Category: Work Page 6 of 9

The Senior Developer

By Dad

On Tuesday, June 16, 2015

In Software, Technology, Work

The guy who has been most responsible for the success of the company for which I currently work sent me an article titled The Role of a Senior Developer. In the world of factory automation, there is a phenomenon that repeats itself on all large projects no matter the company, client nor industry. The phenomenon is this: A finite, specific amount of time is negotiated to deliver the product, the mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and assemblers all use a little more time than they were allocated and the software engineers are expected to make up the time that was lost. A Senior Developer who has the ability and will to “own” the technical decisions and guide the more junior members of the team is essential.

Matt Briggs, the guy who wrote the article completely nails the situation with respect to the Senior Developer. It is not enough to be smart. A senior developer has to be able to work under the pressure of impossible deadlines with management and customers looking over his shoulder. He has to make judicious use of all the resources available to him. If he does not get it done, it will not get done at all. He has to have both the will and the knowledge to make the decisions about the technology and application of technical resources. It is not for the faint of heart. I love it that Briggs identifies one of the core qualities of a Senior Developer as the realization that he cannot do it all and his job is one of service and empowerment of others and (my word) humility. Here is the core truth of the whole matter as explained by Briggs:

A senior developer understands that you cannot do everything yourself, and that their primary role is to help their team get better, in many of the same ways they themselves strive for personal improvement.

A senior developer understands that leadership is not about power, it is about empowerment. It is not about direction, it is about serving.

Full disclosure: While I have worked as a developer, I in no way believe I am the kind of Senior Developer described in the article. Really, I am a Research Engineer and develop new technology so, while I have difficult deadlines sometimes. It is nothing like what is described above. All of us who work in the factory automation world depend on Senior Developers’ for our jobs.

Betty Blonde #347 – 11/13/2009

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Delayed gratification, sometimes even if you do not understand why

By Dad

On Monday, June 1, 2015

Here is a great article on delayed gratification. It describes a longitudinal study that eventually became known as The Marshmallow Experiment. The study itself is pretty fun and even funny. Children are put into a room and told not to eat a marshmallow put in front of them. They are told if they resist, they will be given a second marshmallow. The amount of time they resist is measured and recorded. But the really interesting part is the follow-up studies that showed the students that were able to delay gratification longest were much more successful (at least in some aspects of their lives) later on in life.

I have been confronted with an opportunity to exercise the quality of delayed gratification in my own life. I do not imagine the kids in that experiment thought too much about the why of their situation, but I have found I often let that get in my way when it comes to my work life. I think it must be pride more than anything else that causes the problem. When I am given a task, it is really nice to know where that task fits into the bigger picture and who the results of my work will be used. When I do not know those things, it is harder to put my head down and work.

The problem with that is I am frequently ill served by not just putting my head down and doing what I have been given to do even though I have no view to the end goal. It is like all the laborers in Matthew 20 who all got paid a penny even though each worked a different amount of time. The hard part for me is that it is absolutely not necessary for me to know. This is not my problem and I should not make it the problem of the people for whom I work. My employer should not suffer in any way from diminished output on my part just because I think I need to know certain things or be valued in a different way. There should be no complaints, but, more than that, there should be no consideration or attitude of complaint. I signed up for the penny and should do the work, have a great attitude and leave it at that.

Incidentally, this has nothing to do with my day job.

Betty Blonde #335 – 10/28/2009

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Bring Your Kids to Work Day presentation

By Dad

On Monday, April 27, 2015

In Education, Work

My company held the very best “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” program of any company at which I have worked. Several of the guys gave talks, the kids were fed lunch and snacks and there were great activities. What really impressed me is that the kids were well behaved and very engaged with the talks we gave them. That is me above talking to the kids about machine vision. I talked to one kid, a senior in high school, after my talk for quite awhile. He was into Python programming and robotics–sharp and engaged kid. This has inspired me to do another section or two of Our Homeschool Story. The next section is on what we did during the elementary school years and I will be diving into the mechanics of it all. I searched through my stuff and found some of our old weekly work spreadsheets that put me into pretty nostalgic mood. I am looking forward to writing about it.

