freshman year | sophomore year | junior year | senior year
ahhh the year everyone sits around waiting to graduate. for the sixth and third-last time, my six learning points from the past term are as such:
- there are often misalignments between an actionable plan and the constraints of reality. “starting on projects early” seems to be something that is always difficult to achieve either due to unclear specifications communicated or a discrepancy in team members’ commitment towards a common goal.
- stakeholder management is tricky business when you report to more than two large entities. them having differing views is one thing, but their internal constituents disagreeing is a headache. sometimes i wonder if “stakeholder pleasing” should take precedence of development progress, creating a happier community and a crappier product in due process.
- modern society has degraded money to nothing more than numbers stored in systems, which has made forgery and printing more money (the quantitative easing kind) rather obsolete. there seems to exist a possible future of limitless inflation upon the failure of these systems’ trust/integrity mechanisms. magic money and chaos.
- consultancy is a game of researching success, collating their ingredients into “best practices” and giving them fancy names like post-modern organisations or middle-aware technologies, then preaching it to people who will pay to listen to you.
- there is no one-size-fits-all explanation for complex technology: the consumers don’t want to know your algorithms and the (seemingly?) technical are not too concerned with the user interface / experience. the challenge is when both sit in the same room and your pitch is supposed to enlighten and impress everyone.
- people management is all about the power of persuasion. in school, you are on your own. at the workplace, your place in the hierarchy and past experiences sometimes supersedes your actual requests. from a government perspective, it is irrelevant: who needs persuasion when whatever comes from the top has to be followed? food for thought, especially for quasi-authoritarian administrations.
as usual, the numbers for the few of you:
