Two weeks into the new job, how is it going?

Hi guys, normally I would take summer off and go traveling but in light of the fact that I have started a new job and I've already had a trip to Portugal at the beginning of June and a short break to the English countryside the week before I started by job, I'm actually focusing on my new job at the moment. So I have decided to share some of my experiences here about the new chapter in my life; it has not been easy and so I don't wanna pretend that it's been all smooth sailing. 

Pantry? No no no. Simply dial 1025 for coffee. 

Here's how well they treat their staff at this company: on my very first day, I looked around the office for a pantry-like kitchen area, where I could make myself a cup of coffee - there wasn't one. So my colleague helpfully said, "oh we don't make our own coffee here, simply pick up the office phone, dial 1025 and that will connect you through to room service - here, have a look at the menu. The coffee is always good." I was then handed a full room service menu with everything from breakfast to the finest steaks to dim sum - I started out modestly with an iced coffee but was assured, "just order whatever you want, we don't you to go hungry." You've heard about companies like Google feeding their employees really well? Yeah, this is indeed the case here. I am slowly working my way through the menu and some items have been better than others, but the Singaporean in me hasn't been disappointed by the Asian food on the menu. I just have to watch myself as it is so tempting to order one iced coffee after another then I could end up drinking way too much coffee.

I am working from home 2-3 days a week. 

I have a good relationship with my new boss who actually lives in the north of England where he runs another company. So when he is in the north of England, I work from home but when he is in London, I will join him in the office. It kinda suits me fine - whilst I like the experience of working in an office again after such a long lockdown, I also like getting that extra hour's sleep in the morning and having the luxury of taking a cheeky afternoon nap after lunch when I am working from home. Apart from the room service, there is air-conditioning at the office which is quite a relief as summer temperatures here in London have exceeded 30 degrees this week and I don't have air-conditioning at home - summer temperatures here can vary quite a lot. One day, you can get 34 degrees than the next day it can be just 17 degrees. This is unlike say places in Spain  and Italy where you know the temperatures is going to exceed 30 degrees everyday during the summer months - this does give me an incentive to go into the office, even on the days when my boss isn't in. 

So what does your company do?  

Contract arbitrage - it is a rather technical topic that I won't bore you with, do have a read here if you're really interested. 

How did you find this job? 

I found it through Linkedin but allow me to give you the full story: yes there is a jobs section on Linkedin but I didn't use that. Heck, there are literally a zillion things you can do on Linkedin and I'm barely using 20 to 25% of it all, probably less. I connected with my new boss there because we have over 500 mutual contacts. This is why it is so important to keep networking as you never know when a new contact could turn out to be immensely useful - he invited me round for a coffee to meet him and his team, so I thought, okay why not? They're in London and I was in lockdown then, it was just fun to go meet someone in person rather than just do yet another Zoom call. So I went to do that meeting to talk about a possible collaboration with that company but that never came to fruition but out of that meeting came a job offer which I politely declined, given that I was reasonably happy in my previous job earlier this year. But when I was elbowed out of my old job, this was one of the three companies that came forth with a serious job offer and I have already talked about why I picked this company in a previous post. But yes, this goes to show the value of networking on Linkedin! Do make sure you always keep your Linkedin profile updated and use it to expand your network of professional contacts within your industry - I can't stress how important Linkedin is to your career and make sure you invest in building your network! 

How does it feel to switch jobs after having stayed with your former company for so long? 

Oh to be honest, yeah I felt nervous but that was really only for the first few days. In my old job, I knew exactly what to do, I was relaxed, the job was easy for me - I could do everything I needed to do with my eyes closed. But when you change jobs, there is always a steep learning curve. Then of course, with that unfamiliarity comes the possibility to make mistakes - I've made a few minor admin errors so far, nothing major and no one's upset or angry with me yet, but these are the rookie mistakes that I would have never ever made in my old job. But by and large, the clients have been understanding when I admit to them, "I don't know the answer, I'm quite new to all of this, so let me ask my boss to clarify and I'll get back to you very soon once I have the right answer for you." Actually the clients would rather I be totally honest with them than to make a wild guess when I don't know. I do hope that this transition period is temporary of course and I would soon become a lot more competent, but in the meantime, the rest of my colleagues have been quite accommodating so far. But of course, I believe it is important to challenge yourself, to put yourself in a position like this in order to grow and become a better person. My father was a primary school teacher and his job didn't really change much at all from the day he started work to the day he finally retired - he still walked into the classroom at the primary school and delivered the lessons and he did that for nearly 40 years. Good grief, surely being asked to do the same task day after day for 40 years is extremely boring to say the least so that's why I'm taking these new challenges in the right spirit. 

