It's About The Data

As a computer science student I loved to do things in my way, and now, after more than 30 years I'm still happy to express myself by elaborating personal projects, even if I consider very important to respect customers by offering them great user experience, and my engineer colleagues by valuing their processes.

With a BCS obtained in the 80s in a Comecon country, over the years I've had to dig my way out of improper tools and ignorance - just like most of my peers.

Due to life circumstances I've learned listening users attentively  and testing my code accurately long time before having the opportunity to join a team of engineers and working for the market. That time I knew nothing about processes, practices and habits, but as a synthetic thinker I was fascinated by the architecture of their product, one of the few integrated software packages available that time in my country.

Given that for decades capital deficiency has been one of the essential problems of my geographic zone, I've tried to do my best to meet people, who have been interested in attracting investors from other countries.

The global spread of the low-cost Internet has made  possible to millions of people like-minded to me to start telecommuting and learning proactively, not only following instructions. That was the moment when I realized that the knowledge of searching, filtering and analyzing data is one of the key skills for managing ourselves in the 21st century.

Then I've experienced the importance of the "learning by doing" method for developing and testing software, and I've taken courses for having a better understanding of the big picture: SDLC types and agile frameworks like scrum, lean and recently DevOps.

Taking a well-elaborated DevOps course has been of great help to me in understanding the importance of doing software development and maintenance in small steps, driven by hypothesis and experiments supported by data collected in production.

Filling data stores with numbers resulting from continuous monitoring or each visitor's route on a website is not about dehumanizing the relationship with users - listening the user voice (by the means of support, social networks and surveys) is also essential for gathering data in order to make the right decisions at the right time.

DevOps practitioners consider that starting from the lean practices and making use of automation, data mining, experimentation and continuous learning in rapid iterations is more efficient for navigating our globalized data lake, than prioritizing backlog items based on 1-2 person's opinions.

Growing Businesses for Selling

In Europe this type of business development does not have a long tradition, and even in the USA is not yet considered a classic solution for making money.

Selling a business after 10-20-30 years is not a new phenomenon. A solo founder may loose his or her interest over the years due to the technological and / or economical changes reshaping the original business, or willing to invest in a different activity, or just feeling the need to retire. The evolution of a partnership may experience various ups and downs, but at some point the founders may choose to  sell a big part of their shares.

Building a business from scratch with the aim of selling it for a good price is more like a new profession, because even if the target is merely financial, the founders need to put in the same effort  and dedication in growing their new business, as the initiators of a regular start-up.

As it always happens with sniffing out business opportunities, "many are called but few are chosen". People who don't have years of valuable work experience in filtering, interviewing and managing human resources, will usually find a too big challenge to keep the boat floating.

In other words if a group of investors do not have hands-on experience in HR & PM, their own start-up is the worst possible place to learn.

In the USA people who have already failed with three or more businesses are considered experienced, but who wants to pay that much for growing professionally?

While the board of directors are changing their personnel and decisions all the time, they are in the initial phases of a start-up, regardless of the company's age. In case their product or service offer is considered attractive, and they find sufficient investors for growing, but they don't choose the right tools and solutions for taking their business to the next level, then ...they will certainly gain experience.

Offshore Teams - Good or Bad?

For employers is advantageous to acquire workers in conditions not met in their regions. A project manager skilled in working with human resources in a multicultural context can obtain good results with offshore teams.

In high tech countries the very old and very fresh software solutions are the best candidates for being outsourced - both are considerably less profitable and riskier than a mature product or service.

Outsourcing customer services and digital marketing jobs is already a common practice, and if a company has been able to externalize such activities without losing their customers, then the competition has to streamline their internal processes too.

Using chatbots as customer support representatives may be trendy and funny, but not of much help in resolving non-trivial problems, emergencies or filtering out fraudulent schemes. I consider that replacing skilled workers with AI is more a media buzz than an upcoming technology with real impact on the current markets, and employing offshore teams is one of the typical characteristics of the globalized economy rather than a transient fashion.

For employees the possibility of working in offshore teams usually represents an opportunity to fund their studies or to collect seed capital for a small business.

The catch with these externalized jobs is that the employers eventually will train the worker to do what he or she needs to get done, but nothing more and nothing else, many of them don’t even want to spend time and money with entry-level workforce.

In such conditions the remote worker has to keep taking carefully selected courses, has to search for possibilities for doing professional practice, and to choose contracts for consolidating his or her skills and job history.

It’s not easy to keep the right balance between a well-paying contract, permanent learning and taking up occasional jobs for pushing us out of our comfort zones. The temptation of a boring but materially rewarding job is always there, and it's nothing wrong with investing all our energies in a single project for a couple of weeks, or making money during 20-30 hours per week, but stagnating professionally is as expensive as ignoring our health.

Each project has a start date and an end date, regardless of how optimistic the project owners are. Consequently a contractor or employee working for remote clients has to assume the responsibility of pursuing a personal study plan and diversified work experiences - a need which consolidates the demand of educators and personal coaches ready for the challenges of our epoch.

