Mar 062013
 

Credit: zazzle.com

I have been working for the same company for many, many years. When I talk to my friends from college, they ask me how could I be working for the same company for so long? I tell them I’m still having fun and still doing things that interest me. In asking them why they have hopped from one company to another, I often come to the realization that it’s not the company they dislike, but it’s their job. Digging some more, it’s clear that regardless of the company, they will very likely always end up disliking their job.

Why? Because, they are missing one important ingredient, passion. For me, tinkering with computer “stuff” is something I’ve always loved. And it’s that passion that lead me to buy my first computer and made me sign up for my first Computer Science 101 class. That love is still there. Yes, I was and am still a proud nerd.

Many people start just like me, though that passion erodes over time partially because of the jobs they end up taking but mostly because they decide that they are no longer happy and don’t make room in their daily job for things they do enjoy. This recent article in Inc. brings up a similar point: they complain about their job but don’t do anything about it.

Maybe I have been lucky to have managers who have allowed me some wiggle room to explore new technologies, new ideas, and new methods to keep that passion alive.

Example 1: back in the mid-90s, we used to create bug reports using a home grown app (there was no Bugzilla back then)  running on an xterm-type of terminal. The Internet just started to emerge with technology like Apache and CGI. I pushed to start using it as a new front-end for the bugs system , and people are still using today. Though phased out for the RallyDev  tool, it was fun to develop and watch it grow to 150,000+ logged bugs.

Example 2: when I became a manager in early 2000, I realized that I wasn’t very good at the tedious job of keeping track of my team’s many tasks. Hence, I created “Tasks!”, a tool that allowed me to assign tasks to people, keep track of changes/updates (with email automatically sent to assignee and assignor), and monitor progress during the development and QA. At the end of the week, when meeting with my product manager, I had a nicely formatted report to share with him and talk about the week’s progress. I loved the tool because it took care of the things I didn’t like to do.

I could provide other examples, but you get the point.

Did my company breathe that passion into me? No.

Would I be as passionate at another firm? Probably. At least, I would hope so.

Did my company do something right to keep and nurture the passion alive instead of snuffing it? Yes!

Do I have a point here? Yes! My point is actually two-fold:

  • If you are a nerd like me,  a jock or just an average Joe with a passion for computers, find a way to remain passionate about it and share that passion with your co-workers and managers. If you’ve found something new that you are excited about, find some time to explore it (at work or home) and share your findings/excitement with the other nerds around you.
  • If you are a manager (or a company), please do allow your employees to spend an hour here and there to explore next technologies and share it with the rest of the group. Google has it right allowing its employees to spend 20% of their time on things that interest them.

Bottom-line: Stay passionate and keep “it” alive!

Mar 042013
 
Credit:http://bit.ly/XD06Mt

Credit:http://bit.ly/XD06Mt

OK, you’ve set your mind to be more creative/innovative, but where do you start?

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “everyone’s a critic”. It describes the (good? bad?) habit people have of critiquing things that they find faulty or not up to their expectation.

The next time you find yourself in that situation, do 2 things:

  • STOP COMPLAINING!
  • START DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT…

Being creative/innovative doesn’t solely mean finding the next great business idea to displace Facebook.

You can apply your creative skills to something small yet meaningful in your private or business life.

I’ll give you a personal example which I think illustrates my point.

Many years ago (10+?), I saw the way my wife (Teri) was keeping track of people’s vacation days, using a combination of email and Excel. When an employee wanted to request a day of vacation, (s)he would send an email to his/her manager and cc Teri. The manager would then approve (or not) the vacation and Teri would faithfully record the day in Excel. When either the manager or the employee wanted to know the numbers of days the employee had taken or had left, they would contact Teri, who would pull out Excel and provide them with an answer.

Tedious, right? And I won’t even mention what Teri had to do to produce a report to HR for ALL employees.

I thought to myself: there’s gotta be a better way!

So instead of criticizing the way Teri was keeping track of days (well, maybe I did), the software engineer in me thought “I can come up with something better”. And so, I created “Days!”; the days-off requesting/tracking system that is not only used in my wife’s department but practically in the whole firm, worldwide!

Teri no longer had to update her spreadsheet. Employees can now request days electronically using a simple web form and their managers can easily approve/deny the request directly from Outlook. Both managers and employees can now see how many days they have taken and are left.  And for Teri, creating a nicely formatted report to HR is a simple click away

Sure, the solution I came up with might not be the best solution, there’s no integration with Outlook for example (it wasn’t available back then). But the point is that there was something quite inefficient and I did something about it.

Along the same lines, why waste your energy griping about something that constantly bugs you, while you could use that energy looking into a creative solution to the problem?

So, next time you see something that is within your power to fix/improve, don’t complain but use your creativity do something about it!

Mar 012013
 
Creative Type

Credits:http://bit.ly/Z8yooH

Let me start with this a true, personal anecdote…

Many years ago, I was at a party chitchatting with a young lady, when the inevitable “what do you do for a living” question came up.

The following ensued (with some embellishments):

  • Her: what do you do for a living?
  • Me: why don’t you guess? (I was so cool, back then)
  • Her: Are you a chef?
  • Me: Non. (keeping it cool but seriously thinking, can you be any more cliché!?)
  • Her: A musician maybe?
  • Me: No. (I had longish hair then)
  • Her: do you work in the clothing industry?
  • Me: no (back to the French theme)
  • Her: The movie industry?! As a director or writer maybe?
  • Me: Nope
  • Her: alright, I give up.
  • Me: Ok, I’m a software engineer.
  • Her (barely masking her disappointment): REALLY!? I thought that you were more of the “creative type”! (She probably did the air-quotes with her fingers)
  • Me (Trying to ignore her disappointment): Why would you think that I can’t be both a software engineer and also creative?!

And this is really what’s at the heart of this post: Can one really be a software engineer and be creative too?


Can one really be a software engineer and be creative too?


Talking on behalf of my software development  brethren, my answer is a resounding, heck yes!

Of course,  for the uninitiated eye (like the person in the dialog above), software engineering/development might look more clerical than intellectual, and more structured than imaginative. But for anyone who’s worked in the field, it should be apparent that our work is more governed by ideas and possibilities than the monotony and tedium of routine tasks.

Surely in recent years, the hundreds of companies and thousands of applications (for iOS/Android) created by software engineers are a very clear and visible testimony that software engineers are a creative bunch.

One might say that the coding, the testing, the debugging are probably not what comes at the top of the list of exciting things to do. But can’t they? Who among us never felt the touch of divine inspiration when coming up with a genius way of coding or testing something? That “aha” moment when the idea that makes all the difference comes to you.

How about “being in the zone” when the code seems to write itself and designs, made of one clever idea after another, comes alive before your very eyes.

To me (and I’m not a musician), it seems very much like what composers must experience when they create music: breathing life out of nothing (bytes vs. notes)

As a software engineer, if you don’t feel that you are creative, maybe you never tried to picture yourself as a creative person and maybe it’s time to come out of the “creative closet”.

On the other hand, if you feel that you are actually very creative and full of ideas but your creativity and ideas haven’t been acknowledged by your peers, by your boss and by your company in general, then you need to wake them up.

I could go on but hopefully you get idea.

So, you the teacher, the QA analyst, the engineer, the equity trader, and you who’s always been labeled as “non creative”, do feel that you are the “creative type”?

Share you thoughts/frustrations/inspirations in the comment section below.

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