Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Dell support

At work we deploy, on the PC side, mainly Dell computers. Word on the street (I don’t handle purchasing) is Dell is a fantastic vendor to work with, and the discount we get is hefty. As well it should be, with the amount of hardware we buy.

Obviously, on the Mac side it’s just Apple.

As personnel on the support side, I can say Dell computers can do with better quality control from the factory. Every batch we buy, there seems to be always a few computers that need immediate servicing. During the pandemic, we bought hundreds of Dell laptops, of which dozens had to be serviced because of poor fit and finish (a trackpad should click). I get it, pandemic times were uniquely funky, but the batch of Mac laptops we bought from Apple had zero such issues.

Good news for Dell is that the servicing is solid. Though that’s a back-handed compliment, isn’t it? I reckon companies would want to put out a product so reliably good that the end-user never has to know about after-purchase servicing. Nevertheless, if Dell isn’t capable of ratcheting up its quality control, at least it’s super easy to get items fixed.

So long as the product is under basic servicing warranty (we prepay for four years for everything we buy), Dell can dispatch third-party technicians to your location within business days. Or, if the customer is not in a hurry, an overnight prepaid mail-in option is also available (the Dell repair facility is in Houston). All of this can be initiated on the Dell support website via chat, which is great for people like me who avoids using the telephone as much as possible.

It still won’t pry the MacBook Pro out of my hands. But, if I ever need to run a Windows PC, A Dell-branded unit is a fine option. Even if it malfunctions within the first week of use, Dell support will get it fixed with haste.

Not without the sacrifice

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, got into some controversy during a recent talk at Stanford. Basically, he said that Google is falling behind AI startups like OpenAI because of work-life balance and working from home policies. The virtual-signaling crowd has come out in criticism, saying work-life balance is super important, and not everyone wants to dedicate a majority of their time energy towards work.

And that’s fine - have your work-life balance! Just don’t expect the same results as a team of workers spending 80 to 100 hours a week slaving away at a problem. As the great Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs.” Eric is absolutely correct: a mature company of many thousands can get beaten by a plucky startup dedicated to a eureka moment. For every Adobe, there’s a Figma willing to out-grind its ass.

Work-life balance has many positives, but there are indeed trade-offs. I know this first hand. My career working IT at a university has tremendous work-life balance. However, I know I’m leaving lots of money on the table. In fact, I make the least out of my group of friends. The equation is simple, really: the more time you spend working, the more money you will make. Show me a CEO who goes home right at 5:00 PM, and I will show you a failing company.

I think what people want - and honestly, who wouldn’t if you can get it - is to have work-life balance, but also the high salary. They want the results without the sacrifice. Obviously, that’s not how it works in the real world. If you have aspirations of climbing a company ladder, you put in more work than what is minimally required. You are going to get beaten to the higher seat by the coworker who can come in on a Saturday, while you are home tending to the kids.

Is it fair? Of course it is. The lunch is not free. What do you want to sacrifice?

Do the work

One thing I don’t see talked about in the ‘how to get better sleep’ discussion is the importance of a good day’s work. I don't know about you, but when my day is full of action and getting things done, the satisfaction at the end acts as sweet melatonin. Also helping is that I tend to be more tired, compared to, say, laying on the couch all day. Kind of like how on the days that I workout, those nights I sleep extra well.

Procrastination is only a salve for the moment. The future you will most certainly be happier the current you just did the thing already. No one ever regrets doing the stuff they are supposed to do “early”. Damn it! I should have washed my car today instead of yesterday! More importantly, it contributes to better sleep because I’m not thinking about what I still have to do tomorrow. It’s already done.

Often times when I go to fast food restaurants, I would see workers at the end of their shift leaving. The sense of relieving joy on their faces can be readily seen. They’ve just done a shift of endlessly supplying food to paying customers, on their feet the entire time. Now they get to switch off and relax, and not have to think about work at all until the next day. Can you - with your six figure job - switch off your work brain so cleanly? I think not.

It’s really about putting in the work. Those fast food workers can’t slack off like us white-collar folks can (often on Slack). Many hours are not being lost to Internet browsing. At the end of a work-day, they are tired (it’s hard labor for sure), but they can be satisfied with the output. And I bet they sleep well at night too, the stresses from minimum wage pay notwithstanding.

No water for work

Nothing makes you appreciate first-world amenities quite like having them taken away suddenly. For example: running water. I went to work this morning (as one does every weekday morning) and turns out the entire campus has lost water pressure. This is not because of any maintenance fault of the university, but rather the City and County of San Francisco. Our facilities staff had to call public utilities for assistance. I know you're staring at an enormous fiscal hole, San Francisco, but shortchanging SF State on water is not the way to save money.

When there isn’t enough water pressure to flush toilets, it becomes enough of a biohazard to send everybody home. Thank heavens for modern work safety regulations! (Apparently, OSHA states that if there are working bathrooms within a 10 minute walk, then it is okay to continue working.)The modern us have it so incredibly nice. Think back to when even the highest of kings and queens do not have access to such luxurious plumbing. We are literally living better than royalties of old. No amount of money back then could buy the standards we have now. It’s humbling to think about.

