Get Out of the Way

I have a lot of memories that have emerged from my years as a network engineer — from funny stories to profound moments to those times when I felt like a complete idiot (because we’re all idiots sometimes). One of those formative moments was when I was agonizing over the decision to leave the Global Escalation Team in customer support and move into an engineering focused role. I agonized over the change for a number of reasons.

I was moving out of something I knew well, directly supporting customers in a very real way. The Escalation Team was the last stop in customer support. If we couldn’t solve it, it couldn’t be solved. That meant a lot of high pressure customer interaction, doing troubleshooting work on really hard, really big problems. I learned a ton. The Escalation Team was also the top of the hill in my world. There wasn’t anyplace, really, I could imagine wanting to be more than working directly with customers, being able to say at the end of the day, “I helped someone solve a real problem,” or even better, “I helped someone learn how to solve a real problem.” Not only for external customers, Continue reading

Jim — I’m an Engineer, not a…

Doctor McCoy, on the original Star Trek series had a signature line — he was forever complaining about this or that with the exclamation that he was just a doctor, and not a… Well, whatever, from shuttle driver to politician.

And how many times, in my career, have I wanted to stop in the middle of some meeting and scream, “Jim — I’m an engineer, not a politician!”

After all, there’s some sense in which engineers become engineers because we’re focused on the problem at hand, we’re focused on the technical issue, not the people issue. I once saw a cartoon that expressed the feeling in the technical community almost perfectly — an engineer talking to her manager, who has apparently just been told she needs to work on her “people skills.” Her answer? “I only went into computers in the first place because I don’t like people.”

Exactly.

And there used to be a time when engineers could get away with this. There was once a time when IT was in the basement (we used to joke about putting on the asbestos suites when going down to the basement to get to our desks in one Continue reading

What Good is UML?

A friend of mine — Tony P to be exact — recently talked me into reading up on UML. I hadn’t worked a lot with modeling languages in a serious way before, but I took the bait and read UML Distilled (Safari Amazon). Okay — this is actually interesting stuff. First, a short review of the book itself.

There are, according to the author, two sorts of UML models. The one advocated here is sketchup, which is used to outline a process or the relationship between various components. There is a stricter version of UML that can actually be compiled into software, but I immediately attached the PowerPoint compiler to this in my head (right or wrong, there’s something about moving from a model to a product without anything in the middle that just doesn’t seem right to me — maybe I’m just an old fogy or something). The progress of the book is useful, moving from the basic concept of modeling languages, a history of the UML, and finally through several constructs within the UML. The author attempts to take you through enough constructs to get you to the point of being able to use the UML Continue reading

What I Learned by Being Laid Off

There’s nothing quite so unnerving as being laid off. I know, because I’ve been let go in a “limited restructuring” twice in my life. Through the process, I learned some “life lessons,” that apply to just about every engineering in the world. While I’m safely ensconced in a great place at Ericsson, I thought it might be useful to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned — especially as it seems to be layoff season in other places (or maybe it’s layoff season all the time?).

First, it doesn’t matter if it’s about you, the politics, or just a random event. I still harbor a suspicion that both times I was laid off there was more going on in the background than just “we don’t need your services any longer.” There were probably politics. On the other hand, the politics in these situations are always bigger than you, no matter how personal it might seem. There’s always some back story, there’s always some power play in progress, there’s always some internal struggle.

But the truth is — it doesn’t matter. You can either stew on the past, or move on with your life. Stewing in the past isn’t going Continue reading

Jack of All Trades

“Jack of all trades, master of none…”

How many times have you heard that in your life? In your career as an engineer? I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times, if not thousands, from working on RADAR and various sorts of radio and other electronics in the US Air Force to as recently as last week. There seems to be a feeling that if you can’t know one thing really well unless you somehow give up on knowing a lot of other things — perhaps there is some sort of limiter in our brains that keeps us from learning more than a certain amount of “stuff” in a single lifetime, or some such nonsense. We’ve all seen the Sherlock Holmes moment, for instance, when Sherlock says something about not remembering something because he has so much other stuff to remember.

And we come back to this idea: Jack of all trades, master of none.

Now I’ll readily admit that I only have so much time to read, and therefore to learn new things. I have four or five wish lists on Amazon, each of which has more than 100 books on it. I have a reading list in Logos Bible Continue reading