confusion

Long ago, in tenth grade, I took a drafting class. Long enough ago that we used pencil and paper and had actual drafting tables. We did a little work once in AutoCAD but mostly we used pencil and paper.

I don’t remember much of drafting but I have remembered, again and again over the years, one thing my teacher told us. He was talking about design rules, rules which we must always keep in mind when drafting a blueprint for a building. Over the years I’ve found a two of these rules have been forgotten. Or maybe they never really were rules but they make sense to me and I think they should be reinstated.

Rule number one was about clocks. Clocks and airports as my teacher told it:

“It should be impossible for people to be out of sight of a clock in an airport.”

Anyone who has traveled should appreciate this one. Sitting around in airports or shopping while you wait for your flight the last thing you want is to lose track of the time. Or for others to lose track and make your plane late while they are paged and run through the airport and struggle to find a place for their carry on baggage. I would actually extend this beyond airports to train stations. They are better in my experience at least in Europe and Japan. But nearly every airport and too many train station I have been in suffer from a lack of big, visible clocks. Most times today at airports the only clocks you can find are small ones in the corner of the TVs showing upcoming departures or arrivals. Even Changi, the best airport in the world fails at this rule.

Rule two, was very similar, maybe more of a corollary to rule one:

“It should be impossible to be more than [10 meters] from a trash can in a shopping mall.”

Maybe rule number one fell out of use as we all had watch’s and now phones in our pockets (and with network set clocks the time is correct unlike way too many watches which have slow batteries or were not wound…). This rule, if it was ever followed, was killed by terrorists. I blame the IRA. It started, not in shopping malls but on streets and tube stations. I don’t remember it being a big problem in the malls in my home town or on campus in college but when I moved to London the near complete lack of trash cans — or bins to humor British English speakers — was jarring. I was told it was because tube stations and bus stops were preferred targets for the IRA and they would just dump the bombs in the bins. From there I started to notice, in the aftermath of 9/11 that trash cans in Washington DC’s metro stations and on the streets were removed. Sometimes a simple metal ring with a clear plastic bag was still there but proper trash cans were gone.

Since I just returned from a trip to Japan I should also note that in Japan there is a lack of bins in public places. Your best bet for a bin is in convenience stores, which are omnipresent so you just have to get used to carrying your trash till you pass a convenience store. The first time I went to Japan in 2004 I commented on this to my friend living there and was told that this was not a recent change in Japan. People are used to carrying their trash till they come across a bin, there have never been large numbers of public bins on the streets. Earlier this year when I was in Tokyo on business my Australian colleagues commented on the lack of bins and it was my turn to explain the culture.

I have been a solution architect for over a decade now and for several companies, though almost exclusively in APAC. Over that time one thing that has stood out to me is how poorly defined solution architect is as a job. And not just across different companies but within the same company. I have seen Solution Architects act as glorified project managers for customers or salespeople to create or evaluate proposals. Other times I’ve seen solution architects play the senior technical problem solver, working on day-to-day operations or planning. I’ve meet amazing solutions architects who come from completely non-technical backgrounds and I’ve meet techies who can’t solution themselves out of their pre-conceived boxes.

I have been a solution architect now in the same company for eight years. I have been in the same industry, telecommunications, for my entire career. Working in the same company and industry for so long has created a major issue for me if I wanted to change jobs: domain knowledge. Or, more specifically, how recruiters focus on domain knowledge or skills. It’s an effective way to filter a large pool of applicants or potential applicants but I don’t consider domain knowledge to be one of my key skills. Domain knowledge is the result of my key skill: learning.

A few years ago I would have listed technical foundation alongside learning but, while I still think a solid technical foundation is one of my key skills it’s less important than learning. Eight years ago when I started this job my area of deep domain knowledge in telecommunications was in what are known as Value Added Services or VAS. But a year in that was less important and I had to quickly become an expert in Core BSS domains: Customer Relationship Management, Ordering, Charging and Billing. This involved a lot of discussion, listening, reading product documentation and industry standards —I read close to 800 pages of 3gpp standards for Online Charging at one point. A few years later and I had to learn “Digital” —how Content Management Systems work, what Search Engine Optimization is, how online Campaign Targeting and Execution are done— and I have had to learn what Agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, Microservice architectures and how it enables all of that. I had to understand revenue recognition rules to handle IFRS compliance issues, security standards like PCI DSS and GDPR. And I’ve had to learn to find and evaluate hidden risks and costs associated with any and all of this to ensure that projects are managed end-to-end for risk, TCO and business benefits. Some of its technical and some of its much more “business”.

