I wrote down my New Year’s resolutions in one of my Evernote notebooks, but I figure I’d share them with you all.  I’d say they’re pretty realistic and hopefully I won’t have problems sticking to ‘em.  So, without further ado:

• Practice guitar/bass for a total of 5 hours a week, minimum
• Compose music again
• Write more (both blog essays and hopefully restart the fiction work too)
• Talk to strangers more (and meet more people in SF)
• Exercise (I’m sure I’ll be more motivated when my FitBit arrives)
• Contribute to an open-source project
• Get a raise/promotion at (or before) my 1-year anniversary at my company

What were your New Year’s resolutions?  Post some in the comments section (or in the Notes comments if you’re reading this via Facebook)!

I haven’t worked on any computer projects in a few weeks. I haven’t written a new essay in a few months. I haven’t written a new original song or worked on my short stories in a few years. One morning I woke up realizing all of these things at once and I decided that something wasn’t right.  Was it a lack of creativity?  Motivation perhaps?  Well, it turns out that it was a combination of both. But what could be causing such a drain?

It turns out that it was my job.

A few months ago, I quit my job and moved to the Bay Area for a brand new one.  Some people found this change to be a bit drastic, but as I’ll explain later in this essay, it was a decision in progress for several months. I came to realize that my job left me little time or energy to work on my own projects, and that coupled with general career path dissatisfaction made me decide that it was time to move on.  I’d like to provide a basic summary of what I did, and why.

So what is it that you do here?

I graduated engineering school with a degree involving a healthy blend of business and nerdery.  Most people know that I’m in the software industry, yet don’t realize that I did not graduate with a degree in Computer Science. I made that move specifically so that I got a lot more exposure to the business side of engineering, and it was definitely the right move. So naturally after I graduated I decided to pursue the best of both worlds.

Consulting was a great fit, and so I managed to land myself a pretty hip gig traveling to the west coast working on, you guessed it, business software.  I went to clients, talked about their business needs, put on headphones, and crafted solutions out of thin air.

I got a lot of exposure to the whole “real world” thing, but I also learned a lot about the niche I was in.  I busted ass, and I’d say I was pretty decent at what I did.  I made senior in a year, which was pretty cool, since that doesn’t happen too much at my former company.

When I told my manager I was leaving, it was pretty evident that he didn’t see it coming.  He explained to me that I was on the “fast track” at my company and in my career, and that I should be absolutely sure of what I’m doing before making such a drastic career change.

So why’d I jump ship?

Didn’t you get the memo?

I’m going to let you in on a few secrets.  Most common folks don’t know anything about ERP, CRM, PLM, B2B, B2C, or any other fancy acronyms you throw at them.  All they know is that they get paid to go to work, and sometimes they spend that money on things.  The business world has a very ornate ecosystem that, for some reason, works like an echo chamber.  Everyone in it can hear each other to some degree, but anyone outside of it is blissfully unaware of how it affects them.

When you go to the store to buy something, you’re buying directly from a business.  We call that “Business to Consumer” or B2C for short.  However, that business can’t do everything on its own to sell you that product (no, not even Apple.  Looooove yooou!) and so it has to depend on other businesses to help it along the way.  The interaction between businesses (business-to-business, or B2B) is the space I’m in, and it’s a different monster from the B2C interactions that we are all used to.

That thing you bought at the store?  Well it wasn’t always there.  It got shipped there, and so that involved some sort of shipping logistics.  Someone had to purchase that thing from some vendor, or perhaps put in an order at some overseas manufacturing facility, so now we’re talking about procurement or perhaps production.  Clearly there was money involved, so that means financials.  Obviously a bunch of human beings were involved in this and so now we’re talking about human resources.  Maybe there were some sales guys involved in cutting a deal to get that product to the stores and in your hands, so that means some sort of customer relationship management.

If all of this sounds complex, it’s because it is.  Being the enginerd I am, I’m attracted to complex systems.  The unfortunate part about these complex systems is that they are also usually complicated.  But, that doesn’t mean they have to be.

It’s not that I’m lazy.  It’s that I don’t care.

