Documentation

I like writing documents. Because of the way I was indoctrinated early on in my career, I learnt that documents with fancy names meant that you were more mature in your process. Documents are meant to transfer information around between different people, departments and companies. Its meant to solidify and get agreement on specifications. There's different templates, formats, audiences...the whole deal.

So early on I relished writing documents. I was told that it was important to document the requirements for a system, then document the design of a system after it was built, then document the ...... you get the message.
I then became a consultant, and documents were the measure of progress, and sometimes even the actual thing that we sold. I have worked on projects where for 3 months a team of us created a single power point deck.
In the IT industry, documentation is the lingua franca, the currency of the day. Its what we trade in. "I will send you the Technical Specification once you send me the Business Requirements". So we spend our day writing reams of documents, and project meetings ticking off the documents we have written. But there is one big problem with this whole process:

Nobody reads documents!

There, I said it! Nobody ever reads them, until the person has left the company and the next guy needs to the figure what has been done. This ignores the people who review documents just to nitpick the format, section placement, etc. But nobody reads documents to actually transfer knowledge, and get agreement on a project thats active. Because its just simply a broken way to transfer knowledge - you lose context, the formats and templates force you to write in Enterprise, so you lose the gist of what was intended.

Then there is the technicalities - how do I provide feedback on a document that I actually have read: using comments in Word, separate email referring to section numbers, etc. How do I provide comments/feedback on wiki articles?

C'mon, we need a better way to do this?

Relevance

IT was an exciting field to get into. It was young, and even for the layman, fairly easy to get into. You could easily build up skills, and make a name for your self. Even without a degree, there are many courses, and guys (mostly) got jobs. Our generation replaced the 'main-frame' guys - we used our Java to mock their COBOL,  as we showed them Linux running on our laptops that blew their mind.

But after 10 years now, I can see the 'gotchas'.  There is no "science" to IT. It changes far too fast to mature. And thats the double-edged sword of IT - low barrier to entry as supposed to medicine or engineering, but because it changes so fast, we are becoming quickly out-dated. Not because we don't have the desire and capability to learn and up-skill, but because we will miss the next big mind-shift, and we won't be fast enough to catch up. The next generation will take our combined learnings as innate and obvious and basic, and will define new architectures that we just won't 'GET'.

They say that Computer Science is about learning fundamentals, that can be applied in other areas. Degrees (Engineering, Computer Science, etc) is more about learning how to learn, then learning any language or system in particular. Its about the basic building blocks of Operating Systems, and databases, and other stuff. They should be able to re-learn and re-invent themselves as systems and tools change. But I argue that in 20 years or less, most of those building blocks (data structures, CPUs, networks) will be so vastly changed, that they wont apply any more. They will be so far abstracted away by new languages and frameworks, that you wont even have to think about DNS and IP any more, it will just be assumed. So all those things that we are so particular about when designing systems, like High Availability, Modularity and so forth, will be 'built-in' to the new building blocks of the future, rendering our past experiences and knowledge as null and void.

The people of a few hundred years ago had to primarily worry about food and heat. Those were their basic building blocks of their life. Nowadays, food and heat are just assumed to be there. We can get it with no effort - its included in everything we know and see. So if a person of the past appeared in this day, his complete life of experiences built around learning how to hunt, and how to generate fire, is completely useless. In the same way, as the building blocks of IT change, at some point, it will render past generations (us) irrelevant.

I think thats the key thought: relevance! Will the skills that we have built now, still be relevant in 20 years time. For a doctor and engineer, as he ages, he just gets better at what he does. For guys in IT, change and time is the killer.

It would be interesting to track how a doctor who qualified ten years, would continue to earn over the next fifty years, compared to an IT-skilled person.


Some interesting posts I came across:

• http://www.quora.com/What-jobs-will-exist-in-10-years-that-dont-exist-now-and-how-do-I-prepare-to-qualify-for-them
• http://www.quora.com/Will-a-degree-in-computer-science-still-be-in-demand-50+-years-from-today

Learning and Training

I've just about completed 10 years in the corporate world. Since leaving campus, opportunities for formal studying and training have been difficult to come by. You have to have a plan, be dedicated, and make the time, while being sure to be fair and balance life, family and work.

As I look back, I realise I should have studied more. Here is a quick look at what I have done so far:

• 2005 - 2007: At ECN, I did no formal training. I suppose I was just happy to be finally done with exams after 15 years or so.
• 2008 - 2010:  Early in 2008 just after I joined, I decided I wanted to do more studying. I found out about a MSc Eng in Telecoms that Wits was offering. Some of the guys had completed while still at Wits before coming to work. I planned to complete it over 3 years. The first half of the year was for the course work and lectures, and the 2nd half of the year for research. I did two courses in 2008, and two courses in 2009. Each course lasted 6 weeks, with lectures of 3 hours, two days a week. I used to wake up at 3am to study, come in to work at 7am, leave for lectures at 8:30, and come back at lunch, and stay till late. 3 hour exam at the end of each course! When I told my manager that I was going to make up for all the lost work he said "I dont care what hours you do, just finish the work". Awesome!!! After 2 years of studying most weekends, I gave up. Best decision I made, with absolutely no regrets. Family is more important than this.
• During the same time at MTN, I did a one day Time Management course offered off-site. I still remember some of the things I learned, and have been practicing on it. 
• I also did a one-week F5 BigIP Load-Balancer support engineer course
• Ericsson GSM one-week course
• SmartTrust DP support engineer one week course
• I was scheduled for an Oracle DB one-week course, but my resignation meant I could note make it
• 2011 - 2013: Two major training events at Accenture. Core Consulting School in Chicago in March 2011 - this is one of mandatory schools. They teach the Accenture methodology, primarily for Project Management and client interaction. Very good learning experience - about 300 similar skilled people from all over the world for a week.
• The other major one was Technology Architecture school in London. Very awesome learning experience
• TMForum training - one week
• I also self-studied towards Cisco CCNA1 in May 2011, and CCNA2 during July 2011. In December 2011 and January 2012, I self-studied CCDA
• 2013 - 2015: During December 2013 at IS I self-studied SIP School SSCA
• Formal CCNA SP 1 training for a week, and the exam the next week.
• During December 2014 / January 2015, self studied EMC Information and Storage Management. Exam coming soon I hope
• I also did a on-line VCE Associate course with exam, that took about 6 hours in December

I hope to do a VMWare course and Exam this year, as well as complete CCNA SP 2.