Oct

28

The inevitable learning curve

Filed Under career, quotes, self improvement | Leave a Comment

* 11/19/2006 update: Shoutouts to Career Intensity readers. Welcome!

This past week I started as a security researcher at my company’s R&D dept. a.k.a. Websense Security Labs or known more internally as Security & Technology Research. As with any new job or career, the question is not whether or not there will be a learning curve, but how steep the learning curve will be. Hypothetically, even with a job whose essential functions you already know like the back of your hand, there will still be some variables outside of your control, such as getting to know the people you will be working with. The classic story of the rockstar programmer who can’t get along with all his peers and eventually pisses everyone else off comes to mind — which for the record, isn’t a cool thing to do.

In my case as an example, I’m trying to figure out departmental boundaries lines for task coordination, so that effort isn’t duplicated and nothing is missed because each thought the other person was doing it. How many times have you heard “Oh, but I thought you were working on that?”

Anyway, I’m not going to pretend I’m a know-it-all. The one thing competent people in my field can smell from a mile away is people who fake to know it all. I won’t go into the excruciating details of how people cover up their incompetence or personal insecurity with layers of carefully crafted politically-correct-but-not-quite nonsense because I’d rather talk about something else that isn’t a waste of time — like adaptation skills.

I like to pride myself in my polymorphic adaptation skills. “Polymorphic” is a term borrowed from computer science; “adaptation”, referring to the ability to just adapt. Aside from sounding really cool (heh), it just really means that you adapt to whatever environment you suddenly find yourself to be in — be it the deserts of Sahara or tall forests of the Amazon. You morph into whatever you need to survive in the hotzone you are dropped in, and morph as many times and take as many forms as necessary (wear as many hats), to get the job done right.

Here’s my checklist to address the inevitable learning curve with any new career:

  1. Be upfront of what you know, how well you know what you know, and what you don’t know. Admitting what you don’t know and what you know little about isn’t a sign of weakness, but an acknowledgement of your shortcoming. Nobody is perfect, everyone is bound to lack something in some area, and admitting your weakness is the first step. You won’t take the time to address a problem, if you don’t acknowledge that the problem exist. Personally, I think it’s also a sign of confidence — that you are not shy and insecure about your shortcomings, and you are willing to take on your problems head on (vs. covering it up with political nonsense and pretending to know everything). Pretending and covering up is actually a serious problem for the company. Imagine you got away convincing others of your ability to build a rocket, and they put you in charge of building a rocket that will fly all of mankind to a new planet. Hmm. What will you do then? Will you still try build the rocket and cross your fingers when everyone gets on board?
  2. Take on whatever role you need to get the job done. Wear multiple hats and morph into whatever best suits the current environment. To develop a web application, put on your web programmer hat. If the web application requires some knowledge of server system administration, then put on your sysadmin hat and work out the system problems. If the system is fine but the network is down, put on your network administrator hat and troubleshoot the connectivity problems. It’s easy to place the responsibility of getting things done on others by providing some politically-correct-but-retarded excuse like “Oh, but my job description didn’t say I had to do this-that, so technically I don’t have to. Why can’t Joe do it? It’s his job anyway. I can’t get my job done because Joe needs to do his job first. I’ll wait ’til Monday.” — but that’s not we call “going the extra mile” is it? Take on the responsibilty if it is within your means, save the excuses for your dog. Delegate when you need to but be prepared to do the groundwork if someone drops the ball.
  3. Determination to do whatever it takes. Put in the hours and effort, and give it your absolute best shot at attacking the problem. Read up on whatever the subjects you need to know (techies usually say RTFM) and ask for help from co-workers when you just need someone to explain to you how some internal processes work. Another way to think of this is in terms of supply and demand. In a free market economy, you pay more for what is scarce, and less for what is abundant. If your job were easy, then everyone would be doing it (since it’s easy to do), thereby making the labor pool abundant, and driving down the cost of the job. Still want an easy job?
  4. Do not fear the unknown. It’s how a person reacts to the unknown, and how he reacts to the things that he is uncomfortable with, that makes the person. Don’t shy away from challenges — take some time to figure out if it is a battle you care about winning, and if it is, throw everything at it and hammer away. If it isn’t, why waste your time? Move on to identify the next challenge to take on.

We can never really be prepared from that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
– Eric Hoffer

The Learning Curve

And if you are a super achiever, your graph looks more like this:

Oct

24

Why haven’t you done it?

