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.

I’m a travelin’ man

It’s no big secret that I travel a lot. Since late last summer, I have been on two flights a week without fail (with the notable exception of holidays and a couple of go-live weekends). My job as a traveling consultant adds some challenges to my personal life that become a lot more manageable with modern-day technology. Using a combination of gadgetry and a few clever web applications, I’ve managed to bring everything together in a way that keeps me productive and sane.

Traveling days themselves are the most hectic, and so they provide the best use case for all of the apps I use. My current gadgetry (I say “current” because these are subject to change pretty soon) to interface with these apps consist of my work computer (a simple Dell D620 laptop) and my handy Blackberry Pearl. Most people who use Blackberries don’t realize their full potential as mobile devices; they typically use them as phones and to check their email. Naturally, I use it for both of those tasks as well, but I’ve added the ability to synchronize my Blackberry calendar with my Google Calendar, and I’ve also installed a couple of other applications that I’ll discuss later in this post.

I should also add that this post is about organizing my personal life while I’m at work, not my professional life. I use Outlook to take care of my day-to-day tasks and appointments at work, and I never sync it with my personal Blackberry. I don’t even check my work e-mail on my Blackberry; this is how I stay sane doing what I do.

The Cloud

By now, it should be pretty clear that I’m on the go all the time, so being tied down to a particular computer is not an option. I want all of my data with me everywhere I go, and have it be easily accessible no matter where I am or what kind of device I’m using. This kind of progressive thinking has the tech world discussing what is being commonly referred to as “the cloud.” Using a variety of new applications (which, by the way, have all sorts of security measures in place to make sure my data is secure all the time), I can keep my information stored “in the cloud” and get it whenever I want and wherever I am. While my experience with the “cloud” isn’t 100% perfect (yet), I think I’ve come pretty close, and I’m always looking for better ways to interact with it.

So what is this elusive “cloud” that I speak of? Without getting too technical, modern web applications both manage and store their data in a “cluster” of servers that are arranged to work together. These servers, which may not even be physical computers, work in parallel and this arrangement is commonly referred to as a “cloud computing.” The name comes from the common representation of server clusters in computer architecture diagrams as clouds. One of the largest advantages to this arrangement is scalability, or basically, creating infrastructure to support lots and lots of users; thousands, even millions of users can be active on a system and everything is easily managed, as new servers are added to the cloud easily.

While data stored on these applications’ servers is generally regarded as safe and secure, there is the notion of being able to “take your data with you” from one service to another. This issue is being addressed by a group called the Data Portability group and while major players like Google and Facebook have made nice with Data Portability, it seems like it’s going to take a little bit of time before the actual data becomes truly portable. However, I find that in the current state of things, having easy access to my data from anywhere at any time takes priority over being able to move it to a different service. That’s not to say I disagree with Data Portability; on the contrary I’m all for it. But I digress. Let’s take a closer look at the actual use of these applications.

Monday Morning Routine

I wake up crazy early on Monday mornings to fly out from Chicago’s O’Hare airport. While traveling via taxi to the airport, I check my itinerary on my phone using the mobile version of TripIt. TripIt is a must-have service for anyone who travels a lot. It automatically “scrapes” confirmation emails sent out from travel services (airlines, rental car companies, hotels, and even travel companies like Orbitz and Priceline) and converts the information into consolidated itineraries complete with maps and weather forecasts of the locations you’re traveling to. All you have to do is forward confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and the rest is magic (when you send out your first email, TripIt creates an account for you). The most valuable feature to me is their iCal feed feature that lets me view my travel complete travel plans in my Google Calendar (hence my Blackberry calendar). There’s even a feature that allows you to see if any of your friends are going to be in the same city as you when you travel, however I have yet to use that feature (I don’t have a lot of friends who travel for work, and I usually know where my coworkers are going anyways).

Another travel application that is worth a quick mention here is Dopplr. Dopplr is more of a social utility as their primary focus is on helping you connect to other travellers that share the same destination as you. However, I discontinued use of the application because it required manual data entry; I’d much rather have a handful of emails forwarded to an address (which I don’t usually even do manually, thanks to GMail’s filters) than have to type in where I’m going in a website every week.

After checking my itinerary, I usually need a good time waster, so I check my RSS newsfeeds on Google Reader mobile. One of the things I love about Google’s applications is that many of their apps have great mobile versions, and Google Reader mobile is no exception. While the average Joe might not use an RSS reader (or even know what one is), tech savvy individuals who like to read several blogs and news websites find that they benefit greatly by using one, and Google Reader is one of the better ones out there. My only gripe with it is that it shows stories in random order; I wish there was a way to organize the chaos a little better. The biggest benefit, however, is that when I mark a story as read using the mobile version, the “online” version syncs to it automatically.

