Fantastic Stuff today!
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Well, not inspiring, but it pays the bills. And a lot of times, that’s very important to restoring balance in ones life.
If I’m really involved in a project, doing the lead design as is my want, I tend to get too wrapped up in all facets and it sort of takes over my life. I enjoy it, but suddenly I am obsessing over it. Now this is great if they are willing to pay for 80 hours a week, but many times this freaks people out because, while they get stuff sooner, the upfront cost is high, and my compatriots start keeling over at their desks. Where I am on a budget of like 172 hours/month, I still obsess by thinking about stuff in the shower, brushing my teeth, sleeping, driving.
I love that sort of thing, but it wreaks havoc on other parts of my life, like writing. That was the big reason that book 2 took so long and got rather rushed at the end, I went on a 3 month contract to do specs & design, ended up rebuilding the entire thing myself dragging their team along and it went 9 months, but we got the thing done. However, almost nothing happened on the book for much of that time.
They were budgeted on hours, but it kept my mind occupied off hours such that shifting gears to write was just too difficult.
So like, this year, I am very specifically NOT doing that. It’s just short projects, advising and systems work. Well, except that I got sidetracked in the spring by setting up my own cloud service company, becoming a registrar and ssl reseller and all the stuff that goes with hosting VM’s and VPS. Still only doing existing client hosting because I am behind on documenting all the instructions on how to drive client’s VM’s, firewalls, etc.
That’s not a completely bad idea for next time, if there were people that actually wanted to do editing on a Word document.
[quote=Iume;5638]Shock, that has been my job from time to time. Worst was when our project team had 6 consultants over from India. Smart guys, knew English, couldn’t write well worth a damn. 65 pages of notes was their spec. I ask if their colleges ever covered technical writing and document presentation as a course. They said no. No!
I spent a 8, 14 hours a day converting those documents in section, paragraphs, and even worse, the formatting, oh the inconsistent formatting and badly built table. Eventually they were professional enough to turn over. Just, yeesh. I’ve yet to have a moment like that where I wish I was better paid.[/quote]
Ditto..
I spent 3 years reviewing specs and trouble shooting our Indian consultants for SOA designs….
Of the 5 years I spent in total contracting to that organisation, I did nothing but write or review documents – didn’t get to write a single line of code….but considering the organisation was willing to pay contract Solution Architect rates for me to review documents, I wasn’t going to complain :-“
You guys are great!
Lots of great stuff today, unfortunately my day job caught up to me and I spent the entire day cleaning up 3 weeks of utter neglect on my part. Really good thing I got an end cranked out yesterday, I did not expect the day job rearing its head.
So I got started late and brain burned.
I need to grab a bite and get to bed at some point soon, so I will do the editing tomorrow.
I think I’ve got a handle on what needs to be fixed from a complex point of view (I hope) and the critical thing for that is sleeping on it.
Thanks so much!
Will be back in the saddle tomorrow morning!
psst, pay me as a contractor / temp telecommuter to help handle your workload so you can write more. :-” :-s :-s
Shock, that has been my job from time to time. Worst was when our project team had 6 consultants over from India. Smart guys, knew English, couldn’t write well worth a damn. 65 pages of notes was their spec. I ask if their colleges ever covered technical writing and document presentation as a course. They said no. No!
I spent a 8, 14 hours a day converting those documents in section, paragraphs, and even worse, the formatting, oh the inconsistent formatting and badly built table. Eventually they were professional enough to turn over. Just, yeesh. I’ve yet to have a moment like that where I wish I was better paid.
So what was your job supposed to be?
I think about what a pain it is to write specs and documentation, and English is my first language. I can only imagine how much they would not want to write specs/documentation in their second or third language.
Plus, overall, it’s been a while since I’ve been in academia, but back in the day, CS majors and other majors that went into Tech had relatively minimal writing requirements.
I would argue that any CS, Engineering Program or Science program should have serious technical writing requirements. It’s only going to become more important as systems get more complex. And in Science, if you can’t write a paper, you starve. Fortunately, they do mentor you on that in grad school, if you go for a Ph.D. But you don’t get much of it at the BS/MS level.
In the early days of building big systems all the people came from much more liberal arts programs rather than more dedicated technical and vocational backgrounds. Thus they could write because they were forced to take those classes.
But with the 80’s and later we began seeing much more targeted/narrow degree programs and certification programs. They tended to ignore communication.
Also, for a while, the big Six, as they used to be called, started everyone as a Business Analyst, and taught them this stuff, but by the time the Internet Era fully cranked up, the demand was so high, people didn’t start by learning the BA part. They were dropped into coding or systems.
That job? I was a project management analyst. My job to manage issues, risk, change requests, requirement coordintion, etc. Once the internal quality problems were known I was shifted over to internal QA and became a technical writer and review. I also got placed as a required step in all document signoff (informally) to ensure quality.
Later moved over to business systems analysis and college / new-hire training.
I noticed a similar problem these last four years with “business analysts”. They are sent for 3-5 weeks of systems training, then I get them. They had NO idea how to model a business. They knew what a flowchart was, but that limited to [u]within[/u] an ERP application. Couldn’t abstract, couldn’t map ERP to business without getting stuck on the nitty-gritty details of SAP or EBS waaaaay too early in the project. Their process flows were closer to UI/storyboard flow than anything else. That’s a system use case, not a business process flow! BP flows should model and KPI, process inefficiencies, handle coordination of work.
I had to teach context modeling, business process modeling, process decomposition, how to write a use case… dear god, why didn’t they already know how to write a use case? These people were closer to end-users that could configure than they were “business analysts”.
See, that’s exactly what the larger consulting firms (and other IT firms) did (and do) they grab what we call “green beans” and give them the title “Business Analyst” or “Junior Business Analyst” and then train them on the job, so they get that training. Schools don’t do that, not unless is a business school or MBA program.
I have come to dislike the title BA, because while great as a “role” as a job title (on a resume) it’s a crapshoot as to what you are getting. And no on in HR can tell good from bad. Seriously? But HR is also one of those places that they throw a lot of greenbeans at to see who works out and who falls through the cracks.
I have better luck with people in QA for some reason. it’s equally vague, but I’ve had better luck with it. Although maybe that’s the function of having good BA’s who can design a decent checklist for the QA team to follow. Yeah, that’s probably it.
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