Will Dumb Phones Survive Smartphones?

Last summer I attended a meeting with my former fellow students. After more than thirty years it was a pleasure to discuss with people who had been dreaming to teach math or to work with numbers in an epoch when no material advantages could be obtained by developing such skills.

We’ve graduated several years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the latter being followed by significant changes in our lives - more of my former fellow students having now jobs in other countries. As many of them are now respectable senior teachers in public schools, I consider well-founded their concerns regarding the problems brought by the ubiquitous mobile devices.

Our generation used to employ classic tools for learning, we enjoyed rich social life, and our  personal relationships are still based on direct meetings rather than messaging tools. For a teacher of our generation may be disappointing to see all over the place youngsters absorbed in their smartphones, or wasting their free hours in front of a computer game and chatting instead of spending time together.

One of my former group-mates as a mother of three and as a teacher has been particularly concerned about today's teenagers, many of them apparently addicted to their smartphones. I attempted to calm her by saying “don-t worry, smartphones will disappear ...it won’t happen during the next two weeks, but they are going to be replaced gradually by other tools”. My words have taken her by surprise, but at least I felt I was able to offer her a different perspective.

Many of our generation are sharing the preoccupation for the future of today's kids, the most pessimistic of them envisioning a society of consumer-zombies unable to face real-life challenges.

Regarding the brainwashing effect of smartphones I’m considering myself an optimist. The technology, which has turned mobile devices into consumer goods it’s not yet mature, and as all products, the mobile devices have already started to follow the rule of diversification and specialization.

Several marketing authorities keep telling that Microsoft’s efforts put in popularizing tablets are mistaken, because people are wishing smartphones and are spending money on phones rather than tablets.

In my opinion the smartphone’s form factor is the real winner, being very handy for a high variety of activities. The guys from Microsoft have invested in IoT, and in time the smart things will have a consistently valuable market.

Each industry has its toolset, and very likely each group of people with specific needs are going to have their particular smart kits equipped with sensors and software developed for them. Those smart kits may accespt optional and autonomous extensions like wearables.

Taking in account that a modern basic phone is small enough to be shaped as a wearable, it does not always makes sense to put the phone in the same box with the computer (smart phones are in fact computers), but it's important to assure good integration between them.

So yes, I believe that in future we will have the possibility to choose from a high variety of smart devices, and there will be trendy again to talk to each other.

Insignificant Projects

Bigger IT&C companies always have less important projects used for growing young talents, and identifying the right persons for their teams working on the company's most important products.

Employing unimportant projects for developing the skills of new employees is a good opportunity for exploring their strengths.

It can happen that a product idea proposed by a debutant with evident technical and managerial skills gets at the top of the agenda for some time, even if it's not considered really important by the board of directors. The way a person is dealing with the raise and fall of his or her popularity shows whether he or she is ready to be part of a mature team.

The problems start when the unimportant projects are getting out of the door, and the company’s customers are not informed about the new offer's highly experimental nature.

For an outsider it’s very difficult to make difference between a public beta representing the next member of a well-established company’s product line, and a MVP booked as operational cost rather than investment in the company's future.

In case of startups and free-source teams the early adopters are knowingly assuming the problems caused by unexpected bugs and technical limitations, and respectively the risk, that the product could be discontinued anytime.

Unfortunately it’s a common situation, that a software MVP gains popularity and the original company staying behind it has no willingness to develop and maintain the proper product, or it turns out to be a disappointing manager of a new concept, which needs different approach in comparison with their already mature products.

That's why the to-be product architects with strong personalities, great talent, courage and perseverance are leaving the big companies for building the products they've dreamed of.

Procrastination and Bargaining

Although making a to-be or current partner to feel insecure about the future of your cooperation is considered a classic negotiation strategy, I prefer to avoid obligating myself to people with such attitude.

One of these influential but all in all professional interviewers asked me to make them happy by doing things in a manner they considered beneficial for the project I were going to contribute to ...and the least professional dealer I’ve ever met required me to not ask him for any kind of recommendation, because he was not willing to decorate anyone’s CV.

The theatrical nature of such claims is evident for someone accostumed to dealing with people, and they are certainly not easing the communication flow between strangers.

Procrastination is okay when you are in the situation to manage emotional discussions with children or difficult people, who are not ready to participate in a dialog based on facts and logical arguments.

When developing a strong, mature partnership is at stake, applying psychological pressure is counterproductive. It’s understandable if someone is doing small “tests” for exploring his/her new friend's personality and intentions, but these “tests” need to take advantage of real-life situations rather than theoretical quizzes.

The same goes for the trial job period. A good actor may perform better during an interview than a good professional, and there is no way to filtering out people who will eventually fail in certain conditions.

For me an interviewer who keeps showing undecided attitude over more meetings signals that’s time to withdraw my bid.

For well-defined short-term needs it makes sense identifying the human resources, products or services which are currently available underprice, but trying to keep alive a company built on the culture of “cutting costs at all costs” looks a nonsense on a saturated market.

