I'm in Love with T-Shape of You

Picture source: From T to Pi

A T-shaped person has in in-depth knowledge in one field (vertical bar of T) and a broad knowledge of an application domain (horizontal bar of T). For example, a statistician specialised in political systems. Or, a politician who knows statistics. It is important that the two bars are connected: if you are really good at solving differential equations and know a lot about french porcelain of 17th century you cannot automatically call yourself a T-shaped person. Similarly to T-shape, there is a Pi-shape with one more leg of in-depth knowledge, and an E-shape - you get the point. In general, the more "bars" you have as a person the more interesting you are. In case you choose to be I-shaped, you can still be endlessly interesting for people who are into the same field while running a risk of being seen as a geek by everyone else.

Fun with Flags

Personally, I have been working hard on diversifying my professional profile (=adding more bars to my shape) while keeping it all connected. I gladly take opportunities of diving into new areas and shifting my focus from old areas. In the long run this strategy brings me to a shape of a Swiss army knife. There are plenty of "bars" of different shapes and directions, and they are all connected. 

Companies love multipurpose tools - if they were to close down the corkscrewing department and put more focus on cutting department they would not need to go through a tedious process of firing and hiring people. But multipurpose aspects are not valued when it comes to bringing new people onboard because when a hiring manager is after skill A he'd often rather take a person who only has skill A than a person with skills A, B, C. The latter case is called "overqualified", when in fact the hiring manager is simply worried that skill A won't get enough focus. So here comes a free career advice: be clear (with yourself and others) of what skills you are good at and what skills give you most energy, and go for the ones you love. One of my personal favourites would be the corkscrew.

My digital friends - the more the merrier?

We have more and more supporters in life. Digital assistants pop up everywhere and now we have Mika, Siri, Alexa, Amelia, Lucida, Cortana and many more on the market. They help us navigate in web shops, be more productive at work and keep track of our calendars. And as the field is becoming increasingly popular, the number of digital assistants continue to grow and often similar assistants are being created for the same purpose. And for some time I had this uneasy feeling of having too many of those around me, like having too many phones, or too many irons. Why can't I have one ultimate assistant that can manage everything that concerns me, I thought. But actually I do need several of those. Because I don't want my personal shopper to give me advices in my career. I would like my lifestyle coach to be a woman, and my personal trainer to be a man, preferably with Russian accent. And for driving instructions I for sure want Ozzy Osborne. Sometimes I want to be treated gently, and sometimes I want to be challenged. And I don't want to tell them which approach to use on me - they should know it by themselves. And as I am not a talkative person I do not really want to talk to them. They should act on my behalf, schedule meetings, book tables at restaurants, order food for me, plan my routs and give me recommendations. I will require transparency and sometimes I will check how they came to their conclusions. I will do it more often with my new assistants and give my old proven ones more freedom - just like I do with my colleagues at work.

But humans are full of conflicting objectives. My personal banking assistant may not be happy about the decisions of my holiday planner. And will my work assistant be able to agree with Paul's work assistant to satisfy the constraints of our kids' activity planner? This works as long as they all rely on the same multi-parametric system with all the knowledge that's relevant to me. In other words, all my assistants are in fact one, with many different faces, voices and flavours. And we should not be afraid of hooking in more of them, as long as they are in agreement, and optimizing your life in a systemic way without leading you into local optimum.

Picture source: http://www.karenofford.com/Blog-The-Ego-and-Higher-Self.html

Let's repeat the phrases we must forget

Here's a list of annoying phrases published by Betty Lui - I love it. I do get annoyed by 70% of those. And I do use about 20% of those myself (to be honest). I want to tell you some other annoying phrases that i often hear.

We were too early

Sure, it must feel comforting to say this. We failed because we were too smart for the rest of the world. The market was not ready. The supporting technologies were not ready. I suggest different phrasing:

• We did design mistakes
• Lack of supporting technologies made our product useless
• We were not persistent
• We did not dare to take it the whole way

I am not shooting down the innovations there but sometimes we need to be more humble about the reasons our great ideas fail.

How much do you think Elin learned about Communicating Embedded Systems after reading this book?
We were probably slightly too early...

It's a good start

Yes, i have a tendency of scanning for a negative hidden message in everything. And this one does sound negative to me when it's given.  Don't wrap negative messages into something that sounds more positive - put it like this instead:

• You have not reached that far
• This is junk

But maybe it's too much to ask from Swedes and Americans. Negative feedback is not a strong side of these nationalities in general.

Source of the pictures: What does "It's a good start" actually mean

See it as a good experience

Sure, experiences are good in general. And when we have to go through something that hurts/annoys/irritates we learn something and come out stronger. But i don't ever want to hear this phrase from those who actually cause this experience, especially when the outcome it known a-priori.

Source: http://www.lovethispic.com/image/95103/what-doesn%27t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger

Spaghetti of Things

Spaghetti software was a popular term in the 90s, when I just started to learn programming. When a tool is given to someone who does not plan for dimensioning, scalability and extensibility, the end result becomes a spaghetti. And I did create a couple of spaghetti-projects myself, with all my love to quick-fixes and limited time to hand in assignments at university. Spaghetti code requires shorter starting curve but is not future proof. 

Similarly, "spaghetti" can easily be created when Internet of Things solutions are put together. A couple of years ago my team at Ericsson Research has created a prototype of a fully automated logistics system that consisted of some 100 sensors and actuators and used a control algorithm that could deal with any number of resources (vehicles, cranes, cargo) and adjusted to new logistics tasks and resource changes in real-time. No spaghetti code here. And a very beautiful demo that we presented at Mobile World Congress'2015. Underneath, however, was a "spaghetti" of cables, simply because not all of our devices were capable of wireless connectivity at that time.

Another example could be found at our place 5 years ago. I called it "brain of our apartment". A couple of net disks, wireless router, and even a stationary phone(!). Now we don't have cables any more, all is wireless and in the cloud, and still, there is a risk of creating virtual spaghetti. Ordinary users of a home kits such as Apple's or Telldus' can now easily automate their homes without any knowledge of the underlying technologies as all the complexity is hidden. The invisible cables will however connect our fridges, tv-boxes, coffee machines and temperature sensors to different servers and when you ask your TV to check how your cigars are doing, your AppleTV will send a request to an iCloud server somewhere in the world to decode what you actually meant by this phrase, get back your request in a machine-readable form, send it to your Apple HomeKit, further to the HomeKit application server, back home, then to Telldus server somewhere in the world, back home to the cigar humidor where the humidity sensor is placed, and all the way back to your TV to deliver the answer to your question. No wonder that responses can take time. And the loger the chain of events the longer the response times. Instead, the involved cloud services could talk between themselves and deliver back an answer, and hopefully they can find a "close" friend to discuss.

Picture sources: Spaghetti of cables, Talking servers