Those Who Know Best asked me to train our Client Services folks on "my" application. Cross-pollination, to be sure--just more in the sense of folks in lab coats and latex gloves brushing pollen off carefully selected plant and brushing it on on an equally selected other plant.
But those were the extent of the specifications, leaving me to fill in the details. Which, naturally involved bribes with food, wine, chocolate, and randomly sorting the competing teams into their Hogwarts houses. That was to make up for the pre-class quiz that they were really good sports about. The first half assembled in the big conference room yesterday for the actual hands-on session.
No worries...I was ready with easily two hours of material to cover, during which Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Slytherin and Gryffindor would take turns at the console doing actual client-type stuff on a test system. In my experience, that lends itself to questions far more than having features demonstrated to you.
What actually happened was that we quickly realized that the way they support the clients on their application is not at all how I support mine. Most notably, when there's a problem, I'm generally sticking my head straight head the database itself. Client Services, on the other hand, relies on the interface. Partly because those tools have been built for them all these years, and partly because some don't have the software nor a knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language), much less any idea of how data fits together. Some, particularly the most senior folks do, and I had made the shaky assumption that those skills were acquired by the usual on-the-job organizational osmosis.
Wrong assumption, obviously. Which, for anyone presenting, just might trigger a freak-out because the agenda had suddenly evaporated. Which normally means pulling the plug on the whole thing or completely free-wheeling. Both are valuable meeting skills. But then the questions started flying thick as, for lack of a fresher phrase, two worlds collided.
And you know what? It was straight awesome. The balance of the two hours zipped by as I was grilled and in turn tried to get into their heads. Sure, occasionally we'd dip into the software to illustrate something. But for the most part it was meta-information: What the overall client relationships are like, some of the frustrations of working in a distributed development environment (instead of the one-stop-geek that is me), what the process is like on the client side. Those kinds of things.
I'd do it all over again...and I may just have that chance when I work with the second crew a week from tomorrow. I can only look forward to the instructive chaos that will bring.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Attention Inflation Disorder
We had an interesting bit of "training" over the lunch hour today. One of the deep-thinkers wired himself into our large conference room via two-way webcam, and--unloaded a couple decades of experience on us, which included the pendulum-swings between centralized and distributed computing fads, and also the dead-wrong predictions/assumptions committed by even the most forward-thinking the technorati.
For me, the money-quote was the prediction of an "information economy." Our guest re-cast that instead as an "attention economy," on the premise that information is only valuable if someone reads/views/hears (and, I would add, acts upon) it. Our colleague also theorized about our obsession with glowing rectangles (phones, tablets), and the apparent necessity of maxing out our attention bandwidth when it's not satisfied with the work and people and general doings around us.
Those two notions (attention economy and voluntary information saturation) kind of meshed into the notion that, in terms of classical economics, we're voluntarily debasing our own currency. (Most especially when those brain-CPUs are in paparazzi or "Farmville" spaces.) I suppose it wouldn't be a big deal if Moore's Law and the general premises of computing applied to the think-meat between our ears. Presumably then we could evolve to a state where our internal process monitors looked something like:
30% - Curing Disease
30% - Ending Poverty & Injustice
30% - Saving the Planet
0.0001% - How long are those eggs in the 'fridge okay after their expiration date?
9.9999% - OOOOH--SPARKLY BALL OF TIN FOIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Me, I'm not holding my breath. But in the absence of unprecendented rates of brain evolution (or neural augmentation), our techniques for managing divided attentions will have to evolve to take up the slack. And, sadly, I'm not holding out any more hope for that, either. Not after seeing how stubbornly mainstream corporate culture invests in tired carrot-and-stick paradigms, years of disconnect between worker productivity and pay notwithstanding. Sigh.
But such cognitive fragmentation is something we need to start acknowledging in our work lives--and devising coping strategies for its corrosiveness. Particularly in my profession, where one is expected to toggle between blinders-on, deep-dive focus and collaborative brain-pooling in such an immediate and binary fashion. Anything less is living in denial. And, in the long run, the cost of living in that zip code is higher than anywhere else on earth.
For me, the money-quote was the prediction of an "information economy." Our guest re-cast that instead as an "attention economy," on the premise that information is only valuable if someone reads/views/hears (and, I would add, acts upon) it. Our colleague also theorized about our obsession with glowing rectangles (phones, tablets), and the apparent necessity of maxing out our attention bandwidth when it's not satisfied with the work and people and general doings around us.
Those two notions (attention economy and voluntary information saturation) kind of meshed into the notion that, in terms of classical economics, we're voluntarily debasing our own currency. (Most especially when those brain-CPUs are in paparazzi or "Farmville" spaces.) I suppose it wouldn't be a big deal if Moore's Law and the general premises of computing applied to the think-meat between our ears. Presumably then we could evolve to a state where our internal process monitors looked something like:
30% - Curing Disease
30% - Ending Poverty & Injustice
30% - Saving the Planet
0.0001% - How long are those eggs in the 'fridge okay after their expiration date?
