2 TOPICS DEALING GENERALLY WITH CAREERS

This section, which is not specific to me, might be useful in your career.  Of course, I do not guarantee that everything here applies to all people.

2.1 CONSIDERATIONS FOR WORK (AND GRADUATE SCHOOL)
        RESEARCH OR DESIGN
        BEING OPEN-MINDED
        WORKING WITH OTHER PEOPLE
2.2 CONSIDERATIONS FOR JOB-HUNTING
        NETWORKING
        OTHER TECHNIQUES FOR FINDING EMPLOYERS
        SOURCES OF ADVICE
        MISCELLANEOUS CONSIDERATIONS
2.3 TOPICS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
        SEARCHING THE RESEARCH LITERATURE
        THE JAVA PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
        MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

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2.1 CONSIDERATIONS FOR WORK (AND GRADUATE SCHOOL)

This section's information is, of course, just a fraction of the information that you might find useful for work.

RESEARCH OR DESIGN:

When designing things, one phenomenon that I have observed in software (and that probably exists in other areas) is that when there's an inconsistency, often there's a problem.  Here I define an inconsistency as a situation in which two parts of the thing being designed are symmetric in their relevant underlying characteristics and requirements, but the two parts have designs that are not symmetric.  When an inconsistency occurs, I suggest reexamining the designs (to check whether the parts should be designed consistently) and reexamining the characteristics and requirements (to check whether there really is an asymmetry).

Another phenomenon is that if a design becomes very complicated, there is an increased probability that there is a simpler design that is better.  This is sometimes known as the KISS principle (“Keep It Simple, Stupid”).

Quality can require effort. An article by the astronaut John Glenn says “How do you feel when the countdown gets down to the last few seconds? The standard answer to that one is to ask a counter question: how do you think you’d feel if you knew you were on top of that machine, comprised of thousands of parts all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract?”

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI), which I took at work in a seminar on thinking, is an assessment that helps identify your preferred styles of thinking.  After you have made some initial plans on a task, sometimes you can improve your plans by making an effort to use aspects of thinking that you do not typically emphasize.

Many things can be difficult to predict. I once attended a presentation by an economist who mentioned that the purpose of economic forecasting is to make fortune tellers look good by comparison.

No matter how carefully you document the intended purposes of something, somebody might try to use it for a different purpose.  Therefore, you might observe unexpected uses and unexpected requests for new features.  Will something succeed for an unintended purpose?  I view the answer this way:  Sometimes a thing succeeds for an unintended purpose, a thing is more likely to succeed for an intended purpose, and sometimes a thing fails for an intended purpose.  To state this more mathematically, 0 < Pa < Pb < 1, where Pa and Pb are the probabilities that something will succeed for (a) an unintended purpose and (b) an intended purpose, respectively.

In an interconnected system, sometimes a seemingly simple action can have unintended consequences.  I quote one web page of the World Health Organization (WHO):  This story began in the late 1950s when WHO carried out extensive programs to eradicate mosquitoes in Borneo by spraying the village areas with DDT.  Not long after, the palm-thatched roofs of the village houses began to collapse: a moth larva which fed on the palm fronds had increased because a predatory fly, which ordinarily kept the larva at low levels, had been annihilated by the DDT.  The contaminated flies were eaten by lizards which were eaten by housecats which also died.  As a result, rats began to invade the dwellings, posing a serious threat of diseases.  To solve the problem, WHO and Singapore’s Royal Air Force packed cats into perforated containers and dropped them into the villages by parachute.  Thus the story of Operation Cat Drop was born.  It attracted attention and controversy because a well-meaning action had resulted in the unbalancing of a delicate ecological equilibrium, but it lived on because of the intriguing image of cats plummeting into the Borneo jungle by parachute.

In designing a written or oral explanation of something (e.g., a computer language), I recommend explaining the simple things before explaining the complicated things.  For example, some explanations of the Unix operating system illustrate a Unix pipe (whose syntax is “|”) via an example like “cat myfile | lpr” without previously explaining “cat” and “lpr” individually.  The “cat” concatenates one or more operands (just “myfile” in this case), “lpr” prints its operand on a printer, and “|” feeds the output of one command (cat) into the input of another command (lpr).  Some people who read or hear such an explanation can get the incorrect impression that “cat myfile | lpr” is the simplest way to print a file.  However, the simplest way is really “lpr myfile.”  Explaining “cat” and “lpr” individually before explaining their combination can avoid giving the incorrect impression.