More business trips are on the cards (in the future, when possible).

That's why one major attraction for me in this company is to learn something new and be jolted out of my comfort zone. The directors also did a lot of traveling as well - so here's an example of how they traveled: before the pandemic hit and global travel was a lot easier, the company managed to get a big client in Mauritius. So what did they do? Two of the directors jumped on a plane and flew to Port Louis in Mauritius just to meet him and when I heard that story, I was like, "hey I would have loved to have done that and on top of that, I speak French - Mauritius is a French-speaking country!" I have no doubt that they would start traveling again once it is possible to do so, quite frankly, I've done my share of holidays where I turn up somewhere, I go sightseeing, I do the usual fun stuff and don't get me wrong, that's all very pleasant of course and I still intend to do many more holidays like that. But a business trip is a totally different kind of experience - oh I think it's sour grapes when people claim, "oh I am just traveling there for business, it's not a holiday". I recall my trip to Shenzhen which was a 'business trip' but we were the guest of the Chinese government and the team responsible for welcoming us took such incredibly good care of us there. I have happy memories of my time in Shenzhen and one of the highlights of the trip was the interactions I had with the local team taking care of us - when I go on holiday with my husband, we normally just stick to each other and sometimes we chat with our AirBNB host but that's it. I do enjoy forging relations with the locals when on a business trip - that kind of experience is actually a lot of fun and I get paid for it? Now that is a good deal, in my humble opinion and it does give me something to look forward to in the future. 

Are you using your foreign languages?

In my last post, I did talk about focusing on what I do best but what if my skills aren't that useful? I speak many languages and we're living in a world where the language of business is English - take for instance this afternoon, I was dealing with a client in Turkey. English is not widely spoken there, but amongst the business elite, the ability to speak English fluently is worn as a badge of honour. It demonstrates that you are highly educated, sophisticated and do business with the world outside Turkey whilst an old lady who works in a small shop deep in the Turkish countryside will never deal with foreigners and hence she would never need to speak any English. I am still dealing with the Taiwanese market and my Mandarin is still better than their English, so those conversations will always be in Mandarin. To reflect on how English has come to become the global lingua franca, I am currently watching a Polish series called Zasada Przyjemności - it is really good, a couple of dead bodies show up in Odessa (Ukraine), Warsaw (Poland) and Prague (Czech Republic) at the same time. As the police from these three cities start investigating the murders, more people are killed and the killings are all linked. There are a couple of other characters as well including an Austrian, some Russians and a Lithuanian. So in the end, we have Polish Maria, Czech Viktor and Ukrainian Sergei working together to try to solve this series of murders but what language do they speak to understand each other? English of course, with a thick Eastern European accent. They make absolutely no attempt to speak each other's languages and just default to English. Whilst the drama is intriguing, I'm just frustrated that the programme contains so much English, sometimes more than half the episode is in English, rather than these other languages, but such is Europe today - English is so widely spoken. 

Let me tell you about young 'Dave'. 

I think the most interesting person I've met so far is a young guy (let's call him Dave - not his real name) who is about 24 and he is on our sales team - we have a big network of sales agents on a commission only basis working for us, getting our products out there to the world and Dave is one of our sales agents. I have it on good authority that on a good month, he can make £500,000 or so just in commissions and he doesn't even need to work full time to rake in a few million pounds a year, it is just an insane amount of money we're talking about. The thing about Dave is that I have to really suspend all my preconceptions, go eat an entire humble pie and then tell myself, "this guy is earning much more than you, how the hell does he do it?" I don't know if he went to university but certainly no degree in the world can prepare you to do sales like that. He is monolingual and only speaks English - there's nothing that remarkable about him when you meet him. But the key thing about sales is that everyone does it their way, we use whatever tools we have in our arsenal to make the sale. Clearly, Dave and I have different tools to use, that's why we have very different approaches to how we do sales. But nonetheless, his results speak for themselves - that's why I am so impressed and shocked at the same time, it makes me want to learn from him. Had I been back at my old job, I would have assumed, "yeah I've been doing this for so many years, I'm the expert, I know everything." But meeting Dave and observing him makes me realize that actually, there's still a lot I can learn, there are still so many ways I can improve myself and do my job even better. I may not be able to do what Dave does but I appreciate the reminder he is sending me to always have a very humble attitude. 

