> Instead, I had managers old enough to be my father...
This...
> ... an attitude that wanting to move around within the company was "disloyal" to my current management.
... is bad management and bad company culture and are the reasons you get older managers who are inflexible and just riding out a paycheck. Those are the areas to fixate on and if you see it, leave. Nobody should have to work under those conditions. Working for an older manager shouldn't (and rarely is), in and of itself, be a red flag.
The old automotive company I work for released a "strongly recommended" schedule of different responsibilities that an engineer should have held for what time to be considered a strong candidate for promotion. There was a similar document I heard about for going from supervisor to manager. Combined these schedules said that no one would ever work their way up from entry level to department head. Ever. Therefore the only way to get there is outside of the official system via office politics, and not being honest about that is pretty dysfunctional on its own. That said, a symptom of that is the number of supervisors and managers who have 30+ years in...
Exactly. I was too brief with that point, but the issue is first-line managers, in some cases, having more experience than I had years of life at that point. It's an environment that seems to condemn people to life as a minor cog in a huge machine, where your opinions aren't respected and you have no hope of making it into any sort of management responsibility.
Unless you game the system, that is. If you ever see a "hero", they're either incompetent but putting in extra effort or setting up the events.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-alg...
There's a few other interesting technologies that add a lot of content to a game for relatively small investments; think physics and destruction engines, animation technology (iirc there is something developed by EA's sports games branch that can generate intermediate animations for smooth animation transitions), world generation (height maps), etc.
There are so many industries that aren't going to be 'disrupted' by some fancy new tech. Because they have much more urgent low tech problems to solve first.
I've lost count in the number of startups that want to 'disrupt' agriculture with blockchain, because, you know, who wouldn't want to have their potatoes tracked in a decentralized proof-of-stake ledger? PotatoCoin! But reality is that to store data in a blockchain, you first need data to begin with. Many of the business in agriculture is conducted on a handshake, usually there isn't even paperwork. Also, in many countries agriculture relies on operating in a grey area of tax, just to break a profit. I bet a lot of farmers don't even want a transparent ledger for everyone to see ;-)
Most of us developers don't have the real-life industry experience to remotely understand where the opportunities lie. And we are way to naive to think that we can solve any problem with software.
There was an article recently in a modern farming magazine about how restaurants and downstream consumer organizations and businesses want to use blockchain technology to track where a cow was raised, where it was processed and how, and when it became the hamburger or whatever you're eating so that customers can scan it and feel better about themselves and their choices.
Cool. Super cool technology. That I will never use on my farm because it provides me with absolutely 0 incentive at the start of the stream other than increased overhead. After looking into the technology, there are ways to use that data to track cattle, and ways to use that data to track yield and feed ratios and that sort of thing, but it's not the purpose, and therefore almost impossible to get out of the system. It also would be super easy to game by the large 'family owned' farms (sort of like how they do it now anyway).
And I already do what I need with excel, it's just time consuming. So it's another example of 'BUT IT'S TECHNOLOGY' that just doesn't appeal to me.
For other examples see: automated weed control, most automated irrigation systems, most automated weather and climate tracking systems, and definitely any/all automated feed and livestock management systems.
The one thing you said that I want to push back - from a very US centered perspective - very little farming is done via handshake anymore. Any farmer who is actually able to survive does so by playing the markets, by pushing formal contracts, and by being smarter than that. Nothing on the outgoing side is left to chance anymore, because all of our inputs are based on chance already (weather, performance, yield).
The problem is that stakes are so high that nobody dares to change.
You cannot turn off a running warehouse for some days.
I believe datamigration is mostly where the opportunities are. Because then you can one day flip the switch and start working with new software while having the same 'state' of the old software.
Our competitors to dominance through smart acquisitions, but this came at a fixed linear or super-linear operating cost per unit of growth. We are growing by identifying abstractions, and incorporating the new markets into existing ones.
Their method was the best way to quickly grow a company to a national scale in the 60s, but it comes at the monotonically-increasing costs of internal coordination and duplicate work. Software allows you to grow gracefully, while avoiding those problems as they appear.
As an example, we analyze inbound calls by volume every quarter to identify how we can anticipate user needs, and solve them ahead of time, without requiring a phone call (thereby improving the client's UX and saving operating cost). Every year, we reduce our call volume while simultaneously increasing our client headcount and improving the tools that are at our team's disposal. That kind of iterative optimization isn't possible at the big conglomerates.
Look for industries that haven't figured this out yet, those are the ones where the money will be made; Stripe is a good example of this playing out in finance.
thank you for your explanation! I would love to hear more about your approach. I am looking what to do next in my professional life, and these kind of concepts sound very exciting!
Would you perhaps be willing to have a short conference call, or perhaps, an email exchange?
My email address can be found in my profile.
Cheers!
It needs to be something I've never/barely heard of.
(It works for programming languages, too. Hang out in a forum for a relatively-new language like, say, Elixir, and you'll hear gossip about a lot of languages whose communities would describe Elixir as a staid legacy language, that'd never merit a mention here.)
the first i read of him was ~1988 or so in Mondo 2000....
Now he is popping up all over...
Especially on the lower barrier to entry areas.
Being able to learn things yourself, then learning on the job is more important.
I remember reading that a quantum revolution in computing was just around the corner 12 years (in 2007), and only a month ago has any sort of "breakthrough" happened (referring to Google's "quantum supremacy/breakthrough[0]").
Considering this glacial track record, I'm very skeptical.
[0] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/29/20937930/google-quantu...
I think you’ll start to see more demand for non-PhDs as the various competing QIS players begin to standardize their architectures and practices.
Parallels to Silicon Valley are easy to find. It's a valid career path: if you want to progress fast, find a hot young area where there are no senior experts and work hard to keep up.