Career Advice of Indonesia: The Recent Trends

What is the best shot?

And that is the question...

The answer ranges from academical background, family connections, professional certifications, soft skills, speaking ability, looks, activities, hobbies, and many other things that you normally bring to the job-giver. But normally, people pick one of the most sought-after criterion out of those résumé-filling lists. They gave their reasoning, but they are so popular that most of the HR Department of any companies could second guess where do their candidates get their charming tips from.

Cheapest trick.
Is the academic background. People do everything to obtain one, thus forgery of such certificate becomes a business. Well, not to mention that the "real" certificate also costs a lot too, and time consuming as well. People aim specific career, thus they choose the most relevant study subject to their career of choice, hoping that it will buy the company people over.

The thing is, academic is just one factor, it shall come to nothing with regards to people's qualification. People with the best trick of the trade beats anyone who learned everything straight from the book. But if you seek for someone who would fulfill your demand for respect of that education, look for the alumni clusters, which usually overrun a good number of companies. Aim for prestigious education institution if you seek this.

In Indonesia, at least, people of my generation are confused bunch who look secondary education (university/college) as a safety net. They try to get some sense of security: security for their future career and security for their current state of life (being able to hang out with "those kind of people," acceptable to their parents, and looks safe). Thus they pick any subjects that won't put too much burden on them later on from a seemingly "safe" institution. Few willing to take risks to pursue their true passion and dig their talents further.

Blah...blah...blah...
Soft skills, speaking ability, social skills, connections, they all do help. But they are one of the most difficult traits to discover for every individuals. Some people might overrate their own skills, some might underrate it. Although this blog entry is written in less-than-serious manner, this is actually one important skills to consider when you are looking for jobs. These set of skills are mostly imprinted behavior or impacted by each individual's environment, but they can actually be changed, improved by simply reversing the causality. For example, if you never speak in front of the mirror before, now you should start doing it. If you never feel comfortable with your own voice, record yourself and try to listen it for hours, and many more. Joining a public speaking club will help a lot, since you will meet a lot of confident weirdos that are very willing to help each other.

In Indonesia and every other family-oriented countries, which are identifiable by how much family affair drama TV shows they produce (e.g. Indonesian sinetrons or Latin American, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese telenovelas), these skills are quite the primary.

The thing you love the most
At least for men, one cannot deny how our passion for a thing can't just fade away. It started from the childhood and it grew with us. They say, "boys never grow up, but their toys do, in size and price." That is somewhat true to real men. I drew cheesy planes, fly paper aircraft, and now playing high-fidelity flight simulator. This represents their real skills and their willingness to study a subject with some calling. This is what people call "talent," others call it a hobby or simply an interest.

In most developed countries, companies treat this thing seriously as it really fruitful for the company if they could find a good guy who would undertake painstakingly difficult effort in getting things done, just because they love doing it. In undeveloped countries like Indonesia and the rest of Asia and Africa, they only do this just to follow what those industrial nations do. And people normally cites "reading, swimming, browsing, listening to music" as their hobby, simple, neutral, but pointless, because they were never taught to pursue their passion with utmost calling. Back then, in my Catholic class, the teacher told us about Parable of the Talents, but most of the students just remember that to fill in the exam paper. Yes, during your career, many of you most probably are wasting your God-given gifts or talents in exchange for "realistic" thing such as monetary rewards or social status or parent's demand as in typical Asia.

Here we go... 

Now this is the most important thing: LOOKS. In Indonesia at least.

You can't go wrong if you got good looks. It is an observable trend amongst the people nowadays. See these evidences:   

No talents are required

Boybands and girlbands represents what is worse from industrialization of art from that is music. Originally, people with greatly tuned ear created some melody that is music. In the advent of technology, people began visualising musics, using videoclips, televised it to everybody so we can see what the original artists tried to interpret. But that doesn't sell enough, while the men still rule the world and their pride still high, the industry created boyband to fish out revenue from fangirls, because girls don't go to work. Now girls being the object, whose a common object to receive all the blame and it is socially acceptable to be silly.

