My first 10 years as a programmer and software architect

working with computer late at night

I started my career as an application programmer and I love it. I called every application system that I developed my baby and I put my name in every program that I coded. To me, programming is creation, you are literally creating something from nothing. Seeing that something you created put to good use in real life by real people is amazing, especially when you see differences in the before and after. Whenever I see people using the systems I developed, I felt very much to tell him//her that “I created it”. 

I often worked into late hours and having difficulty to stop…just one more function.. got to solve this bug… ok I will go to sleep after I get this running… very much like how I see my son playing computer games nowadays. So I told my son programming is better than gaming, not only you get to solve mysteries and kill monsters (bugs), here you create your own game. 

I like the term software architect because it does felt like one. You start with conceptualization of the look and feel of the end product, draw up a structural diagram to layout the components and interfaces. You (and your team) construct the components from ground up and make sure all the interfaces fit well together. You get feedback along the way and necessary alterations. Finally you put the final product to test and make sure it meet the requirements of functionality, security and availability

My next 10 years in Finance and Business

Display showing the stock market recession

After spending 10 years in information technology, I decided to switch to a business unit of a financial division when an opportunity arose. I have always been curious about how it would be on ‘the other side’ of work. Turn out it wasn’t as difficult as I thought as many skills that I learned in computing days are transferable to solving business problems. Instead of aiming to get the system up and running as it should be, now is the business and financial outcomes that I need to focus on. The difficult part is actually the people relationship and office politics.

My turning point came when I was tasked to take over a profit center unit. It has a revenue of approx. $30 million with a profit margin of about 50%. Not too bad, except it was a hot potato. The service was running on an obsolete technology platform, so old that the hardware is no longer supported and we frequently have to source worldwide for replacement. Both customers and our company doesn’t want the high cost of technology replacement yet the mission given to me was “don’t lose the profit”. 

We changed the business model from a technology provider to a provider of access to the marketplace. We bring in technology partners for technical services and we focus on expanding our connectivity as well as customer base and allow foreign firms direct access to our marketplace. We also change our pricing model to a small percentage of traded value instead of fixed terminal price. The result, we grew our revenue to more than 5 times with a profit margin exceeding 80%. 

My Last 10 years as Entrepreneur

My entrepreneurship came unintended. I was on a family trip which we booked a full-size coach for our extended family members of around 30 people. I spent many hours talked to my 2 cousins-in-law who run a small tuition center. We talked about the education business and I shared ideas of how I see the business potentials and how they can expand their business.

It was the year 2007. being in the financial industry and having gone through 2 major financial crises, it wasn’t difficult to sense that a storm is coming. In my own investment portfolio, I identified 4 industries that are resilient to financial turmoil; government projects, healthcare, education, and gaming (include casino). So in the following year, I decided to make the switch and join the team.

We revamp the business into 2 tracks; academy focus and personal enrichment. The business revenue grew double year by year for the first few years and continues to grow at a healthy rate after. However, not all businesses are successful, including my investment into a vocational institution. The business was promising when I invested in it but the climate changed completely after a change in government policy which made the business not viable. That’s a painful lesson.

One thing I learned, getting into a business is easy but coming out can be very difficult. So, always plan for an exit strategy, for good and for bad.

In 2013, I started my own consultancy firm. Our clients are mainly large family-run businesses in emerging markets like Myanmar and China. My team comprises of professionals of multidisciplinary so that we can provide a 360 holistic management consultancy work. In this team, you can really experience cultural diversity here as not only the members are of different educational backgrounds and professions, they are also from different countries. Among the 11 consultants, we have 8 nationalities. It was fun and also makes me believe that diversity makes a better team.