Good at PowerPoint?

Current status (to quote @cathcam): “I used to be good at my job. Now I’m just good at PowerPoint.”

— cote (@cote) May 23, 2012

Careers and Professions in IT

I’ve updated my old “Seven” presentation on managing your career, which I developed some 10-12 years ago, I’m giving a talk at Texas A&M University next week.Careers and Professions in IT.

Large-scale Software Engineering at High Speed

I very much enjoyed presenting the Distinguished Lecture at this years Texas A&M Industrial Affiliates Program, and have uploaded my slides to slideshare.net. I had the opportunity to review and judge a number of the under grad and doctorate poster sessions, and was impressed with both the breadth of the ideas being explored and the depth of the doctoral thesis topics. Some very imaginative projects. I liked a couple so much I’m going to make an effort to get them in as summer interns here at Dell.

Visiting Universities and especially Computer Science classes is always fascinating, any trends that are going to happen are often really visible in this type of environment. What I noticed, and I shouldn’t have been surprised, was a number of this year under-grad class with projects using Android phones and bluetooth, combined with GPS. There were proximity projects, location awareness projects, directions finding projects and more. None really required a GSM contract.

What this indicates is that Android based mobile phones are becoming generalized computing platforms, not just smart phones. Of course, if they are doing this at Texas A&M, similar projects will be running at other universities all over the world. The knowledge, education and development in this space will push the next generation apps, often around the same platform. Back in 1998, I visited Warwick and a number of other Universities and this convinced me Linux was coming.

Today, we’re in an era where speed is of the essence.

• It’s critical for competitive reasons to stay ahead of the competition.
• The customer expectation for the Internet is much higher.

Engineering is a discipline.

• Foundation: I look for people who have a firm foundation in engineering and treat it like a discipline
• Definition: Look up engineering on Wikipedia and the first descriptive word behind it is discipline (followed by art and profession)
• Software: Software is NOT [treated like] an engineering discipline today.[It's all about invention]
• Discipline: The key to success: We have to get better as a profession at treating software engineering like a discipline.

Culture is critical.

• Garage band?: The days of four or five people starting out of their garage and working that way is less common now[in the enterprise app space, but increasing IS in the personal space].
• Big=global. Most big projects are globally distributed and developed.
• Global differences. The attitude and approach of teams in the USA, India, and China will be vastly different.
• Play to cultural strengths. Adapt to cultural strengths — understand, and use them to your benefit.

Process matters.

• The “how”: It’s not just what you’re doing, but how you do it.
• No surprises: Good ≠ good; Bad ≠ bad
• Communicate: Overcommunicate if needed, but make sure people understand and are aligned.
• Incremental works: Let people see checkpoints where they can gauge progress and give individual groups/teams a chance to report out. You don’t need everyone to review.

Architecture must support the engineering.

• No roadblock: Architecture can’t get in the way of engineering/development.
• Good architecture: Allows people to work effectively in a globally distributed environment.
• Vertical no more: Silos were the old way; technology grew up vertically.
• Alignment: The way people think about constructing systems needs to match the engineering.
• x86 and Cloud: Both allow for globally distributed environment (open source is another example)

Customer First: Dells Software Approach

• Starting anew: Starting and building from scratch
• Integration: It’s all about bringing elements together
• Customer choice: We’re taking a different approach, delivering customer choice through open, horizontal integration (customers can choose hardware – storage, networking – and hypervisor)

Thanks to Michael Conway in Dell Product Group for helping me crystallize my thoughts into a concise structure for the slides. Also to Dr Valerie Taylor, Department Head and Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship in Engineering at Texas A&M for the invitation and for hosting my visit.

As always, if you have any comments or feedback, please feel free to post here, or via email.

Texas A&M IAP Distinguished Lecture

I guess it had to happen eventually, after a hiatus of some 3 1/2 -years, I’m going to be giving a public presentation again. I’m super excited to say that I’ve been given the honor of giving the Texas A&M University distinguished lecture and part of the Computer Science and Computer Engineering, Industrial Affiliates Program (IAP).

I’ll be up at Texas A&M on both March 8th for the presentation and the Undergraduate Design Project Posters, Reception and Banquet. My session is “Large-Scale Software Engineering at High Speed” and you can find a full abstract here.

I will make the slides available via slideshare.net, but if you are a student or in the area, it would be great to see you at the event.

More jobs news

We are making great progress on filling out the teams, and my 2nd pilot technology program started with a bang last week, building an embedded processor stack based on ServiceMix; my 3rd pilot, to test some key technologies like AMQP and Cassandra is taking shape. However, we need to backfill some of the work I’ve been doing, and for the consultants we’ve had on staff.