At the airport and on the plane

While I wait for my flight, I might have access to free wifi (depending on which airport I’m at), I’ll usually hop online to sync my Google Reader into offline mode. Offline mode is a new-ish feature in a few Google applications (and non-Google ones for that matter) thanks to Google Gears. A quick, painless install of Google Gears allows me to take my newsfeeds with me in offline mode for reading on the plane. I subscribe to a variety of blogs, many of them tech-oriented such as TechCrunch or Lifehacker, but of course there are oodles of news sources one can subscribe to besides blogs.

Google Docs also offers offline mode (although, at the time of this post, only the word processor has it) which is great since I use it to write drafts of posts for Aashay.com. For those of you who are unaware or unfamiliar with Google Docs (aka GDocs), it’s basically a word processor (like Microsoft Word) and also a spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel) application that runs within your browser. It has been one of my favorite applications for a long while now, mostly due to its collaboration features. It allows you to work with other people simultaneously (or asynchronously) on the same documents/spreadsheets, and while this may sound like a gimmick to some, let me tell you first hand that GDocs’ collaboration features helped me get through my senior design project in college. Since I have people serve as guest-editors to my posts here, I write them in GDocs offline mode, sync when I’m online, and invite them to collaborate/annotate on my posts before I post them. It’s seriously good stuff.

To the client

Depending on the client I’m travelling to, I might need to rent a car and drive for a bit. This is where my organization-a-la-webapps gets even more high tech. While driving, I usually like to plan out my day and think about things I might need to do that don’t fall under the category of “tasks for work,” such as buying groceries, paying bills, or making personal phone calls. Before you imagine me holding the steering wheel with one hand and my laptop/Blackberry with another, however, let me tell you about a service called Jott. The basic gist of Jott is that it’s a voice-to-text service that allows you to email yourself (or others) using nothing but a phone. The other fantastic thing about Jott is that it works with a variety of third-party services, notable Sandy and Twitter (more on these later).

While driving, I’d activate my bluetooth headset, and use the voice-activated dialing to “Call Jott.” Once the number dials, and I hear the familiar “Who do you want to Jott?” prompt, I would say something like “myself” and wait for the beep. Then I would say something like “remember to buy allergy medicine this evening” and after Jott’s magic elves decode my voice to text, I would get an email that had my voice transcription in it. It’ pretty neat stuff, but it’s still very new, so it has its quirks. I once used Jott to transcribe a grocery list to myself on the way to the store, but the transcription process took so long that didn’t get the email until after I was in the checkout line (needless to say I forgot a few things). Most of the time, however, it works pretty quickly. It’s nice to be able to email myself, but when it comes to todo’s and reminders, I take it a step further with a fantastic new service called Sandy .

Sandy is my personal assistant…sorta. It’s an online service that allows me to send myself reminders at specific times, schedule appointments, make todo lists, and remember details about people, places, and things. This is all facilitated via a virtual secretary of sorts named Sandy. I interact with Sandy by sending “her” an email (or using Jott, an SMS text message, or a Tweet from Twitter; more on Twitter later) with a few basic keywords such as “remind me to do my laundry at 9pm tomorrow” or “remember that the car is parked in the south lot” and when the time is right, Sandy will send me an email reminder, if appropriate, to take care of business.

I can also store and organize any data I want using Sandy by using tags; all I have to do is prepend an “@” symbol in front of a tag. For example, I have an @ideas tag that I use to store random product and/or invention ideas I think up every now and then. I’ll send Sandy an email with something “remember portable fuel-cell powered jetpack @ideas.” I can then send a “lookup @ideas” message and Sandy emails me back a list of my latest crazy ideas. It’s a fantastic service, and while they’re still in beta (there are a few tweaks that need to be made still), I highly recommend it. The fact that I can contact Sandy from so many mediums makes it that much more valuable. Also, the overall interaction experience with Sandy is a lot of fun: the designers make it feel like you’re actually interacting with a person.

Calling it a night

While on client sites, I stay in a variety of hotels. After checking in to my hotel at night, I like to unwind a bit and maybe do a little websurfing while listening to some music from Pandora or my home Ampache library (while neither of these function as cloud services, I figure I mention them anyways. I’m hoping that Pandora will soon open up to more devices). When living in hotels 80% of your week, it’s harder to stay social. That’s why I use applications like Facebook (which needs no explanation, I’m sure) and Twitter to stay in touch with friends.

