Welcome back? Well, probably Welcome - I can’t imagine that anyone who used to read would be visiting my journal again after almost two years. The last couple of years have been stagnant; I have started several projects but have not managed to get a single one to production. I often wonder if this is similar to creator block, but it usually feels like burnout. Over the last year in particular, it feels like, in many ways, I have stopped thinking at all for myself but just existing and trying to get between work, home, and daily maintenance.

I started this blog over half a year ago now and have done a post every Monday. Some of the posts felt great to publish and write, but lately I have been noticing a drop in writing and have not even put in a basic proof reading check. As life has gotten busy this has taken a lower priority. Anyways, onwards.

I work in the engineering field and so often we build teams around delivering a feature or a product without any concern to how the customer interacts with the product. Us engineering teams will measure our success by how few meetings we had and how much coding we got done. But I would put forward that is flawed, instead teams should be focused around the customer. It is fine if more meetings are required to understand how the customer will use something or to get feedback on something new.

Recently I got the chance to hear from many different senior officials from several different companies. One of the officials is working towards a similar goal as mine which is to build complete teams that can deliver a single thing and have a driving feature of revenue as the final mark. What stood out to me was the way in which we are each are going about the implantation. The Vice president spends his days politicking other Vice Presidents, C-Levels, and the Board to allow him the budget to do this.

This follows somewhat from last weeks entry. It is strange how often we view are our actions and right and justified; where the actions of others are wrong and unjustified. It is strange to think that the majority of people are generally trying to do what they view as right based on their view of the world and their experiences. Yet, when we talk with them we, we assume they are trying to do harm, often to us directly.

Reality tends to follow your expectations. That might seem like a strange thing to say with how often we feel like it is others people’s actions that drive the world around us. But let me share a few examples to help illustrate the point. Illustration 1: You are a team lead and on of the members on the team you believe can’t possibly succeeded, maybe it is because they did not have the right education, personality, or length of time in the position.

Ok, maybe the title is a little wrong. You may have control what happened or what happened might have been a direct result of the choices you made. But, ultimately, their are to many people for you to control everything that happens and eventually something will happen that you did not wish. Strangely, we tend to get upset or annoyed by it, but our upset and annoyance does nothing to effect what happened and we have let the past control us.

Within the last few months, I have gotten the opportunity to move twice, once into a storage unit and then out of the storage unit when I purchased a more permeant place. Both times I used the same moving service, Two Men and a Truck, but each time I had a very difference experience. The first time with the service, the team was amazing. The team leader walked into the place with a positive attitude and made the task seem simple for the team and then quickly assigned roles to different members of his team and they completed the entire move in less time than estimated.

Every time private equity comes into a company, it is interesting to see how the culture changes at the company. Most companies I join tend to be on the small and coming into a growth and/or transition phase. When I join the company normally has a strong culture focused around a type of client and figuring out how to serve them best. The culture tends to also be strong, one that generally involves a lot of work, but includes nice extras in the break room, private offices, not overpacked spaces, etc.

I work in the tech industry and one of the most common slow downs that I run into is engineering building for a future requirement that may never exist. This does not mean to build as if you will never have to work on that product again, but to aim for a balance, such as documentation and test cases, but building code to be reusable later in another project or making the code written easy to expand later is commonly not worth it in many cases as it will frequently never be used again or expanded upon resulting in a lot of wasted time.