Business software doesn’t evolve as rapidly as consumer software. However, in the past few years, a handful of really bright people decided to take unique approaches to some common complexities.  They decided “Hey, we’re going to do this differently” and of course their well-established counterparts scoffed.  They found a way to deliver business software without the typical overhead and up-front costs to the customer, and Software-as-a-Service was born.

My former company is, by design, affiliated with one of those well-established counterparts.  So, when I was sent out to help folks with their businesses, they had to play by our rules, which were the rules passed down by our king company.  We used a specific platform, did things a specific way, and used the same playbooks over and over for completely different businesses.  Also, the tools and technology we used were designed for very specific purposes.

I think most good technologists don’t like being tied down like this, especially early on in their careers.  I suppose if I stuck around, I would’ve become a total guru at doing what I was doing.  But that would’ve just turned me into a magician with one good magic trick, and that’s not the career path I wanted to head down.

I don’t want to be such a specialist.  I want to experience a wide variety of technologies, tools, and tricks of the trade.  I want to expand my horizons and work with the absolute best.  That handful of really bright people who take unique approaches have created astounding companies that have developed revolutionary technology- and I want to be a part of that wave.  Knowing about it and not being a part of it caused me to become a bit stagnant.

Of course, there were other reasons besides wanting to hang out with the cool kids that made me make the switch.

Deeper and deeper.  Way down.

Few people would argue against the statement that the San Francisco Bay Area (which includes Silicon Valley) is filled with some of the country’s brightest minds.  I always try to be around smart people, and while the folks I previously worked with were quite smart (and thanks to the hours I worked, I was definitely around them quite a bit), there was something about the Bay Area vibe that caught my attention.  Moving to the Bay Area was an obvious choice.

I managed to get lucky in that my last project, before I quit, was in the Bay Area, and I stayed at a place in San Francisco while on it.  However, just because I resided in San Francisco didn’t mean I “lived” in San Francisco.  My job’s long hours and travel schedule were hardly conducive to any sort of social lifestyle out here, and that was a problem.

My former company was also having issues of its own.  Retention was poor, possibly because of “the economy” or the shifts in the company direction.  Nobody really knows even today, but the point is that the situation was looking a bit grim.  While my particular position was secure (at least, I assumed as much), all the nervous energy made it apparent that I needed a backup plan.

I found a position at my new company (I still need to talk to our PR department to see if it’s okay for me to disclose the name, will post an update later if possible) that lets me build things that help other people by making their work lives easier, and allows me to work in a stimulating environment with intelligent people.  So the question that remains is, what’s next?

I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob

Some of you may be wondering if I miss the perks that came with my consulting job. Don’t I miss the basically-free travel, hotel and airline points, and nomad lifestyle? Meh, not really.  I’m not going to lie and say that the next five years of my life are planned out.  Sure, there’s a possibility of me getting back into the consulting gig some day.  There’s even the possibility of me not being in the software realm in the future.  It’s pretty hard to tell where I’ll be, but that’s not to say I don’t have a vision for the future.

It’s no secret that I’m aligning myself to either create or be a part of a start-up some day.  Until that happens, I can only absorb as much knowledge as possible and develop skills along the way to prepare me for those days.  I’m pretty sure that my recent career move is only going to help in that respect.  I almost make it sound like I’ve got some sort of career commitment phobia, but rest assured, as long as I’m being intellectually stimulated, working on a kickass product, and working with brilliant people, I’ll be quite happy.

Now, what these decisions are going to do for my comatose creative life is still a toss-up…but I suppose I’ve already taken the first step.

Special thanks to Mike Stashwick for reading drafts of this essay.

Buzz-What?

A little research shows that Wikipedia provides some insight:

A buzzword (also known as a fashion word or vogue word) is a vague idiom, or a neologism, that is commonly used in managerial, technical, administrative, and sometimes political environments. Although buzzwords can impress one’s audience with the pretense of knowledge, they typically make sentences difficult to dispute, on account of their cloudy meaning.

For those of you with a penchant for trusting older, established sources of research:

“an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen”

So a buzzword by definition obfuscates unclear ideas. Arcane business concepts that have little or no value usually end up turning into buzzwords that are spewed out by industry pundits and players alike.

This leaves us to our next question: why use buzzwords?