Twitter is an odd phenomenon. It’s a service that allows you to “microblog” your life by posting short 140-character-or-less messages (called “tweets”) to the Twitter website. These short messages are meant to answer the question, “what are you doing?” and not only appear on your personal Twitter page, but can be sent instantaneously to friends of yours who “follow” you on Twitter.

Most people who don’t use Twitter fail to understand it, and in most cases, assume it to be useless and even silly. I know I was in that boat: when I first heard about it, I thought to myself, “this sounds totally obnoxious.” Why would I want to know what my friends are doing all of the time? As much as I love ‘em, I know them well enough to imagine my feed being polluted with such messages as “climbing stairs,” “eating a sandwich,” or even “pooping.” Do I really need to know all of these aspects of people’s lives? More importantly, do they really need to know mine?

The truth is, while Twitter can easily be misused for spamming mundane details about one’s life, most Twitter users don’t do that (unless in jest, of course). It’s become increasingly useful as an asynchronous conversation platform, since all you have to do to “reply” (in quotes, as you can “reply” to someone without actually replying to a specific message) to someone’s messages publicly is throw in an @ in front of their username (for example, to send me a “reply” just send a message to @Aashay on Twitter). These “replies,” or “at messages” as some people call them, are publicly viewable, and often spawn conversations between groups of people. While I rarely use them, Twitter also offers “direct” (private) messages.

Certain people who are “popular” on Twitter (meaning they have a lot of followers) such as web celebrities like Kevin Rose and popular bloggers like Michael Arrington of TechCrunch have tens of thousands of followers. Why? Because they often have useful, interesting, or important things to say. Bloggers especially can use Twitter to their advantage as it lets them push breaking news to thousands of people before anybody else gets to it. The recent deadly earthquakes in China, for example, were reported by people in China using Twitter long before CNN reported them.

I personally use Twitter to keep in touch with a handful of Bay Area friends, but I also use it to publish information about what flights I’m taking when I fly around. It’s a safety thing, in a way; in case any news breaks of plane mishaps (let’s hope there won’t be any), people who care can stay informed. Twitter is also terribly addicting once you and a small group of friends start using it. The most common use of Twitter is using it on mobile devices, whether through SMS messages or clients (I use one called TwitterBerry). It makes tweeting on the go practical and useful. People have even organized entire impromptu parties by using Twitter from their mobile devices!

Will that be all, sir?

One final service I’ve been using that deserves a mention, but doesn’t fit in a specific “timeslot” during my day, is Dropbox. It’s still in private beta, so you might not get a chance to use it for a while, but I can at least share my experiences with it. Dropbox describes itself as a solution for “secure backup, sync and sharing made easy” and those three reasons are exactly why I use it. It backs up my files, allows me to store one persistant version of each one across multiple computers (for example, I can make a change to a Visio document on my laptop, and any other PCs or Macs I have my Dropbox account linked to automatically see those changes), and makes it easy to share certain files with friends. They’ve also got a slick web interface and they make it easy to “roll back” to previous versions of your files. Dropbox is still in development, so I can only assume they’ll be adding more features later.

Store it in the cloud and go to bed already

I’m always on the hunt for new, useful web applications to improve my productivity and lifestyle. Desktop apps are great, but being constrained to a single computer is no longer acceptable in the world I live in. Web applications offer much more in terms of letting me access my data anywhere and letting me do a lot more with it. While some of the apps I mentioned might sound confusing, useless, or overkill at first, I encourage you to explore them and see if they improve your lifestyle even the least bit. I think, with the right mix of patience and the will to learn new things, you just might find something new, useful, and fun to use.



Thanks to Jevon Wild, Russell Dare, and David “Skipper” Everling for reading drafts of this post.

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.

What does it take?

“What does it mean to have a job in consulting?” I’ve been asked this question by friends and strangers alike. Many images pop into one’s mind when thinking of consultants. Some may remember Bob and Bob, the “consultants” from the 1999 movie Office Space. Others may think of the “TD” consultants that grace us with their antics on the popular (and hilarious) blog Getting Drunk in First Class. Yet others may picture geeky young men in polo shirts discussing the latest in WiMax technology. But what exactly does it take to be a consultant?