Amongst the vacancies we have open is “Senior SOA Architect – Enterprise Systems Management-1003LEFS“. Also a “Senior Software Engineer, Systems Management- 10069ZNS“

A good place to get a list of Dell jobs in Round Rock is here on the cnn.com website. If you are interested in working with some of our recent acquisitions out on the west coast, including Scalent(Dell AIM) or Kace, check out this link.

Got ServiceMix?

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the news and job position listings at Dell you’ll have seen a number of positions open-up over the last 3-months for Java and Service Bus developers, not to mention our completed acquisition of Scalent. We are busy working on the first release of the Dell “soup to nuts” virtualization management, orchestration and deployment software, one of the core technologies of which is Apache ServiceMix.

One of the open positions we’ve got is for a Senior Software Engineer with solid ServiceMix skills from a programming perspective. This job listing is the position, the job description and skills will be updated over the next few days but if you’d like to join the team architecting, designing and programming Dell’s first real software product, that’s aiming at making the virtual data center easy to use, as well as open, capable and affordable to run, go ahead and apply now.

If you make it through the HR process, I’ll see you at the interview…

New Friends, missing news

Turbo Todd muses over on his blog that he missed the friendster/facebook announcement because he was on a plane and it didn’t have wireless and the implications of being behind.

Todd, get over it, you are not in fact behind, getting off the plane after something has been announced, you are in fact ahead in these modern interconnected days. Just through our common twitter “friends”, there were 10-blog posts within 90-minutes that carried the news and gave an analysis, just like the VMware/Springsource acquisition, there are more angles than you can measure with an Isosceles triangle. Unless you are suggesting your are wiser than the crowd and knew all these angles and more.

Also, since Silicon Valley is to the tech industry, what LA is to the movie industry, get used to making new friends, this years movers and shakers are next years fail whales or Scott and Larry, either way, you’ll need new friends!

Oh, yeah, we must be friends, Facebook says so…

Visible personal branding and the big company

I’m keeping busy at Dell, currently working on designs for both our 12g and 13g servers. My current motto is less is more, I’m trying to see what I can cut out to simplify things, as well as what can be automated. In my blog catch-up this morning I came across this excellent post, The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?

No, it is not another warning about posting compromising pictures on facebook, or blogging about doing outside work while telling your boss you are off sick. It talks about some of the issues and values of creating your own “brand” through social media tools. Now, back when Nigel Dessau and I worked together at IBM UK in the mid-1990′s, Nigel was quick off the mark creating content for, and getting involved with IBM UK and IBM Europes first web sites. I had the chance to work with him on some of the content and low and behold, the first Cathcarts Corner was published almost 13-years ago. Over the years, it moved, grew and contracted, and now is just this blog.

One thing I learned though was indeed the value of the perosnal brand. When reading Jennifer Leggios’ blog posting a few things rang true. One, it is worth thinking through before you launch into “just blogging”. It’s not sufficient to work out what you want to talk about and how you say it, but who your audience are, how you will reach them, your style and much more. Secondly, at many IBM Acadamey of Technology annual meetings, and often at other events, we were told by the business executives how IBM wanted the company to be more recognised for its innovation, for its technical leadership, and yes, they promised action. However despite the multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, there are and have never been almost any household names of technical leaders at IBM, or for that matter any major publically qouted company like Oracle, HP in the tech business, but also in other traditional NYSE style big companies GE, General Motors etc. Have there ?

In the second section of her blog post, entitled Workplace Impact, Jennifer talks how the corporation handles the rising, and visible brand that is a key spokesperson. I also worked with one of the tech industries most visible brands, Simon Phipps of Sun, now Oracle. It will be interesting to see where his “brand” goes once things get sorted out at Oracle. While Simon and I worked together at IBM, I was the Linux/Open Source guy, Simon was the Java guy, but he has done a much better job of communicating, and putting the case for open source than I ever could, and in the process created a brand through his blog, twitter and other contributions. I can’t see he’d have had the same success at IBM.

The point that Jennifer makes is it’s how the company reacts that makes the difference. My IBM UK managers where always very supportive of my personal brand, they definately empowered me. However, at a corporate level, unlike Simons’ experience at Sun, it’s my view that most companies practise what Jennifer describes as “talking out both sides of their mouth”. That is they realise that an engineer or technician that creates a personal brand is both getting distracted from their “day” job through their activities, and secondly, is a risk to the company if their exposure gets them unwanted attraction from competitors, start-ups and analyst companies who might offer them a better deal in order to capture the value from their brand.