Dealing with cynicism 

Oh this has been something that took me quite by surprise! Allow me to put it this way: there are very simple investment products and there are complex ones. Let me give you an example of a simple investment proposition: this company makes cookies and they are already have ten factories across the country making cookies; business is good and they wish to expand. However, to expand, they need more capital to set up more factories, invest in machinery and hire more staff -  so if you invest in this company, you're effectively lending them money for their expansion plans, knowing that they are able to pay you a good rate of return on your investment since their business is doing really well. It's a simple story to tell: everyone knows what cookies are, you can go down to the supermarket and buy a pack of this company's cookies and eat them - you could even visit their factory, see how the product is made and whilst you're there, you can smell the aromas of the freshly baked cookies and taste them. However, with the complex world of arbitrage, you couldn't get further removed from something as simple as cookies: we're not actually making any products that you can hold in your hands like a packet of biscuits. Traders make vast profits and it is just numbers on a screen - this tends to be the point where cynicism kicks in: how does it all work? How is it possible to make millions simply by sitting at a computer and making trades based on contract arbitrage? It's not an easy concept to understand and some people prefer simpler investment propositions the aforementioned cookie factory: it is your money - you invest in whatever you are happy with. 

How do you deal with stuff you don't understand?

But what do some people do when they don't understand how contract arbitrage works? I have been dealing with a ridiculous amount of cynicism. "It's just a scam, I don't believe your business model can deliver this kind of returns." Now don't get me wrong, there are a ton of scams out there in the financial services at the moment and it is right to be prudent when dealing with any proposition. I would even go as far as to say that if you don't understand how it works, then it is important to seek professional advice the same way you wouldn't try to self-diagnose and self-medicate if you were feeling very unwell - no, in such a situation, you need to go see a doctor. But some of the people have relied on their own (limited) understanding of economics and banking to try to understand how contract arbitrage works, so their response is, "I don't understand it, so I will dismiss it as just a scam." Is everything that you don't understand a scam? Practically everyone has a smart phone these days, I don't know how the complex electronic mechanisms in my phone works, but I do know what it can do for me. I don't have a problem using an electronic device like a smart phone whilst openly admitting I am an absolute idiot when it comes to electronic engineering. The very same people who claimed that what my company does is a scam are the same people who have no idea how their smart phones work, yet they are still happily using their smart phones everyday - that's a major blind spot in my humble opinion. At the heart of that reaction is poor social skills: this tendency to only consider matters only from one's point of view, this is what they call navel gazing. 

The inevitable office politics. 

You'd think that I would have stepped into this new company with a bit more awareness on this issue but no, I was naive and thought that it was a fairly small company, everyone's friendly. But even in just two weeks I've dealt with my share of office politics. Now it would be inappropriate for me to share individual stories here but let's just say some of the things I have encountered did take me by surprise. I would look at an incident and think, "that's not how I would have dealt with it, I would have handled it in a different manner to achieve a better outcome." One way to look at it is that not everyone has my kind of social skills and thus have reacted differently - but I do take comfort in one aspect of the business: none of that matters as much as how much money you can make for the company. There is this guy the company deals with, let's call him Mr Bleugh (not his real name and I can't be asked to give him a normal sounding name). Mr Bleugh makes the company a lot of money but has some personality flaws that I shall not go into, lest I accidentally identify him. I know that in private conversations amongst the staff, they have said some rather unpleasant things about him and it suffices to say that they don't like him but hey, everyone puts their personal feelings aside, forces a smile and deals with Mr Bleugh because he is good for business and everyone shares the same objective to make loads of money - that's how practical and pragmatic they are in the real world, money and profits always come first. So I have used this saying before and I'll use it again, "I'm here to make money not friends and if you don't like me, that's fine by me - I can live with that as long as I get paid on time. Besides I already have many good friends in my life so I don't need my new colleagues to like me." 

So there you go, that's it from me for now. I think I will check in with you again in a few more weeks and let you know how I am getting along in this new job. Overall, it has been challenging but I would be naive to imagine that it would be super easy for the first few weeks - I'm realistic enough to know that it would be very difficult to hit the ground running. Such is the nature of changing jobs! Wish me luck please guys. Do leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.