On-Campus Interview

Posted by Shaza Hakim on April 20, 2010

“Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.”

Shaza Hakim fulfills her duty (so requested by Shaiful Borhan) as the chronicler of Stampede Design’s annual on-campus interview at Universiti Teknologi Petronas. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

Consider An On-Campus Interview

You are an IT student, black circles under your eyes from that last attempt at submitting your Final Year Project in one coherent piece. You have an interview with a web company and you’ve heard all sort of cautionary tales and advise about your future career.

The university indulges you but being in IT, you can’t help but feeling marginalized over your fellow soon-to-be engineer friends. This is after all, an engineering university, where engineering future is made.

You are under-motivated, overworked and just barely made it to your 8.30 am interview. You heard you are one of six students selected from a pool of forty. You’re confident that your well-ironed shirt will leave a good impression, until you see another student arrived in a black suit with a sleek briefcase in tow, looking all polished and caffeinated. Suddenly you feel like an underdog. Ain’t life grand.

You walked into the interview room and exchanged greetings with the interviewers. They looked young and somewhat casual, probably mid-20s. They screened your resume and you started to sweat. You began to wonder if you spelled “proficient” correctly. Acting nonchalant, you flashed your biggest smile. Then one of them shot the first question,

“How good are you with PHP?”

I dare say the students we interviewed that Friday morning were in for a surprise.

Why We Interview?

To most companies, this is a blasphemy. “Of course you interview to hire more people in order to grow your business and generate more income.” I disagree.

Stampede’s hiring rate is one person a year, but we work hard and interview far and wide to get that one person. I believe that you do not have to hire many to achieve whatever goals you choose for your company. In most cases, you’re only adding unnecessary overhead to your otherwise agile and flexible team.

The number of employees you have is not a prerequisite to a successful business. You can be successful by staying small if staying small means keeping your people happy and giving your client work quality no bigger company can. By hiring at the rate of one person a year, Stampede is able to focus on training and introduction to our work culture, not by how quickly the person can start hacking codes. Most importantly, we are able to grow sustainably, without compromising our values.

Why Fresh Graduates?

Amazingly, this is the least-tapped pool of young talents in Malaysia. Most companies either look for candidates with significant industry experience or fresh grads with outstanding academic qualifications. Passion is often not in the equation.

Here’s what I think. People with experience tend to have one very big disadvantage: they bring with them culture from their previous work place. When they join Stampede, they tend to be highly individualized, not ready to share knowledge or responsibility. They sometimes conflict sense of teamwork with personal gain. Stampede is an office-politic-free environment. We keep communication flat so we can avoid elaborate hierarchical structure. This is not the case with other working environment where hierarchy is a way to manage and control.

In my years of interviewing and hiring, I personally find that fresh graduates should truly be the darlings of the industry. They are young and idealistic, eager to be an active part of the team. They are not (yet) affected by bad life choices. Most importantly, they bring a different level of energy to a company.

Some managers balk at the training cost. It does take more effort and patience to guide these high-octane powerhouses towards the right direction, but at the end of the day, we are in the business of nurturing talent and giving them work they are passionate about.

When you have a team of people truly invested in their work, you are doing it right.

“How Good Are You With PHP?”

Because we have a web developer vacancy, Dov did the preliminary filtering this time around. He easily trimmed a stack of resumes into six short-listed faces – a feat I never quite managed to do. A resume can be very misleading, with happy internship pictures and big company name-dropping. The most essential element we looked for was promising web programming skill. You may have interned at Intel but if you’re not good in PHP, then we’d rather not be wasting your time.

Dov as usual, was very direct about his requirements. He’s very involved with the hiring process of any new programmer and can be brutal with questions. There were times when I wished I weren’t in the student’s shoe. I am sure Shaiful and Guo Lin know this well. When he’s interested with a student’s PHP work, Dov would reach across the table, grabbed the laptop and dissected the code himself. It wasn’t a pretty sight when he ever-so-gloriously did an SQL injection vulnerability test via the login prompt. The student went pale. He only got his colors back when Dov said “That’s okay, you’re new.”

My questions, on the other hand, were centered more on the soft skills – what aspect of web development that really interests the student, what he aspires to, what an ideal workplace is like to him. These are important because we are, at the most basic, a team. We spend a great deal of time working together so the next person to join the team should be just as fun. Besides, I was due for a Stampede dinner that weekend to relay the summary of our interview to the rest of the team.

Some of the students however, were interested in other fields. One was into computer networking and the other quite a decent ASP programmer. They were honest enough to let us know the type of work they’re interested in. You could easily see that these are good students, though perhaps misguided by their seniors to simply settle for any job opportunities.

My advise in return, don’t compromise your interest. There’s only so much opportunity in life to do what you love, so start steering your way towards that now.

