December 6th, 2009 · 1 Comment
That Was The Year That Was (Tom Lehrer)
So, it’s a bit early to call this year complete, but for my purposes, the year I’m going to review is from mid-November to mid-November (more or less). For these purposes, we’ll call that 2009.
The year that was 2009 got an early start in mid-November of 2008.
The startup that I’d been a part of for a little more than a year ran out of funding and was forced to close its doors. It was very sad since we had interesting products (which were arguably still looking for their best markets), great tools, great folks and actual customers. Unfortunately, a hardware company is a tougher sell to investors even in good times. In the bad times of late 2008, at the beginning of the year-long recession we’re arguably still in the midst of, it was an untenable time to try and wrangle tens of millions of dollars from financiers who were trying to hold on to what they had in hopes of weathering the coming storms.
We were forced to close our doors on November 14th, 2008. For all but the CEO, who probably had a bit more warning than the rest of us, we came in that Friday hoping that we had another couple weeks to secure financing which seemed like it might happen and left at the end of the day with a box with our personal stuff in it while they locked the building behind us.
Around the same time, you might recall, we elected our first African American President in our country’s history. This was, for me, probably one of the most hopeful things to have happened in a great while.
After Ambric closed its doors, we took a vacation that we had planned (and paid for) for some time before that. It was a nice vacation. I even did a phone screen for a job, so things seemed like they might not be so bad.
I was wrong.
The phone screen turned in to an interview at the company down in Mountain View. It went poorly. It seemed more an opportunity to torture the candidate than to really establish whether I was a good candidate. What it did do was establish that this was not a place I wanted to work. Which was fortuitous since it turned out they felt the same way.
For much of the next few months, I sent out lots and lots of resumes, usually getting no response whatsoever indicating that they were even received, let alone seen by human eyes. It was a cold, cold winter on the job front.
In the Spring, based on my experience with Ambric, I landed a consulting job for the company that purchased the IP (Intellectual Property) that remained after Ambric shut its doors. I was tasked with rebuilding the process that we used to build and test the tools. This meant provisioning a Linux and Windows box, running down the necessary tools, installing and configuring them and trying to recreate the build process which hadn’t run in the past five months.
I described the process like this: Imagine that you know what the Death Star from Star Wars looks like. Now imagine someone hands you a tote full of Lego bricks and says “This can, if assembled correctly, be built in to the Death Star. We don’t have the instructions. But, we know you know what the Death Star looks like, so please build us a Death Star.”
It was a great project and I delivered a working solution that could build the product and run some basic tests. (And, yes, like the Lego project above, there may have been some bricks left over…)
This kept me busy and off the unemployment rolls for two and a half months. I am very thankful for that opportunity.
That project ramped down and it was back to looking for jobs as my full time occupation.
Much like the winter was cold, the late Spring was very, very dry on the job front.
In June I landed a job. It was the one job in my professional life that I look back and and think was a terrible mistake and wish I’d not taken it. But, things were learned in my two and a half months there and then I was out in the market again. And that was two and a half months of making a salary (albeit reduced) and not being on unemployment.
This year seemed to have a theme to it. Loss.
For most of the year I had known that my mother was suffering from COPD. Amongst the list of things I’m thankful for (which probably ought to be a separate exercise, whether I choose to share it or not) is that I was able to travel the seven hours by car to spend several weeks with my parents and specifically with my mother. On Mother’s Day my brother and I were there and I wasn’t sure she was going to make it through the weekend. I’m glad I was there, but it was a very hard time to be there.
My sister flew out from the east coast and stayed with my parents for a couple weeks. I joined her for roughly a week of that. I’m thankful for that time with her, as I don’t get to see her as much as I’d like. I’m also thankful for the additional time with my mother.
My mother passed away the first of August, 2009. She was at home with my father, which is where she wanted to be.
I was struck, repeatedly (as with a hammer to the forehead) by the disconnect between how I experienced this intellectually and how I experienced this emotionally. I could intellectualize myself through the process all day, but all it took was thinking a bit about how it felt and it was like getting beat with an emotional hockey stick. Surprisingly painful and difficult.
So, loss of a close family members, loss of job(s).
Loss of control.
This was a big one for me. I pride myself (and pride goeth before the yadda, yadda, yadda) on many things in my life and one of those is my career. I’ve been very fortunate, in many respects, but it’s also come with a great deal of work on my part. That is to say, I’ve worked hard for my career. To have that sense of control of my destiny yanked away by the realization that circumstances outside my control can still have a dramatic effect on me and on my career was a painful realization.