Giving Up on a Plan

It happens quite often that our requests are placed on hold for days, weeks or forever, and we have to find alternatives for resolving our problems.

While a tech guy in production can learn rapidly where are the limitations of the buying power and the resource costs of his industry, in field of digital services the walls are not visible and are moving constantly due to the changing demands.

Physical goods are always produced for a well-defined market, even if the technology and / or some resources are coming from different regions. The digital goods don't have stable markets, since people can use computing capacities and software services offered  by a high number of geographically dispersed suppliers.

The digital businesses are operating with higher risks than the classic businesses, and in such situations correct prioritization is key: paying clients with consistent commands will always get served before customers using economy offers and free resources.

Theoretically one's managerial capabilities are measured by what we've been able to accomplish with the resources we've had ...but with too few resources we can get nowhere, because people need to be served in timely manner.

Whatever membership website putting customers in the situation to spend weeks until finding somebody able to fix a broken database transaction or other problem certainly won't have a bright future.

In this context giving up on our plan to keep using the service, and identifying a different company with after-sales services suitable for us is the right thing to do, even if sometimes it's not easy at all.

The Temptation of Tinkering

It's not about the incapacity of finalizing a piece of software or choosing a new toolset.

It's not about the syndrome of the programmer willing to take up the role of the architect - those guys sooner or later will change their attitude, because the more dynamically evolving a project is, the more difficult is to manage its structure and processes.

And it's not about the architect having fun with trying out various scripting languages, he/she always has to take in account the price level of the human and technical resources, even if sometimes it hurts.

The persons demonstrating this particular weakness can be quite successful in business, and great family people or friends, but they do have at least one project, which somehow always gets reshaped and never good to go.

The problem is that those projects at some point in time have addressed a real need (or they are still addressing it), but the project owner is not feeling ready to share his/her ideas, wishes and uncertainties related to his/her solution.

Nowadays a big number of living development tools are contiguously gaining new features, we can read each day about the new versions and extensions related to the tools we are currently using or planning to adopt. It's understandable that the more professional their marketing are, the bigger the temptation is to invest time in tinkering with the latest early beta of this or that product instead of developing our own.

Put differently, we need to find day by day a good balance between making our own dreams come true, and supporting others in doing the same.

Is Freemium a Way To Go for E-learning Solutions?

In 2016 I took a sabbatical year dedicated to studies. Between others I’ve taken foundation courses about the education paradigms of the 21st century, project-based learning, problem-based learning, methodologies and software tools specific to e-Learning.

Today I can say that I was in the right place at the right time, because all those courses were offered for free by an international educational platform sponsored by multiple companies, and I had the chance to do my home works by employing freemium packages offered that time by various online software solution providers.

Now, two years later, some of those freemium packages ar no more available at all, others have been “streamlined”, so they are suitable only for testing purposes. Last year the platform’s biggest sponsor has stepped back, and several courses taken by me are no more part of the current offer.

The thing is, that in 2016 my average monthly Internet traffic was over 50 GB, respectively the educators and the operational personnel of such platforms need acceptable technical conditions and salaries ...In other words decent quality and good results imply a reasonable cost level.

E-learning activities are big IT&C resource consumers, and additionally to processor power, storage and bandwidth they require complex software solutions.

Managing and maintaining successfully such a platform goes far beyond the financial capabilities of a small-medium company, and even big, nationwide companies are creating associations, and doing lobbying for grants in order to assure the continuity and quality of the E-learning services delivered by their platforms.

Taking in account the resource-intensive nature of multimedia file handling and teleconferencing software, it’s better to treat with reserve those services offering “too many” resources as part of a freemium package. Sooner or later their funds are going to end, and then we may run in trouble with our course materials, quizzes, catalogs, home works, messages, forums etc. stored by them in some proprietary database.

For example Moodlecloud is offering a freemium package suitable for storing link collections rather than multimedia files, but most software features are available, and an educator can learn for free how to work with the software, respectively he/she can evaluate the file importing and exporting features, and the compatibility level with a different platform.

Elves and Bubbles

According to the German folklore, helpful elves may visit people's houses nightly, and get work done for them while they are sleeping.

The ambiguous perception of work is present in various cultures, being considered a necessary evil or even a punishment for the human kind. It's a generally accepted idea, that living in paradisiacal conditions does not imply a working relation or contract.

Financial bubbles are not a new phenomenon, they have always been fed by people unhappy with their jobs and lacking the necessary financial and psychological literacy.

The truth is that there are no recipes for filtering out unsuitable investment advices popularized by people caught in the system they are advertising. We have to try things out and we have to fail a number of times in order to develop common sense.

Investing real efforts in following a good school and making our home works do help many more than people tend to think, but gathering life experience and standing up when falling down are part of the process.

Then the answer to the following question will be straightforward: Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, hedge funds, unicorns and cryptocurrencies promising the moon from the sky ...from where they'll get the goods they are promising? Who will work to produce those goods?

We can redistribute only what we have produced, and who have lived in socialism as a macro economic system, have learned the hard way why it does not work.