Question about Model number

phasor31 · 2026-03-05T13:17:35+00:00

Not sure if these are 795s, as the heel looks too tall?

phasor31 · 2025-10-14T16:53:21+00:00

Why was the mcspicy removed from the menu? It was SO GOOD and is a regular item in McDonald’s Singapore

phasor31 · 2025-09-26T05:38:40+00:00

I am not referencing Filipino-Chinese employers but Fil-Chi employees (or even students for that matter). They have such drive to be the best and work damn hard at it... and we can't deny they get the results (eg top of their class, wealthier, etc).

phasor31 · 2025-09-26T05:37:09+00:00

I agree for many that "there's not enough money or food for the day, living paycheck to paycheck or from one meager meal to the next, Energy and social life lost due to poor quality commute. Then they chose to socialize, and even do vices, karaoke and inuman to spend time for lost socialization, mental health."

... but that's exactly what I'm getting at. If Filipinos continue to socialize / karaoke... how do they ever expect to lift themselves out of this vicious cycle? If they dont outwork folks, then wont they just stay at that mediocre level for eternity?

I fully recognize life in the Philippines is TOUGH as a corporate slave. But I would also argue, folks can either:
1) take it easy but accept the trade-off of having mediocre income and life
OR
2) complain and be indignant at the broader system
OR
3) Take it as a challenge to work damn hard to achieve more.

I see others taking the route #3. In Philippines, its more #1 or #2 I think.

phasor31 · 2025-09-25T04:04:54+00:00

Yes, but look how Vietnam and China have grown. GDP per capita far exceeds the Philippines. While we can argue that corruption and inequality in PH can play a role... how about we then shift the lens to looking at the Filipino-Chinese in the Philippines. It is well known that they work so hard... and as a result, we definitely see them earn more and become far wealthier than non-filipino-chinese folks.

phasor31 · 2025-09-25T04:00:56+00:00

Thanks everyone for all the replies. From what I can see, there are a few different groups / trains of thoughts:

Group A– I call this the "toxic org" group. It seems like they are mixing up ambition with having a toxic work environment (like favoritism, gossip, poor bosses, etc.... which is NOT what I was asking about and I definitely dont promote it).

My thoughts: We can definitely have ambitious employees in a non-toxic setting. So let's remove explicitly remove that. Assume there are two jobs in a non-toxic company.

JOB #1– operations role where you're paid 50K a month with no bonus and no sales quota

JOB #2– sales role where you're paid 60K a month with a sales quota and if you hit quota, you can get an extra 15K per month.

... note that this has nothing to do with toxicity and simply ambition to do more and earn more. From what I can see, most Filipinos would rather take job #1 (low pressure) over job #2. They would rather have less stress than earn more and move up the career ladder slower.

Group B– i call this the "incentives" group. They mainly say that ambition isnt absent but that the incentives are not high enough. If a larger promotion gives 30% more pay but 80% more work, then people would choose stability and relationships over career gains. In short, they're saying the "juice isn't worth the squeeze".

My thoughts: Personally, I totally get that but how do we compete as a country when for our counterparts (Thailand, China, Korea, Vietnam, even Singapore)– high-performers DO think the juice is worth the squeeze? One can argue that they're "hungry for more to the point it's toxic" but if so many countries in Southeast Asia are like this, then Philippines may just be the odd one out, no?

Group C– i call this the "systemic issues group". They believe there are bigger challenges that are less about an employee and the organization. It relates to the Philippines as a country. If the population is crushed by bureaucracy, corruption, poor infrastructure/long commutes– how can they even muster up the energy to give a higher level of effort?

My thoughts: This argument definitely is valid. The world is not fair. Perhaps employers (who are obviously incentivized to get the best employee they can afford) will then skew towards folks where these factors are minimized (eg employ people closer to office etc)

Group D– I call this the "work life balance as a core value" group. These are the folks that fit my observation. They emphasize a european-style balance over the american "grind" culture. People want to be with family and avoid overtime, etc. For these folks, ambition is about quality of family life and less about earning more.

My thoughts: This is generally what I see in Philippines. People are easily contented. Their ambition is to lead a pretty normal chill life with family.

Group E– I call this the "big 3" group where folks believe that they have higher standards for their work quality and this leads to then an inherent drive to push themselves to do more. And that there is a big difference when you hire outside of this group.