In designing an explanation, there can be a trade-off between thoroughness and conciseness.  I heard a presentation by Terry Smith called “The 10 Commandments (More or Less) of Successful Presentations.”  He gives an example to illustrate the need for conciseness: “A diminutive immature specimen of a ruminant mammal of the genus Ovis was under the exclusive dominion and control of Mary.”

It is always important to consider the users.  I quote this example from the “Error Messages” section of B. Shneiderman, Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, Addison-Wesley:  The phone company, long used to dealing with nontechnical users, offers this tolerant message:  “We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your call as dialed.  Please hang up, check your number, or consult the operator for assistance.”  They take the blame and offer constructive guidance for what do to.  A thoughtless programmer might have generated:  Illegal phone number.  Call aborted.  Error number 583-2R6.9.  Consult your user manual for further information.

BEING OPEN-MINDED:

Two events in my Ph.D. thesis work provide lessons on being open-minded:

• My undergraduate research, on a graphics project, involved writing firmware that included support for operating system functions and data structures.  This work led to my interest in firmware and graphics.  My M.S. thesis involved building a graphics package that performed main storage compaction (a subset of garbage collection) concurrently with usage of the graphics display, to avoid disrupting the display activities.  When searching for a Ph.D. thesis topic, I initially investigated firmware/hardware support for operating systems.  My search did not lead to a thesis topic, but one person whom I consulted was Robert Goldberg, whose thesis had dealt with architectural support for virtualization.  One day he asked about my M.S. thesis topic, and I told him.  He suggested investigating such reorganization (garbage collection, etc.) for databases, performed concurrently with usage.  I replied that I had looked at the previous semester's description of the database course, and it looked boring, but I was willing to investigate it.  The bottom line is that I was the grader for the database course in the next semester, I wrote a Ph.D. thesis in the database area, and my main area of interest since then has been databases!  Life is strange!
• At my oral qualifying examination, when I was mid-way through my thesis work, I explained several possible specializations that could be investigated within the topic of database reorganization.  My committee noted that I had made the most progress so far on performance modeling, so they suggested concentrating on that specialization.  I initially disliked that idea, since it seemed to be the least interesting specialization.  However, eventually I concentrated on that specialization, and 1 year later I had a Ph.D.  So the members of your committee might be smarter than you think they are!

Of course, things change, so we should keep learning.  For example, I learned about constructing web sites, as a prerequisite for constructing this web site.  There are opportunities for professional development.  For example, you can attend local events of professional societies.  For computer scientists, examples of such societies are ACM, IEEE, and the New England Database Society.  On the other hand, skills in well-established things can help sometimes.  In a joke from the Y2K time frame, a programmer had himself frozen, to be preserved for later.  As the year 10,000 approached, some people thawed him.  When he awoke, they told him, “We have this Y10K problem, and we heard that you know COBOL!”

Different people have different degrees of resistance to change, and the effort required to accommodate change is proportional to one's degree of resistance to change, of course.  One example of change-resistance is a tendency to consider an initial design the best design, even if later evidence indicates that a different design is better.

I heard a story about Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, who invented the scanning tunneling microscope.  When they told their colleagues about their proposed research, their colleagues said, “You're crazy!  It will never work.  But if it does work, you will win a Nobel Prize.”  The colleagues were partially correct; after it was shown to work, they won a Nobel Prize (physics, 1986).  Sometimes it is worthwhile to do what some people consider crazy.

In graduate school, a professor quoted a figure for the cost to produce a line of code (programming).  At the time, I had trouble believing the figure.  How can it cost so much?  Just write the code!  Now, however, I believe it!  For some lessons, full appreciation apparently requires first-hand experience.

Jumping to unjustified conclusions can be a mistake.  I attended a presentation by James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  He included an anecdote about the first vacation plane trip that he took while director.  Two armed bodyguards accompanied him.  At the beginning of the trip, one bodyguard notified the flight attendants that they were carrying firearms on the plane.  At the end of the trip, a flight attendant whispered something to a bodyguard, who laughed.  Mr. Woolsey later asked the bodyguard what the flight attendant said that made him laugh.  The flight attendant had told the bodyguard that she had been on many such flights before, but this (Mr. Woolsey) was the best-behaved prisoner that she had ever seen!

