Doing well

Things have changed somewhat since the last post. We’ve moved desks, I’ve hit all of Feb’s targets, I took up bareback horse riding and I’m selling stuff somewhat better than before (handy when you consider that I’m a salesperson). As you may recall I was having a hard time last month and was seriously doubting my ability as a salesperson, I was looking at the possibilities of moving department. This has obviously changed and has done so because I was able to listen in to some other people and got told where I was going wrong by Gary.

So obviously I’m doing a bit better, better enough that my APP (the percentage of extra stuff sold) is at 0.93 where’s it used to be at 0.54 or something, a massive improvement. I’m now ahead on all things except IPP where I’m basically keeping up with my target. I’m still a fair distance behind Lucy (who sells very well) but in a position where I should start earning a not too bad amount of commision. New car and/or computer here I come!

The new desks means I’m now sitting right next to Ross which is… mostly bad because we’re both used to somewhat more space. I’m also next to Stuart whom I’ve been competing with since we started, currently I’m in the lead but he’s had some time off so it’s early days yet.

Up the lane are some horses that Cerys has been tasked with breaking in. Apparently my weighing more than Cerys means I’m a perfect candidate to help, oh and until today we didn’t have a saddle. It’s not nearly as bad as I thought, I originally only said yes because I was bored and wanted a break from programming.

So yes my life is getting a bit better, who knows, maybe this month I’ll grow a personality, perfect my “evil genius” laugh and work out how to wiggle my ears.

So I’ve had a bad few days and not a great month as a whole, the result is that halfway through the month I’m now behind on one of my targets and am generally not doing that great on my others. Gary is somewhat understaffed (he’s running a 14 man team on his own) but found time to listen to a call of mine and tell me just where I went wrong. I got some good feedback from it, my customer service is still marvellous but it was simply a “very good” call because I didn’t try hard enough for my optional extras.

Missing target and getting no incentive is quite honestly not a huge deal to me; I would enjoy the extra money but money is not my main motivator. What is worrying is that if I miss target twice in the six months of probation then I won’t pass probation, so I’m trying to work out exactly how to deal with this. I really enjoy working at Admiral but my gut is telling me that I’m not cut out to be a salesperson, I’ve consistently scored highly on my manner on the phone which suggests that maybe I should put in for a transfer to Claims or CS. I looked at the IT department and sadly most of the jobs seem to be in Java which I’m not so fluent in, I’ve emailed them all the same asking a few questions about what they do.

But it’s not all bad, even though I’m doing rubbish I still enjoy going into work, I enjoy being part of the team and I am looking forwards to the party on Friday. Hopefully things will turn out a little better in the future, I’d rather not be on the dole queue again.

So far I’ve had fantastic feedback from Lisa and some good feedback from both the customer services spot monitoring and Gary. It’s a good start but given that I act like I’m constantly high on something (like Opera music or blue smarties) I don’t think it’s enough. Saturday involved me upselling five IPPs (Instalment protection plans), we’re being moderated really heavily on them and can get fined £100 if we get it wrong! Gary listened to all of them but also used the first one as a full on monitoring call as I was due another (and he probably decided he needed a laugh).

He was sniggering and giggling the whole way through the call and at one point broke out into laughter, paused the recording and yelled to the whole team what I’d said. The customer had told me I sounded a bit like a game show host; a bit later I’d had to call them back (their phone was running low on batteries or something) and I opened with “Welcome back to the game-show that is Teifion Insurance”. This call warranted a level of “Fantastic” and a large smile from Gary which was pretty nice.

Today however we were told that two of us had been monitored externally, doing well would mean either a bonus of £25 or £100! Doing badly could be either £25 or £50 out of your incentive for the month. Needless to say that when Andrew was told that he was first he was a bit worried; Paul said it was good and Andrew had a good call . There were only two calls that had been monitored in this manner so Paul decided to keep us on tenter-hooks and read through the comments omitting names. I figured that some of the stuff was indicative of myself but for the most part it was saying things such as “good upsell” and leaving out things such as “constant sugar rush” so I figured it must be someone else. It was however me and warrented yet another “Fantastic” and £100 on my incentive for either this month or the next one (I can’t remember which it will be).

Today I got some more feedback from work, I think I’ve now accrued enough to share on here just what things people have thought of me. I’ll start by sharing some choice phrases used in relation to my phone manner: exuberant, enthusiastic, funny, customer focused, overpowering, excitable, friendly and overcooked.

My 1-2-1 with Gary at the end of the first month showed me that I need to focus on the Car Hire and IPP upspells, it focused on a few other things but I seem to be at least moving towards those other targets. My Car hire and IPP scores are somewhat lacking at the moment though and I need to redouble my efforts to ensure I hit the targets.

Gary was particularly happy with my customer service, I was always polite yet at the same time built repore at a good rate each call. This was echoed in my customer services spot monitoring where the moderator said that she had actually laughed at the call because I was so funny, the only fault they could find from that perspective was that I talked too fast at some points, so only nine out of ten. From a technical standpoint my calls are so far all green, that means that I’ve not violated FSA requirements, if I did that then I’d start to lose some of my commission pay.

Today I had my next wad of feedback; despite the best efforts of both Gary and Lisa to unnerve me I was confident. Lisa was the one that’d monitored the call and had found it very funny and of high quality. What was rubbish about it was my ability as a salesperson, she showed me where I went wrong and hopefully it won’t happen again.

Better yet I got some comment forms from customers back, they were pretty happy with the service received and I’ve now taken them home. I’ve since decided that I will be taking them back in and filing them in a file that I’ll look at every time I’m feeling bummed after a bad call. I may also put a picture of the cookie monster on the front of the file, just because I can.

So I’ve been working at Admiral for a month and a bit, I’ve got some thoughts about it and as I’ve nothing better to do would post it up here. You may recall that my last post expressed just how happy I am to work at Admiral. Well I’ve had some time to settle in a bit and it’s much the same, I’m still very happy to work for Admiral and I think they’re happy for me to work for them, something about the way that I’m constantly upbeat and enthusiastic.

It’s not without it’s annoyances, I get very little say in what days I work and so do work some weekends when I’d rather not. At the same time though there are some very cool things about it, today I went home half an hour early! I’ll explain: We had a competition where if you managed to get two extras onto a policy then you’d get a go with a small remote control car, you’d race it around the row of desks as fast as possible and whoever had the fastest time half an hour before closing got to go home early. I got 9.6 something and the 2nd place had 11 point something. You can imagine just how humble I was about this.

The other funny thing is that if I’m at a social gathering and people hear I work for Admiral; then the conversation rapidly swings to them asking questions about how things work. The really funny part of that is however that I’m able to answer almost all their questions and that I enjoy doing it!

Finally, I may enjoy the job but am I any good at it? Yes, I got some high stats yet did no overtime! I’m surprised by this as I’ve never done sales jobs before. I’ll be sure to post here at a later date about the situation with my work but I must say it’s pretty good so far

It’s not hard to find stories about how Google is such a great employer, they have amazing canteens, free gyms and a generally all round “cool” attitude. I have never worked for Google but I must admit that I think it’d be pretty interesting but also pretty tiring. They do hard and complicated work there and though I’d enjoy it; I’d get burnt out pretty fast. Now we come to my current employer, Admiral Car Insurance.

Admiral has a very good policy which can best be summed up as “Happy employees produce higher quality work”. It’s easy to find a company that emsays/em it subscribes to that but this is one of the few cases where I’ve seen proof of it. I could list how the vending machines are very cheap, everybody from sales staff to managers dress casually and how the managers are really nice people but I think I can better sum it up with one line.

There is a strongMinistry of Fun/strong. That’s right, groups of people take it in turns to organise competitions, trips and general coolness. Before you worry that I’m giving away company secrets; it’s all located on their website a href=”http://www.joinadmiral.co.uk/Culture.aspx”here/a.

I must say that when I left university a year and a half ago with my lovely degree in Computer Engineering I never thought I’d be working as a salesman for a company quite as cool as this.

I have a job and will be starting it on the 9th of November. This means I need a car and on Saturday I found one (with much aid from my Dad and brother). There are pictures of the front, side, rear and other side. My ever helpful uncle Brett has suggested a slight alteration to the paint scheme, any thoughts?

I know I said I’d post up a database sync script but on the basis that this blog has low readership and that it was actually not as cool as I thought it was I changed my mind. I looked at it and realised that most of it is really simple stuff; most of which is tied into other parts of the program. Today I found that I will be starting a new job in early November and on the basis that I’ll meet people and do cool stuff each day this blog may find itself becoming more interesting and updated more frequently. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to post stories of my attempts to woo young ladies, probably not though…

You may notice that I’ve not posted a caching article yet, that’s because I’ve simply not needed to. I have cached only a few functions and have achieved a query duplication rate of only 1.5-3 times. Sure that’s not good to have on a public web server but this is my computer and the script runs approximately once a day, it’s simply a matter of the cost-gain ratio. But fear not, I have something related to write about and that’s the underlying “problem”.

As I said, this is a 23 thousand lines of code (not counting those comments and empty lines) program, actually it’s 24.8 now because I added some features but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s not a small script that’ll do one or two simple things, it’s a pretty big application and I knew from the start it would be. I designed it knowing these things, I knew these things because I previously wrote something very similar in PHP, I knew what I wanted to avoid. But enough about how I apparently know what I’m doing, lets get to the nitty gritty.

Modularity
Rob2 is very modular. Modularity means that I reduce code duplication and that I can copy+paste+edit code from one part and use it in another. Modularity brings with it the curse that things need to slot together which means that some things will be sub-optimal. A good example is that several places in the code can run a query that goes something like this:

SELECT * FROM armies WHERE id = X

Where X is a number, part of my initial optimisation was to find these things and make them call a complete list of the table as it’s cached.

Laziness
Like any good programmer I’m lazy. Like any good programmer; this can cause problems for me. Since I use a hand-rolled Database layer I’m often selecting * from my tables and often from the entire table. Normally this is good and I then cache it so that it runs real fast. In many instances however I will call * from the entire table and not need it. Worse yet I’ll call it for the whole table when I need only 1/20_th of the table! In a situation where resources are limited this is clearly not acceptable but like I said, this is not one of those situations and the code is so much easier to follow because it all follows the same design.

It is however not all bad; there are some things that I’ve done well. Some things are common sense while others might not be (I’m not common and may or may not possess sense).

Indexes
Most of my tables have indexes. The trick is to put the index on the field that you apply a WHERE statement to, not the field that you’re trying to get at. I didn’t know this at first and thought that my queries were loads faster because I used indexes! Indexes provide a saving in speed for a cost in space, I have 58GB of space left so I probably have a couple of indexes I don’t need.

IDs
I store stuff by it’s ID; not by it’s name. Searching through an integer field is a lot faster than searching through a length 40 varchar field. Better yet, the integer has no reason to change but a user can change their username and that causes all manner of “fun” for the developer(s).

Duplicate data
I intentionally duplicated one of the fields in my database and for a good reason. If I didn’t then at several points there would have been a 3 table join and several queries that don’t use a join currently would have needed one. It’s data that won’t change and it’s an integer, thus it doesn’t come into conflict with the main reasons to ensure data normalisation is applied.

Finally…

Lack of obsession
As a developer it’s very easy to focus on one thing to the exclusion of others, premature optimisation being a pitfall I fall into if not thinking carefully. In this instance I implemented a basic cache system and left it at that until a few weeks ago. By not obsessing about the speed of my program I completed it faster and then when I did optimise it a bit, I continued to not obsess and have since added new features to it. If a script runs 10% faster but it took you 2 days to make the change then it’s probably not worth it. I say probably because as I’ve been so happy to point out, my situation is not your situation, there are cases where that 10% will be the difference between success and failure.

For my next trick…
I will be sharing the database checker that I wrote for Rob2. It runs through the data types and matches them to the table, automatically adding/removing columns and indexes.

I know I said that I’d develop on that caching system but I’ve not had a chance! I have something more interesting anyway; yes it’s hard to imagine anything more interesting than a caching system but it’s true, there are things more interesting than caching (granted not many). I had a programming-exam-interview… thingie.

The test itself was not overly complex, I had an hour to complete as much of a simple yet tricky task, a good understanding of regular expressions will mean that you can do it, you just probably won’t have time to do all of it. The test itself is not the interesting part though, screen scraping it as anybody knows, boring. The part I want to talk about is the fact that there’s a test and the way it was done.

In theory the test will do the following:

1. Prove that a candidate can actually program as listed on their CV
2. Show exactly how well a candidate can perform at a task that will be a key part of their employment at a company
3. Show how good the candidate is at working on their own

I want to explain how this is both good and bad.

Bad
Bad comes in two parts, exam and my selfishness. As with any exam, if I was having a bad day, if I’d not gotten much sleep (which incidentally I didn’t) or any number of other things then it’d have counted against me, it’d have made the test unfair and lowered my chances of progressing further. Obviously this is pot luck and nothing specific against me so by the very same logic I can have good conditions and all other candidates can be so ill they can’t even check their email.

The second part of the bad is my personal selfishness. If I am below average compared to the other candidates (and statistically there’s about a 50% chance I am) then it’ll count against me as would any test of skill. The test was pretty open, I was allowed to use any language I wanted and to output the data into any one of several common formats so that was okay. Again this can go both ways, if I’m above average then this obviously increases my chance of progressing further so is it really bad?

Good
There’s one good thing about it but it’s a big good thing and I think it outweighs the bad by a lot. Assuming all those that work there undergo a similar test it means that the people I work with will be better qualified and if I do slip up (and everybody slips up) then they’re more likely to be of help and it also means that I’m more likely to be able to learn from them and converse in the same terms.

I think it’s a great idea and will be thinking more highly of any companies that employ such a scheme.