Thoughts on Engineering. And Coffee. Posts

After recently stumbling upon a commencement speech by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, I started thinking about mentors and the people that have helped me in my professional journey. The speech that I am referring to is one where the man, the myth, the legend himself, Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger calls out that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman. The relevant parts of the speech are captured in this edited video: This got me to thinking. The statement does apply to all of us, no matter what profession we are in. It is double so for Engineers and Developers. If you are ready to argue this point – please step back and listen. Even if you have never set foot in a classroom that teaches code, application development, or logical constructs, you have not learned in a vacuum. We all learn from others. It is…

We have all come to know and love Emotional Intelligence. Just in case you have been living under a rock for the past few years, emotional intelligence is the capacity to manage your own emotions as well as recognize and understand emotions in others. I am not knocking Emotional Intelligence. It seems to be an incredibly popular buzzword and there are plenty of articles out there discussing this topic. Practicing these skills as a manager is important, and I do believe in it. I am just tired of every time some CEO makes a decision a companion article pops up describing how that decision reflected his vast reservoir of Emotional Intelligence. My writings encompass a constant quest to define what steps I can take to practice lifelong continuous improvement in my life and career. Part of this effort includes defining what it really means to be an Engineer as a…

Kids do not understand the true value of money. To be honest, most adults don’t understand it well either. Society has dictated that we use a form of currency to exchange effort for value that we in turn give to someone else for something that we deem as an equivalent value. Here is a quick exercise to try sometime. Try and explain to a child what the real value of money actually is. Yes, it is simple to explain that we give a $20 to the nice cashier and they allow us to take the shiny new toy home. Yet, to a 5 year old, the concept of money as a unit of value does not compute. They have no ability to understand what is involved in trading money for goods and services. They have no concept to differentiate between a quarter and a $100 bill. Even with this lack…

Who wouldn’t want to be a couch potato for a living? Imaging, the overstuffed cushions, and piles of blankets and pillows. The softness of the sweatpants. The collection of remote controls arrayed around the empty bottles and bags of chips on the coffee table right in front of you. As fun as it may sound on the surface, many people would have a hard time actually enjoying this lifestyle. Yet the description above certainly checks all of the boxes for the Hollywood definition of the word “lazy”. This image is highly contradictory against the backdrop of a busy office and the flurry of activity around a hardworking and focused Engineer. These two images could not be further apart in terms of activity levels but the people at the center of these two scenes actually have a lot of things in common. The best Engineers excel at being efficient. They achieve…