Learning to focus on the things that I can control and attempting to let go of the things I cannot. Now there’s something I could likely spend the rest of my life working towards and never reach that goal.
In the first week of September, I received an email from a former co-worker asking if I knew someone looking for a job as a QA (Quality Assurance) Manager. While I am not a QA Manager, I threw my hat in to the ring in part because, frankly, there weren’t that many rings in which to toss my hat.
After a few weeks a time was set up to interview. In that same timeframe I found out I would be interviewing against another former co-worker from Ambric who actually is a QA Manager. And a good one. Crap.
But, I had some indications that perhaps they might consider a Development Manager who could do some QA. I thought I could do that. So, I retained some hope.
In the end, the QA Manager rocked her interview and apparently I did well with mine because we were both offered jobs. The best of all possible outcomes.
So, on November 3rd, 2009, I started my new job as a Development Engineer at Flashlight Engineering and Consulting.
It’s been a little over a month now and it has been more than 13 years since I have had this much fun at a job. And a job that felt like a good fit for me and where I want to be in my career.
To summarize, this last year, as I choose to measure it from mid-November 2008 to mid-November 2009 has been a year of ups and downs. It’s a year I would not choose to repeat, though I suppose if I’ve learned anything it’s that, while you cannot plan for the unpredictable, it may well happen and it can happen to any of us.
For all of the adventures of the last year, I also have much to be thankful for.
I have my health and the health of my family and kids. My kids are doing well in starting their lives as young adults. I have a relationship that makes me happy and hopeful for the future.
The fundamentals (if we were talking about the economy as described by multiple elected officials) are sound. After a year like the last one, that’s a lot to be thankful for.
Tags: Personal
I was driving through a small town in Washington today when I spotted a billboard with a quote on it.
I looked at it for all of the three seconds it took to drive by it, but the quote on it caused it to stick in my head.
It said (something very close to): “Tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society”. It was in quotes, so I know it was intended as a quote. But there was no attribution.
As I moved along the road, I played it over a few times in my head trying to figure out what the message was trying to say.
Was it really trying to imply that tolerance is a bad thing? That seemed unlikely. Who argues that tolerance is bad? Okay, I was able to come up with a few: zealots, xenophobes and small minded bigots.
But this was on a billboard owned by a business. Typically I expect a business owner interested in retaining customers to not advertise their bigotry and small mindedness.
Was it trying to say that we’re a dying society because we’re tolerant?
I’m not sure I’d agree that as a society we are particularly tolerant. It seems like when faced with repeated opportunities to be tolerant our default reaction as a society seems to be to defend the current state of society. See the Defense of Marriage Act as an example where we legislate the status quo to try and defend something that’s not being attacked.
I think tolerance is something we strive to practice but as a society it’s a virtue that I think we’re too quick to set aside when we’re frightened by “the other”.
Beyond that, though, I was struck wondering who said such a thing? Perhaps it lacked context. Maybe if I knew who said it and why, I might find more merit in a statement that, on the face of it, seemed patently unacceptable.
So I made a note to myself to check the quote when I got home.
When I got home I googled the phrase and came quickly came up with roughly 5000 attributions for a similar statement to Aristotle: “Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society”.
But, that’s not enough. I wanted to understand the context in which that statement was made. I kept thinking something must justify such a wrong headed statement.
Interestingly, a bit more research made it clear that I was not the only one who had spotted this or variations on this quote.
What was more interesting was that others had similarly researched the quotation and the consensus is that this statement was never made by Aristotle.
It was made up to justify ridiculous statements and positions, typically by right wing web sites.
As if wrapping it in quotes and attributing it to Aristotle somehow took the bad taste out of what was a pretty offensive statement.
By the way, here was one site that addressed the quote:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090516003631AAcNoXS
Lesson for the day: Question when someone says something as a “fact” or attributes it to someone to whom we might otherwise give intellectual credibility. And, finally, remember that even if Aristotle had said something so egregiously offensive, that doesn’t make it any less a stupid statement.
Tags: Uncategorized
Let’s talk about interviews. Or, for the purpose of this story, two interviews and what we can learn from them.
Interview 1: Red Flags and You
The first interview was for a job somewhat outside my area of expertise, but I saw it as a subset of what I do as an Engineering Manager. The job was for a Project Manager. Unfortunately, this phrase gets used to cover many kinds of jobs. In some cases PMs are the folks who help wrangle the data that indicates the progress of a project and it’s their job to look for when a project goes sideways, call attention to that fact and get the necessary people in a room to address the problem. Often/usually they don’t have resources they manage directly, so they work with the managers who do control the resources. In this case I was told that PMs did, in fact, manage resources but reported directly to the Director of the group. So, although this sounded different than other PM jobs out there, it sounded close enough to an Engineering Manager position that it seemed something at least worth talking about.