I’d never thought about it that way, but it certainly puts into perspective the legions of corporate Vice Presidents who march through the PR sausage machine and come out the other other side talking tech, only to disappear 18-months later when they move on to their next assignment and are replaced by the next [insert name here] VP. The only really famous technical person I can recall from IBM, from a public perspective is Gene Amdahl, and thats more legend than fact. Sure, I’ve known many others, but none outside their narrow specialist area and through personal contact rather than through their notoriety, promotion or brand. Can you name anyone ?

Jennifers article is a long, but worthwhile read on the subject of personal brands, and certianly made me reconsider some of my long held views.

CV as a cloud tag

@epredator came up with a great idea, to create a tag cloud from your CV using wordle. The output wasn’t perfect the first run as it didn’t match Mainframe with mainframe, or IBM with IBM’s, but after doing a few global changes, here is what I got. Pretty good summary.

Click the thumbnail for a larger version, or try your own via wordle.net

Coming out – intp.org

So, off the back of the careers presentations and posts I’ve been discussing personality types with my eldest daughter, Eloise, who works in HR.

I remember doing the Myers Briggs stuff a while back, maybe the late 1990′s. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember my type. Today while trying to find my folder that has hardcopies of all my PC Software licenses, I came across my “Sixteen Personality Types at work in organisations” booklet, written by Jenny Rogers for ASK Europe plc and Management Futures Ltd.

Right there in the back, was my Myers Briggs type indicator assessment. My reported type is INTP and my preference scores are 23/23/37/9. It’s pretty risky declaring this stuff in public, if it leaked I could always get another US Social Security Number(SSN), but you can never take back a web disclosure of your Myers Briggs type.

Posts on a journal and to news groups might effect your future employment, especially if you are two different people, one in person, and one online. But your MBTI is an insight into the real you or in this case, me.

Looking at INTP.ORG, it has a list of jobs, I smiled quietly as I’ve done four of them, double counting my IT roles, in the list it says “Career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy”. Exactly, so I better not try to become a “marketing professional”, since this is a job I wouldn’t enjoy and would be least chosen by an INTP.

Just in case anyone was wondering why I was working for the VP of marketing for Power Systems

Best Career Advice: What’s yours?

Debbe Kennedy over on the Greater IBM posted on career advice, which lines up with my most recent post. I’m making some good recent progress and have some great feedback from my recent IBM ATSM presentation on careers.

Managing your career

No, not the verb, the noun.

One of my early posts in this blog was “A. Seven – Q. Ways to measure progress ?”, a response to an entry on Brian Peacocks internal blog. Thursday last week I had the pleasure of doing the pitch behind the post, to the world-wide IBM Assistant Technical Staff Member(ATSM) community. Although “corny“, one of the phrases that is a staple in the presentation is “Make sure change is something that happens for you, not to you”.

It stuck in my mind. When I got off a flight from the UK on Tuesday night, actually early Wednesday morning, I decided that I needed to live up to that mantra.

And so it was after some frantic last minute activities yesterday, I’m pleased to announce that today I signed form to become a full IBM US employee as of today. Nothing much else changes, I’m still leading the marketing requirements, scenarios and related work on Systems Management. I’m pulling together a number of important threads for the p7 based server, and I lead/own the Power Systems Appliance strategy work. But as of today I do that as a full IBM Corporation employee and will be resigning from IBM United Kingdom, and at least for the foreseable future, no more assignments. Colour me really excited.

Make sure change is something that happens for YOU, not to you.

[Update: I've uploaded the slides after a couple of requests, you can view them online or download from slideshare.net here. ]

A. Seven – Q. Ways to measure progress ?

Some how I should have guessed that as soon as I restarted my blog a load of opportunities to comment would come up, that wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t have the blog….

I’ve just been catching up with Brian Peacocks IBM Internal blog, its great to see Brian still blogging, he is currently theme-posting, blogging on single themes. This weeks theme is careers. In his introductory(internal) post Brian muses that he thinks it would be good if “one of the Execs (VPs) wrote articles explaining the career path that ends up with an Exec position, something that many of us would find fascinating.”

I don’t think I can offer that but I can offer my “Seven Ways for a technical person to measure their career progress.”

The loves and life of an evangelist – no, not me!

Sasha asks in her personal and IBM internal blog about the rate of attrition in her sphere and what the problem is?