My job over the past few months has been dynamic. I’ve learned many things along the way, but there have been a few primary takeaways that I’ve learned are common across all varieties of consulting. Being flexible and adaptive, taking initiative, and knowing when and how to make sacrifices are three core competencies every consultant should have.

Be flexible.

The ability to hold steady in the face of change is a necessity for any type of consultant. There are a variety of consultants out there: Creative, Management, Risk Assessment, and of course the quintessential IT and Software consultants, along with a plethora of others. While I happen to know people in most of these fields, I work at an IT/Software consultancy, so naturally I’m most familiar with that category. Without getting too specific, I’ll say that I work for a small company in an industry that is populated by behemoth corporations and small startups alike. I work primarily with clients who are in the retail industry. They sell things, and we help design and implement software systems that help them manage their selling of things. This includes systems such as back-office software and inventory management systems to websites and point-of-sale systems (a fancy word for “cash register”). However, my initial exposure to what I do today was originally presented to me in a completely different environment. I went through a training course, and my experience in training was drastically different than my experience on my first project.

The training course for my job was a 5-week course designed to teach newcomers certain nuances of the system we’d be working with, as well as give a broad overview of what consulting life was like. I met a lot of people during this course, and established new friendships. During our off-hours, we explored the amazing city of Denver, Colorado and had a generally good time. Although we were expected to pass an exam at the end of the course (which we all did with flying colors), for the most part, the course wasn’t too intensive. After training was finished, we all received our first project assignments, and I found out that I was getting thrown in the fire.

I was put on what’s called a “Go-Live” project. “Go-Live” (or “Cutover” in some circles) is a Consultantese term for flipping the switch: the system you and your company has been working on/with is about to replace a system that your client has been using, usually for many years. While all projects eventually go live, to be placed on a “Go-Live” project simply means that the project you have been put on is going “live” within a very short period of time (usually a couple of months; most of our projects take a year or more to complete). This almost always translates to long hours, high stress levels, and of course, lots of challenges.

Naturally, this was a huge change from my experience during training. I was expected to catch up on all the business processes of my client and understand the both basic and advanced principles of a system I had no exposure to prior the few weeks of training. Being able to learn things quickly is a huge asset. No matter what type of consultancy you work for: the quicker you learn and adapt, the faster you’ll be able to prove yourself useful to your company and your clients.

Just like most IT/Software consultants, I started out with basic programming tasks. Since our project was on a tight deadline, my project managers and teammates were swamped with tasks of their own, so I had learned to become pretty autonomous early on. It was disorienting at first but within a couple of months I became familiar with my client’s business and went from coding basic system modifications to designing entire subsystems. While this was a satisfying transition, however, I came to realize that I’d have to somehow add a new mix of things to my plate in order to truly be satisfied with what I do.

Step up to the plate.

To get the most out of a consulting career, you’ll need to demonstrate the will to take initiative. Naturally, those of you who are interviewing or planning to interview with consulting companies should probably not mention that you intend to be a bitchin’ rebel of some sort and attempt to make changes at an organization you’re not quite familiar with yet, but if you do plan on any sort of career advancement, seizing opportunities is important. Regardless of the type of organization you are in, you need to be able to identify situations that you think need improvement, and you need to be able to both voice your opinion about them and act upon them. If you find yourself at an organization where saying “this sucks, here’s why, and here’s a better way” is not allowed or is considered taboo, then you need to do yourself a favor and quit. Of course, don’t take this to the extreme; spend some time observing things before you formulate an opinion.

I’ll give you an example from my experiences. Because the company I work at is small, we don’t have a dedicated “Change management” team (usually a team that takes care of training clients on new systems) like some larger consultancies do. One of the more common methodologies we like to use is to train people who are in management roles, as opposed to training end-users (an “end-user” is someone who actually uses the system, such as warehouse worker, as opposed to the people who buy the system, such as IT people or CFOs). The practicality of this approach is sound on paper: you train so-called “power users” and they will be responsible for training the units they manage. However, after spending time watching power user training, I started to feel that it was only appropriate to go directly to the end-users and say “Hey, you guys are getting a new system…you’re going to be expected to do your job a little differently from now on, so you should learn this new stuff, and I can show you how.” Taking this step was something I chose to do on my own; it wasn’t one of my original expected responsibilities. I suppose it turned out I had a knack for it, and now teaching both power users and end-users in small groups has become a regular part (and satisfying part) of my day. Not bad for someone who used to sit around and crap out code 12 hours a day, eh?