After an initial phone screen I was asked to come in and meet with the interview team.
The first pair of people I was to talk to were the Director and another PM. The Director and I talked about general experience, management philosophy, how he ran his department. Through all this the other PM was silent. At the end of that interview, which was very short, maybe 40 minutes, the Director asked the other PM if there were any other questions and the answer was no.
Two red flags went up from this first interview:
- No interaction or questions with the other PM
- Very short interview with me asking more questions than the two interviewers.
The second interview was with a senior architect.
That interview opened with the senior architect stating: “I really don’t know what to ask someone interviewing for this position”. And then he just sort of looked at me quietly.
Well, crap. That’s not going to work. So, I launched in to a discussion about the kinds of questions he should consider asking of a PM that he might be working with. I gave him the questions, I gave him the answers.
I ran the interview and controlled it from start to finish.
At one point he said “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were in Sales!” I don’t think he meant it badly, but what was the alternative? In the absence of any real questions or discussion, I was not going to sit there for 10 minutes and shoot the breeze. So, I took over the interview and made sure that I had a chance to talk about what I could do, my skills, my value to the process, how I run an organization. We discussed some technical tidbits, but not a lot since it had been made clear to me that the Developers develop and the PMs manage the projects and the tasks.
Red Flag #3: If you have to run the interview as the interviewee, be worried. What this tells you is one and possibly two things.
First, it tells you that the people interviewing really haven’t prepped and/or thought much about interviewing someone who might come on the team. Second, given that I’d been told that they’d already interviewed several people and had more to interview, it likely implied that they were not using a consistent team of interviewers.
I’ve found that very useful to have a core group of interviewers to speak with candidates. Yes, it’s a commitment, but without it you’re comparing apples and oranges in terms of feedback when you’re hearing Joe talk about his impression of Candidate #1 and Sam talks about his impressions of Candidate #2. Limit the variables, limit the interview team.
Another thing which works well is to establish areas to interview within. Perhaps one team member does team fit and another does technical fit and another quizzes on projects past. You should have the same folks talking to candidates about the same things. Importantly, this eliminates overlaps which are wasteful of time and resources, but it also makes sure that someone has the responsibility to speak to them about the areas that are important to you to place the right person in a given job.
Finally, I was supposed to talk to the VP of the group. But he was out and would I be willing to come back another time to speak with him.
Sure, things come up, and yes, I am looking for a job, but ideally try and work hard to be respectful of your interviewees time.
In the end, I came back and met with the VP. The meeting went fine until the discussion of compensation came up. I was asked what my last salary wasand I was up front but made sure to let him know that it was important to me to look at the total compensation package and that I was looking for an opportunity to work in a different domain than I had in the past.
The VP replied that their budget was more in the range of about 70% of what I made in my last job. Well, crap.
So, depending on your count, that’s somewhere between three and five red flags from that interview.
In a perfect world one might take those and say “Hmmm, my gut is telling me that there’s something not great going on here. Perhaps this isn’t the place for me.”
And that’s fantastic if you have the luxury to trust your gut and walk away from a job offer. But, as was pointed out to me, even 70% of my last job is significantly more than I was making on unemployment. And I could always continue to look for a better fit.
In the end, it became clear that that job was not a good fit and there was a parting of the ways. So, gut was right, but I did work for several months, which is good. But, on the negative side, there was a parting of the ways, which has not happened to me in 20 years as a professional.
That whole experience reminds me of a story one of my mentors told me about when he interviewed for a position at a company where he and I worked together. After meeting with the interview team, he was offered the job. But, before he would take it, he asked to talk with additional people about the job and the company. He really saw the interview process as a two way street. Not only was the company interviewing him for fit, but he took seriously the idea that he was interviewing the company to see if it was someplace he wanted to be. I really respected that approach. I also didn’t feel like I had that opportunity in this case. I needed a job and that puts the balance of power on the side of the company in a way which makes it hard to be objective.
Interview 2: Finding My Tribe
The second interview started with me waiting in the lobby of the company. One of the managers chatted with me while one of the other managers was trying to clear a conference room for us to talk.
As I was chatting with the first manager, the folks in the conference room began to exit. Engineers wearing jeans and t-shirts and the last guy out … had bare feet and a ponytalk. Ah, my people!