Communication failure

I’m of the opinion that most of the time, buzzwords are used as a communications crutch. Clearly, one of the more popular uses of buzzwords may be used to change the tone of voice (or text) to a more “professional” one. In doing so, however, the speaker/writer may be demonstrating a certain “overprofessionalism” which may be an indicator that they don’t exactly know what they’re talking about.

Consider the following (pseudo) example:

Hi Aashay,
I just wanted to touch base with you about the new features on the Gibson. The client is beginning to see the value-add of leveraging our on-demand solutions and I would like you to prepare a few deliverables to pass to the stakeholders. Moving forward, we will want to provide synergistic metrics that demonstrate increased ROI.
Ping me if you have any questions.
-Bob

To a lay person, there isn’t much substance behind the email. However, to the experienced yuppie who is conditioned to parse buzzwords into english, the message indicates that someone is asking me to perform some action and/or interact with a client. Removing the corporatey buzzwords, this email becomes far less intimidating, and perhaps the message becomes even more clear:

Hi Aashay,
I just explained the new features of the Gibson to the clients and they like what they saw. Can you provide us with some detailed documents I can give to some of their executives? In particular, we’re going to want to show them that working with us and our products was well-worth their time and money.
Contact me if you have any questions.
-Bob

I’m not sure why they do it, but management executives in particular are very good at using buzzwords, especially when trying to communicate an ideas or concepts without knowledge of details. I’m of the opinion that a humble “I don’t know, but I intend to find out” beats a long-winded circular response any day.

Just for fun, here’s a small list of some other buzzwords I’ve seen or heard that bug me:

• leverage: This one’s used in place of the word “use” more often than it needs to be. Say this one enough and it’ll start to annoy you.
• net new: I heard this one from a friend of mine at a different consulting company. Example usage: “We’re only performing upgrades on anything that is net new.” This one is particularly awful. what’s with the “net”? Is there such thing as “gross” new? Isn’t simply “new” adequate?
• value-add: An ubiquitous phrase, although what’s with the “add” part. A common use phrase would be something like “where’s the value-add in this new feature?” My question is, does the “add” really add any value?
• deliverable: A generic word that came from consulting practices to describe anything you give to a client: documents, software code, etc. Say it ten times fast.
• synergize: This is pretty much the stereotypical business buzzword. Wikipedia describes synergy as “The phenomenon in which two or more discrete influences or agents acting together create an effect greater than that predicted by knowing only the separate effects of the individual agents” …What?

Good for nothin? Not quite.

The abundance of buzzwords may lead one to believe that there has to be some value in at least some of them…somewhere? I don’t disagree that certain buzzwords have importance. However in my opinion, they only become useful when everyone agrees to their meaning. Certain buzzwords have permeated throughout different industries and become ubiquitous (such as “value-add”, or “low-hanging fruit”). Perhaps it would only be fair to remove these words and phrases from the “buzzword” category and place them gently in the “jargon” category?

Besides playing Buzzword Bingo and sugarcoating unfamiliar concepts, there is one example that I can think of where a few buzzwords (used in moderation, of course), can be quite useful: Job interviews. Studying up in advance and dropping an industry buzzword here and there during a job interview can show that you’ve done your research and made an attempt to prepare for the interview. In fact, it might even be fair to say that interviewers will expect at least a few to be thrown about; the interviewers themselves tend to use them (this is especially true in the consulting field). Pro tip for consulting interviews: ask your interviewers what their companies’ typical deliverables are. This will give you a general idea of what it is they actually do.

Be warned however, as this can also lead to a major pitfall if you use too many or are careless in using them. If you’re going to use a buzzword be absolutely sure you understand when and where it is used, and make sure you’re using it in the right context. For example, during one of my first job interviews, I mentioned something about “human-centric design” (at the time this was a buzzword to me. I now know that the phrase holds true meaning, but that’s a story for later) to one of my interviewers. He responded with an enthusiastic story about how he studied Human-Computer Interaction in college and had a variety of interests in the field, and started to ask me technical questions that I clearly could not answer. It was a pretty embarrassing moment.

