Sully Syed

Why the liberal arts are important: Learning to reflect

I hold a degree in computer science. I’ve been employed for 10+ years as a software developer. When the occasional news story comes out about liberal arts majors having trouble finding employment in today’s economy, there’s a part of me that feels smug. It says, “Yeah. All right. Go us. We made the right choice. We were rational about the job market.” And it is indeed very easy to indulge that part of myself by lapping up news that confirms my life choices.

But I’m also something of a contrarian. (Actually what’s probably more accurate is I hate to be wrong, so I feel compelled to understand the pro-arts side of the argument to prepare for it.) What is the appeal of the liberal arts in 2012? Are they necessary? In the end, I think my final position is that the liberal arts are important, and if a comparison must be done, they’re likely to  be more important than computer science or engineering. My reasoning: Engineering may allow us to live longer and better, but liberal arts let us find understanding in others and ourselves.

As evidence, I offer portions of a piece from 1997 by the late Earl Shorris. It’s about his attempt to teach a group of impoverished Americans about the humanities. It’s really quite profound and, I think, one of the only true ways to permanently solve poverty in the world. Enjoy the read.

Harper’s Magazine – On the Uses of a Liberal Education, Part II: As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor

We had never met before. The conversation around us focused on the abuse of women. [Viniece Walker]’s eyes were perfectly opaque—hostile, prison eyes. Her mouth was set in the beginning of a sneer.

“You got to begin with the children,” she said, speaking rapidly, clipping out the street sounds as they came into her speech.

She paused long enough to let the change of direction take effect, then resumed the rapid, rhythmless speech. “You’ve got to teach the moral life of downtown to the children. And the way you do that, Earl, is by taking them downtown to plays, museums, concerts, lectures, where they can learn the moral life of downtown.”

I smiled at her, misunderstanding, thinking I was indulging her. “And then they won’t be poor anymore?”

She read every nuance of my response, and answered angrily, “And they won’t be poor no more.”

“What you mean is—”

“What I mean is what I said—a moral alternative to the street.”

She didn’t speak of jobs or money. In that, she was like the others I had listened to. No one had spoken of jobs or money. But how could the “moral life of downtown” lead anyone out from the surround of force? How could a museum push poverty away? Who can dress in statues or eat the past? And what of the political life? Had Niecie skipped a step or failed to take a step? The way out of poverty was politics, not the “moral life of downtown.”

But to enter the public world, to practice the political life, the poor had first to learn to reflect. That was what Niecie meant by the “moral life of downtown.” She did not make the error of divorcing ethics from politics. Niecie had simply said, in a kind of shorthand, that no one could step out of the panicking circumstance of poverty directly into the public world.

Although she did not say so, I was sure that when she spoke of the “moral life of downtown” she meant something that had happened to her. With no job and no money, a prisoner, she had undergone a radical transformation. She had followed the same path that led to the invention of politics in ancient Greece. She had learned to reflect.

In further conversation it became clear that when she spoke of “the moral life of downtown” she meant the humanities, the study of human constructs and concerns, which has been the source of reflection for the secular world since the Greeks first stepped back from nature to experience wonder at what they beheld.

If the political life was the way out of poverty, the humanities provided an entrance to reflection and the political life. The poor did not need anyone to release them; an escape route existed. But to open this avenue to reflection and politics a major distinction between the preparation for the life of the rich and the life of the poor had to be eliminated.

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5 questions great job candidates ask

There are lots of articles like these on the Web that have terrible questions in them and exist solely as SEO bait. As a rare exception, I thought the first three of these five questions were terrific, and something I personally experienced during my interviews when I was looking for jobs in Pensacola.

Inc.com – 5 Questions Great Job Candidates Ask

What do you expect me to accomplish in the first 60 to 90 days?

Great candidates want to hit the ground running. They don’t want to spend weeks or months “getting to know the organization.”

They want to make a difference–right away.

What are the common attributes of your top performers?

Great candidates also want to be great long-term employees. Every organization is different, and so are the key qualities of top performers in those organizations.

Maybe your top performers work longer hours. Maybe creativity is more important than methodology. Maybe constantly landing new customers in new markets is more important than building long-term customer relationships. Maybe it’s a willingness to spend the same amount of time educating an entry-level customer as helping an enthusiast who wants high-end equipment.

Great candidates want to know, because 1) they want to know if they fit, and 2) if they do fit, they want to be a top performer.

What are a few things that really drive results for the company?

Employees are investments, and every employee should generate a positive return on his or her salary. (Otherwise why are they on the payroll?)

In every job some activities make a bigger difference than others. You need your HR folks to fill job openings… but what you really want is for HR to find the right candidates because that results in higher retention rates, lower training costs, and better overall productivity.

