Posted by F
Mon, 14 May 2007 03:13:00 GMT
In March, I accepted a new position within BEA, to work for BEA Argentina.
After more than six years in the U.S., my wife and I were thinking about moving back to
Argentina. We were talking about doing so in 2008. Then, this opportunity
within BEA came across. It was sooner than what we planned, but it was interesting
for me professionally, and BEA was helping with all the relocation needs. So I accepted.
It all happened (is happening I’d say) pretty quickly. Me and my family arrived at
Argentina a couple of weeks ago, and I started on this new role immediately.
April was a good exercise on getting things done, both in and out of work. Here’s just
a summary:
Read more...
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Posted by F
Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:02:00 GMT
If you work as a software developer for a living, I recommend you get a copy of “My Job Went to India”
. Ignore the curious title and funny cover. It’s about planning your career and making yourself a more valuable developer.
I read it right after “The World is Flat” (by the way, a fascinating description of today’s globalized economics), and it was a good 1-2 punch.
Full of great advice. Stimulating and motivating little book. It
helped me find the energy to go back to work after taking a week off
:-).
The book is divided in 52 concrete pieces of advice. You’ll get ideas
for improving your technical abilities, as well as business-related
knowledge and inter-personal skills.
A couple of paragraphs I liked, from the Introduction:
For some not-insignificant percentage of IT workers, the safest bet
is to start looking for an alternate line of work. […] If you
don’t have passion and a drive that would force you to create
software […] you’re not going to be able to continue to compete
with those who do.
… Software is a business […] To stay employed, you’re going to
have to understand how you fit into the business’s plan to make
money.
And this one below made me laugh, from advice #6 “Be a specialist”:
“Too many of us seem to believe that specializing in something
simply means not knowing about other things.”
I would have titled it something like “The Mature Pragmatic Programmer”, as it is a perfect second volume for “The Pragmatic Programmer” (What? you haven’t read it? Stop reading this stupid blog and go get TPP now!).
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Posted by F
Sat, 17 Dec 2005 19:11:00 GMT
I’m surely stating the obvious here (I hope!), but what seems obvious for some people is not so for others.
Work Experience should not be expressed in years. There’s a quality component to it that is more important than quantity. Some people learn very little over several years of “experience”, while others learn and grow a lot in a fraction of the time.
The amount of experience is still important. And the quality of someone’s experience is lot harder to measure, since it may depend on many interrelated factors: type of work done, intelligence, interest, motivation, attitude, the environment, and people (s)he worked with.
But please, don’t measure experience in time units alone.
Unfortunately, if you need to hire someone, recruiters do little (if any) to find quality workers. They just care about keywords (like: java, web, manager) and the years of experience associated with each of them.
If you think about it, time is relatively easy to add to the
experience of a person: it’s just a matter of time :-).
The quality of a person’s experience, on the other hand, depends a lot on his/her
own will.
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