Game in the Brain

A fresh graduate of a 4 year course has a starting basic salary of about 16,000php per month. We have 13th month pay which makes the annual computation of the salary equal to basic pay x 13. So he earns roughly 4,160usd per year. Typical job of an IT fresh grad would be desktop support. Depending on the school’s quality of teaching and the graduate they would typically have Visual Basic Training and some Web. Note that salaries are factoring 192 hours of work a month on average.

My mentor was telling me it was an average increase of 5% per year of working experience – this
means salaries matched inflation (which was around 4% from 2011-2015, and slowed down to 3% ). 10% is the highest expected salary and anything beyond that is a special exception and would be worth investigating whats makes the exception as due diligence.

Ever since then I used that formula to guess Market Rates. And we tend to pay within Market Rates. Market rates mean 50% of the time applicants don’t accept the salary. and 20% of applicants are seriously underpaid and consider it a bump up. While Graduates of our top tier schools consider it too low, even if I came from one of those schools and know the weaknesses of the school’s training and know the company will have to pickup up a lot of the training obligations.

Vmware has been trying to push their product here a lot and I find it too damn expensive given the way most companies are structured. ERPS and business-critical systems – while important can afford to be unstable and prone to firefighting and a lot of technical debt because we are a freaking developing world country. The macroeconomics is that paying thousands of dollars per Core is too damn expensive.

10usd a month for MS365 is not an easy biz decision. In fact Opex vs Capex is not so cut and dry with a large young population with low salaries and inflation that is winding down. We can afford to have ALOT of technical debt because management can afford to throw manpower at a problem because we have a lot of cheap low skilled manpower for fire fighting.

Companies who have Valuable Manpower, so valuable that they can allow manpower to do Deepwork is RARE and are exceptions and not the rule. Companies with Total Throughput Systems are also exceptions and more rare then Deepwork.

The environment is that I will take an inherently less stable Openstack over a more stable VMware with Expensive hardware and create a high technical debt architecture that utilizes more Older unstable equipment and Game the System to have more resiliency through redundancy. 

Open Source like Asterix and Open stack is better for our Company than other Companies who specialize in it because We have a Core Business: Construction, Furniture and Datacenters and we have these IT skills as Addons instead of being our Core Revenues. While other companies have to make cost x2 to x4 PBX, Servers, Software, etc… we can do it at lower margins because we are utilizing extra capacity. We have data centers and furniture projects coming, what I make with this is relatively small but the skillset makes me differentiate from all the other Construction Companies who don’t have these complementary skills that emphasize their PM and biz process skills.

In an Economy or Market full of Multi-Taskers you don’t win by maxing the number of tasks we are  Multi-Tasking. Its by increasing the value of each Multi-Task.

We lose some Deep work Capability because the Staff conditioned to multitask. But things change from Multi-Tasking to Deepwork slowly and by Stabilizing Operations and The Sales Pipeline. In the Next 5 years I need to stabalize Operations and keep the clients who we’ve won. We’ve been around since 1981 – and that track record means a lot in a Low Trust environment of a Developing world country.