I greatly appreciate automatic hot water out of every faucet tap in the home (here in America) whenever I go back to China. There, it’s typical for older apartment buildings to only have hot water for the bathroom shower head. Can you imagine washing your face with cold water in the dead of winter? (I don’t have to imagine it, because that is exactly what I will be doing a month from now.) Meanwhile, here in the States we open the faucet and wait for water to get hot in the morning…

The living standards are pretty high here, and I think it’s useful to not take it for granted once in a while. And perhaps, to not be so wasteful of it either.

Thankful for the balance

Welcome back, everyone! I hope you’ve all had a very nice Thanksgiving holiday. I most certainly did. I accomplished the one task I set out at the start: vacuum and clean the interior of my BMW M2. Job done, the rest of the time is pure rest and relaxation.

Cleaning the inside of my car is an annual tradition (unlike any other). Because I drive the BMW so seldomly - and typically it’s just me inside - the interior never gets too grimy. The few people I’ve chauffeured around have all remarked in amazement how clean it is. I would sheepishly reply that it is not due to any sort of cleaning diligence on my part. Granted, I probably would vacuum more often if the M2 needed it.

I am thankful I live close enough to work for me to walk (instead of drive). Furthermore, what I am most grateful for this Thanksgiving is happy employment, one that allows for taking an entire holiday week off with zero issues. There was no stress at all in going back to work today. I slept quite soundly the previous night; the dreaded “Sunday scaries” are fortunately not a thing for me.

You absolutely cannot pay me enough (more) to break this peace of mind.

The contrast of seeing people working during Thanksgiving week (shoutout to the folks keeping Whole Foods open for half a day that Thursday), while I am freely hanging out on vacation, fills me with immense gratitude. Sure, I’ve hustled tremendously to be where I am at, but it would be naive to think there weren’t some lucky levers that got pushed by some sky deity along the way. My original staff position - some 10 years ago - only opened up because someone left.

No amount of agency on my part could have control that!

It's nap time

You know things are slow at work when a coworker falls sleep while watching a YouTube video. Granted, the snoozing is probably not due to boredom. Rather it’s likely insufficient sleep. Sure we tend to yawn when we’re bored, but then we’d go find something to un-bore ourselves. Nobody goes, “You know what, I am bored. Let me go take a nap!”

Indeed, the workday does go by quicker when there is more stuff to do. This workload ebb and flow comes with the territory of one, working at a university, and two, being on the service side. People call us when shit goes bad, so if we’re busy all the time, then something is horribly wrong. We are smack dab in the middle of the Fall semester, so not a lot of things are going wrong at the moment (knock on wood).

The weather in San Francisco has finally turned cooler, a real autumnal feeling. That coziness probably adds to the drowsiness factor (I definitely sleep better during the winter months). The coworker did just return from a heavy lunch, too, so all the pressures of wanting-to-take-a-nap were working against him staying awake. Sadly, a public university is not the Google campus: there aren’t any nap pods around here.

As a purveyor of consistent, quality sleep, you won’t find me doing the head-nod into slumber whilst doing a sedentary activity. I haven’t done something like that since my college days of falling asleep in class. For obvious reasons, my sleep schedule was all over the place back then. No, professor, your lecture isn’t boring! I’m simply running on fumes.

These days, I no longer sacrifice sleep to the altar of continue playing a video game, or keep watching a TV series. I purposely leave social gatherings early in order to preserve the amount of sleep I get. It is too important for brain health to forsake.

Nah, we just hate you

It’s always interesting to hear from new faculty members about “how it was” back at the university they used to work. Of course, this line of comment is typically accompanied with them complaining they’re not getting the same treatment here at San Francisco State University. To which I have to say they need to realize that our university is the second tier of the California public university system. We are not a UC. We’re not even a Polytechnic. Resources and support around here might not be as ample as that private institution they were at previously.

Besides, if their previous institution is so great in comparison, why the French did they leave in the first place? Let’s not forget: they applied for their faculty positions. That means they wanted to come to San Francisco State University. Perhaps some due diligence was missing if the quantity and quality of available resources (IT or otherwise) is proving insufficient. But hey, I get it: they’re probably getting paid more now than their old positions. It’s all about the money.

What really irks me is when certain new faculty get personal with it. As if our inability to fulfill their computing wants is a direct affront to their personhood. Right, because when the California Sate University system mandates certain requirements vis a vis computer security, it’s specifically targeting you. Same with us: we’re declining your request to dual-boot Windows and Linux because we hate you. Just you, not anyone else. (Obviously, my tongue is fully in cheek here.) Asking for my supervisor? Sure, I guess you like to be told the same thing twice by two different people.

As Michael Corleone famously says in The Godfather: “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.”