That first interview portion was with all three of the current managers for that company. Everyone talked, everyone asked questions, everyone participated. I got smiles and handshakes all around and they seemed genuinely interested in talking with me. What was supposed to be 45 minutes turned in to an hour before they decided to hand me over to the VP and HR. Again, smiles and handshakes.
Next I spoke with the VP and HR. A bit more on management philosophy, what works and doesn’t work in engineering organizations. I got an overview of the company, how they run things, where their business comes from and a general sense of the values of the company. HR talked about all the usual HR subjects and was very helpful, very nice and a pleasure to talk with. Again, roughly 45 minutes turned in to an hour and we parted with handshakes and smiles all around.
Finally I spoke with the owner of the company.
So, for this interview for this job I spoke with the entire management team, HR and the owners. That’s an example of folks who are interested and involved with who they are bringing in to the company.
We talked some more about the opportunity, what the position would entail, opportunities for growth, necessity to be technical. All the things I would want to be clear on before I consider whether this is someplace I’d like to work.
But here are the kinds of details that jumped out at me from this discussion, in addition to all the meat and potatoes subjects: The owner has a bookshelf behind him. In the book shelf were two kinds of books: Technical and Science Fiction.
Not management philosophy, not How to Build and Sell a Business or How to Get Rich. Technical and Science Fiction. And Good Science Fiction (which means Science Fiction that I like).
So, let’s walk through the second interview:
- Great location in downtown Portland
- Interesting technical work and the managers (me!) have to be technical
- Pure engineering organization
- Minimal management structure
- Growing in the midst of a really atrocious economy
- Company values were talked about the talk is walked
- Bare feet and Science Fiction
Now, had both of these interviews happened at a time where they overlapped, it would have been a no-brainer which was the right fit for me. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, but this second one was certainly worth waiting for.
For the first time in probably a decade, I’m excited and looking forward to starting a job. Excited about the challenges and the opportunities. Excited about the people I’ll be working with.
I think I found my tribe.
Tags: Uncategorized
September 2nd, 2009 · 1 Comment
I won’t go in to detail here because of the public nature of the Internet, but after two and a half months of employment, I find myself in search of a new job.
I learned first hand many things that contribute to a successful organization and what doesn’t, so it’s not a total loss.
Best of luck to the place I was as I move on to the place I will be in next!
Tags: Job
It’s good to learn new things. It keeps us fresh, keeps us from getting complacent.
One thing that is true of moving not only to a new job, but a new job in an entirely new domain, is that there will be plenty of new things to learn.
Today’s observation relates to vocabulary.
It’s probably true that every group larger than four starts to create a unique vocabulary. It’s certainly true when you move from one company to another and even more so if you move to a new industry.
With my new job, I get to learn a new industry as well as a new host of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and vocabulary.
I’ve read entire emails where while I recognize each and every individual word, I have no bloody idea what the author is talking about. That’s scary!
And then, if you like words, occasionally you simply get to learn a new word and its usage.
My favorite new word for the week is: Idempotent.
I’ve seen it used three times in the last two weeks and, to the best of my knowledge, have never seen the word before that.
I had to look it up on Wikipedia. No, I’m not going to explain it here because they do a better job of explaining it there.
Turns out it has an application in software as well which I’d never been exposed to before and was not clear from the context.
New things to learn! Life is good! Now to use it in a sentence…
“If I have a sex change operation and then have another one, I’ll be back where I started,” he observed idempotently.
Hmmm. See, that’s funnier after you read the Wikipedia article. But not much.
Tags: Job · Personal
As I get older I’m being forced to acknowledge that my physical body is not accepting my mental premise that I’m pretty much the same as I was when I was 18 years old.
I’m forced to rationalize more things to myself.
I tell myself I’m wiser though strangely slower to learn some new things. I have a slower metabolism while at the same time recalling the days I could eat anything and everything that passed within reach of my hands and mouth and suffer no ill consequences aside from occasional indigestion. I still have hair that hasn’t gone gray (yet), but either my forehead is getting taller or (*gasp*) my hairline might be receding. I can still play a good game of volleyball and jump pretty well, but I seem to walk a bit funny the next day and getting out of bed my ankles or perhaps my knees seem oddly pained. Oh, and I have full-grown kids, near adults where before that I used to have children then infants then … well, more intent then opportunity to explore the joys of the opposite sex.
All this has caused me to start to wrap my head around the fact that, to use a golf metaphor, which probably firmly places me with my elders, statistically I seem to be on the back nine of my life. More life behind me than I likely have ahead of me.