But since men's ego took over, then came girlbands, yet with poorer musical taste, more sexual exploitation, and lesser art form. Girlbands that are trendy recently are those of cute, oriental looking, with whiny animic voices. It completely transforms what was once an art form into purely industrial exploitation that is commonly referred as "entertainment industries." It is now, a mass-produced audio-visual entertainment from what was once an elitist consumption produced by select few like Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Bach, Chopin, Tchaikovsky.
Girlband and boyband personnel are auditioned, carefully selected for the looks and (recently) attitude and characters in order to better suit its target audiences. For the "musical" side, they were intensively trained to sing and dance the best they could. It could be said that they are no better than you being a bus driver than them performing on stage, after all both of you will be intensively trained for the job anyway. They have a very short marginal utility, due to age constraints (audience preference factor) and from business point of view, should be exploited to the fullest while they still holds some value, thus you can normally see them starring in several heavily marketed mediocre movies and tie-in merchandises.
Now what?
Oh, it is "the more the better." The usual 3-5 singer format is now expanded to include 7-9 personnel, which typically sing a 4-5 minutes song. We never know who sings which part, but never mind, we never cared about their musical talents anyway.

Skill? Education background?

A friend of mine scored higher in his recruitment test, answer the interviewer questions' better (according to the interviewer's own testimony), have the interest most relevant to their business. His competition was this girl, scored slightly lower, but she won it. She simply "connects better when talking to me" bullshit was given as the excuse.
I can't say that looks matter here, but sexual preference also sells. And in this race, female wins big time. Most of the decision making power are in the hands of a male, and to avoid sex-bias decision making/opinion, financial institution top analysts and opinion makers are gays or inclining to be so.
I think we are going to see the reverse trend soon when those girls advanced through the ranks and finally made it into the decision making position. Then we will have males becoming the preferred sex in the job market.

You don't even need to learn

I am slightly good looking, not to say handsome, but adequate enough to pass the common "ugliness stare test" during the first meeting. That is probably why I got a rather good standings in the business. It is unfair to my weirdo, awkward-looking friends, but that is life. Fock it!
Now, doing the business, you require some basic knowledge about things you are going to do. But if you got the looks who the hell needs them?
This came from an annoying experience with some nice but quite incapable people. I got to work with some guys from other companies, usually with their IT department. I met with this one helpful and charming girl, she is nice and welcoming, but that is not what I was looking for. To make it short, she didn't know a thing about her IT environment, let alone some familiar IT terms like virtual servers, domain controller, anti virus update log report, etc. Gee thanks. We know she is in the IT department, but her main job is really to welcome guests and serves as the intermediary between us and their geeky technicians (who normally don't speak everyday languages, like I do).
It was a very pleasant view, but certainly not an enjoyable experience. I expect "IT people" to be more knowledgeable. There shouldn't be one guy sitting amongst the smarties just to look pretty and use his/her charm to work things around without actually making things right. Not even knowing a piece or two about computers, well, we should mourn for the jobless genius geeks out there. It is clearly another case of blatant sexual preference and looks.

When in Rome, you don't have to behave like Romans, if you are pretty

It came to me that amongst sexually-deprived society, you'll tolerate women more than you should. Especially, when they are slender, have a beauty features that are trendy, charming, and (look) nice. Even when you go around the most elite office towers along the main business districts of Jakarta, you can't miss those people. People who ogles, gawks, stares, at sexy (mostly) and beautiful (sometimes) ladies.

"That is normal,"

Of course, obviously, it is, but only to the point where you have to experience this: minor harassment. But I observed that some women actually exploit it for their own favour. That is a bold move I say. But when it comes to business, I cannot say anything besides that I usually commend more intelligible and honorable conduct to be carried out at any possibilities. Think of watching porns during working hour, then imagine how disgusting it is. That is what I think when people exploit their sexuality to gain something at work. However, that is only one way of doing it. The other way is to act innocent and play nice, despite knowing the dirty intentions. Slightly less than annoying, but it is still not comforting to know. People who can't be firm on their stance (especially regarding self-respect), can't even be called "professional," not even "maestro," the level which I aspire to be.