Filed Under career, passion, quotes | Leave a Comment

Persons with mediocre accomplishments are quick to explain why they haven’t, why they don’t, why they can’t, and why they aren’t.
– David J. Schwartz, The Magic Of Thinking Big

What is your excuse today, for not taking a step, no matter how small, towards your goal?

The Magic of Thinking Big

Oct

18

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions

Filed Under career, quotes, startup | Leave a Comment

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
– Mark Twain

Oct

15

Discourage politics, use data

Filed Under google, product management, project management | Leave a Comment

BusinessWeek has this excellent article about how Google (more specifically Marissa Mayer) runs meetings. What stood out to me the most is #5: Discourage politics, use data

This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will give the green light to a design created by the person he or she likes the best, showing favoritism for the individual instead of the idea.

Mayer believes this mindset can demoralize employees, so she goes out of her way to make the approval process a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships.

Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.” This works for Google, because it builds a culture driven by customer feedback data, not the internal politics that pervade so many of today’s corporations.

Well said. Too many times have I seen favouritism/politics trump true merit, inconvenient hard-facts that are just “shrugged” off (and left at that). Or just be given some lame excuse (so shoddy and shady that it wouldn’t stand fact-based scrutiny) of why the idea “wouldn’t fly”.

By definition, sheer hard work and determination won’t help since merit isn’t appreciated. The solution? Cut your losses and get the hell out.

Oct

11

Success as a measure of distance

Filed Under career, passion, quotes, startup | Leave a Comment

Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one’s origins and one’s final achievement.
– Michael Korda, former Editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City

Oct

9

Honing strategic thinking skills

Filed Under career, self improvement, strategy | Leave a Comment

Dave Lorenzo talks about learning how to think strategically and how it is similar to learning a new foreign language.

  1. Perfection is simply unattainable when you are learning. Strategic thinking is developed over time, and isn’t an on/off switch you can flip at a whim
  2. You evaluate, choose, and act, leveraging your experience, and then evaluate the outcome, refining your ability for future decision making. You don’t need to make the perfect decision—you only need to keep making active choices and striving for excellence
  3. Practice. Keep making better decision over and over, until making best strategic decisions until it becomes second nature.

For the more technically inclined (e.g. programmers), this reminds me a lot of the rule of writing recursive functions.

  1. The result of each successive computation has to be closer towards the ultimate result, no matter how small of a leap
  2. Just keep running it as many times as needed (just assume until infinity)

* I’ve ommited the last rule of recursive functions, which is to stop when the result is achieved. Learning how to think strategically should be a life-long learning process. There’s no such thing as too much of it. We just don’t want computations on computers to run forever.

Oct

6

Arguments — pick your battles

Filed Under self improvement | Leave a Comment

Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience

I saw the funny (albeit rude) quote above today and recalled how I have learned (from a person wiser than myself) about life in the corporate world — that it’s not always about constantly topping the other person in an argument. People have feelings, and you pick your battles. Letting the other person win gives them a boost of confidence, and we can all use that once in a while. Give and take. No need to be a jerk over why the toilet scrub brush should be red instead of blue (even if blue is better).

Take a step back and look at the big picture, I’m sure the corporation has bigger problems to worry about.

Oct

5

Schedule wake-up calls to your mobile phone from Skype

Filed Under automation, mobile, technology | 3 Comments

Lifehacker has this post on a command line feature that will invoke Skype to call a phone number. Looks like it works! Now you can schedule wake-up calls to your cell via Skype. The command (for Windows) is:

c:\Program Files\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe /callto:001XXXXXXXXXX
(replace X’s with 10 digit phone number)

1. Run command

2. Skype initiates outgoing call

3. Phone rings!

Cool stuff. Now all you gotta do is write a script that will initiate the call at a certain time to fully automate it. Maybe throw in a web based interface and hook it up to the web so that you can schedule these “reminder” calls from anywhere with internet access.

* At time of writing, Skype offers free PC-to-phone calls to US and Canada

Oct

1

Algorithm for a sincere apology

Filed Under self improvement | Leave a Comment

Owing up isn’t something everyone likes to do, and when we do, we usually just try to get it over with as soon as possible. Here’s an algorithm for a sincere apology (vs. an insincere “canned” apology).

  1. Say what you did wrong;
  2. Acknowledge how it hurt, disappointed, or upset the other person;
  3. Admit you were wrong to do it and then apologize;
  4. Say what you are going to do to correct it and make sure it doesn’t happen again;
  5. Ask those people you upset how you can make it up to them and then do it.

— David Ackert, Ackert Advisory

Thanks to Mark Goulston’s post here.