The time I have ahead of me will probably be marked more by the passing of my ability to do things I’ve taken for granted like playing volleyball without pain, jumping high without warming up, learning quickly, staying up till 2am programming something interesting, eating spicy foods and not suffering the punishments of my digestive tract.
Instead, I’m learning of the joys of Tums, ibuprofen and the reality that creating muscle mass becomes more difficult on the back nine of this course.
What else? Oh, yeah. I seem to forget things more easily. Names, things that I remembered five minutes before, what brought me in to the room I’m standing in while I try to reconstruct the last five minutes of thoughts to see what drew me here.
At the same time, I’m certainly thankful for where I am now. I’m healthy, happy and have purpose. I am loved and I love. So, all in all, not a bad deal.
This thought process also had me thinking about immortality.
Not the living forever part, though if I could choose to do that as my 25 year old self and still know what I know that might have some appeal. But, that’s really nothing more than a fun way to wile away a bit of time, like thinking about what you’d do if you won that $200M powerball lottery.
Failing science coming in the next 40 years and figuring out how to clone my body and create a 25-year old version of me that I can download in to, I’m left thinking about other demonstrable notions of immortality.
Before I go on, I want to make clear that I’m not even going to touch the spiritual part of this discussion. That’s not something I can prove or disprove. It’s a matter of faith and that’s a different discussion.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s define terms. The dictionary defines immortality thusly: “the quality or state of being immortal: a: unending existence b: lasting fame”.
I’m going to define it a bit differently and talk about immortality in the sense of what we leave behind after we are gone from this world. Even if it’s not forever, immortality is what persists after we are gone.
With that in mind, I think there are three demonstrable forms of immortality that are worth thinking about.
They are: our children, the things we make and our acts.
Our Children
Our children are our most direct “product” in terms of literally leaving something of ourselves to persist and continue in the world. But, the same applies for adopted children since the impact a parent has on the child in terms of day-to-day interactions is at least as critical as the genetic component. It’s not Nature versus Nurture. It’s Nature plus Nurture.
We don’t get to pick which of our natural traits we get to pass on to our children, so there’s certainly a somewhat random melange there. They will likely receive both the worst and the best of us.
One of our main added values is in trying to help our children do better with what we’ve given them than we may have done ourselves.
Our children will grow up and become independent individuals that carry the legacy of our genetics as well as the everything we’ve tried to be as people and parents. Hopefully the net result of that is more positive than negative.
Scientists can, in some cases, trace the genetic drift of certain chromosomes which allows them to track characteristics back thousands of years to a time and place.
That’s certainly a certain kind of immortality. Someone was born with a mutation for red hair (likely multiple someones) and the characteristic persists today. Perhaps some characteristic of my genetic profile will persist hundreds or more years in to the future, albeit mixed with whatever comes in from elsewhere in future generations.
So, we see that while our children inherit (some might say suffer) the largest piece of our genetic legacy, that continues, albeit diluted, in to later generations.
Similarly, what we teach them about how to be in the world, right and wrong, how to handle disappointment, how to work hard, what’s truly important (to us). These, too, will persist in some form.
The difference is that later generations will largely be a random mix of genetic tendencies, but our children will consciously choose what and who to be. Or not to be.
We’re not doing genetic engineering of our offspring (yet), but generations have partaken in values engineering or behavioral engineering as we choose what to take from our parents and perpetuate in our own lives.
In the end, this form of immortality is one of the most direct ways to influence the world we leave behind. But it’s certainly not the only form.
Things We Make
There have always been people who created art in various forms, be it painting, poetry, music or any other form that has existed through history.
We know who painted the Mona Lisa, we know the Eiffel Tower was named after the guy who created it, most of us can probably quote a least a bit of poetry and hopefully the author, or a bit of Shakespeare or a few bars of a classic piece of music and the composer.
This is the most recognized form of immortality in the form of the Things We Make.
Will they persist forever? No, but they will certainly last long after the individual is gone.
But, you might say, everyone can’t be a DaVinci, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare or Mozart!
And, of course, you’d be right.
So, what, I would probably reply. Maybe you won’t create the next Eiffel Tower, but that doesn’t stop us from creating something that can live on past our time.
I have a couple pieces of wooden furniture and toys created by my step-Grandfather, Pappy. Each has a small brand on the bottom of them that says “Hand crafted by Pappy”.
