You don’t really have to do that anymore once you are a program director. There are people under you who do.
You need a lot of experience with how projects are managed and how work packages interact however and I don’t really see how you can get that if you didn’t do a job where you actually had to carefully reason through what’s required before.
He regularly stunned the Ph.Ds in Japan, and they were no slouches.
It would be a different, and strange, world where people typically got to be professional drivers by taking out loans at 18 to buy brand new 500 hp sports cars and majoring in "Race Car Driving" at universities.
“ Biaggi was more interested in football as a child. But in 1989, after he was given a motorcycle for his seventeenth birthday, he began his racing career in the 125cc class at age eighteen.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Biaggi
Definitely not “typical”, but you don’t _have_ to be a child prodigy to be a world champion (motorcycle) racer.
(Sadly, I suspect the one guaranteed indicator of world champion potential in motor racing is being a “rich kid”. )
But "racing in the 125cc class" vs. the sort of person who begins on a liter bike sort of amounts to the same kind of dichotomy I was thinking of.
People who have a career in one sport, may grow up playing a different sport, but they were still likely doing something that demanded endurance, strength, and coordination.
I would suggest though, that the jump from “500hp sports car” to F1 is quite a lot bigger than 125cc GP bike (or Moto3 these days) to a premier class MotoGP (or 500cc GP) bike.
Those things were tiny little jewels of pure race bike, a world apart from even my Cagiva Mito (125cc sports street bike).
I’ve ridden a friends late 90s vintage Honda RS125 at a track day, and it’s such a joy to ride, beautifully precise - and way way more capable that I’ll ever be on a racetrack. I could match my own personal best lap times on my 900cc Ducati, but the club level racers could do 10 seconds a lap or so faster than me on their 125GP bikes, and the GP riders from 5 or 6 years earlier when the World Championship ran on the same track were almost 10 seconds faster in races than the club guys.
"the jump from “500hp sports car” to F1 is quite a lot bigger..." is what I was trying to say; someone imagining a career pipeline might point out that the power level is numerically closer, but in fact, that doesn't capture the proximity.
He ended up building an open source app in a few months that attracted a bunch of attention and moved into a big FANG type company doing development.
This is what put projects on track again.
> he can go into a room, he can sit in a cafeteria, and by the time he leaves the cafeteria, he knows half of the people.
and ability to think technically/rationally
> He earned a bachelor’s in math from Virginia Union and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Howard.
...to be able to carefully reason through what's required for a technical project, and get stakeholders on board.