My experience varies between businesses. There is one girl who completely pursues a career out of her interest. She clings into her innocent thoughts that "people like her" should belong to that kind of position (e.g. sales and marketing). That's good, but please show us your real deal please, because business is helping other people to fulfill their needs for specific goods or service, not side-show entertainment. I know that sex sells, but it is a requirement to know what we are selling here. Sadly, they easily forgot that thing here.

And another one girl (again) acts like she is pretty innocent about how easy she got her job despite not knowing anything about the subject. So what the deuce is wrong here? I was talking to somebody who is quite smart actually, but her background couldn't speak any better than that: the family owns IT-related business, works in IT stuffs distributor, so the list goes on, building some amount of credibility in the IT field. But we all know about the common problem of every working people: you will never be happy with what you have. So it happens, she didn't gather some amount of knowledge regarding IT subjects, let alone the stuffs she is selling, like what processors do, why we should upgrade our memory, or how DDR3 differs from DDR2.

Opportunity knocks your door all the time!

It is difficult enough for normal, intelligent on average people to get a decent job at a decent place. But for pretty girls, or at least good-looking one, it takes much much much less effort than it normally does. One girl got an offer before she even graduated from her study! So how easy is that? With average intelligence, you can win a career opportunity, even if you have less interest in the subject than everybody else in the market.

Again, it is because of the principle that sex sells. Apparently, marketing position is ripe for pretty good looking ladies in Indonesia out there. Well, never mind, it is the first requirement when you apply for stewardess/flight attendant jobs, explicitly. You don't have to be smart, you don't have to know shit about airplanes, you just do the walk in, pass the stare test with some small talks they refer as "interview," and voila. We'll never met better looking junior flight attendants than ever. You can see them got scared by minor turbulence, being late in preparing the in-flight meals, some poor attitude towards passengers, missing few safety checks, SOPs, uniform apparels, etc. Because it doesn't matter, but looks does! So welcome to Indonesian working environment!

To get a job

You have to take care for your looks, that's it. I mean, you can't present yourself to other people as you please, but at least put some effort into it. Take the advice in less satirical way, because here is the catch:

It is not nice to get yourself dirty and smelly, then flail around and let everybody get a taste of that odour. Surely that can't be right, that's why we wear fragrances or deodorants. It is actually a part of a collective effort to help other people feeling more comfortable socialising in public places.

So, it should be the same thing to the eyes, not just the noses. We present ourselves to look good in front of other people, and making their times around us more comfortable. So why not polishing our looks? And especially, getting over that...insecurity...*barf*

Is making more money a science?

Making more money, have you ever notice the difference?

For all those of you, non-nonsense guys out there, actually there are two major branch of disciplines if you are into corporatism. One is economy and the other is business (economic term). Much later on, they develop more complicated things such as Finance, Accounting, and then Risk Management, and other complicated non civilisation-developing stuffs. Each of them getting too much unnecessary detail, which makes it become more and more pointless.

I have nothing against economic science, after all, it is the the kind of discipline that I was raised from. It is actually pretty much scientific: finding out how the population could sustain its needs given the known limited resources available for them to be gathered. Every RTS games will give you this one lesson from economy: limited resources will lead to war, that's their only single scenario. Like many other sciences, they have a lot of exact definition a concept but their theories are mostly bounded by certain conditions and cannot always give satisfying explanations for every real events out there.


Other than economy, it is her snobbish, lying, and so all-knowing sibling named business. Like every other science on the field, this is economy's practical knowledge, or more popularly: applied science. But, to honestly define this: it is dumbed-down half-assed scientific studies, so common doofuses could at least get a grip on it to actually put it on the show.