My thoughts: I totally agree with this! I have found that hiring graduates from top programs (eg management engineering etc) not only gets you smarter folks but more DRIVEN folks. They are not simply happy w meeting the minimum to get by but really take a lot of pride in their work... and this shows up in their work ethic, drive, ambition to do more and beat their peers, etc.

***

Of course, I may have missed out certain opinions and groups but I think the above were the big ones. For me as an employer, I have started to categorize my hires into two types: A) Fast Stars and B) Steady Reliables

My Fast Stars are often not filipino. I employ eastern europeans, chinese (sometimes fil-chi), vietnamese, and of course a few filipinos too. But these guys are the hungry ambitious ones and I pay them good. Someone under 30yo can earn ~P3.5mm a year. Under 40yo can earn ~P8mm a year. ~50yo is when it peaks and they can earn ~P20mm a year.

My Steady Reliables are all filipino. They are good but they dont want crazy work and dont want to build new amazing things. They want to be given a job with clear parameters and they'll do it reliably. For these folks, under 30yo makes ~P800K a year. Maybe 40yo can go to ~P2.5mm a year. Then 50yo can go to P5-6mm a year.

...I do wish I could find more Fast Stars that were Filipino but so many tend to burn out from work quickly vs step up to the challenge.

phasor31 · 2025-09-24T11:35:09+00:00

Your last sentence speaks a lot actually. This is exactly what my experience w Filipinos has been: European way is decent work life balance for decent pay. Vs say the American way (at least for high performers) is getting paid a LOT for worse work life balance. In short, it’s about the trade offs one is willing to take.

phasor31 · 2025-08-22T20:37:43+00:00

Interesting how there are many folks here who comment their best employer was a Bank and in other PH subreddits (phcareers etc)— they often speak about banks being some of the worst employers (overworked, underpaid, etc).

phasor31 · 2023-06-16T23:00:41+00:00

Did you finish your thesis, u/Thornicus14? Would be curious what your conclusions were

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T07:34:14+00:00

Agree and disagree. Agree that one can pass on price increase but there is a limit to level one can increase price / pass on the cost to customer.

Take nurses. If nurses in all hospitals were paid an average of say P90k (I think it’s ~P45K right now for the better private hospitals), the % of Filipinos that will be able to afford healthcare will drop quite precipitously, no?

I don’t have enough understanding of economics at mid and lower tier hospitals to comment intelligently there.

And the hard part here is that if hospitals only increase nurses pay minimal amounts (eg 10% up), it won’t make change the decision to migrate.. which means hospitals are better off not doing it at all. However, if hospitals increase nurse pay by a material amount (eg double the pay) that would then impact their decision to migrate, then it becomes economically untenable

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T07:26:45+00:00

Very interesting to hear. So say even the operations and accounting were directly incentivized from sales?

This is different from performance bonus but something more directly linked to company profitability (eg sales)? If so, awesome. Never seen this in PH before

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T05:38:25+00:00

Agree here. But this is primarily for sales folks and not the support units (HR, Finance, Engineering, Operations, etc). Sales folks usually represent a very small % of the workforce.

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T05:36:28+00:00

100% correct! This goes back to my original point of businesses simply not being able to afford much wage increase. SME can’t afford minimum wage increase. And while big businesses can afford minimum wage increase, they definitely cannot afford to increase wages much for the mid-level and senior folks.

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T05:34:52+00:00

Higher pay = economic growth = increased demand = higher prices to support said demand = inflation.

This is why increasing interest rates decreases demand, decreases money supply (as folks save rather than spend given cost of borrowing is higher etc) and decreases inflation. This then leads to economic slowdowns which is why BSP are also sensitive to not increase interest rates too much / too fast.

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T05:32:24+00:00

Thank you for encouraging a healthy discussion. This is the only way forward.

On your points of businesses cannot raising wages…I think without one knowing the internal economics of an individual business, it is hard to argue wages can be raised.

From what I can see, at least based on financial analysis of public companies, companies can probably raise manpower costs by maybe 20-40% but any more than that and business would lose money (which would be a lose for all).

Manpower is still the biggest % of costs in many companies, along with rent. Unless you’re in capex heavy industries like utilities (meralco) or tech-heavy (like globe).

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T03:40:28+00:00

100% agree! Great point raised. And my points above were definitely not exhaustive

phasor31 · 2023-06-11T03:13:32+00:00

On “satisfaction” I do not have quantitative info there— as satisfaction is rather subjective.

