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Showing posts from September, 2009

Hill climbing problem with your career

Chris Dixon's has an interesting post on hill climbing as it relates to career development. In short, his basic premise is to imagine your career is a 3d surface and your goal is to get as high on this surface as possible. He then outlines a couple of algorithms to do this. In explaining some trivial solutions I was struck by a common problem in people who work for a living. We are creatures of habit and we love the known. In addition, the known pulls at us due to it's immediacy, after all, it's right HERE, right NOW, I'm 100% certain of what it is. If I where to start venturing out into the unknown, I better have a reasonally high expectation of something positive happening. If I'm going into the unknown AND I'm fairly sure I'm going to have a negative outcome, it takes an inhuman (maybe vulcan) amount of logical reasoning to act counter to that intuition. Put another way, I believe the reality of life is that this 3d surface metaphor is further com

The Curse of Knowledge

I'm currently listening to an intro to psycology course lecture series and during a lecture on intelligence, the speaker mentioned "the curse of knowledge" (it's lecture 12 in this series ocw Brain and Cognitive Sciences . This is the problem caused by a difficulty in seeing the perspective of someone who DOESN'T know it. This means that when I'm describing something to you, I inherently assume you know what I know. I have to consciously stop and think to try and figure out what you may or may not know and develop an idea about how to present what I know in a manner that you will be able to understand. It turns out that this is often difficult, especially if you have a LOT of knowledge about a specific subject. That is not to say it's impossible to see things from the ignorant party's perspective, but it requires a conscious effort to change perspective. I see this all the time and it is particularly evident where I'm working right now. We hav

Elusive software requirements

Those who have been following know that I moved to a new position about a month ago. I took over as a development lead for a project that was "just about ready" to go live. In speaking with the guys in charge, there was some concern because it seemed like some apparently simple changes where causing HUGE pushback from the development team. In addition, the application actually didn't even work by ANY measure... oh yeah, everybody could get a little tiny piece of it to work on their machine, but there's a whole other story about how we couldn't even actually build the project without having first built the project.... So I've spent an enormous amount of time (weeks) navigating the murky waters of "requirements" looking for the iceberg that caused this hole in our development boat. At first, I was told thing like "well, the requirements keep changing", and "well, things are kinda fluid, we just gotta be flexible". In addition,