What is this? Three posts, in three days? What's next... dogs and cats living together?
First, I saw this on a banner ad today.
Are you really in love? Click our free love meter to find out!
DON'T CLICK ON IT.... it'll only encourage them! But, let me let you in on a little hint. If you have to ask a Web site, the answer is no... or it better be.
Second, and more philosophically, I'm so astounded at how much I thought I knew in the past, and how little I actually knew, now that I look back. I helped start up a company when I was 25... it was the height of the Internet boom and it was what all the cool kids were doing. We had a great first release, got funded, and got a fair bit of hype relatively quickly. When the second version came around, I thought I could move easily into the CTO position and help manage the developers we brought on. Naturally, the second version crashed and burned miserably and, while I wasn't the sole person at the cause of it, my fingerprints were all over it. The interesting part is that at the time it was not like I was blaming everyone else. I thought I knew what I had done wrong, but I was way off.
If I asked you to cut me a piece of metal, or as one of my favorite focus group leaders likes to say, how long a piece of string is, you'd come back with a thousand questions. How big? What kind of metal? What color? and so on. The reason you'd come back with this is because you would have no idea how to tell when you were done without significantly more information. Today, I was going through a bunch of test suites that we have at work, and I realized that this was exactly where I failed in my prior software project. It wasn't that I didn't work enough, or didn't watch the project closely enough, it was that I couldn't tell when the project would be done, and I certainly did not any method to measure progress. We did not even have formal workitems that had to be completed, let alone something as granular as a bug tracker (to actually see what is going wrong). It really is such a simple concept, but so frequently in life we seem to miss it. "I'd like to make more money" you might say... but when are you done? When you get a raise? Two? Ten? And what if you never saw your paycheck? How would you know you ever actually DID get a raise?
I suppose the net of it is experience is a phenomenal teacher, and so on with other cliched phrases. But in this case (as in most cases I suppose), the cliche is accurate. The 2.5 years I've spent at my current job, as well as the 2 years I had at my previous job, really did educate me enormously. And now that I've spent just 6 months as a release manager, and a good amount of time just creating the tools to watch exactly where we are and what where we need to get to, the differences between then and now seem even more extreme. Just FYI, the company _is_ still in business, and doing fairly well (from what I understand). Check them out!
I'm sort of using this space to reflect on how quickly we all learn by doing and how much even a short time of distance can mean to reflection. But I also want to temper any arrogance that I (or anyone else for that matter) might have at all. I'm 29 now, and when I'm 35 I hope to re-read this and say, wow I was a moron then.
D