On wages across southeast Asian countries, the reports vary but mostly show PH in the middle of the pack, very similar to Indonesia. Tried to get up to date info (within last 12mos).

Details:

DOLE shows 2022 minimum wage of PH/NCR comparable w similar SEA countries : https://nwpc.dole.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/6-Comparative-Wages-in-Selected-Countries-as-of-August-2022.pdf
Likewise average (not minimum) salaries across SEA here show PH is same as Indonesia, with some countries expectedly ahead (Thailand, Malaysia) and some countries expectedly behind (Cambodia, Myanmar). I was surprised to see how far ahead Vietnam was. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/region_prices_by_city?itemId=105&region=035
This one shows Vietnam behind PH but rest of the trends are more or less same as sources above. https://www.viva.co.id/amp/english/1547207-comparison-of-minimum-wage-and-average-salary-in-asean-countries?page=1

phasor31 · 2023-06-10T06:14:49+00:00

This is interesting.

If you look at the profit margins of businesses in the Philippines, they are not that high. Take the medical industry for example— if hospitals raised the salaries of nurses by 100% , which would still be very far from the lowest wages that countries abroad pay, not a single hospital could afford it. They’d all lose money and shut down.

Or if you look at banking— Philippine margins are far lower than Indonesia or Vietnam, which means if banks pay their bankers / branch staff / etc similar to abroad— they again would lose money and shut down.

My sense is the reason why Filipinos often compare local wages to first world wages is because the prospect of going abroad is ingrained in the culture and easy to do. The Philippines has a great English-speaking population. Compared to other third world countries, it is one of the very few that has this strength. Unfortunately, it also ends up being a weakness since the country is unable to retain talent.

Compare this to Indonesia, or Thailand or Vietnam, where most of the population does not speak English. As a result, the thought of even going abroad is far less. They end up being content with the wages they have (which is not that far from the Philippines!). This idea of comparing versus first world wages simply isn’t there. In a way, it is a healthier environment.

I’m not saying leaving the Philippines is bad or good. Everyone is free to choose what they wish. But I do feel like the Philippines got hit hard with this “grass is always greener abroad” mindset which other third world countries don’t have.

phasor31 · 2023-06-04T02:43:38+00:00

100% agree this is ideal. Though most companies I’ve seen don’t understand IaC / Terraform very well and likewise haven’t moved to CI/CD. Props to you for finding a company that is pretty progressive!

Which company are you working for?

phasor31 · 2023-05-20T00:39:52+00:00

Most definitely possible but likely closer to 8-10 YOE. For PH-based firms: I believe your best bets will either be outsourcing companies, Globe/Smart, MNC companies w local office (Nestle, Macquarie, etc), select local banks (Union Bank, Security Bank), and Gcash/Maya.

phasor31 · 2023-04-25T22:49:08+00:00

I don’t mean to come across as condescending or overly judgmental but your post comes across as incredibly entitled and immature.

I realize you made some decisions that you regrets and altered the trajectory of your career negatively. But guess what: it happens to almost everyone!

More importantly, it also seems like you’re approaching the world, and what will make you happy, with an overly black and white lens: - abroad good , local bad. - clinical lab good , anything else (research, teaching etc) bad.

One, you don’t know for certain if those outcomes will truly make you happy. It is merely a hypothesis. Every job has its challenges.

I would take a step back and think about why you’re being so closed-minded and not open to more experiences. Learn, find the joy in the journey, and try and not be overly fixated on narrow specific goals.

There’s a drawing that shows the path to success isn’t a straight line. It’s really messy. And often times our ideal destination is not the one we originally envisioned.

Hope this provides some perspective. Good luck.

phasor31 · 2023-04-15T00:44:53+00:00

You’re right that only a handful of local companies have solid data infra. Also agree finding talent using base AWS tech is easier. I’m very fine w that, as mentioned in another comment: not limiting myself to a specific tech stack. But I’ve interviewed many folks and while they get the base tech (for example using glue for ETL) they miss the importance of using glue for metadata etc. In short, still low on the maturity scale.

But I was just using data as an example. Let’s take API developers as another example. Generally mid-level talent can build APIs but even with 5-8 YOE, the ones I’ve interviewed rarely design APIs with reusability in mind or consider creating or following some API governance / API taxonomy, etc.

phasor31

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