Betty Blonde #309 – 09/23/2009

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Dunning Kruger Effect

By Dad

On Wednesday, April 22, 2015

In culture, Work

Wikipedia has the following definition for the Dunning Kruger Effect paraphrased from a scholarly article by the people who first described it:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

A good friend of mine sent me a quote about this and pointed to a great article in the New York Times that describes it all. We have done some consulting work together with a group of people who are floundering in their effort to solve a hard engineering problem. The main engineer who works on the problem seems to suffer from this phenomena so we feel helpless and do not hold out a lot of hope that the problem will be solved.

This all got me to thinking that I have lived on both sides of that divide–unrecognized incompetence and underrated competence. It is horrifying and, frankly, embarrassing when I think on past projects. In the case of our current project, it was not really the unrecognized incompetence that motivated us to leave the project, it was the arrogance with which it was coupled.

That needs to be a lesson to me. I need to really work on suppressing my inner Ted Baxter.

Betty Blonde #304 – 09/16/2009

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Humility is a good thing

By Dad

On Monday, April 13, 2015

In Christianity, Work

Proverbs 18:12 – Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before honour is humility.

A couple of events over the last couple of days reminded me of the fact that humility is a marvelous thing. The first was a pair of comments (here and here) made on this blog. A young lady (rightly) castigated me for something I wrote about tuition costs, but she did it in such a humble, complimentary manner, there was no way I could do anything other than appreciate her kindness in giving me the correction. I responded to her and she responded back with an additional comment that just left me very impressed.

In this day and age, when the pride in self is the accepted, even expected, perspective for young people to embrace, she said, “Thank you. I know I’m not the smartest college student out there but I know a lot about the school systems.”

She then goes on to explain that, with hard work (she did not call that out, but that was the crux of the thing), she got a great educational start at a great price. She did all this with an endearing sense of humility leaving me to believe that she must be, at least on some very important levels, one of the smartest college students out there. Intelligence is not immutable, hard work helps and humility is a great quality in any context.

The second event was an engagement, a series of meetings, with a team of engineers working on a hard, very technical image processing problem. Everyone is wracking their brain to figure out a way to solve a problem for which there might be no good solution. The engineer who has worked longest on the problem spends all his time in the meetings explaining how his approach is the scientific approach and that if the other engineers do not cite articles from academia that describe how to do even the most mundane task, there is no reason to try them, well-known, well-tested algorithms in the field. His contribution mostly consists of aggrandizement of his own contributions that have yet to work after six months.

The sadness is that I often find myself adopting the second attitude. It will take humility to over come that.

Betty Blonde #295 – 09/03/2009

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You should not just do the hard stuff when you are young

By Dad

On Sunday, March 29, 2015

In Homeschool, Work

I am grateful that, through no fault of my own, I was put into circumstances that required me to learn how to do hard stuff starting in my late twenties. I took an amazingly slacker approach to life starting at about age 18. It lead to a Marketing degree with a fairly lousy GPA and no good job opportunities. Fortunately, my parents helped me get back on the right track, not so much by providing money (although there was a little of that), but moral support. I went back to school and got an associate degree that led to some technical jobs and I was on my way up. I ended up with a Masters degree in Engineering and now have over thirty years experience in a great field. The whole thing was typified by something my father asked me when I told him I was two old to go back for a Masters degree at age 31.

I said, “I will be 33 years old when I finish my Masters degree.”

He said, “How old will you be if you don’t finish your Masters degree.”

I have thought about that quite a lot over the years. On some levels, I am not that old, but am moving out of middle age now and thinking about retirement in a few years. When I look back at my life, I feel the greatest fondness for the times when we signed up for hard stuff then followed through on it. The Masters degree was one example of that, but our best one (other than Christianity) has to be homeschool. It was a ten year effort and we took a path that was far from the easiest in terms of the available homeschooling methods. It also brought us some of our greatest joy.

Now that I am thinking about retirement, I hate the thought of not having something hard to do. I think the idea of retirement is a recent idea. Did anyone ever really retire in the Greek or Roman eras or in Medieval times. I think people must have slowed down a lot in their later years, but retirement seems like somewhat of a luxury. And it sounds boring and a waste, too. I need to consider what I am going to do after I quit my full-time job. Maybe I can consult for while. But then what do I do after that? I need to consider this more. I want to do something hard that is of service.

Maybe I will get hit by a truck and never have to make these kinds of decisions.

Betty Blonde #287 – 08/24/2009

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When machine vision engineers have too much time on their hands

By Dad

On Monday, February 23, 2015

A cat with its back to the sun
My good friend and fellow machine vision engineer Ann, sent me this picture of her cat. The title of the email was “My cat sitting in a sunbeam.” She took the picture with a thermal camera and said, “Can you see where the sun is hitting her? Cool huh?” I completely concur. If you do not think this is cool you are not a cat person and you are not an engineer.

