Surprise! It's over!
Today, when I was minding my own business before the computer in the Vision Lab in ASM, my supervisors Wenling and Daniel suddenly appeared next to me and tapped my shoulder. That really scared the crap outta me. First, I was working (I really was!) so I was really caught off guard when I saw them. And second, Daniel, my real supervisor from the Algorithm Team, was often nowhere to be seen, cause he was always crazy busy to the extent that this morning he was even asked to schedule an impromptu flight to Thailand tonight to fix some technical issue. Therefore, when my temporary (probably permanent) supervisor from the Die Bond Application Team and Daniel both shown up, it really was like a miracle. And third, Daniel was holding an envelope.
You know when people say when they were dying they saw their life flash before their eyes? That's real. So I tried so hard to mutter, "What's up?" when they grabbed the chairs and sat before me. Wenling answered, "Don't you see this odd combination? Of course it's something special!" Then he stared at me for 2 seconds and announced,"You're fired."
Every new employee in ASM has a probation period of 3 months. I started working in ASM on 19/5, 2 days after I came back from Korea. So you know how I felt if you were told you got fired 2 weeks before your probation was over? Well, confidence. I was pretty sure I did nothing wrong, unless they found out I'd been testing the limit of the Internet filter since Day 1 (I literally tried every website I could think of and even conjured up a list, and I'd been using Wenling's account for internet) So I looked to Daniel, and gave him the "Is it true?" look. He opened his mouth, "Relax, it's not true." I quickly turned to Wenling and stuck my tongue out. Wenling, who was already used to my impromptu childish behavior, just sighed and told me to listen. Therefore I cleared my my mind a little bit and listened what Daniel had to say. He pulled a piece of paper from the envelope and said,"Your's probation is over."
O-M-G! What? That seems wrong. So I didn't got fired, but became an official ... intern ... in ASM? You know what that means? It means that I am among the first of all new employees since May to pass his/her probation, even earlier than Angus, who should be passing his probation next week. I really didn't know how to react but kept saying "Wow". Finally Daniel interrupted and said,"Okay, at this very moment Wenling and I have to talk about something we don't usually talk about, with you. That's right, a review of you." Sometimes I think praise and criticism are the same thing when you're taking it. When someone criticizes you, you felt embarrassed as you are ashamed of your mistakes and bad decisions. When someone praises you, you felt embarrassed as you are ashamed you're not actually that smart or that talented. Therefore when Daniel praised me for my "deep thinking" and always trying to "perfect" the testing results, reports and presentations I worked on, etc. I could feel my face burning. I mean, come on, if you have read one or two posts in this "blag", you'll know there's only one word suitable for this "deep thinking" dude - dumbass. Luckily, Wenling's impression of me was a bit, well, closer to the truth. He praised my programming skill and fast thinking. He said I was a fast learner and always looked like having tons of fun at work. But! But I had to code following the company's convention and programming style for other people's sake, no matter how much I didn't want to. And I really got to clean up my desk more often, cause sometimes I looked like I was working in a pile of trash. But still, attaboy! Finally, they asked me how I felt about working in ASM.
I still remember my Day 1 in ASM. After Vincent, an employee from the Algorithm Team, brought me around the whole floor telling everyone "Here's the new intern, Daniel's boy." I finally met Wenling, who told me he would "borrow" me from Daniel for a moment as Daniel wasn't here and didn't have the time to take care of me yet. He asked me what I wanted to learn or achieve in ASM. I didn't even think and said I wanted to learn how many different programs, coded by many different programmers, were combined into a big one and could actually work inside a machine, or a device. He told me Die Bond Application Team would be the perfect place where you learn how to make use of different functions coded by the others and also write your own ones for others to use. Vision Department is an essential part in ASM, unlike the Motion Department, every machine made by ASM requires camera(s) to do different kinds of advanced stuff like pattern recognition, defect analysis and detection.
Up til that point, I still didn't know clearly what ASM was, I just knew it was a Dutch company manufacturing wafers, machines and stuff (and I had to give up the opportunity to go to University of Washington for an exchange program and missing Carmen's graduation just to work here for a year.) So I really had no idea what Wenling was talking about. And then before I could realize, I started to learn Microsoft's MFC (the library which let programs have OK, Cancel buttons and scroll bars for you to click with your mouse) and writing a GUI interface to control all testing programs they had made so far. Long story short, I had to rewrite all of them, by myself most of the time. After 3 weeks, I finally finished a skeleton for the program. And Angus had already been doing different kinds of work which I didn't understand while I still had basically no knowledge in image processing, had no idea how to distinguish between different kinds of cameras. And I'd been there for 3 weeks for crying out loud. I was a bit jealous. So I reached out to Ting, an intern who was about to leave in a month, and asked him to teach me how to set up a camera for my computer to use, how to connect the lights. I was bored and had been learning slow, with no motivation or whatsoever.
