Now that I’m entering the 5th decade of my career with technology companies – and with Covid19 providing an assist in freeing up my calendar somewhat – lately it’s been a time of reflection.

I’ve never considered myself to be a standout engineer. I’ve done okay in my career, no complaints, but have never worked anywhere that I was the BMOC technology-wise.  Each place has had some real shining stars and it’s been both a privilege and humbling to get to know them.

But there are different ways to add value to your particular engineering organization. I was reminded of this yesterday as I was mentoring a new start on the deployment process for some frontend code. This is a process I only learned myself a couple of months ago, but now I’m mentoring others on it. That’s often how it works. Not long after you learn something, others in the company start referring to you as the defacto SME.

I made a list of some former senior co-workers who have taken the time to mentor me so that I could try to find common traits that made them good mentors. For what it’s worth, here’s what I came up with. If you’re junior on the scale of things, maybe seek people with some of these traits out. If you’re senior, just know that people with these particular traits have made a real difference in my career.

True SME

First and foremost the person needs to be a true subject matter expert (SME) on whatever it is I’m asking about. They either know the answer or know where to find it. At the end of the day, they’ve been helpful in advancing whatever problem I’ve been tasked with resolving.

The little things

Knowlege and skils are great but it makes a huge difference if they are also personable. This is not always the case with those who are considered top of the heap on the tech stack scale. We have all run into the legendary recluse who has marginal social skills but is yet invaluable to the company because they just know so much. It can be frustrating when people with the most knowledge aren’t equipped to help, but that’s just how it is in tech. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

What is most helpful is the very basics, like getting calls/emails returned. Everyone is busy, but the good mentor will at least respond and communicate that while maybe they are busy right now, they will set expectations on when they can meet with you at a later time in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you’re stressing them out with your questions.

Meet me at my level

No, I don’t mean showing up at my desk. I mean asking ME questions to find out what I already know or don’t know so they know where to start. Some people make assumptions that I already know several things I have yet to learn and start talking over my head from the first sentence. Then we have to back up.  The good mentor wants to know where to start and then bring my understanding along at whatever pace is possible.

A real-world example

I once left a fairly stable career in Aerospace in Everett, WA. in order to move the family back to the city where I grew up, Portland, Oregon. I was still writing software, but it was for a small printer company. The underlying technologies of the companies had nothing in common with each other (Flight Controls v. Printers). This change was harder than I had expected it would be.

When I arrived our team of 10 was tasked with reverse-engineering the Adobe PostScript Level II interpreter so that the parent company (Oce’, Netherlands) could avoid paying royalties to Adobe when they shipped their printers with PostScript capability.

I was new so they had divided up the teams in the backroom and then let me know my assignment. I was very fortunate to get paired with not only an extremely brilliant engineer but also a fantastic mentor.

There were only two of us tasked with writing the rendering engine for the printer. The renderer is really where the rubber meets the road in printing. It’s the lowest level. It’s where all of those high-level commands get turned into dots on a page… but not before the boundaries of the image or text are set, and the image is broken up into hundreds if not thousands of trapezoids to fill with dots.

The very notion of that design was fascinating from the start.  Ah, so that’s how they do it.  Wow, I have no idea where to start. My mentor did though. He was a math major and no stranger to figuring this type of thing out. But best of all he was a FANTASTIC teacher. We may have benefited some from small team dynamics, but he set aside about 3 separate 1-hour whiteboard sessions to explain in detail, the design he had in mind. And he stopped to let me ask questions. He figured out where I was starting from (ground zero) and we went from there. His ability to put the right thoughts and images in my head was off the charts helpful. When I talked he listened.  It was… fabulous.  And I learned it.  And if memory servers I performed pretty well after that and held my own.

The pace of change at work has gotten even more frenetic since the 1990’s when I transitioned to printing.  I just hope people can be made aware of how valuable this level of mentoring can be.

Breaking: Jerry Falwell tests negative for Christianity. @travisakers

There are few things I can imagine that would be much harder than telling 300 million people “Nothing to see here” in the midst of a global pandemic, so I have to give the Trump administration credit for trying at least.  Just a minor blip to my booming economy.  We’ll be fully open for business by Easter.