The point of this soup of terms and idea is that I knew none of that when I started this job. So how would any HR or recruiter judge me? I know the answer is that they judge me badly. I’ve been interviewed enough times and been told by enough recruiters that I don’t have the “right” experience. But they don’t want to hear about the ability to learn, and learn quickly. My most valuable skill is not something that shows up in job descriptions. We hear a lot, or at least I do, about how lifelong learning is the skill of the future. If that is so I should be well positioned, but I feel like it’s not valued, either not for someone my age? or experience? or recruiters and HR are not ready to evaluate people in the lifelong learning job market.

Last week LinkedIn reminded me I have worked for the same company for eight years. In the same role. By coincidence Jeff Atwood  [codinghorror.com] published a new post on his blog a few days later, What Does Stack Overflow Want to be When it Grows Up [codinghorror.com]. Jeff’s blog is in my feed because I was fairly early user on Stack Overflow [stackoverflow.com], though I had already left day-to-day programming, a choice driven by the economics of making a good living as a techie in Singapore. Coding was the only career I ever wanted but it lost out in the end to wanting to live and travel outside the US and getting married.  I moved into development management and then into solution architecture, so I don’t have a lot of chance to practice software engineering or programming.

In his post Jeff mentions the “people reached” feature of Stack Overflow:

Stack Overflow later added a super neat feature to highlight this core value in user profiles, where it shows how many other people you have potentially helped with your contributed questions and answers so far.

So I checked mine: 

Almost one million people! Wow. But much more impressive, to me, is this stat:

“Top 10% overall“. I have not contributed to Stack Overflow in years and I’ve still managed to crack the top 10%. I’m proud of that. Anyone want to hire me to go back to writing code?

Siri was listening to my daughter and I discuss what drink (Ribena) and snack (Strawberry Pokki) she wanted after Chinese class this morning. I’m dying… “Justin Bieber has banana…”

Just to make sure Google can index this: The whole series of things need to be done as a project looking person the ringer enterprise architecture is it from Justin Bieber has banana

Memory is a strange thing. The ability of a smell, taste or sound to immediately invoke a specific memory is amazing. There are foods that take me back to Charlottesville or DC or London. But one of the funniest triggers I have a sound association with a book and by extension a movie.

The sound is Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis [wikipedia.org] album and it is forever linked to images of the rabbits in Richard Adams Watership Down [wikipedia.org].

My association is not from the first time I read Watership Down but the second. Sitting in my tiny one room flat in London listening to Dusty in Memphis in early 2002. I bought a copy of Memphis for £5 at a used CD shop in Islington on a whim. I listened to it on my crappy laptop speakers. Reading Watership Down because I had just labored through Ulysses and I needed some lighter fare.

Maybe the link was burned into my mind due to my mental state at that time. Having just gone through a bad breakup and still a bit lost in London. I played Memphis over and over. It wasn’t my “breakup song” I wore out Black by Pearl Jam for that, but that is a different story.

A few bars of Just a Little Loving is all it takes to open the flood gates. I can see Fiver, Hazel and Bigwig. “Seeing” them is another odd feature of memory… I see the animated movie version [wikipedia.org] of them I watched when I was young. A movie that I loved but also scared me a bit as a kid. It was probably more then close to 15 years since I saw the movie when I read Watership Down in London.  But the images from the movie are linked to the songs on Memphis. I remember reading in a psychology textbook about the fallibility of memory, an example given about a man who have very vivid memories of when he first heard about the attach on Pearl Harbor — that he was listening to a baseball game when the broadcast was interrupted, he cloud remember the inning and the score.  The only problem is that Baseball has never been played in December.  His vivid memory had become corrupted with some other memory. I guess listening to an album and reading about rabbits is not same league as hearing about an attack like Pearl Harbor but somehow I just remembering the movie from my childhood as I read Watership Down has linked it to Dusty in Memphis.

Dusty in Memphis is still one of my favorite albums and Watership Down is one of my all time favorite books. I’m listening to Memphis as I write this and it still invokes a strange mix of feelings, anthropomorphic rabbits and imagery of London: crying for Hazel and watching the sun set from Finsbury Hall.