Wow, it has been almost a year since my last post. A lot of reasons for that (probably equal parts laziness and busyness), but I am back and on my soapbox yet again.

I have changed my career path, not radically but significantly enough. Previously, I had been an ETL Architect, consulting at Fortune 500 companies and working with Ab Initio, Oracle, and UNIX. However, about 6 months ago I moved out of my long-time comfort zone and into something new.

I now am a Sales Engineer working in the Data Warehouse Appliance space. I know a lot of people say that they are satisfied with their career or that they enjoy what they do. I feel sorry for these people. I absolutely, positively the best job in the world with one of the best companies in the world.

I LOVE MY JOB!

Being an SE isn’t for everyone, but it certainly is for everyone who likes to deal with complex situations where you rarely have enough information to act decisively and have the urgent need to act decisively. IT is for anyone who likes to deal with people as much as with technology and it is for anyone who has the vision to see the world from both the eyes of a business person, an analyst, a programmer, a DBA, a system administrator. It takes an interesting mix of empathy, vision, and technical excellence that you don’t really need for most cubicle jobs. It is easily as technical as my most difficult consulting engagements, but significantly more fast paced and exciting.

Look for more in the future.

News.com has an article about HorizonOne, a company that is utilizing technology in a way that makes a difference and makes a profit.  They have created new, high-tech vending machines for schools that dispense healthy food and teach children how to eat in a more nutritious manner.

According to the article:

Software installed in the refrigerated box connects the student IDs and purchase data to Horizon’s point of sale servers, which automatically track students’ prepaid account IDs, along with information on whether a student qualifies for free or discounted lunch rates based on household income. School districts get reimbursed by the government for a fraction of the discounted cost when they sell a balanced meal–under USDA rules, three of five of a bread, protein, dairy or fruit and vegetables–to low-income students.

Finally, and this is the selling point for parents who want oversight of their child’s eating habits, parents can log onto a secure Web site, called MealPayPlus, to see what their child ate for lunch, or how they snacked on any given day. They can also add money to their child’s account directly on the Web site

This is a very, very cool idea and a true win-win-win for school districts, parents, and children.  The kind of solution that really can only be done with integrated technology and cooperation between everyone involved.  The only losers here are the existing vending industry and suppliers.  They have stubbornly insisted on delivering food that maximizes their profits and tried to lock them in with exclusive contracts and payments to schools that border on bribes.

Kudos to HorizonOne for their innovation and vision!

In the IT world, I am not sure if I should take user-driven innovation to be a sign of progress or a sad display on how difficult things have become. With all the talk about Web 2.0, wikis, social media, and the cathedral and the bazaar, I would think that any technologist who isn’t at least passingly familiar with these ideas must be on a contract, working out of a cave, typing programs on dusty green screen terminal connected to the corporate mainframe by a thick token ring cable.

However, the ‘new trend’ of allowing users actually provide feedback into the products that they are using has produced a professorship at MIT and been mentioned in the New York Times ::sigh::  IMHO, this is simply the realization that ignoring people is less effective than communicating with them, and less effective means less profitable.  I think the technology world should be embarassed that it is so disfunctional that this is at all new or interesting enough to study.

On a similar note, Ben Stein has some interesting thoughts about how to have a business conversation.  If you plan on doing anything other than pure solo work for the rest of your life it is mandatory reading.  Interestingly, it seems that the best conversationalists are the ones who are the most considerate and do the most listening.  Sounds like organizations might want to focus on having an actual conversation with their customers …

The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.
– Samuel McChord Crothers, The Gentle Reader

Steve Hamm at Business Week has a short post about the hiring practices of Chinese IT firms, which hopefully will open the eyes of some of the leaders here in the west. Symbio is an outsourcing company that was facing a problem with not having enough qualified recruits. Their response?

[Symbio CEO Jacob] Hsu and his colleagues decided they needed a feeder program to prepare college students to work for them, so they recently established software institutes in the Harbin Institute of Technology and Shandong University, both in the coastal city of Weihai. That’s where Symbio is about to establish a new development center. Says Hsu, who grew up in San Francisco: “Other companies have university partnerships; we run the university departments.”

This isn’t something Symbio undertakes lightly. “We’re a human potential factory. We’re in the talent management business,” says Hsu. “In the next couple of years the companies that win will be the ones who manage talent the best.”

The Chinese have an abundance mentality, a positive outlook for their long-term future. Not only are they doing business successfully today, they are investing in building a generation of leaders for tomorrow. At the same time, western companies are shedding jobs and looking to outsource jobs and import labor to meet the needs of the moment. The west isn’t going to lose its edge because of quarterly profit outlooks, it is going to lose it because it lacks the vision to see the future and the audacity to put itself at the center of it!