Was It Worth It?

For sure. The students left the interview room happier than when they came in. That alone makes it a good interview day for me.

(wonderful photography by Antontang)

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A City of Our Own Part II: Kuala Lumpur

Posted by Shaiful Borhan on April 6, 2010

This is where age-old tradition blends in with the fine touch of modern lifestyle.

Shaiful Borhan shares some first hand experience about life as a city dweller in the culturally-rich Kuala Lumpur. Shaiful is the Web Analyst and Developer at Stampede.

Kuala Lumpur, or more affectionately known as KL, is the capital and largest city of Malaysia. It has all the ingredients synonymous with a metropolitan city; skyscrapers, mega shopping malls, excellent public transportation network and happening nightlife. Home to approximately 1.8 million people today, KL, like Malaysia, is known for its impressive mix of cultural values from the major religions of the country. This is where age-old tradition blends in with the fine touch of modern lifestyle.

As a kid, I was raised in the vicinity of KL or what we would call the Klang Valley. Then I did part of my high school years at Victoria Institution, tucked right in the heart of KL. It was my first real experience living life in the city. I still remember back then when we used to walk along Jalan Hang Tuah to Plaza Imbi passing by construction sites where now lies the monorail tracks and Berjaya Times Square shopping mall. Brings back memories for sure.

My second and more formal city experience came during my diploma days at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia located just a stone’s throw away from the ever-so-famous Petronas Twin Towers. It was the time when I had the chance to discover some of the finest local delicacies around town, and ultimately turned me into an avid foodie.

Talk about the mouth-watering cheese naan and tadoori down in Little India, the juicy Hainanese chicken rice at Bukit Bintang and the best authentic Thai tom yum in the streets of Kampung Baru. And who can even forget the coveted nasi lemak Kampung Baru? In addition, it’s fairly easy to find Iranian, Japanese and Italian restaurants to name a few, if you’re in for some fine international delights.

Life in KL like any big city, is fast-paced. It is one of those places where you get the impression that every person is planning to get something done quickly, unless you’re a tourist of course. Being one of the economic powerhouse of the nation, KL has the highest employment-population ratio among all states. It is an ideal city to expand your career prospects whilst enjoying yourself at the same time.

Talking about enjoying yourself, the array of entertainment and leisure activities offered by the city is endless. For the performing art lovers, a visit to Istana Budaya is a must. It is Malaysia’s state of the art cultural centre staging some of the most notable productions of musical theatre, opera and classical concert. And as an added bonus, the National Art Gallery is located right next door. My most memorable visit was a few years ago when they had an exhibition about the musical instruments of Malaysia combined with a guitar festival. It was super awesome!

Ranging from spectacular cultural show, to fun-filled day with the family at the theme park, to sizzling nightlife for the trendy urbanites, there’s surely something for everyone here.

KL is also a centre stage for the nation’s events calendar. On some occasion, the city could easily get twice as crowded although not for long. The best example I could think of is the nation’s highly-anticipated Year End Sale that takes place well, towards the end of the year. If you don’t mind getting stuck in standstill traffic for hours and super-crowded shopping malls, rest assured you are in for an ultimate shopping experience.

On the other hand, there were also times when the city turned into a ghost town, literally speaking. During the festive season especially Hari Raya Puasa, majority of the city inhabitants took some time off to visit friends and family outside of the city. This sudden change quickly puts the city in a more laid-back mood and makes moving around feels like a walk in the park. If you’re feeling old-school artistic, this is definitely the perfect time to hang around the city with camera in your hands.

I have always considered myself a city guy. KL is no stranger to me. It is my favorite place to have close within reach.

(gorgeous photography by obliviouslysin, Afiq Rostam, digitalwerk, jo.sau and Sacha Fernandez)

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Weekly Bits #1

Posted by Shaza Hakim on April 4, 2010

Beginning this week in April, we’re going to do a small roundup of visually interesting things that we came across the web for the past 7 days. It’s our own time-capsule so when we get old and cranky, we’ll be reminded of the era of awesome.

The Rework Illustrations

Rework is a brand new book by 37Signals, a bunch of smartasses who hypnotize people into throwing away the usual management shenanigans and in return bestows us mere mortals wholesome web apps you quickly cannot live without.

They’re the new world order.

See the illustrated version of the book by Mike Rhode. Anyone up for printing these bad boys?

7 Rules to Understand Design & Designers

Rule #5: Good design can be planned, but great design just happened. My favourite.
Get it here.

10 Reasons to Avoid Talking on the Phone

I’m no fan of phone conversation – they’re difficult to track, have plenty of room for misinterpretation and frankly you have to filter through a lot of noises to actually get to to the point. Fantastic and spot-on observation as usual from The Oatmeal.

(via @swissmiss)

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