Live to work or Live to learn

Last week, I had a small talk with a friend about the attitude to work. She's working at FPT around 2 years. Basically, I think she is good in term of desiring to learn skills/techniques, sharing knowledge. Currently she is in charge of a product for banking to manage exchanging gold. I'm sorry if you're FPTer :-) but I can see FPT style via her project : a product is considered a success if it's released ontime whatever its quality. I'm not going to argue about the quality of her project. That's a long story for managers. I just want to share some thoughts about her view on the job because it's different from me :-).

Her point is all-for-work. That's you should use all your resources (time, mainly) only for producing good software. And after that you will recieve a great reward which could be client's bonus, becoming a leader in another project or moving up :-). The term all-for-work means that your team have to build the product as quick as possible; there is no unit tests, test scripts, spec, .. They are things I had to do or be involved in my team. And as quick as possible could mean you need to work overtime frequently. However, if you have to develop something within a short time, I agree that you will do like this because it's no choice. But the main point in her all-for-work is that she prefers taking time only for product to learning something new that isn't related to work. That's why I call it all-for-work

Mine is opposite : work is only a part of life. Self-improvement is my style. Actually I have learnt a lot from Buu Nguyen. I have completely changed my mind since he interviewed me at FCG Vietnam (CSC Vietnam). I suppose the client is always hard to please so I usually give out the result that almost fits their expectation, no more no less. Then after the task is done, I do self-improvement to make myself better for future. Therefor, things I learn to improve myself aren't quite linked to the project. It can be something else like book reading, a new programming language, another platform for development, blog writing ...

We talked about 30 minutes to protect our oppions. She dislikes my attitude with 2 ideas:

1. Work can teach us new things and experience you learn from work is better than pure theory.
2. The pressure from client will let you get the right things to learn new technique instead of looking through it.
   

That are her points. Hmm, the way I see it that you're going to know ajax if the project requires fast response, you're getting to know unit if you have to use unit test ... That means if project doesn't require any of them, you wouldn't know those stuffs. Does it sound we are inactive to get new knowledge ? Once she asked me "how do you develop your 3-layers in application". It's 3, not 2 or 4 :-).

I'm a open mind guy. Of course I don't tell her off for her way. She has being followed it and she succeeds in her career. I prefer self-improvement in order I can be up for new chance (maybe). All things I wrote in this post just a question : why doesn't she accept my oppion as I did with her ?

Got a lesson. It's hard to change somebody's view :-)

c:\>clr

What's CLR ? It's just a DOS command to clear the screen :-).

So how it comes into this post ? Well, it means I will start using blog again as a real blogger. I want to write my thought, life and career in a professional way. Ok, let CLR the previous posts and start again now.

P/S: I write this post and push it to blog via email but how can I put tag into post ? Still searching ...

English world

"I want to be good at English, so what thing I need to do ?". This question always go around in my mind, make me worry about family and career. But why I had that thinking ? Why is it English but nothing else like business knowledge, experience of life or our ambitions ?. Oh, if we're in a century ago, English is nothing. But now, we're living in the world whose number of language is two at least. These're English and your language. Clearly, we use our language to communicate with countryman and English for the rest of the world. By that way, we can learn many things from the ocean of knowledge on the earth.


Yes, you can see the important of English for our. Therefore we ought to catch English skills as much as possible. We must practise four basic skills such as reading, writing, speaking and listening at least. Why did I say four basic skills ? Because there're serveral another skills like translation, specialistic English for medicine, economy or physics. So how do we exercise those skills ? If you already have been in perfect conditions like being a child of rich family or living in a country using English as second language, you don't have to think about this training. Since you have been exercising English everyday, and it's so good for you. So we go back to our conditions - a normal environment without English -, as my experience, we just frequently practise English at everytime and everywhere, in anyway you have. All thing you need remember is that you must try to use English as much as possible. For example, you watch a film with English subtitle and listen carefully what actor said and when you's listening, try to remember their English pronounce. Or you write an email for your boss or client, just use English. Or reading articles on the internet also is good practice. Maybe you see it's hard to do but there's a ground rule : you will be familiar to English if you use English continuously day by day. And now, I'm doing this way. Hope this help ^^


When I was going to to write this post, I didn't know what to write . And idea always occurs when I write a sentence out. Then this post have been created. It's so great, isn't it ?

I make some phrase italic to remember that there's maybe error in this