You need your service techs to perform effective repairs… but what you really want is for those techs to identify ways to solve problems and provide other benefits–in short, to generate additional sales.

Great candidates want to know what truly makes a difference. They know helping the company succeed means they succeed as well.

What do employees do in their spare time?

Happy employees 1) like what they do and 2) like the people they work with.

Granted this is a tough question to answer. Unless the company is really small, all any interviewer can do is speak in generalities.

What’s important is that the candidate wants to make sure they have a reasonable chance of fitting in–because great job candidates usually have options.

How do you plan to deal with…?

Every business faces a major challenge: technological changes, competitors entering the market, shifting economic trends… there’s rarely a Warren Buffett moat protecting a small business.

So while a candidate may see your company as a stepping-stone, they still hope for growth and advancement… and if they do eventually leave, they want it to be on their terms and not because you were forced out of business.

Say I’m interviewing for a position at your bike shop. Another shop is opening less than a mile away: How do you plan to deal with the new competitor? Or you run a poultry farm (a huge industry in my area): What will you do to deal with rising feed costs?

A great candidate doesn’t just want to know what you think; they want to know what you plan to do–and how they will fit into those plans.

Sully Syed

Getting Aptana Studio 3 to ignore extremely large folders in your project

I’m in the midst of a website conversion to WordPress, and the resulting import of images to the uploads/ folder is somewhere north of 8 GB. My IDE, Aptana Studio 3, tries to scan the folder every time I refresh the project or do code completion. I was on the verge of ditching Aptana altogether when I hit upon the answer:

  1. Move the large folder you wish to have Aptana ignore out of your project and replace it with an empty folder.
  2. Refresh the project to ensure the empty folder appears in the project.
  3. Right-click on the empty folder and select Properties, and then Resource.
  4. Under Attributes, check Derived.
  5. Copy the contents of the folder back into place – Aptana should ignore it and keep UI responsiveness quick.

Sources:

Sully Syed

All hail the generalist

I’ll have to buy Mr. Mansharamani a drink or two if I ever meet him at a bar. I’ve considered myself a generalist for nearly a decade, but I’ve at times had difficulty explaining how useful it is to have a broader viewpoint when looking at specific problems.

All Hail the Generalist

…

Approximately 2,700 years ago, the Greek poet Archilochus wrote that “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 essay “The Fox and the Hedgehog” contrasts hedgehogs that “relate everything to a single, central vision” with foxes who “pursue many ends connected…if at all, only in some de facto way.” It’s really a story of specialists vs. generalists.

In the six decades since Berlin’s essay was published, hedgehogs have come to dominate academia, medicine, finance, law, and many other professional domains. Specialists with deep expertise have ruled the roost, climbing to higher and higher positions. To advance in one’s career, it was most efficient to specialize.

For various reasons, though, the specialist era is waning. The future may belong to the generalist. Why’s that? To begin, our highly interconnected and global economy means that seemingly unrelated developments can affect each other. Consider the Miami condo market, which has rebounded quite nicely since 2008 on the back of strong demand from Latin American buyers. But perhaps a slowdown in China, which can take away the “bid” for certain industrial commodities, might adversely affect many of the Latin American extraction-based companies, countries, and economies. How many real estate professionals in Miami are closely watching Chinese economic developments?

Secondly, specialists toil within a singular tradition and apply formulaic solutions to situations that are rarely well-defined. This often results in intellectual acrobatics to justify one’s perspective in the face of conflicting data. Think about Alan Greenspan’s public admission of “finding a flaw” in his worldview. Academics and serious economists were dogmatically dedicated to the efficient market hypothesis — contributing to the inflation of an unprecedented credit bubble between 2001 and 2007.

Finally, there appears to be reasonable and robust data suggesting that generalists are better at navigating uncertainty. Professor Phillip Tetlock conducted a 20+ year study of 284 professional forecasters. He asked them to predict the probability of various occurrences both within and outside of their areas of expertise. Analysis of the 80,000+ forecasts found that experts are less accurate predictors than non-experts in their area of expertise.

Tetlock’s conclusion: when seeking accuracy of predictions, it is better to turn to those like “Berlin’s prototypical fox, those who know many little things, draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradictions.” Ideological reliance on a single perspective appears detrimental to one’s ability to successfully navigate vague or poorly-defined situations (which are more prevalent today than ever before).

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The skills gap myth: Survey reveals why companies can’t find “good people”

As a software developer I’m always bemused by the leaders of industry who lament the lack of skilled workers to fill open positions in my field. It seems that too many forget one of the most basic rules of capitalism: If demand is low, you’re not offering enough value. As it fits this scenario: If developers aren’t applying for your position, you’re not offering enough compensation.

