I attended an offsite training today at Vancouver Golf Club on project managment.  The course itself is more or less the same old stuff I read from the book “Rapid Development”.  However, the environment is really nice and a tasty lunch is included.  That place is classy golf club that require dress code, no jeans are allowed.  Since we are all engineers who love to jeans, we got kicked out from the place by 4:30p.m, so we won’t disturb the dinner customers.  The material in the course is useful, having an instructor giving presentation is better than reading on your own, and I could always use the review.  This course has lots of workshop sessions with group discussion on work place sceniro.  It turns out everyone complains alot the malfunction in managmennt practice in PMC during the workshop session.  We all understand the value of the project managment principle taught in the class, the problem is that our bosses don’t get the same idea.  Sadly, the instructor agree with us that something is really wrong with the management work flow in PMC.  She told us to follow the project management best practice, but it won’t solve our problem.  In the ideal management world, once you have done your part raising the issues to your manager, you should not be accountable to the project failure.  Here in PMC, the management only look at and reward the result, regardless who suppose to be accountable.  The instructor tried to comfort us saying that PMC has improved quite a bit since she teach this class a few years ago.  If the high up doesn’t see the problem and inititate the change, it is useless to give this kind of project managment course to the people down below.  I wonder is this project managment training really try to teach you something useful or just part of the corporate brain washing scam making the workers more obedience.

When you dine out in a restaurant, usually you have to pay tips on top of the amount on the bill. The original intention of paying tips is to reward good service. However, tipping slowly deviated from its original intention and no longer correlate to the service level. Most people just pay the same amount of tips regardless of the service they receive. Tipping becomes a hidden cost not shown on the menu, so the food appears cheaper to the customers. The restaurant owners can pay less to the waiters and the wage is made up by the tips from the customers. The waiters forgot the meaning of tips are really gratitudes, now they take it for granted they will receive tips from customers. Some places even listed the required amount of tips on the menu as service charge and printed it on the bill. The effectiveness of Tips has changed from positive reinforcement to negative reinforce. You no longer get better service for paying tips, instead you will guarantee a bad service next time if you didn’t pay enough tips. In another word, as long as you won’t visit that restaurant again, you don’t have to pay the tips. There are other subjective factors that make people pay tips, such as saving face, politeness or simply don’t want to deal with troublesome waiter in case he ask for tips. There is no objective benefits paying tips to restaurant you never go again. In game theory, this is the difference between one-time games and repeat games.

There is objection to my argument for not paying tips by making an analogy of tips to bonus. Actually, game theory can apply to paying out bonus. Most people think companies pay bonus to its employees to reward good works, but never ask the question why they have to reward good works. The company reward good works because it give incentive for more good works. No company will ever pay bonus to the employees if they are going to be laid off, it is just a waste of money. Although the amount of the bonus each receives is judged by work in the past, but it is really as investment in human capital for the future. In term of bonus, rewarding good work is just a mean, stimulating more good work is the end. When tipping fail to stimulate good service, then there is no need to paying tips.

This the comments Pat made after hearing my story about today’s Whistler trip. I went to Whistler with 2 other guys and 1 girl today. It was snowing heavy and the wind was really strong. It was all white out on the top of the mountain, so the visibility is quite bad. We were going down hill and there was a section on the run that goes down then goes up. Normally we would speed up and clear the ramp without much trouble. One of my guy friend went first and then he fell down when he was going up. I thought he didn’t have enough speed to clear the up ramp so I went down faster. Bam! I fell down just like him. There has no up ramp, I ran into a snow wall. Then another guy friend saw both of us fell down, he also thought we were not fast enough, so he speed up even more. He ran straight into the snow wall, made a big hole and his skis were flying all over the place. After we fell down, we were expecting the girl will come after us and run into the snow wall as well. She was smart, she didn’t fall for the trap. She saw all of us fell down and took a easier route to ski around that section. Pat said only guys have the “I can do better” mentality and stupid enough to run into the snow wall one after another. When girls see someone fall down, they would think something is wrong and avoid the snow wall on the way.