Finally Daniel asked me to do some testing of recognition on some 2D code samples (simply speaking, some dots on a piece of tiny material, which could be decoded into a string of alphabets and numbers, in fact, QR code is a kind of 2D code) to compare the accuracy of a program his team had been working on and a huge American company's. I couldn't even recognized the dots with my naked eyes and a program could actually achieve that. That was fun and amazing, I even tested every sample (26 in total) thrice. Finally I made a report and sent it to Daniel, which led to me getting his praise today.
And then Wenling lent me to Clement, an employee from Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) Team to help him test the performance (regarding speed and space) of a function some dude wrote to do compression using Run-Length Encoding (RLE). Again, I had no idea what that was. And then that dude's function was so crappy that I was asked to write a new one. So I spent an weekend and finished 2 functions, for compressing a Bitmap image to a .rle file and vice versa. And then I spent another three weeks to rewrite my functions in order to fit all the programs Vision Department was using and write another 2 functions to do data packing and unpacking. I had a hard time understand how my department handles images and the convention and style they were using but I thought I was starting to get the hang of it. Since a lot of new employees had appeared after I started working in ASM. I knew how they felt while looking at codes they didn't understand. So I wrote my findings with extreme details in my report on RLE and gave a presentation during Die Bond Application Team's weekly meeting. I thought that might be when my reputation of giving good presentation starting to grow.
And during that 3-week, I was also doing some testing on the performance of a Cognex Wafer Reader. That was a really expensive toy to me. I got 2 wafer samples which a code written on each of them. Testing limit was always my favorite. So I moved the wafers around, rotated them, tilted them, compressed them, zoomed the camera in and out to see if the Reader could really handle it. I managed to create a testing report with 109 pages, which scared the crap outta everyone. But man that was fun.
So, when Wenling and Daniel asked me how I felt about working in ASM, I said I was really grateful for working for them. I had been having tons of fun, and realized my work of scope was more focused that Angus', which made him so jealous now. I liked understanding how things worked and they let me, gave me the chance. I just wanted to say "thank you". Before leaving after I signed the paper inside the envelope, they looked quite satisfied and promised to let me do more work on algorithms and programming, which I was good at and loved.
I still got 10 months to go, but choosing to work in ASM was the best decision I did so far.
Kev
You know when people say when they were dying they saw their life flash before their eyes? That's real. So I tried so hard to mutter, "What's up?" when they grabbed the chairs and sat before me. Wenling answered, "Don't you see this odd combination? Of course it's something special!" Then he stared at me for 2 seconds and announced,"You're fired."
Every new employee in ASM has a probation period of 3 months. I started working in ASM on 19/5, 2 days after I came back from Korea. So you know how I felt if you were told you got fired 2 weeks before your probation was over? Well, confidence. I was pretty sure I did nothing wrong, unless they found out I'd been testing the limit of the Internet filter since Day 1 (I literally tried every website I could think of and even conjured up a list, and I'd been using Wenling's account for internet) So I looked to Daniel, and gave him the "Is it true?" look. He opened his mouth, "Relax, it's not true." I quickly turned to Wenling and stuck my tongue out. Wenling, who was already used to my impromptu childish behavior, just sighed and told me to listen. Therefore I cleared my my mind a little bit and listened what Daniel had to say. He pulled a piece of paper from the envelope and said,"Your's probation is over."
O-M-G! What? That seems wrong. So I didn't got fired, but became an official ... intern ... in ASM? You know what that means? It means that I am among the first of all new employees since May to pass his/her probation, even earlier than Angus, who should be passing his probation next week. I really didn't know how to react but kept saying "Wow". Finally Daniel interrupted and said,"Okay, at this very moment Wenling and I have to talk about something we don't usually talk about, with you. That's right, a review of you." Sometimes I think praise and criticism are the same thing when you're taking it. When someone criticizes you, you felt embarrassed as you are ashamed of your mistakes and bad decisions. When someone praises you, you felt embarrassed as you are ashamed you're not actually that smart or that talented. Therefore when Daniel praised me for my "deep thinking" and always trying to "perfect" the testing results, reports and presentations I worked on, etc. I could feel my face burning. I mean, come on, if you have read one or two posts in this "blag", you'll know there's only one word suitable for this "deep thinking" dude - dumbass. Luckily, Wenling's impression of me was a bit, well, closer to the truth. He praised my programming skill and fast thinking. He said I was a fast learner and always looked like having tons of fun at work. But! But I had to code following the company's convention and programming style for other people's sake, no matter how much I didn't want to. And I really got to clean up my desk more often, cause sometimes I looked like I was working in a pile of trash. But still, attaboy! Finally, they asked me how I felt about working in ASM.