Betty Blonde #266 – 07/27/2009

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The view from my office window

By Dad

On Monday, February 9, 2015

Rain streaked view of OIT from my window at work
Still slammed at work, so not a lot of time to write, but (pinching myself to see if I am awake and not dreaming), they have given me an office with a rain streaked view of the beautiful new (to me) OIT facility in Wilsonville. Will write more when I can–lots of good stuff to write.

Betty Blonde #257 – 07/14/2009

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Visiting Christian in Phoenix

By Dad

On Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Arizona State entrance
We drove twenty hours straight to be able to spend a day with Christian in Tempe. What an absolutely gorgeous place this time of year. It is 75 degrees here and we get to go to Bible study with him tonight and see a bunch of the people who have been so good to him.

Betty Blonde #251 – 07/06/2009

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Wrapping it up – Why I love North Carolina (professionally)

By Dad

On Friday, January 23, 2015

I wrote about why we love North Carolina in my last post. I thought I would write about why it was a good move for me professional in this post and maybe add another one on why it was a good academic move for our kids in the next one. Again, I am reserving the right to add to this if I think of more stuff after this post gets published:

Three great interesting jobs in North Carolina:

Centice (Raman spectroscopy and machine vision based pill identifier)
Bioptigen (Optical Coherence Tomography based hypercube, 3D eye imager)
Cimtec (Machine vision supplier–interesting applications in MANY industries including lumber, nuclear power, food and automotive)

Volunteer work at the NCSU Biological and Agricultural Engineering department

Refereed journal artical
Very remote (no power, only cell/satellite connectivity available) machine vision detection
Introduced the Arduino to the NCSU BAE deparment–It is ubiquitous there now

Learned new stuff and extended skills

Qt/Qt Creator/QMake
Cross platform development
LMI Gocator/Sick 3D imager programming
Much more

Earned a few more patents

Made a lot of new professional friends

I would put my current job at BHVD in here, too, but really I worked in Prescott, Arizona for the last two years, so I guess that does not count.

Betty Blonde #249 – 06/30/2009

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Return to Oregon

By Dad

On Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Yesterday, I accepted a job in Wilsonville, Oregon. Lorena and I will leave to drive from North Carolina next week. North Carolina is great, but it will be good to be home.

Betty Blonde #247 – 06/26/2009

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Last night at the Raven in Prescott with my buddies

By Dad

On Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The hamburger Lorena ate at the Raven Mark is already gone. I leave in a little less than two weeks. Now it will only be John and Forrest. Every week when Mark and I were in town, we all got together to eat rubbed chicken wings. The hamburger to the left is the one Lorena ate the one time she went there with us. It was a great hamburger and today is Lorena’s birthday, so that is a good enough reason to put it up here. I am feeling a little nostalgic about the job because the “Software Thursday” crowd went through the wars together and I will miss them and our nights out, too.

Betty Blonde #243 – 06/22/2009

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Resigned my job today — no more work trips to Arizona

By Dad

On Tuesday, January 13, 2015

I resigned my job today. I will no longer be flying back and forth between Raleigh, North Carolina and Prescott, Arizona for work. I will have one more big (Well, big for me and is it not all about me?) announcement to make about what I will be doing. I have a pretty good idea that it will be one of two things and it could allow us to move west.

Betty Blonde #242 – 06/19/2009

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More C++, Python, PySide, SWIG, OpenCV and an early Christmas gift

By Dad

On Monday, December 15, 2014

In Software, Work

We received a great Christmas gift last night. The big, big boss of our company in Sydney (not just the big boss from Prescott) wrote a letter and gave us an extra five days of vacation over the holidays because we had such a tough year and because of some health issues in our new executive team. The reality is that no one has taken much of a vacation over the last two years and most of us have worked just about every weekend. It will be nice to spend a couple of unfettered weeks with the family.

Just as good, I have been put on a project that involves writing programs in two different languages using a couple of libraries I really like in both of those languages.

“Why two languages?” you ask.