Scalable Conclusive Logistical Objective Framework Smorgasbord

The inevitable mumbo jumbo can confuse, bore, and even belittle unprepared newcomers to the corporate world. While it’s a bunch of fluff for the most part, there are occastions, however, where it comes in handy. The key to buzzwords is using them in moderation. Too many can make you sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about, but too few may indicate that you’re not really trying. In my opinion, if you’re ever unsure about the vocabulary to use, keeping it simple usually doesn’t hurt. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about, and if you don’t, simply tell the truth. People will respect you a lot more for admitting when you don’t know something than trying to “buzz” your way around it.

Know any buzzwords you find annoying or interesting? Leave some in the comments!

Thanks again to Matt Moen and Ryan Spraetz for reading drafts of this.

I had plans to write a long, elaborate entry right after I came home from graduation. I had a lot I wanted to talk about, from the insights I gained during the graduation ceremony, to the owl that mysteriously perched itself outside my window the night I came home from school.

Unfortunately, the past few weeks have been pretty chaotic.

And now here I am, thrown into what people call “The Real World”.

Looking back at things, at first I found it surprising that I hadn’t made a blog post in almost two months. Then I came to realize that it wasn’t very surprising at all. I haven’t even kept in touch with people in two months, let alone write in my blog.

I guess I’ve lost a few connections to friends in the process.

I suppose I should briefly outline what I’ve been doing for the past few months, so here goes.

As I’ve stated in previous entries, my entire last semester of school involved doing my Senior Design Project. It was an engineering project, so in order to avoid boring ya’ll, I’ll give you a brief description.

Myself and two of my colleagues were responsible for designing and implementing some software at a subsidiary of a billion-dollar company. The software itself was production scheduling software, so that the company could schedule their products for processing more efficiently, and more according to their own business process. Before our software was implemented, they literally had a guy who would randomly pick what got processed that day.

After a stressful semester of dealing with aggressive professors, insane mathematical models, uncooperative IT folks, poorly designed databases, and lots of red tape, my team and I managed to succeed, and we saved the company something like $250,000 annually.

That felt good…almost as good as graduating.

I spent a few weeks after graduation not doing a whole lot (I went to San Diego, that was a lot of fun), but gears shifted pretty quickly.

I’m writing this post from a hotel in Denver, Colorado, where I’m training for my new job. It’s a job with a consulting company that does stuff similar to what I did last semester, but on a drastically larger scale (well, sorta. If you really want to know the details, say so in the comments, and I’ll write more about it later). I’m only in training right now, but I’m already starting to get an idea of what’s to come. The people I’m going to work with are all young, brilliant, and (as I’ve seen already in the two-ish weeks I’ve been here) a helluva lot of fun.

That being said, my worklife is going to be pretty challenging. That’s okay though…I’d be bored without a challenge.

However, notice how I said “worklife”. My point here is that I am completely unaware of what my work-life balance is going to be like. For those of you who know me well, or have worked with me in the past, you know that I’m somewhat masochistic when it comes to getting work done, and that I have to actually force myself to get up and take a break (even to do things like eat!). It’s a bit daunting right now since I don’t really know what to expect, but my colleagues who have been at the company tell me not to worry.

There is plenty more to be said, but now that I have finished my blogging hiatus, I’ll try and post a few times a week.

Colorado sunsets are gorgeous. I’ll write more about my experiences here and post some more photos later.

It’s not usually my style to write philosophical posts pondering the meaning of life and whatnot, as I find this to be ridiculously cliche when it comes to blogging. It’s also not my style to sit around and write gloating “I’m a pretty modest person, but let’s face it, I am great” posts. I can, however, speculate a bit about my life.

I know I’m getting older, and as I get older, I’m going to be taking on more responsibilities. Physically, I am 22 years of age. However, I don’t feel 22 at all. Maybe it’s because of my personality, or maybe it’s because of my lack of an “adult” lifestyle, but I have a lot of trouble comprehending the fact that I’m about to enter the “real” world…you know, the one where people pay bills and work 9 to 5.

I can’t remember where it was, but I was once told that the “real” mid-life crisis comes at this age, the age where you’re about to leave college and enter the “real” world. I’ve been pretty stressed out lately about this fact, and I suppose if I had a job lined up for me right now, I’d be a little less stressed.