When those pass on to my children or they give it to their children (one of them is a small stool shaped like a turtle with a cushion on the top), my kids will know that this came from Pappy. They may not have known him (he passed away before they were very old), but I will get the chance to tell them the story of how the stool came to be and how much Pappy loved making things for people. This is a form of immortality. He will live on in the things he made. Are they the Eiffel Tower? No, but watching my son sit on the turtle stool while learning to tie his shoes is a memory that is far more real to me and touches me deeper than when I stood in front of the Eiffel Tower. Is it impressive? Sure. But it lacks an emotional component that that little stool will always have. And that emotional connection will hopefully grow as my son passes that little stool down to his kids and they make their own stories and create their own connections to that piece of wood and stuffing.
Thanks for that, Pappy.
There’s been a movement afoot that I’ve noticed in last few years. People are Making more things. Average people. They’re learning skills in wood working, crafting, electronics. They’re taking things that other have built and twisting them in to new and amazing things.
You can read about this in great blogs like Make (http://blog.makezine.com).
Frankly anything that helps turn people from Consumers to Producers is a good thing for our world. And I’m not talking about producing more cars or *stuff*. I’m talking about the fact that a proportionally very small number of people Produce the material that the rest of the developed world Consumes. I’m talking about art, music, books, media in all its forms, games, etc. Think how many people passively absorb the results of the hard work of a relatively small number of producers. Millions see a movie that hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people made. Millions read a book that was written by a single person. The proportion of Consumers to Producers for media and art is skewed very heavily towards a reducing number of Producers and a growing number of Consumers.
Thousands of people lament how long it takes a popular author to write the next book in a beloved series. Millions consume that series. One person created it. If our society persists in creating a system that reduces the number of Producers down to a one to a million kind of ratio, it will become unsustainable. Or, rather, it will be the death of a variety of voices as the only choices available via mass media marketing are those where millions of Consumers pay for the output.
Makers are turning that around. They produce things. They Make things and music and art and words!
Certainly the Internet has helped facilitate that. It allows people to communicate from one-to-one or one-to-many. Bloggers can have audiences of a few family and friends or have thousands of people reading their material. One person can create a plan for something as simple as an Adirondack chair and share that on the Internet so that instead of just his chair, there are hundreds of chairs out there. And each person is welcome to tweak the design to suit their need when people open that design up to others.
That’s an immortality, too.
Personally, I’m a dilettante with intentions to improve in the Making space.
I write sometimes, though I’ve published nothing, yet. I’ve written computer software that was published in a book. I’ve created animations and I’ve had images I created on the computer featured in books. Not bad, but I can do better.
I believe we can all Make more than we do. Paint. Write. Draw. Learn the guitar. Create a game.
Maybe it is only seen locally or only by family, but the act of creation is an amazing thing. That energy gets transformed in to something that will persist. Maybe it persists in itself or maybe it influences someone or encourages them to make something themselves.
That act of creation can have far more impact than the work that went in to it. That’s immortality!
Our Acts
The final area where we have an ability to have an impact even after we are gone is in our acts.
This last is certainly more amorphous, less prone to easy measurement.
By our act, I mean the ways we touch, both intentionally and unintentionally, those around us in the world.
These can be as small as opening a door for someone or smiling at someone and asking them abou their day. And listening to the response like you care!
They can also be large. An endowment or scholarship fund. Think what you will of Bill Gates, but his Gates Foundation is likely to have a profound impact long after he is actively involved and likely long after he has left this world.
But, there’s much ground in the middle, too.
Think about someone who volunteers at a soup kitchen, or cleans up garbage in a community. What about a Big Brother, Big Sister or a Foster parent. These people have an effect from the very local, even to a single person, up to something as large as our local community. And those changes, those ripples that we introduce in the pond around us, can have profound impacts long after the act that caused that ripple.
You might recall the 2000 movie “Pay It Forward” where the main character had the idea of doing a good deed and asking the recipient rather than paying them back, to pay it forward to someone else in need. The ripples continue after the initial stone is dropped.
Finally
In the end, we all pass on and leave a legacy of some form. Few people manage to leave this earth without having affected someone in big and small ways, or made something that is left behind, or without having loved and been loved.
That’s a real sense of immortality. It’s tangible. We can wrap our heads and our hearts around it.
And, at the same time, it gives us something to strive for. It gives us a checkpoint that we can take to look at ourselves and ask questions about how we are living our lives, who we are touching, what are we making, what are we doing that makes some difference?
That kind of self-analysis, that mental and emotional check-in is an important opportunity to make sure that our life doesn’t just slip away from us between all the moments and days where we just do the next thing without thought, without reflection, without direction.