More responsibilities naturally means more work, but as long as it’s work I’m interested in, I rarely have a problem with that. You’ll quickly find that tasks that seem difficult to others will become simple for you, based on the fact that you’ve done them several times before. Just like any job, however, you’ll occasionally need to do things that you really don’t want to do.

Be willing to make sacrifices.

Sometimes you’ll be expected to make some sacrifices in your career, particularly when it comes to doing things for your client. Because of their fast-paced, dynamic nature, consulting careers are full of on-the-fly decisions that may have negative impact on other more stable decisions. Like any job, you’ll have to do things you don’t want to do. You’ll may have to prioritize other aspects of your life a little differently. Learning when and where to make sacrifices is an asset to your consulting tool belt.

I remember one particular week of my first project where, after a long week, I was totally ready to fly home on Thursday (the typical day to fly home). A few hours before I was about to leave for my flight, one of my managers came in and explained how a bug in the system caused a $10,000 purchase order to be mysteriously deleted. We needed to build the 600-line order, based only on an Excel spreadsheet that we had, and this required coding a small “job” to automate this process. I was chosen for the task. My hopes of flying back to Chicago and having a relaxing time working from home the next day were shattered. I also needed to perform the tricky task of getting one more night at our always-booked hotel (it’s the only hotel in the area worth staying at). Looking back at the situation, I realized that my manager had chosen me because he knew I was the right man for the job, and that the small sacrifices I had to make only paid off in earning his trust. This trust may have helped in his decision to hand-pick me for my current project, which also happens to be another Go-Live (being on two Go-Lives within one year is not too common in our company).

Making sacrifices for your client will be a regular part of your consulting career. However, be cautious about making sacrifices for your company itself. If you find that your firm requires you to do things you don’t really want to do on a regular basis, you may need to reevaluate some of your career decisions. A consulting firm that values itself over its clients is never a good sign.

Bring it all together.

Consulting careers are dynamic careers. Things can change fast, and being able to adapt to changing circumstances is key. If you’re one of those people who prefer to do one thing consistently, consulting may not be right for you. Also, while it might be fine to have your tasks handed to you when you’re first starting out, it’s important to take charge and find your own tasks as well. Doing this will only increase your interest in your work, and I find that doing work that interests me makes the days go by a lot faster. And finally, don’t let the images scare you. Sacrifices you make in your lifestyle may end up having many other perks, so it’s important to learn to make these types of decisions. I know consultants that travel a lot (myself included), and I know consultants that don’t travel at all. I know some who work ridiculous hours and some who never miss their 5 o’clock happy hour. I even know a consultant or two who have gone from mundane, repetitive tasks to managing entire aspects of Cutovers/Go-Lives. The jobs are different, the job descriptions are different, the companies and corporate cultures are different, and the people are different, but in the end consulting careers are about showing initiative, demonstrating flexibility, and knowing when to simply suck it up and get the job done.

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

If you notice there are a few posts missing, this was done on purpose. I have only kept blog posts that had a semblance of usefulness (so none of the “sorry for not posting in a while” posts).

The new goal for this site will be to write longer, well-thought-out, and edited essay-style posts. While I still may make announcements (such as this one), all other microblogging will be done via Twitter.
If you have any questions or concerns about me or the site, please leave a comment (there is no longer a need to sign up for accounts to leave comments).

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.

Well, it seems like a grad student here has been working on a more modern version of the glove gaming controller.

Now, I’m not trying to point fingers and say that this isn’t an original idea (well…it’s not). In fact, I’m quite impressed that someone is making an attempt to bring an inexpensively-manufactured glove controller to the market. With upcoming consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, something like this might actually manage to find its way into the homes of gamers.

I don’t know this guy personally nor am I too familiar with how this device of his is going to work (on a technical level), but I found this article linked on my school’s main website, and thought I would investigate.

According to the article, Jason Skowronski, an ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) student here at the UIUC, has been working on this glove for almost two years a his senior design project. He’s even received funding from a VC and is talking to video game companies to develop games that utilize the glove.

Currently, the prototype models cost around $1,500, but Skowronski expects to retail them for $99.

It’ll be interesting to see if the gaming glove will make a comback or not. A handful of my buddies have been discussing the upcoming Nintendo Wii, which will utilize a funky remote-control-looking controller that actually responds to movement.

I think this whole “tactile” gaming experience mentality is going to be interesting. It’s about time we see something unique in the gaming world, and I wish Skowronski the best in his venture.

Source: http://www.engr.uiuc.edu/news/index.php?xId=068908800742