This is rather cynical, but I imagine that these pronouncements aren’t for my ears anyways: They’re made to justify keeping “information technology professionals” on the overtime exempt list, or to raise immigration caps for technology workers. (Which is often well justified, but I wonder at the distortion it introduces to the domestic labour pool.)

TIME.com – The Skills Gap Myth: Why Companies Can’t Find Good People

…

The first thing that makes me wonder about the supposed “skill gap” is that, when pressed for more evidence, roughly 10% of employers admit that the problem is really that the candidates they want won’t accept the positions at the wage level being offered. That’s not a skill shortage, it’s simply being unwilling to pay the going price.

But the heart of the real story about employer difficulties in hiring can be seen in the Manpower data showing that only 15% of employers who say they see a skill shortage say that the issue is a lack of candidate knowledge, which is what we’d normally think of as skill. Instead, by far the most important shortfall they see in candidates is a lack of experience doing similar jobs.

Employers are not looking to hire entry-level applicants right out of school. They want experienced candidates who can contribute immediately with no training or start-up time. That’s certainly understandable, but the only people who can do that are those who have done virtually the same job before, and that often requires a skill set that, in a rapidly changing world, may die out soon after it is perfected.

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Sully Syed

Moon approved

On 1st March 1965, OMEGA’s Speedmaster chronograph was “flight-qualified by NASA for all manned space missions“. Aside from this bit of starry eyed trivia, I’ve always thought that the Speedmaster neatly straddled the line between minimalism and showiness. It’s a watch that doesn’t knock anyone’s socks off for being huge or flashy, but is appreciated for those who know of its historical significance and pedigree.

Back in 2009 I acquired a Speedmaster Reduced (3539.50) which, on account of being extremely comfortable to wear, has become something I wear daily. It’s also nice to own an automatic variant of the watch so I don’t have to wind it quite so often.

Sully Syed

We are not now that strength which in old days; Moved earth and heaven

Despite being originally taken in 1962, the above remains a well-recognized photograph: That’s James Meredith, the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, walking to class accompanied by U.S. Marshal James McShane on his left and John Doar of the Justice Department to his right.

John Doar was bestowed with the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday. Sometimes it seems like the world is running out of men like Mr. Doar; men and women willing to put their lives on the line to take an unpopular stand and do what they think is right.

Sully Syed

Heroku’s Adam Wiggins on how to scale a development team

Not much to say here; I think this is an excellent template for growing a software company and this is my way or preserving copy for when I need it.

Adam Wiggins – How To Scale a Development Team

As hackers, we’re familiar with the need to scale web servers, databases, and other software systems. An equally important challenge in a growing business is scaling your development team.

Most technology companies hit a wall with dev team scalability somewhere around ten developers. Having navigated this process fairly successfully over the last few years at Heroku, this post will present what I see as the stages of life in a development team, and the problems and potential solutions at each stage.

Stage 1: Homebrewing

In the beginning, your company is 2 – 4 guys/gals working in someone’s living room, a cafe, or a coworking space. Communication and coordination is easy: with just a few people sitting right next to each other, everyone knows what everyone else is working on. Founders and early employees tend to be very self-directed so the need for management is nearly non-existent. Everyone is a generalist and works on a little bit of everything. You have a single group chat channel and a single [email protected] mailing list. There’s no real need to track any tasks or even bugs. A full copy of the state of the entire company and your product is easily contained within everyone’s brain.

At this stage, you’re trying to create and vet your minimum viable product, which is a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to figure out what you’re even doing here. Any kind of structure or process at this point will be extremely detrimental. Everyone has to be a generalist and able to work on any kind of problem – specialists will be (at best) somewhat bored and (at worst) highly distracting because they want to steer product development into whatever realm they specialize in.

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2012 vs. 1984: Comparing the costs of tuition and housing

One of Canada’s best finance journalists, Rob Carrick, wrote this piece in response to the furious protests being held by students in Quebec regarding skyrocketing tuition fees and living expenses.

The Globe And Mail – 2012 vs. 1984: Young adults really do have it harder today

All young adults who think they’re getting a raw deal in today’s economy, let me tell you about how it was back in my day.

In 1984, my final undergraduate year of university, tuition cost more or less $1,000. I earned that much in a summer without breaking a sweat.

When I went looking for a new car in 1986, the average cost was roughly half of what it is now. It was totally affordable.

The average price of a house in Toronto back in 1984 was just over $96,000. I wasn’t buying just then, but it’s worth noting that the average family after-tax income back then was close to $50,000. Buy a first home? Easy to imagine for new graduates of the day.

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Sully Syed

The Hindenburg over Manhattan

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The Hindenburg floats past the Empire State Building over Manhattan on August 8, 1936, en route to Lakehurst, New Jersey, from Germany. (AP Photo)

— In Focus – 75 Years Since The Hindenburg Disaster