Time is an arrow and it can’t be stopped. Like Ferris Bueller said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Don’t miss yours.
Tags: Make · Personal
Well, as much fun as it has been to be part of this growing new movement we call rampant unemployment during the largest economic recession/depression since the early 20th century, it’s time to do something else.
I’ll be starting work as a Senior Project Manager at an information management company here in the Portland area.
It will be an exciting new opportunity for me and I look forward to the challenges it will bring!
Tags: Job
I did some simple hacking of the php for the blog. For the non-techies, that’s the language that’s used for the dynamic creation of some of the content.
In this case, all I did was add some basic checking for the current month to roll the header image at the top through a series of per-month header images to add some variety as the months progress. In the end it was two lines of php. (And a couple hours picking header images that I could crop to 970×140, adding the month in the upper left corner in Photoshop, etc). I didn’t know (and don’t know) php, but it’s not difficult for something so trivial and it adds a bit more variety to the page.
Tags: Web
Whether “Apocalypse” is the right word or not is certainly up for discussion. Certainly David Sirota at Salon thinks so in his article here.
What I can say is that Oregon is sliding in to whatever this is (recession, depression, economic event, End Times) at a rate in excess of the nation as a whole. Oregon unemployment exceeds 10% now, which hasn’t been seen since the early 80s, I understand.
Many seem convinced that our new president is badly misjudging the necessary correction necessary, though since that judgment comes from the very people at the rudder for the last eight years and who bear a great deal of the responsibility for letting the greed of the market run roughshod over the country for much of the last eight years, I’m inclined to take it with a grain of salt and to remain hopeful.
It certainly is distressing when even a room full of economists cannot seem to agree on the necessary course for the very economy they are presumed to be experts in.
Going in to this, back in mid-November, I posited that my job search would be at worst a three to six month experience. Sadly, it appears that events in the economy and world seek to prove me quite wrong.
After three months I am still looking and could not, in good conscience, tell anyone that I have a clue when this will be over for me or the country.
I am an engineer by temperament and by training. In my experience what distinguishes an engineer is a critical mind that loves a problem, loves to take it apart and solve it. What separates a good engineer from the pack is that their solutions are well thought out and stand the test of time. I believe I am a good engineer.
With that comes a confidence that I can be successful in any position requiring software engineering.
Unfortunately, when a hiring manager looks at my resume, what they see on the engineering and development side is that my time actively developing software was something like eight years ago as I’ve moved in to management.
A staffing expert at a local agency stated that software skills more than eight months out of date are considered to be obsolete. Such is the rate of change in software development, tools and practices.
Now, I don’t actually buy that. I believe that I and any software engineer worth their pay can pick up the necessary language and specifics of a problem quickly. What you are paying for, especially in an experieneed engineer, is not whether they were coding in that specific environment yesterday, it’s their ability to problem solve.
I’ve long believed that another characteristic that separates a good engineer from the pack is not that they can keep all of the details of the dozen or more languages they may be able to work in in their head at one time. It’s that they know where to find the answers quickly and how to apply them efficiently and with a high level of quality.
When I was just out of college, I could work on a problem for 60 hours a week and generate a great deal of code. Today I can create better, higher quality code in 30 hours because I know what *not* to do. Energy does not equal productivity. Time spent at a keyboard banging on the keys does not equate to quality code.
But, all that is moot if you cannot get in front of a hiring manager to seal the deal.
“People hire people they know or are comfortable with”
This is something I am hearing over and over again these last few months. And, as I reflect on my own career, in all cases each job I took or moved to was made easier by the network of people I know and who can vouch for me and that I’m worth talking to. So, networking is clearly critical, especially during a time when the market is saturated with people and resumes that all look much the same.
The other path I’ve been pursuing and will likely move to be my focus is to find a job managing. This takes on several facets. Apparently there is a hierarchy of management that goes something like this, from more to less difficult:
- Engineering Management – Responsible for managing people, programs and product direction, often with input from Marketing and customers. Responsible for schedules, task prioritization and delivery. Main knobs on the process include the classics: Scope, Schedule and Resources.
- Project Management – Much like the above but often without the people management. Wikipedia describes it thusly:
“A project manager is the person accountable for accomplishing the stated project objectives. Key project management responsibilities include creating clear and attainable project objectives, building the project requirements, and managing the triple constraint for projects, which is cost, time, and scope.