WORKING WITH OTHER PEOPLE:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality questionnaire that helps identify how you think and act.  It tells you which of 16 personality types you exhibit.  After I and my coworkers took it, we were given descriptions of how each of the 16 types is likely to do things.  I read the description for my type and thought “Oh, yes, that's an accurate description of how I work!”  Differences in personality types are one reason that different people do things in different ways.  The people can be different colleagues, different managers, different customers, etc.  Of course, it is not necessarily true that one way is better than the other; they might just be different.  For example, some people (including the owner of this web site) view most things as spectra (shades of gray), and some view most things as dichotomies (black and white).

People from different cultures often have different customs.  A friend worked for an American company that celebrated major product releases by giving employees T-shirts containing a message about the release.  He once visited an engineering lab that the company had in Germany.  After work one day, he and his German colleagues went out for drinks.  After a few beers, one colleague said “We love you Americans, but why do you keep sending us underwear?”

One activity that arises in work (not just in salary discussions) is negotiation.  People with whom you negotiate are not necessarily “opponents”; they might be “partners.”  This book might help:  R. Fisher, W. L. Ury, and B. Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Penguin Books.  One example of a technique is to analyze the parties' stated positions to discover the parties' underlying goals, which might not really contradict each other even if the stated positions seem to contradict each other.

Of course, consulting your colleagues can be very useful.  Different people have different perspectives, as I mentioned earlier.  If you have forgotten to consider an approach, perhaps a colleague will think of that approach.  The combination of different people's ideas is often better than any one person's idea.  Unfortunately, the combination is not always better; one classic joke is that the definition of a camel is a horse that a committee has designed.

Talking to colleagues before talking to outsiders can also help you find ambiguities and become aware of differences in terminology.  Murphy's Law, as applied to communication, says that anything that can be misinterpreted will be misinterpreted!

If you plan to work in a large corporation, this book might help:  C. Shapiro, Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know -- and What to Do About Them, St. Martin's Press.  The author, a former human resources executive, gives an insider's advice on corporate employment.


See also the next section on considerations for job-hunting. 

2.2 CONSIDERATIONS FOR JOB-HUNTING

Here are some caveats:

• I am a software engineer and researcher, not a professional advisor on job-hunting.
• Different cultures can have different practices.  I suggest that you investigate and respect the employment practices of the country in which you want to work.  I have worked only in the United States, and I can't guarantee the extent to which these considerations apply to jobs in other countries, but I suspect that most of them apply.
• This section's information is, of course, just a fraction of the information that you might find useful for job-hunting.

See also the previous section on considerations for work.

NETWORKING:

People find many (perhaps most) jobs through networking (contacting people), not through applying to companies' human resources departments.

In networking, asking for “advice on finding a position” sounds less threatening than asking more directly whether the person knows of a position.  If a networking contact happens to know of a position, he/she will mention it in answering your request for advice.  If he/she does not know of a position, his/her advice can still be useful.  Many companies give bonuses to current employees who find new employees; therefore, a networking contact at a prospective employer has a motivation to help you.

Of course, maintaining your network of contacts and being willing to help them are important even during periods when you are not looking for jobs.

There are many potential sources of networking contacts; this list is probably incomplete:

• Contact your friends and relatives.
• Search the alumni directories of any colleges or universities that you attended.  Many but not all alumni are happy to help a fellow alumnus whom they don't know.  To maximize the probability of finding a cooperative alumnus, do not pick alumni randomly.  Instead, limit your search to alumni whom you know, who majored in your major subject, who work at companies that interest you, who work in occupations that interest you, who have announced their availability to give career advice, or who have some other relevant characteristic.  Very recent graduates might be less cooperative than older alumni, who have seen more of the world of work.
• If you are a member of an organization, search its membership directory.  As with alumni, limit your search to members who have a relevant characteristic.
• Contact relevant professors whom you know (not necessarily at colleges or universities that you attended).
• Attend local events of professional societies.  For computer scientists, examples of such societies are ACM, IEEE, and the New England Database Society.
• There are web sites for business-oriented networking.  LinkedIn has many participants and also has a section for job openings.  You will probably find many people whom you know and many people at the companies that interest you.  There are tips on using LinkedIn to find a job.  I have less experience with Ryze.  Some people do career-related networking on social networking sites that are not specifically business-oriented, e.g., Facebook.  There are other sites, and many people whom I do not know at all have sent me invitations to join.  If you are a member of a networking site, I recommend against inviting people who have never heard of you, to avoid annoying them.
• Many products have users groups, some of which have local chapters.  If you have experience as a developer or a user of a product, consider the users group.
• Your geographic area might have networking groups.  Several people have recommended WIND in Massachusetts.
• See the web sites of venture capital (VC) firms.  Many (but probably not all) help in placement at the companies that they fund.  The National Venture Capital Association lists many VC firms.  The web sites of many VC firms include biographies of their team members; you might find a fellow alumnus.
• There are various Yahoo groups for networking and job-hunting.  There are groups for various geographic areas.  For example, the Boston area has boston_tech_jobs, bostonbusinessprofessionals, bostonstartups, and NewEnglandNetworking.  There are groups for people affiliated with various universities.  For example, if you are a computer scientist affiliated with Brown University, try cslubrano.  If you are affiliated with Harvard University, try Harvard-startups and HarvardJobs.  I am less familiar with Google groups.