Well, C++ is a language that is very good for doing things very efficiently and effectively, but that can really get you in trouble if you do not know what you are doing. Well written C++ code generally runs much faster than code written in higher level languages like Python. It lets you do just about anything you want and does not provide any restrictions with respect to leaking memory or jumping off into areas of memory that are totally unrelated to what you are doing. Python is a great language for people who are not so comfortable with the freedom of C++. It also allows user to write a lot of functionality fast and has lots and lots of add-on libraries to do lots and lots of things easily.

I normally use C++ because of the need for speed. Other members of my team need to use my code in programs they can develop rapidly for use in scientific experiments and production code for the instruments we make. So, we have decided that I will write my machine vision code in C++, then wrap it up in a Python wrapper using a tool called SWIG. All the tools I normally use in C++ to build GUI’s (Qt) and perform image processing tasks (OpenCV) are available in Python as libraries. The Qt libraries we use are called PySide and the OpenCV libraries are just called Python OpenCV.

I have set up my environment so that whenever I write a C++ library, the Python wrapped results are automatically built and stuck into the correct directory for use by the rest of the team. In addition, when I build a GUI with Qt Designer, I can run a batch file that turns the C++ code into a Python program. I have to do a little merging with that if I change the GUI, but it is all quite painless. I think I might write up what I have done and post it here. I am sure I have some inefficiencies and someone might be able to make some suggestions.

Betty Blonde #219 – 05/19/2009

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No Shave November (more than Movember), Python, C++, PySide and SWIG

By Dad

On Sunday, November 16, 2014

In Software, Work

What you see below is a little program I have worked on over the last week or so. It does not look like much, but there is quite a bit under the hood. The GUI is built with something called PySide which is an open source version of the wonderful C++ Qt libraries in a Python wrapper. It is amazing how easy it is to use. I knew nothing about it less than a week ago. In addition, I built a C++ capture library based on OpenCV (I will switch to camera specific libraries when we decide what camera we want to use for our project). I then used SWIG to add a Python wrapper around the library. I write this, not because I think it is particularly interesting to anyone, but because I am having a great time learning some new things, there appears to be a lot more coming and it will be good to remember what a good time I had doing it a few years from now.

You might notice that I got a little jump on No Shave November. I decided to go with the beard, partly because I have been away from home quite a bit over the last month, so Lorena has not been able to wrestle me down and shave it all off. If I can just last until Thanksgiving…

Python/C++ GUI for Machine Vision Development

Betty Blonde #212 – 05/08/2009

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Getting out the product

By Dad

On Tuesday, November 11, 2014

In House and home, Work

The small team of engineers with whom I work spent last week, the entire weekend and yesterday putting the final touches on two of the retinal imaging cameras we designed so they can be shown at a conference in Colorado starting tomorrow. Everyone who has done real engineering has participated in this type of sprint to the finish. Really, I do not get a lot of satisfaction out of my work unless I get to do something like this a couple of times per year. We worked 16 hour days and barely made it, but the cameras will do well at the show.

The times when I work hard like this are the times I remember and cherish most about my work life. These times are when big advances are made in product understanding and, more importantly, lasting friendships are built. I love that. At the same time, now we are all completely fried. One of the guys took the day off. I am going to work on my really fun programming project (cameras, Python, SWIG and C/C++) and get back to blogging. We will have to work hard until Christmas, then take it up again for a rush to another product milestone in March, then it will be on to a new product for me.

So, that is why I have missed a few days of blogging. I hope to continue my Our Homeschool Story tomorrow.

Betty Blonde #208 – 05/04/2009

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How much money will you earn if you get a little more school?

By Dad

On Sunday, November 2, 2014

In Education, Work

I ran into a great article in The Blaze that very succinctly explains, with graphics, how much more money you will make if you:

Get a high school degree rather than drop out
Get an Associate’s degree after your high school diploma
Get a Bachelor’s degree after your high school diploma
Get a Master’s degree after you Bachelor’s degree
Det a PhD after your Bachelor’s degree

It also explains how much additional money you will make for each lecture you attend and what will change if you get A’s and B’s rather than C’s and D’s. It breaks it down by degree type, not surprisingly the hard sciences and engineering have the biggest economic impact on ones lifetime income. The people who did this are from eBay. Pretty impressive. Here is how the research is described in the article that points to the eBay work:

Using data from a variety of sources, including the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the team at eBay Deals produced an infographic breaking down exactly how different degrees — and even individual grades — correlate to extra earning potential over the course of a lifetime.

Now if they could only break lifetime income down based on whether you got your high school diploma from a homeschool, government school or private school.