A project manager is often a client representative and has to determine and implement the exact needs of the client, based on knowledge of the firm they are representing. The ability to adapt to the various internal procedures of the contracting party, and to form close links with the nominated representatives, is essential in ensuring that the key issues of cost, time, quality and above all, client satisfaction, can be realized.”
- Program Management – Responsible for tracking the progress of a project, often without responsibility for the resources. Often a collector/reporter of status without direct access to the resources doing the work. Wikipedia differs with me somewhat, though:
“Program management or programme management is the process of managing multiple interdependent projects that lead towards an improvement in an organization’s performance.
Projects deliver outputs; programs create outcomes. A project might deliver a new factory, hospital or IT system. By combining these project with other deliverables and changes, their programs might deliver increased income from a new product, shorter waiting lists at the hospital or reduced operating costs due to improved technology.
Program management is concerned with doing the right projects, whereas project management is about doing projects right. Successful projects deliver on time, to budget and to specification.”
- Product Management – According to Wikipedia, “A product manager considers numerous factors such as target demographic, the products offered by the competition, and how well the product fits in with the company’s business model. Generally, a product manager manages one or more tangible products. However, the term may be used to describe a person who manages intangible products, such as music, information, and services.” Further, “Diverse interpretations regarding the role of the product manager are the norm. The product manager title is often used in many ways to describe drastically different duties and responsibilities. Even within the high-tech industry where product management is better defined, the product manager’s job description varies widely among companies. This is due to tradition and intuitive interpretations by different individuals.”
By the way, I think these definitions are pretty subjective and likely would not be agreed upon by a room full of people who may claim to have done any or all of them. It’s pretty fuzzy.
What I’ve discovered recently is that I am currently in a difficult position because my development experience is old and rusty by the above “eight month rule” and my management experience potentially over qualifies me for many of the jobs which are looking for Project/Program/Product Management.
In my time looking I’ve only seen a single job that I would call “Engineering Management” and it turns out I was competing with at least two friends who also are out looking. In the end the hiring company had many, many people apply and were able to choose people with very close experience to what they were looking for and didn’t have to chance bringing on someone who might have to come up to speed in their specific technical domain.
So, I continue to work on tuning my resume, I continue to figure out how better to leverage my network and I’m looking in to some Project Management certifications which, though I’ve been doing the relevant activities for the last decade, possession of the certification will set my resume just one more skill above some of the masses.
It is a black box, though. Since you don’t get feedback on why you didn’t get called or get the interview, you really don’t have enough information to figure out how to tweak the resume or the phone screen to do better next time. Whoever might have that feedback has gone on their way and has no reason to make themselves available for that kind of feedback.
I do believe things will work out, but I also believe that the market has swung dramatically in favor of the hiring company in their ability to have a large range of talent to choose from and in possessing a very strong negotiating position when it comes to salary because there are a dozen people waiting to take that position at a reduced rate of pay.
Perhaps this will turn back around. Certainly one hopes that is the case. But, I would not hazard a guess about when that might be.
I had a friend tell me that when they were looking for work for seven months a few years ago, they were struck by how when you are working, you lament how you wish you had time to do all the things on your “to-do” list, be they chores or projects or hobbies. Then yout find yourself without a job and suddenly you have all the time in the world (minus the considerable time you can spend looking for work), but you lack the means and you cannot enjoy that time because you don’t know when you’ll be working again.
Another friend made a similar observation: If someone could come up to you and tell you “The first day of your new job will be June 12th”, you could plan for that, relax and enjoy the remaining time. Without that, all you can do is stress what you don’t know.
Much of this comes down to trying to be patient about the things we cannot control and that list is considerable. But, another characteristic that separates a good engineer from the pack is a confidence in their ability to solve *any* problem if they can just figure out the buttons to push and the levers to pull. So to be presented with a problem that doesn’t seem to amenable to all the button pushing and lever pulling I can come up with is close to intolerable. That’s not how things work(ed) in my world.
That’s tough to accept.
There’s probably a lesson in there if I weren’t too stubborn to accept it.
Tags: Job · Personal
A nice article on how to work better. I like that it focuses on simple ideas that can have profound impact on how we work and how we think about working.
The list appears simple on it’s face, but is worth thinking about as we do our day-to-day task, but especially, I think, as we try something new.
Here’s the list:
- Do one thing at a time
- Know the problem
- Learn to listen
- Learn to ask questions
- Distinguish sense from nonsense
- Accept change as inevitable
- Admit mistakes
- Say it simple
- Be calm
- Smile
[Lifehacker via Scott Berkun via Team Genius Book Report
Tags: Job