OTHER TECHNIQUES FOR FINDING EMPLOYERS:

There are web sites for job postings.  Several people have recommended monster, Dice (for technical jobs), craigslist, the ACM career center (for computer science jobs), and the IEEE Computer Society career center (for computer science jobs).  Some other sites are specific to certain products or technologies.

Yes, some newspapers still exist.  For example, the Boston Globe and the San Jose Mercury News have online listings.

For information on a company that interests you, Hoover's, Yahoo Finance, and Google Finance can supplement what you find on the company's own web site.

Outside recruiters (which some people call “headhunters”) find people to work for their client companies.  Some people like to use recruiters, and some people do not.  If you contact recruiters, it is likely that some will be energetic for you and many will not be energetic for you.  Some companies' employment advertisements say “no recruiters” or “principals only.”  I'm not certain, but I think that all these things about recruiters are true:

• A company hires employees through a recruiter only if the company has an agreement with the recruiter.
• A company has such an agreement only if it is willing to pay the fee that the recruiter charges to a company that hires an employee through the recruiter.
• A recruiter would send your resume only to companies that have agreements with the recruiter, not to companies that lack agreements.

Therefore, I suspect that:

• If company X has such an agreement, then your use of the recruiter (to find a position at company X or another company) would not prevent you from getting a job offer at company X, because company X is willing to pay the recruiter's fee.
• If company X has no such agreement, again your use of the recruiter (to find a position at another company) would not prevent you from getting a job offer at company X, because I think that the recruiter would not send your resume to company X.
• If a recruiter does send your resume to a company that has no agreement with the recruiter, then the company has no obligation to pay the recruiter's fee if the company hires you.

Some people do free-lance (contract) work.  Some web sites that match companies with contractors are Elance, oDesk, sologig.com, and VirtualAssistants.com.  I have no experience with these web sites.

SOURCES OF ADVICE:

Here are ways to find advice in areas like choosing a career direction, improving your resume, tracking employment trends, networking, interviewing, and negotiating:

1. Many universities have career advice on their web sites.  Like many things on the web, the advice is free, even for non-alumni.  Some advice is oriented toward students who will graduate soon, but much advice also applies to people with more work experience.  Some such web sites list companies that are recruiting.
2. The United States Department of Labor has links to advice.
3. There are many books on job-hunting.  One classic, which is updated regularly, is R. N. Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute? 2009: A Practical Manual for Job-hunters and Career-Changers, Ten Speed Press.  The author gives advice on choosing a career, searching for jobs, and other topics.  I heard the author at a seminar.  He's an interesting speaker:
   
   • He said that he once lost a job as a church's canon, but that's OK because cannons are meant to be fired.
   • Somebody mentioned “recession-proof jobs.”  He said that if anybody has a recession-proof job, he does.
4. Another book is C. Shapiro, What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here?, St. Martin's Press.  The author, a former human resources executive, gives an insider's advice on interviewing, resumes, and other topics.
5. You can often find employment-related information in Yahoo Finance, Money, professional societies' web sites, and professional societies' e-mails to you.
6. For employment trends and advice in computer science, you can register for a free e-mail subscription to Computerworld's career information (after selecting “CareerMail”).
7. A career counselor can customize his/her help toward your goals.  Here are ways to find a career counselor:
   
   • Contact counselors at the career offices of colleges or universities that you attended.  Typically, they serve both alumni and current students.
   • If you live far away and you prefer a local counselor, your college might have a list of local counselors.
   • The National Board for Certified Counselors lists career counselors and other types of counselors.
   • A counselors' organization or licensing board in your state or local area might also list career counselors.
8. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which I mentioned in the previous section on considerations for work, can provide guidance on career choices.  Different career counselors have different opinions of the value of the MBTI in deciding on a career direction.