How to follow your dreams (Humans of New York)

By Dad

On Wednesday, October 22, 2014

In Education, Work

A while back, the guy who does Humans of New York posted this about a talk he gave, Brando Stanton says,

Love the quote they chose to pull. Can’t be emphasized enough.

Humans of New York creator and photographer Brandon Stanton spoke to a sold out crowd at Eisenhower Auditorium Thursday night. “There are so many people that use ‘following your dreams’ as an excuse to not work,” he said. “When in reality, following your dreams, successfully, is nothing but work.”

I love this. Kelly and I had a brief “messaging” conversation today. She is slammed right now with work, social commitments and living on her own (pay bills, keep the car running, dentist appoints, shopping, etc.). This is a recurrent theme between Christian and I, too. We have always had to perform triage on our opportunities and commitments on an almost daily basis. Is this opportunity going to help us or hurt us? Do we need to take time to smell the roses today or do we need to just put our head down and work?

Now the conversation has turned to whether our consistent high level of frenetic work will end. It is a hard question. Consistency is more important than the freneticism and it is good to take time to reflect and rest. It is important, also, to take the time to ask the question, “What is the point?” Sometimes the answer really is that there IS no point and one’s ways should change. Our educational goal in homeschool and at an undergraduate level was to finish well and get into a grad school. We did that. We are done.

Now that the kids are in graduate school, they need to decide whether what they are doing really meets any goals they want to accomplish. They have now entered “life” and school for school’s sake is not sufficient reason to continue. So if the hard work of graduate school is replaceable with hard work to meet another, more noble end, then it makes a lot of sense to do that.

The other part of this “follow your dream” equation is the dream itself. It seems like many, many dreams in our narcissistic generation are selfish dreams, but that is a topic for another day.

Betty Blonde #191 – 04/09/2009

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Tom Cornsweet

By Dad

On Monday, September 29, 2014

In Science, Technology, Work

The chief scientist at my current job is a really nice guy named Tom Cornsweet who has spent a very long career studying human vision and developing tools to measure and analyze it. You can see his Wikipedia page here and a visual effect named after him called the Cornsweet Illusion here. A couple of days ago he lent me the seminal text book he wrote titled Visual Perception. The copyright date was 1970 and Tom says that, of course, technology and understanding have moved on since then, but it still provides a pretty good description of what we know about how people see. I am really looking forward to reading it. Visual Perception by Tom Cornsweet I work closely with Tom as part of a team that is implementing his “vision” of an instrument to help ophthalmologists and optometrists do their work better. It is a joy to work with him and I am learning a lot about how humans do the things I have spent my career trying to do inside computers.

Betty Blonde #173 – 03/16/2009

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No job offers for people with no hard science in their degrees

By Dad

On Thursday, May 8, 2014

In culture, Education, Work

I am always amazed when a hard left rag like The Minneapolis Star-Tribune publishes a column like this one written by a medical device company CEO explaining why he is unable to hire liberal arts graduates from the local “Big State U”, in this case University of Minnesota. His company had a need for someone in technical communications. Here is what he wrote about that student:

[He} took college classes in karate, guitar, Latin dance, handball, saber fencing, golf and master gardening. Then, for some of his core curriculum, he took courses in team leadership, Internet tools, visual rhetoric, intimate relationships, proposals and grants, exploring the universe, and technology and self.

So for a degree in scientific and technical communication, this student had no hard science, very little technical learning and only a “visual” communications course on his transcript. Even though we would like to hire an additional apprentice for our medical communications department, we didn’t hire this graduate because, despite the title of his degree, his curriculum failed to develop the ability to learn and communicate any subject even remotely as scientific or technical as a medical device.

And by no means was this student the exception. Other U graduates we interviewed had loaded their schedules with courses in honeybee management, personal leadership in the universe and my personal favorite, “cash or credit,” with the stated goal “to help students decide whether or not they want to apply for a credit card.” One credit awarded.

I am glad he added additional commentary about the fact that he did not expect the University to be a trade school. His company expected them to train people on hard technical stuff, but not on stuff specific to his company and industry. His company just needs people, even liberal arts majors, with a technical base that can only be achieved only through a classical liberal arts education which includes substantive courses in “science, math, literature, composition, and speech.” Come to think of it, I believe we got more of that even in homeschool than many of today’s liberal arts students get during their entire undergraduate degree.

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