The long road to becoming Singapore’s Codefather

Like any ambitious young man, Chang Sau Sheong had big dreams. His aspirations included being an author, an archaeologist, an astronomer, and a journalist. At the heart of it, though, was a larger desire to be “an explorer of frontiers, a discoverer of the unknown, and a maker of new things.”

“It was never about just being a journalist,” Chang clarified. “The reality is, at the age I was then, everything would have been new.”

So, he did what any sensible young man would do: He flipped a coin.

“I placed all my dreams in one set of universities and all the realities in another set of universities and left it to fate,” he recalled. As chance would have it, he ended up doing computer engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore.

Today, he is known as Singapore’s “Codefather.” Chang is also the managing director of digital technology at SP Group (previously known as Singapore Power) and has gone on to author four books. In many ways, he’s living his dreams after all.

Being one of the oldest active coders in the industry now, Chang has been through both the best and worst of times as a software engineer.

Here’s his journey and what we can learn from it.

Building a strong foundation

In the 90s, the computer engineering course at NTU was split between hardware and software. Chang ended up doing a lot more of the former. According to him,  he would have become a network engineer had he gone on with his original plan.

“As luck would have it, there weren’t that many network engineering jobs when I graduated,” he said. “The first job I picked up was developing a large-scale enterprise billing system for Singtel. From then on, it was all software and application development.”

Despite having little opportunity to use the knowledge he had gained in university, he acknowledged that the understanding of how computers work gave him a firm foundation to build the rest of his knowledge and capabilities on. “Without that, it would have been a very haphazard journey.”

As such, Chang strongly recommended that budding coders undergo formal education, whether in polytechnics or universities. He offers two reasons why:

“Firstly, formal education trains the basics, and the basics often take time to be absorbed and get into the system. Formal education drills that into you. The second [reason] is more down to earth. Regardless of whichever anecdotal stories we tell about Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Elon Musk, it is definitely much harder to get a job and do well in your career without formal education and the implicit acknowledgements that come along with it. That’s the reality.”

Taking the winding path

A time of wandering and exploring

PayPal and Singapore Power

Climbing the ladder