Capitalism and Socialism are few of many great economic theories resulted from thorough studies and deep thoughts. But it is always the practice that bring them both down. The way they done their business is commonly cited as the main cause. Capitalism often found a lot of ways to fool themselves into believing themselves that there is such amount of money, which is actually does not exist. Through its other "applied science," called Financial, it invented many estimates, which most of the times are less accurate than David Beckham's freekick taken 23 metres from the goalie. Socialism pretty much destroy itself when they tried to force-feed everyone with it a.k.a communism: taking away your freedom for bullshit. Instead of spreading the wealth fairly, it is putting the system in the hand of one know-it-all smartass, who we all know is going to ruin it. Communism is not in anyway a socialism, but it is actually one of socialism in business: a bad move.


Credibility always gives someone an access card to ultimate douchebaggery without known limits.

The sad thing is that, business has already been widely accepted. People easily buy the nonsense, because they simply believe in them, and the system works also based on trust alone. There has never been something like this besides religion. It is systematic, because there is a large cult of people willing to uphold such beliefs to be true. Besides, what makes the value of a US Dollar other than your worthless trust? The fear of chaos keeps people from seeking better alternatives, and instead they tend to shift the blame elsewhere, which is the very basic of business science. This is the science of fear-mongering and pointing out on obviously the wrong cases.


Economic activity translates to productivity, which is people doing things to fulfill their needs. In today's world, most needs is exchangeable with money. Money is becoming the main commodity of today. There is nothing to fear about other than having the wrong perception about money. Most non-economic persons absolutely have no idea about what money is besides their school textbooks (which mediocre Indonesian education curriculum explain it badly). And, yes money is a commodity, it is nothing more than a goods, it is a piece of paper, warranted by the government and endorsed by law. It's value is changing everyday like every other goods in the market.


To satisfy demands efficiently, people began developing industries, which improves the production process a lot, that makes once luxury goods become affordable to almost everyone. The potency of industries in fulfilling the needs of many at reasonable cost has become the main key to Socialism. Up to this stage, people are still talking about the economy. But then industries got bigger to satisfy more demands. Now, we came to the part where others are trying to milk from this ever-growing economy machine (or money-making machine).


This is called business. It takes care of your basic economic activity management so industries can now think on the bigger scale. It is like Total War game series, where your cities are being partially managed so you don't have to dip your hands into managing each town/village/cities' wheat productions, tax collections, sanitation, maintenance, public events, etc. The people who are in charge for these things are doing its business.


As technology and specialisation progress, economy has become even more complicated. An industry could have more than one specific task to fulfill and also more than one income source. We never give a damn about what happen inside Terran's barracks or Zerg spawning pool while they are producing units. Perhaps they have their own accountants, HR department, Finance department, procurement, IT staffs, production planning & inventory control, etc. They seemed normal, but you'll expect more from their production staffs, the one who will have more influence on the quality and the quantity of the units produced by them. It is not always the case in the real world. They don't have marketing/sales, because you'll clean up their inventory immediately when the units are coming out from their production line.


So what if you produce silly things such as cloth softener? Do you really need such thing? But don't worry, that is where marketing business came to light. When industries are so desperate on competing in saturated market, they opted to create their own market by producing goods that is never needed before, like an iPhone. That is still fine.

But then, too much resources are attention are dedicated to this alone, that now we pay people to talk nonsense about the prospect of the products that they know shit about. These people most probably never visited their factory or have any slightest idea about what is operating system kernel, nor processor cache memory is for, but they talk about how big the industry will be in the future. The funny thing is, people trust them instead of the industry or the producer itself.


Serious people talk business, but their intelligence level are never questioned. Seriously awesome people talk about their stuff, it has never been less than awesome.


Even funnier, they started another activity of creating series of transaction deals between several parties and sell the rights to execute that transaction to interested buyers. Is this even in the economy? What kind of stupid people relies their economy on such bullshit? But that is business, the science of making more money. They'll always find a way to make more money from stupid people.