I still remember my Day 1 in ASM. After Vincent, an employee from the Algorithm Team, brought me around the whole floor telling everyone "Here's the new intern, Daniel's boy." I finally met Wenling, who told me he would "borrow" me from Daniel for a moment as Daniel wasn't here and didn't have the time to take care of me yet. He asked me what I wanted to learn or achieve in ASM. I didn't even think and said I wanted to learn how many different programs, coded by many different programmers, were combined into a big one and could actually work inside a machine, or a device. He told me Die Bond Application Team would be the perfect place where you learn how to make use of different functions coded by the others and also write your own ones for others to use. Vision Department is an essential part in ASM, unlike the Motion Department, every machine made by ASM requires camera(s) to do different kinds of advanced stuff like pattern recognition, defect analysis and detection.
Up til that point, I still didn't know clearly what ASM was, I just knew it was a Dutch company manufacturing wafers, machines and stuff (and I had to give up the opportunity to go to University of Washington for an exchange program and missing Carmen's graduation just to work here for a year.) So I really had no idea what Wenling was talking about. And then before I could realize, I started to learn Microsoft's MFC (the library which let programs have OK, Cancel buttons and scroll bars for you to click with your mouse) and writing a GUI interface to control all testing programs they had made so far. Long story short, I had to rewrite all of them, by myself most of the time. After 3 weeks, I finally finished a skeleton for the program. And Angus had already been doing different kinds of work which I didn't understand while I still had basically no knowledge in image processing, had no idea how to distinguish between different kinds of cameras. And I'd been there for 3 weeks for crying out loud. I was a bit jealous. So I reached out to Ting, an intern who was about to leave in a month, and asked him to teach me how to set up a camera for my computer to use, how to connect the lights. I was bored and had been learning slow, with no motivation or whatsoever.
Finally Daniel asked me to do some testing of recognition on some 2D code samples (simply speaking, some dots on a piece of tiny material, which could be decoded into a string of alphabets and numbers, in fact, QR code is a kind of 2D code) to compare the accuracy of a program his team had been working on and a huge American company's. I couldn't even recognized the dots with my naked eyes and a program could actually achieve that. That was fun and amazing, I even tested every sample (26 in total) thrice. Finally I made a report and sent it to Daniel, which led to me getting his praise today.
And then Wenling lent me to Clement, an employee from Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) Team to help him test the performance (regarding speed and space) of a function some dude wrote to do compression using Run-Length Encoding (RLE). Again, I had no idea what that was. And then that dude's function was so crappy that I was asked to write a new one. So I spent an weekend and finished 2 functions, for compressing a Bitmap image to a .rle file and vice versa. And then I spent another three weeks to rewrite my functions in order to fit all the programs Vision Department was using and write another 2 functions to do data packing and unpacking. I had a hard time understand how my department handles images and the convention and style they were using but I thought I was starting to get the hang of it. Since a lot of new employees had appeared after I started working in ASM. I knew how they felt while looking at codes they didn't understand. So I wrote my findings with extreme details in my report on RLE and gave a presentation during Die Bond Application Team's weekly meeting. I thought that might be when my reputation of giving good presentation starting to grow.
And during that 3-week, I was also doing some testing on the performance of a Cognex Wafer Reader. That was a really expensive toy to me. I got 2 wafer samples which a code written on each of them. Testing limit was always my favorite. So I moved the wafers around, rotated them, tilted them, compressed them, zoomed the camera in and out to see if the Reader could really handle it. I managed to create a testing report with 109 pages, which scared the crap outta everyone. But man that was fun.
So, when Wenling and Daniel asked me how I felt about working in ASM, I said I was really grateful for working for them. I had been having tons of fun, and realized my work of scope was more focused that Angus', which made him so jealous now. I liked understanding how things worked and they let me, gave me the chance. I just wanted to say "thank you". Before leaving after I signed the paper inside the envelope, they looked quite satisfied and promised to let me do more work on algorithms and programming, which I was good at and loved.
I still got 10 months to go, but choosing to work in ASM was the best decision I did so far.
Kev
Surprise! It's over!
Reviewed by Kevin Lai
on
10:54:00 AM
Rating:
Reviewed by Kevin Lai
on
10:54:00 AM
Rating:
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