Posts Tagged ‘this smumester’

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:

moving into the second half of this degree programme creates a glimmer that tells you the end is visible, just not there yet. in tradition, my learning points are as follows:

• working all-nighters continue to present a dilemma where it is poor time management practice, but there is much efficiency in last-minute work and nothing can quite beat the high of a 4am epiphany.
• spend less time in experiments focusing on getting theoretically-correct results and more on hypothesising the causes behind actual results instead.
• the generalisation that industry professionals know their stuff is highly flawed; many have been living in a hole for far too long and their ignorance of reality is astounding.
• understanding expectations is hard work; students continually attempt to be psychologists in analysing what professors actually want to see.
• abstractions are dangerous; they should be created if and only if users will never need to understand the underlying complexity. unravelling the deep mysteries only make abstractions even more complex. (in english: don’t try too hard simplifying things, sometimes understanding the difficult parts is necessary)
• mentorship is a game of passive facilitation that attempts to elicit behaviour which promotes self-learning; spoonfeeding advice and active intervention have little value.

all said and done, here are the corresponding results for the eyes of the privileged few: