. I hate upgrading software. I hate making images of machines and then deploying them on new machines that usually do not work right away. I hate power failures that mess up my fleet of build and test machines in mysterious ways. Basically, when you have to be a daily user of a bunch of different machines you generally end up maintaining them at least a little bit, and that could be a pain in the butt.

2. Broken builds - At my last company I kept a hall of shame for those who broke the build, and then I got bored of taking down people’s names because they were doing it every few hours. Someone emailed me once and said, “you’re like a zookeeper”. It really felt like that sometimes when I had to manage 30+ code branches with around 80 developers checking in code. At my current company we don’t have that many builds or developers and people seem to be more careful so it’s not so bad.

3. Telling people to fix stuff – I actually don’t like to send emails that tell people what they broke. However, this is really part of the job, too because the goal is to get a clean build every single time and I have to be whiny sometimes for the sake of product quality.

4. It is a tedious job – I think a good release engineer has to be somewhat obsessive compulsive to make sure a build contains exactly what is supposed to be there. In the most extreme case it involves manual inspections of hundreds of nasty code merge conflicts from various branches of code. If you ever used CVS for a large project with a crapload of branches you might have run into this problem. I have done that before and it was painful. Then again, a lot of other jobs are also very tedious so I don’t think tedium is a unique problem.

At the end of the day, I am pretty happy to be a release engineer because it is an important job in any engineering organization and I have a lot of autonomy to do my work. This job also helped me develop my organization and management skills that I could use in the future.

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Today the hubby and I once again discussed the idea of having one of us stay at home when we have a kid. I have researched the costs of daycare in San Mateo and it is very expensive. We can definitely afford it but from what I read many infant care facilities are not only expensive, but have extremely long waiting lists. One of the Wise Bread writers I met last week used to live in Redwood City and she said that she signed up to be on the wait list of one of the daycares with a better reputation while she was pregnant and she got a call back when her daughter was two! That’s pretty crazy and makes me want to put myself on the list right now. Anyway, the hubby expressed interest in being a stay at home dad before, and I asked him about it again.

Financially, my income is still above the San Mateo median if we became an one income family. I used our actual incomes and plugged it into this second income calculator at MSN money. According to the calculator if we lose my hubby’s income but he takes care of our kid we would lose about $12500 a year and that doesn’t seem like all that much. The hubby makes a decent income as a game programmer, but we are taxed quite a bit on that second income so the biggest savings we get is on taxes. I plugged in daycare costs at $1200 a month, but that’s actually a pretty low estimate because apparently Google employees will be shelling out $2500 a month for their top of the line on campus daycare. I consider my hubby to be a top of the line caretaker considering his intelligence and attentiveness towards kids so when I plug in $2500 a month for daycare obviously we come out ahead by having the hubby stay at home. Additionally, right now the hubby commutes about 50 miles a day to and from work so we will save a few hundred a month on gas. If I were to stay home, we would lose more money because my base salary is about 12% higher than the hubby’s and I have been getting bigger raises than the hubby just because the type of companies I work for pay more. If the hubby stayed in enterprise software he would be making more money than me right now because he has one more year of experience and he graduated from an elite school. However, he is in games right now and every software engineer knows that you work in games for love and not money.

The main issue is that I am afraid that the hubby would not want to give up his career, but he said that he really would love to be a stay at home at dad. He thinks that he would have a lot of free time for his own projects because he always wanted to make his own games. He also has tons of movies he would like to watch, dozens of books he wants to read, and so much stuff he wants to learn. Additionally, he just loves babies. Then I asked him if he would be lonely, and he said that he could just hang out with all the other stay at home parents he knows. We do know a stay at home dad from church with three kids and several stay at home moms that are our friends. Besides that, one of the hubby’s best friends has a work schedule where he gets home in the early afternoon so they could hang out. In terms of jobs, it is also generally easier for a man to get back to a career after taking a little hiatus. If he really uses his time to create games on his own then he would be even more attractive to future employers., or if he really makes great games he could sell them on the internet by himself.

Anyway, this is all hypothetical because we don’t have kids yet, but it is good to know that the hubby wouldn’t mind being a stay at home parent. I have read many blog posts by women whose husbands tried out the stay at home thing and got ridiculously bored and went back to work, but I guess it’s mostly because they didn’t have any projects of their own. I am not too worried about the hubby having nothing to entertain himself with because he has a ton of games he hasn’t started playing yet and he is one of those nerds that could just sit there and think for hours for fun. The hubby wants to finish the game at his workplace first, and then we may work on actually trying to having a kid and this stay at home dad thing may actually happen.

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I have only two cousins because of the one child policy. My older cousin is named Yang and he is three days older than me. Before I left China, we were sort of like twins and played with each other quite often. Last year, he finished his masters in wireless engineering in Nanjing and recently my mom told me that he got a job as an wireless engineer in Shanghai that pays about 5000 yuan a month. I thought that was great news because jobs in China are very difficult to find for young people since there are just too many college graduates. Then my mom started to name all the things she thought were negative about this job because it is her duty as a Chinese mom to report all the bad things in a gossip session.

First of all she said that my cousin is paying over 1000 yuan to rent a small apartment in the city of Shanghai even though he is only paid 5000 yuan. Second, the company he works for does not provide job security. They fire anyone at anytime they please, and some employees have committed suicide because of long work hours. Third, she said that my aunt told her that it is impossible for Yang to afford to buy a place in Shanghai on his salary. I pretty much laughed at this and said, “you think my life is so different?” When I just graduated, I was paid exactly 5000 dollars a month, and I also had living expenses of nearly 1000 a month. If I lived alone I would also have paid rent of over 1000 dollars a month. So on the expenses front, the difference between my cousin and I is that one of us uses dollar and one of us uses yuan, but our expenses are pretty much the same in terms of percentage of income. I also do not have any job security because California is an at-will state that can fire anyone they want at any time for any reason. Finally, on the real estate front, I can’t afford a place in San Francisco on my salary either! (I am using San Francisco as a parallel to Shanghai because they are both big and densely populated cities with very expensive real estate). The only thing I don’t have is the long work hours, but that is because I choose to not work long hours.

After talking to my friend Mary who goes to China often, we both came to the conclusion that the struggles of young people in China and America are very similar. Financially, we are all dealing with rising prices, stagnant pay, and unstable careers. There has also been a housing bubble in China since the Chinese Communist Party allowed personal ownership of real estate. Politically and socially we all do not have much of a say in  governments that are ruled by the generation before us. Sure, America is supposedly democratic, but honestly how many politicians actually care about our generation? Even Obama, who is supposed to be “young”, is proposing a tax proposal that eliminates taxes for seniors making under $50,000. What about the young people that make under $50,000? Anyway, I could write a whole other rant on this issue, but basically the challenges American young adults face politically are not so different from Chinese youths who are under a totalitarian regime. American youths are taught to believe that they can affect the decisions of the government, but in actuality the government is controlled by an older generation that could not care less. In a way that’s more frustrating than knowing for certain that your government will not listen.

One thing that is marked different between the lives of Chinese young adults and American young adults is that many of the urban Chinese youths we know have quite a bit financial and physical support from their parents. For example, some married only children have all four of their parents taking care of their kids. On the other hand, American young adults have to deal with costly childcare or just not have children at all. I don’t know of any non-Asian households where all four grandparents are taking care of their grandchildren full time. A lot of Chinese parents also buy houses for their children, and again, that is rare in America.

So having said that, I think my cousin is doing great in China. He has officially become independent, and that is a great achievement for any young adult.

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