The UnSub

http://politicssg.blogspot.com/2009/01/so-where-are-jobs-for-singaporeans.html

A very interesting article. I have never wanted to be in middle management. To date, at my age, I can still consider myself technical but at the same time business savvy. I’d rather to be the source of value and inspiration in my office than be stuck in the middle of senior management and engineers.

There are folks advising me to aim to be a manager but I do not think I need to explain myself. The economic reality now is doing the explanation. Most of the project managers or whatever managers they might be typically add little value.

If you are a manager and doing your job well, I believe there is no need to be offended by this entry because most likely you are still keeping your paycheck. I speak the truth and the truth hurts.

The recent trend of retrenchments is a dangerous sign. By making people jobless, we are effectively killing demand & ability to buy. Who are the people who buys goods? You, I and everyone else who takes a paycheck.

Our world economy is much like a set of intricate array of dominoes. Some folks at some corner of the world lost their job, stop buying certain products, chokes demand which in turn affects the jobs of the other folks elsewhere around the globe.

Keeping people in their jobs and being productive are the right ways.

NTUC seems to be quite innovative. They have a referral service based on SMS.
Full details:  http://income.com.sg/tuition/tutor.asp

I guess having tutors for children is something common in asian societies.
I wonder tutoring or tuition classes are common western societies?

Any comments from U.S. and non-asian readers are welcomed

My new Dell Inspiron 530, a Quad Core, 3Gb RAM together with 3-year Plus Phone Support is less than inspiring. Less than 3 weeks old and it is failing. The phone support on the invoice states that support is available on Sat 0900-1600 but

the number to the Plus-Phone-Support is nowhere to be found. For goodness sake, just print it on my invoice or put it clearly on your support site.

Dell has done a heck of a job with their direct sales and logistics management. So far, I am very pleased with the order fulfillment and delivery process for both desktops and servers.

Unfortunately when it comes to my own machine, Dell’s support site looks like a cacophony of irrelevant information. I can’t even find a simple phone number after many clicks and searches. Yes, there are plenty of other numbers that is “manned” by pre-recorded messages but where is the Plus-support number? If a tech-savy user can’t find support number that works on Saturday, how would you expect a non-savvy user to find it? And the weird thing about their search engine is it returns some results that were seemingly relevant but are zipped up in a file.

Why put information into Zip files that contains nothing more than some HTML and images when you have a website?!?

The site has everything but the relevant telephone number that I was looking desperately for. The very idea of displaying all the troubleshooting issues and forum gives people the perception that the products are problem ridden. I have about 10 years of computing experience since the days of DOS6.22, I’d done enough of troubleshooting, nowadays I pay for someone to fix my problems.

The most annoying thing about the support systems of most businesses is the use of IVR or Interactive Voice Response system. IVR is invented for the benefit of businesses that are short of man-power to handle calls. No one, whose purchase is broken, has little if not any patience to listen to your long-winded pre-recorded message.

No matter how diplomatic the speeches in your IVR might be, all I hear is: “Sorry, we don’t work on Saturdays”.

After all a round of frustration while filling up their email support that DID NOT WORK on Firefox browser, I called the sales line and to my surprise, a human!!! Actually not a surprise considering sales-lines are “revenue” centers while support lines are cost-centric. Naturally, she has to take the first blow of my sarcasm before I got hold of the so call Plus-support extension. It’s just too bad that she was the first person who represented Dell who spoke to me after digging around their stupid website and listening to recorded messages for 10mins or so.

The next person on the line was basically Dell’s saving grace. Of course much of my lethal negative energy in me was fired at the first Dell representative, she basically did a good job of asking the right questions and making the arrangement for an on-site engineer. Before this event, i have never considered other desktop brands because they have done a good job making online configuration and purchase convenient (and of course cheap). The next buy will definitely NOT be a Dell.

Things failing within 2 weeks+ is not acceptable, regardless of how well you can sell and distribute. It’s time to look at the basics and common sense when it comes to designing portals. Dell’s search engine is basically crap compared to Google. A unhappy user needs a phone-call to a human who is trained to make arrangements to resolve the problem, not some pre-recorded message that says “we don’t work on Saturdays”, or a bunch of irrelevant information littered on your website.