Welcome to the month of August 2009! It’s been just a year after the Beijing Olympics 2008. Time flies doesn’t it? Ok…let me see, last month I did an article about my trip to visit the Buddha statues. What’s for this month? I wanted to write about a little Star Wars combined with Cisco but because I have yet to work on my StormTrooper armor, I probably leave that to next month or the month after whenever I can find time to actually do a little work on the armor itself. Work has been plentiful recently so that’s another contributing factor. This leaded me to talk about the current economy at least from my perspective on Malaysia which plays a major role in me ‘surviving’ for the next few months/years :-).
The economy situation in Malaysia is a little slow. Malaysia being a third world country only felt the after effects of the global economy recession a while back. But to say that we are in a dire situation financially is a little unreal in comparison to the real deal here.
Granted we have had a few projects getting cancelled, some of them major and some of them minor. However, the ironic part is we still have new projects coming in. Granted that the developers are mostly local and the workforce consists of foreign labor but at least this shows that there is still yet hope for a quick economy recovery.
Now although I do sound optimistic, unfortunately this does not apply for every project that are either pre-planned, in the works or nearly completed. One good example is the apartment unit that I bought. Originally the date of the unit that I bought which is part of the second phase is to be completed in May 2010. Now judging from the current speed of the project and the project timeline, I very much doubt it can be completed in time. The shopping lot (which is adjacent to my apartment) which was supposed to be completed last year, August 2008, was delayed to November 2009. The first phase of residence apartments was supposed to be completed in April 2009 has been delayed to January 2010.
Now let’s take this snapshot into the CCIE industry here in Malaysia. As far as my conversations with friends who are CCIEs (yours truly is a slow poke and have yet to get his CCIE), the economy itself has taken its toll on them. Plenty of them have told me that the companies that they are attached to (it seems to me that their companies are channel partners based on the fact that they do hire a minimum of four CCIEs) have either suspended or totally cancelled their CCIE training or even an opportunity to be trained for another CCIE track.
For my working life personally, my company although still healthy with their reserve funds, have taken the cautious approach like other companies, cutting on allowances and unnecessary spending. Even this year, we have cancelled our annual dinner party as well as employees had no increments due to the economic situation. Training budget and other perks like computer subsidies, car loans and other form of personal loans have been suspended until further notice. We did receive our bonuses but I am highly doubtful we will so next year as business is again, rather slow this year.
Now many of us will sort of feel unhappy with this. I admit I am one of those unhappy goons but at the same time like so many other sensible colleagues of mine, we do know that in order for our company to survive through these rough waters, we need to stand as one. We need to be united and steer the company out of this crisis. I do not know yet what is our progress since this is supposed to be our higher management’s or even our finance department’s cup of tea and I am pretty sure they will work something out with their management/mathematical wizardry.
We do also have certain rules imposed like everyone has to travel on an economy flight when flying even if you are from senior management. Overseas meetings are also often cancelled in place of an online meeting utilizing Microsoft’s Office Communication Server. This had lead to substantial cost savings.
Now a friend of mine who works in a different company albeit a big player in the IT industry recently revealed to me to me that her company is currently laying off ‘redundant’ positions. I tried to probe for more information on the condition of anonymity but she is afraid that even such news may cause unnecessary panic to the CCIE readers who are from that company. Very thoughtful don’t you think? This however shows that even big players who have business globally and in particular Malaysia are also taking cost-cutting approaches.
Now so far you have been hearing about the not so good news in my article. Where the heck is some positive news? Well, recently a very close friend of mine who has worked in a company for 7 years have resigned not because the company does not want him but because he has a much better offer from another company. All I can say is that personally I feel that even with the slowing economy still todate, there is a handful of companies that is still very much hiring new talents to add to their current pool of workforce.
In addition to that, a few of my other friends not from the IT background but from the accounting/audit and one from the pastry industry have resigned to accept better offers from other companies within the same industry. This lead me to believe that despite the slow economic situation that is currently faced by many in Malaysia and of course around the world, there is still a strong chance that the economy here will recover sooner that we all think…
Nickelby Thane, a CCIE blogger who maintains his blog at http://cciecisco.blogspot.com have been spending time lately on preparing for v4 of the CCIE written examination which he will take next month. He is also spending time during his study breaks looking and inviting people to the CCIE Flyer Facebook group as well as doing local promotion for Narbik Kocharians’s bootcamp in Malaysia this coming October 2009. When Nickelby is not in CCIE mode, he tries to spend time on attempting to mod his StormTrooper armor where he will soon apply to be a member of the 501st legion in his region. Other than that, he is also spending time on Wiresharking although not as much as he likes as he has another problem on hand, which is to keep his wife at bay from his Transformers Dinobots collection. Should you need to contact Nickelby just to say hi or just to harass him with pictures and phone numbers of cute Japanese girls, you may reach him through his email address, nickelby at hotmail dot com.
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