Day: October 25, 2014

None more qualified than you

Based on the conversations I heard prior to the testing, these folks were Seriously qualified!  Fierce competition.

Were they all for the same position or were there other positions being tested then as well?

 

All for the same two positions.  These guys knew their stuff every bit as well as I do and much better in some cases, because like me they’d been in the trenches.  Some of them knew stuff about fibre optics that I never thought to ask.

 

That surprises me.

Others in the group knew configuration of really high end routers, the kinds of routers that your ISP uses for entire cities.

 

But you have the user relations experience.

So alien to me since I work so much alone.

 

My specialization / Talent is user interfaces. Either in communicating for the team or in testing software that the users access. I’m usually the coordinator of resources, and the “go to guy” to obtain resources so the team can move forward.

I understand the technology, and leverage that knowledge to help the team. I also am usually the team historian and the guy that members of the team brainstorm with when they’re stuck. 

 

Because I’ve been around forever and Can relate everything I’ve ever encountered to the new stuff I help by providing new perspectives or a different view of a particular problem.  That function requires building trust between myself and the team members.

And trust is critical.

Very! I have to be willing to tell them that I don’t know something, and ask that they explain it to me. And they have to be trusting enough to lower their guard and admit they don’t know something or that a problem has them stumped.

 

Then we put our heads together and call upon other resources from the team directing our energies toward a resolution. No one is criticized or derided about it. The focus is about all of us doing our job and learning in the process.

 

That’s a team.

 

These abilities are not shown by tests, or speaking with HR representatives. The only people that get it, are people that have been there, themselves.

 

Unfortunately over the past 10 or 15 years teams aren’t often perceived as entities, they’re seen as individuals and any person that appears flawed is replaced instantly, often without telling the team. This results in critical data being lost. I’ve referred to it as Tribal Data, because sometimes things are done in a particular way that is not immediately obvious to an outsider.  Those “special” things are done because they work not because they’re part of a policy or procedure.

 

When you have a lot of churn in corporations or a stressed group of individuals who never become a team, fewer people have ever had the experience of team work.  

 

Instead they’ve only dealt with Machiavellian machinations that lead to promotions and raises by eliminating people in your way.  These kinds of office politics have become commonplace and the sense of teamwork is becoming more rarified.

 

Wait!?!!? Isn’t that kind of like the academic world?

Too much so.

 

It would be a cruel irony if american businesses were falling behind, not due to degradation of skills but instead due to the most negative lessons learned in institutions of higher learning.  Especially when so many college graduates can’t seem to write a cogent sentence.

 

But the academy is becoming more of a business- money driven and sales defined

Some of my colleagues argue grammar is a vestige of colonial patriarchal oppression. And they’re teaching writing.

 

So we could be looking at a college, business, college, self perpetuating model. Oh crap whats that snake thing eating it’s tale?? Ouroboros! that’s it.  A never ending  cycle of education & business eating and creating itself at the  same time.

 

Education now is the process of technical training.

 

Sadly from what I’ve seen, in general the technical training isn’t all that good.

 

Teach me how to find things, teach me how to teach myself, teach me philosophy, and ethics, teach me that learning is a lifelong pursuit not an end state,  teach me that independent thought is equally important to equations and sums.

 

To think critically, to express yourself effectively, to know where to go to find information.

 

Teach me the value of duty, and honor, and how bad choices lead to bad things and that there may be shades of grey but that the best choice is the choice that is mostly white. (Meaning good, not the great white way.)  

 

I’m such a dinosaur,  I’ve held many of these philosophies to be true the majority of my life.

 

And that life is more grays than black and white.

 

What does that make me?

 

You’re T-REX!

 

I’m probably more like one of the smaller Raptors.

 

I’ve had to learn about life being shades of gray. I was taught it is all b/w.

 

Oh respective histories are similar, I too had those lessons. While I think there is  value in a B/W philosophy and it should really be the “Ideal”. 

 

Practically speaking, humans are not computers, and not all situations lend themselves to a binary outcome.  There is always fuzz in the stuff to the right of a decimal point.  AKA Chaos theory.

 

The best I can do it navigate toward the white and get as close as I can before the time element collapses on a particular choice / outcome scenario. 

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