9.9999% - OOOOH--SPARKLY BALL OF TIN FOIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Me, I'm not holding my breath. But in the absence of unprecendented rates of brain evolution (or neural augmentation), our techniques for managing divided attentions will have to evolve to take up the slack. And, sadly, I'm not holding out any more hope for that, either. Not after seeing how stubbornly mainstream corporate culture invests in tired carrot-and-stick paradigms, years of disconnect between worker productivity and pay notwithstanding. Sigh.
But such cognitive fragmentation is something we need to start acknowledging in our work lives--and devising coping strategies for its corrosiveness. Particularly in my profession, where one is expected to toggle between blinders-on, deep-dive focus and collaborative brain-pooling in such an immediate and binary fashion. Anything less is living in denial. And, in the long run, the cost of living in that zip code is higher than anywhere else on earth.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Silly Sunday, 09.11.2011: A reorg. poem
The rumor mill is humming
As it's running at full bore:
Word from the grapevine says that
A reorg. is in store.
And soon The Powers That Be
Are citing "re-alignment,"
Which for us can only mean
One thing: Reassignment.
So boxes now we scavenge,
Then we pack up all our stuff
And cough and sneeze amidst the haze
Of dust and lint and fluff.
Windex and compressed air
At each cube make a stop:
Coffee-rings fade, keyboards harvest
Crumb-farm bumper-crops!
Our PCs we then power down
And unsnarl spaghetti-wires;
Desktop Support is too swamped
With fighting bigger fires.
Traffic crowds the elevators
The hallways and the stairs
As we ferry stacks of boxes
And monitors on chairs.
We read our mail by smartphone
And quell the urge to thwack
That fool in our new office who
Has not begun to pack.
Greetings, my new cube-mate:
No doubt we'll get on fine--
So long as you keep to your half
Like I will keep to mine.
New roles and hats are donned
Tho' the going starts out slow.
And as the dust yet settles,
One thing I claim to know:
In my annual review
Surely this I did not mean
When I said that I could use
A little change of scene.
As it's running at full bore:
Word from the grapevine says that
A reorg. is in store.
And soon The Powers That Be
Are citing "re-alignment,"
Which for us can only mean
One thing: Reassignment.
So boxes now we scavenge,
Then we pack up all our stuff
And cough and sneeze amidst the haze
Of dust and lint and fluff.
Windex and compressed air
At each cube make a stop:
Coffee-rings fade, keyboards harvest
Crumb-farm bumper-crops!
Our PCs we then power down
And unsnarl spaghetti-wires;
Desktop Support is too swamped
With fighting bigger fires.
Traffic crowds the elevators
The hallways and the stairs
As we ferry stacks of boxes
And monitors on chairs.
We read our mail by smartphone
And quell the urge to thwack
That fool in our new office who
Has not begun to pack.
Greetings, my new cube-mate:
No doubt we'll get on fine--
So long as you keep to your half
Like I will keep to mine.
New roles and hats are donned
Tho' the going starts out slow.
And as the dust yet settles,
One thing I claim to know:
In my annual review
Surely this I did not mean
When I said that I could use
A little change of scene.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Post post-poned
Home from work now, headache in tow. Tomorrow is another day, still busy, but hopefully more in the pro-active sense.
Cheers, all!
Cheers, all!
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
(Yet another) Sign of the times
I tried to log in to Twitter earlier today, only to be greeted by the trademark Fail Whale and the uncharacteristic (of late, anyway) message that the web's foremost ADOS application was "over capacity."
But rather than immediately roll my eyes over scalability growing-pains, my first thought was to wonder where the earthquake/tsunami/hurricane/tornado/revolution had hit. (Or, more cynically, which overrated celebrity had died.)
Of course, nothing of the kind had happened (at least not anywhere off the "Hic Dracones Sunt" area of the American mind-map.) But I thought the fact that it was my first instinct to assume that the disaster was outside Twitter's server-room--and the fact that I didn't question this until some time later--was interesting. If I'm not alone, then I think Twitter should be congratulated on a serious milestone. (Good job, y'all.)
But rather than immediately roll my eyes over scalability growing-pains, my first thought was to wonder where the earthquake/tsunami/hurricane/tornado/revolution had hit. (Or, more cynically, which overrated celebrity had died.)
Of course, nothing of the kind had happened (at least not anywhere off the "Hic Dracones Sunt" area of the American mind-map.) But I thought the fact that it was my first instinct to assume that the disaster was outside Twitter's server-room--and the fact that I didn't question this until some time later--was interesting. If I'm not alone, then I think Twitter should be congratulated on a serious milestone. (Good job, y'all.)
Friday, September 2, 2011
No post tonight
I'm afraid I haven't been feeling too frivolous the last few days, and tonight is anything but the start of a languorous three-day holiday weekend.
Hope everyone is back home by Tuesday, safe, sane and not too sunburned.
Cheers, all!
Doreen
Hope everyone is back home by Tuesday, safe, sane and not too sunburned.
Cheers, all!
Doreen
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