Oh, that reminds me. I have some exciting news! Well, it might not seem that exciting to you, but my adventures at Expo have paid off: I have a couple of interviews lined up. They are with companies that I am very fond of, and involve job positions that not only sound really exciting but also involve things I am genuinely interested (in other words, they look outside the scope of the “traditional” engineer). But more on that later.

I will say one thing: while I don’t acknowledge the fact that I’m ready to go into the real world, I do acknowledge the fact that, in general, I feel older than my peers. I’m one of the “old farts” on campus now, and even with my personality, I do get a sense of it. I used to think that everyone in college had the same mental age, but in the past year or so I have recognized that this is simply untrue. It’s not a question of mental age as much as it is experience: the younglings on campus (namely freshmen) have simply not experienced as much as us old farts, and this is what causes me to have some trouble relating to them.

However, it doesn’t seem to work the other way around: I wasn’t the only youngling to think that all ages are alike in college. This is a particularly annoying fact, because it leads to the younger generation making an attempt to relate to you when there are things they cannot relate to; they just simply do not recognize that fact.

I suppose it also helps that I’ve had a healthy dose of the “real” world as well. I know what type of lifestyle I want to live, and particularly what type of lifestyle I do not want to live, and truth be told, my concept for these things were drastically different 3-4 years ago.

My twisted sense of comfort behind a computer keyboard permits me to type for hours on end without a single flinch, so I’m going to purposely keep this post shorter than I originally intended, in the interest of not boring the living crap out of you all.

My friends, I have grown and I have changed. The age difference between 18/19 and 22/23 are much more drastic than you’d think. The primary difference, as you will (or do) notice, is not in intelligence, and is not even in maturity (I still consider myself immature in many ways: my mother still teases me for acting 10 years younger than my actual age); it is simply the way you relate to other people.

But this time, I have a new excuse. From Sept. 11th-13th here at the UIUC campus, we have our Engineering EXPO, which is the Midwest’s largest career fair for engineers (or something like that), so I’ve been busy preparing for it, and today was day 1 of the extravaganza.

I’ll tell you a little secret. These things make me really nervous. I have no problems talking to representatives and selling myself, but I get nervous nevertheless. The whole job hunt experience for us going-to-be-graduating-soon-from-college folks is very stressful, and I am no exception to this annoying little lemma.

Normally I kind of do a kind of hand-out-my-resume-and-chat-for-a-while dance, but this time I’m going to be a little more focused in my search. I’m mostly interested in consulting companies that utilize technical & analytical skills, so basically business & technology consulting, software consulting , and even management consulting companies. There’s a good chunk of them this time around and I’m looking forward to meeting their reps.

My personal bane, however, are the recruiting representatives who care more about your GPA than that fantastic internship experience that’s the highlight of your resume, or your astounding skill sets. To some companies (and I notice this particularly with larger consulting companies) you are just a number until you get past the preliminary interview stage. This time around I think I’m going to avoid their booths. The only information they seem to provide you with is “well you should really do this-and-that on your resume.” Gee, thanks lady.

I do have one useful tip for you fellow job hunters out there: eat properly. All I’ve had today is a cup of morning coffee and an iced coffee from an ice cream shop. Coffee-fueled job searches aren’t exactly what the doctor ordered, so to make sure you guys have plenty of energy, eat a good breakfast before you head out to the career zoo…er, fair.

I should definitely take my own advice starting tomorrow. Two more days of this? Lets hope I make it.

Now, I’ve got nothing against Chicago, but I’m hoping that when I start up my own business (doing whatever it is I decide I want to do…don’t you love the uncertainty of the future?), I’m probably not going to be in Chicago. I really want to explore the west coast, to at least check it out. I guess if I decide its not for me, I can always come back here.

But I digress…what I originally intended to ponder about was startup companies. One of the benefits of being in the curriculum I’m in is that I get to explore entrepreneurship. This semester, in fact, I’m taking a seminar on technology entrepreneurship and I’m totally looking forward to it. There’s just something about being able to make my own rules that I like…not that I have a problem abiding by anyone else’s rules…usually

There’s a group of people here who I thought were strangers that are communicating with each other using sign language. How crazy would it be if they really were strangers who all just happen to know sign language?