Glen,
I have always had a similiar experience, albeit on a different path. Every
computer program I've written, maintained, upgraded, or assessed has been
intrinsically part of a real-world process. The fun thing for me has been
understanding the real-world business, mission, process, or system. Over the
course of roughly fourty years, I've learned about a huge variety of industry,
military, and business activities. Just in the last 10-15 years I've learned
about pipelines, gas, awl bidness, 'lectric utilities, and railroads. What's
even more amazing to me is that things I learned 30 years ago keep coming back
up - GPS is a neverending resource I keep calling back up for control systems,
Smart Grid, mobile phones, radios, ships, and all kinds of other systems.
BTW, the difference is that I've rarely actively looked for something new -
it always seems to land in my lap.
Sometimes, my hobbies have rolled over into my work. About 15 years ago, I
was gamemastering a group of folks in an apocalyptic cold war game called
Twilight 2000 set in post WWIII Poland. Part of the game is set in Oswiecim,
long-known for it's chemical industry making insecticides and poison gas. So I
read up on poison gasses and branched into biowarfare to make the game as
realistic as possible. A few months later, I was asked to assess a bio-agent
detection system. Imagine the customer's surprise when I walked in talking
their jargon from my reading for an RPG.
Ray Parks
Consilient Heuristician/IDART Old-Timer
V: 505-844-4024 M: 505-238-9359 P: 505-951-6084
NIPR: rcpa...@sandia.gov
SIPR: rcpar...@sandia.doe.sgov.gov (send NIPR reminder)
JWICS: dopa...@doe.ic.gov (send NIPR reminder)
On Jul 14, 2015, at 2:40 PM, glen wrote:
Both of these comments touch on something that irritates me quite a bit.
Because I have a chip on my shoulder and enjoy confrontation, I regularly
apply for jobs even when I'm only a tiny bit interested in changing jobs.
(Plus, who knows? Maybe someone will make a really good offer.) In doing
so, I often apply for jobs for which I'm over qualified. I don't get paid
much for what I _am_ qualified to do. So, it wouldn't be much of a hit to
take a job for which I'm over qualified. These jobs almost always have
something educational about them. I regard the education as part of the
compensation. I'm willing to take a lot less money in exchange for the
chance to learn-on-the-job.
The interviewers never seem to understand that point. When it comes down to
the practicals of offering me a job, they often get caught by my inadequate
answers to the question Why would you want to do these jobs, for this
salary? Why give up what you have already? I don't know ... YOLO? It
happens so often, perhaps I should be less enthusiastic about whatever
projects I'm working on at any given time. Maybe if I'm all grumpy about the
sh!t I have to do, I'd get less complaints about me being over qualified for
some other job ... which obviously I'm not. My incompetence knows no bounds.
I've never had a boring job, from selling carpet water proofing
door-to-door, to sacking groceries, selling electronic parts at the
university store, flowcharting assembly code for obsolete avionics, etc.
There are always boring tasks to every job, but the jobs have never been
boring in their entirety.
In any case, it seems to me like incentive is always weaker than motivation,
regardless of the dimensions involved. But, then again, I'm a white male
from a middle-class household in the US. So, surely that biases me.
On 07/14/2015 01:05 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
Motivation is such a subjective thing. Like most people, I like to work on
things that are at least a little challenging intellectually, but
sometimes, just seeing the end result and knowing that I did it is reward
enough to make the tedium bearable. A few years back, I did a bunch of very
tedious work that synchronized video of conference speakers with their
slide presentations NM INBRE. The idea was to create a Flash presentation
that showed the video of the speaker, but displayed static images (taken
from the PPT presentation) representing the auditorium's screen. This saved
a lot of bandwidth compared to streaming a composite video of both the
speaker and the actual screen, and in the 2006 timeframe, really was
necessary.
So, I had “capture” video from tape from two sources (speaker and screen);
scrub through the two resulting videos, recording slide translation
timings; export and trim images for each slide; compress video into
appropriate formats; import images and video into Flash, and enter the
timings that I recorded; etc etc. All that multiplied by 10 or more
speakers, it took me over a month to complete. Kind of like mowing your
lawn with a pair of fingernail clippers. I automated as much as I could,
but given the number of tools that I had to deal with, I