Different sources of advice can contradict each other.  For example, some people advise that a resume should always be 1 page long.  Some say that the maximum is 2 pages.  Some people advise that a resume can be longer, perhaps 1 page per decade of work experience.  I will not resolve the debate.  However, if you have a large amount of information to convey, but you do not want a long resume, one compromise is to set up your own web site (containing all the information that you want to convey) and to create a shorter resume that references the web site for more information.  Many e-mail providers also provide web hosting.

MISCELLANEOUS CONSIDERATIONS:

The file name of your resume should include your name, e.g., “ResumeGeorgeWashington” (if your name is George Washington).  Recipients might get many people's resumes and would not want many resume files all named just “Resume.”  Of course, if your name is George Washington, you are probably applying for a job as chief executive officer of a start-up.  ☺

I have read that to be successful, a fertilizer salesman emphasizes the customer's lawn, not the company's fertilizer.  Similarly, in interviewing, you can emphasize how you can help your prospective employer.  One part of preparing for interviews is to consider what you would want to hear if you were a hiring manager.


On any topic (e.g., job-hunting techniques), two people's suggestions might contradict each other.  That's life!

2.3 TOPICS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

SEARCHING THE RESEARCH LITERATURE:

I have used mainly three free web sites.  For each site, this table lists the site's name, the areas covered, and the number of publications that the site found in November 2007 when I searched for publications that I have authored:

Site's name	Areas covered	# publications
Google Scholar	many disciplines, including computer science	16
ACM Guide to Computing Literature	computer science	11
DBLP	computer science, especially databases and logic programming	10

    
Of the 16 publications that Google found, 8 were in both ACM and DBLP, 3 were just in ACM, 1 was just in DBLP, and 4 were in neither.  DBLP also found 1 publication that was in neither Google nor ACM.  Google found all my patents, but ACM and DBLP did not find any.  When analyzing this comparison, remember that this was a one-time test that involved only one search criterion (authorship by me); different search criteria can produce different comparisons (YMMV).

All three include facilities for advanced search.  ACM's advanced search seems to be the most powerful; it even lets you search by authors' affiliations (companies or schools).

ACM and DBLP also let you browse the tables of contents of journals and conference proceedings.

If you search DBLP by author, DBLP sorts the displayed publications by year.

Google (for some publications), ACM, and DBLP include BibTeX tags for publications, which will save you time if you want to reference the publications in a document that you are preparing with LaTeX.

You can also search for U.S. patents through the Patent and Trademark Office.  There are web sites for producing a pdf file for a patent; one such site is pat2pdf.org.

Many authors' web sites list more publications than any of the search sites list for those authors.  Besides using a search engine (Yahoo, Google, etc.), here are other ways to find an author's web site:

• In the ACM Guide, if you follow an author link from the page for one of that author's publications, the Guide also displays a link to the author's home page (if the author has an ACM web account and has sent the URL to ACM).  The page that results from searching the Guide by author will not display the home page link; you must follow an author link from a publication page.
• If you search DBLP by author, DBLP also displays a link to the author's home page (if the author has sent the URL to DBLP).

THE JAVA PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE:

I like this book:  D. Lowe and B. Burd, Java All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies, 2nd Edition, Wiley Publishing, 2007.  It is thorough (882 Pages) and easy to understand.  The book also notes these interesting facts:

• The Java license agreement says “Licensed Software is not designed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.”
• The Java copyright says “Nuclear, missile, chemical biological weapons or nuclear maritime end uses or end users, whether direct or indirect, are strictly prohibited.”

 I'm so disappointed!  ☺

I can usually find other Java subjects (not found in the book) on Sun's web site or elsewhere on the web.  Sun's web site provides the full specification of the language, a searchable tutorial, an overview of the platform packages, and other things.

MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE:

There is a blog on web 3.0 and the semantic web.


Forward to Section 3. Topics Dealing with Leisure.

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