We are all going to be telling our deepest, darkest secrets to a volleyball within 72 hours. @DoYouEvenLlf

One of the things that drives me crazy about the main stream media is that the perception that “the economy will do better under republican leadership” goes unchallenged when the data suggests otherwise.  It happens every election cycle and because people hear it on the news this way, republicans get credit in the minds of most Americans for something that just isn’t true.  In 2016 Republicans were throwing crazy numbers for GDP growth out there like 4% if only we could get our tax cut, this engine would really start cooking.  According to the chart below, GDP growth under republican leadership is nothing to be bloviating about.

Then the media has the current woefully under-qualified NEC director Larry Kudlow on and they let him get away with using phrases like “This economy is… smokin‘”.   And he doesn’t just say smokin’, he says smokin‘ like a line right out of American Graffiti, with all kinds of emphasis that suggest that now that republicans have enacted their tax cut for the rich, we are REALLY COOKING NOW. 

And the Sunday morning shows don’t challenge it.  They don’t review the actual data and say Larry,  please show me the data that says the economy is better now vs. Obama.  It never happens.  They get a pass on this issue ever since the Reagan administration convinced everyone that trickle down was effective.

Kudlow, a disciple of the laffer curve, gets a free pass every time as do other republicans.  It’s beyond my comprehension how this continues to happen.

It’s true that unemployment is a little bit lower under Trump, but at what cost?  The tax cuts of 2017 were based on the promise of getting to 4% growth (every real economist knew this wasn’t going to happen) and the idea that the tax cuts would pay for themselves.  Obviously, they are not as the federal deficit is getting worse under Trump, and with Coronavirus, about to get worser.

To my maximum frustration level, the MSM just gives republicans a pass on these broken promises.  The general public still thinks that Democrats are going to enact policies that destroy this smokin‘ economy,  when in fact it’s doing the same thing it did under Obama, it’s just that (until recently) Trump is riding on the coat-tails of a bull market and acting as if he was responsible for every point growth in the S&P 500.  Not true.

The job market has remained steady over the past 3 years, but has it done something so noteworthy that republicans get to brag about how awesome things are under their leadership?   Looks the same to me.

Why doesn’t the MSM look at the data and challenge these assertions?

A big part of how people perceive this issue is simply how we talk about it.  Democrats need to do a much better sales pitch in this area.  It’s as if you’re riding a bus to Los Angeles and everything is going fine but then they switch drivers in Sacramento and tell the whole bus, WOW! this trip is really going well now!  When in fact it’s the same experience, different day.

It happened on the Republican watch.  Finally.  The recession I’d been dreaming of.

At last, Trumpy ran into some bad luck.  It was bound to happen.  The Coronavirus is a serious threat to seniors and Trump’s attempt to frame it as a hoax failed miserably.  Witness the stock market decline of 8,000 points in the past week.  Of course, it helps when messaging if the messenger has credibility.  Trump has none.  His staff has to spend the following day of every press conference cleaning up the lies and other misleading statements.

The best part of it all is it is happening on the Republican watch.  The biggest arguments for supporting Trump have all been wiped out in one week.  The how’s your 401k argument – gone.

I’ve said for years the Presidents get too much credit for market conditions when they are good and too much blame when they are bad.  So normally I would defend that argument except for the fact that Trump has been taking credit every point rise in the Dow Industrials since he took office.  Never-mind the fact that the economy that he inherited was riding a 6-year run of nothing but growth.

Every president has to face some adversity at some point.  Some market condition that is out of his/her control.  What we then observe is how well they handle adversity.  GW Bush had 9/11.  He brought the country together at least, including trying very hard to win the support of moderate Muslims.  Obama had the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent housing crash to deal with.  He instituted QE2, bailed out the auto-industry and restored faith to the markets.  It took over a year but he did it.  Hilarious that the Tea Party was wailing about QE2 but unanimously supported Trump’s bailout of the farmers due to his own tariffs.

Trickle-down is what George Herbert Walker Bush said it was back in 1992.  “Voo-doo economics.”

Faced with a pandemic, Trump had two options, both really bad, but one was less bad.  He could have faced it head-on, explained that we’re in a tough situation for a while and deploy the government services to respond in full.  The downside of this is that the markets aren’t going to like  the news of course, but long term they would like that it’s being dealt with and a recovery period is in sight.

The other option he had (and chose), was to try to minimize the pandemic as another form of the flu, nothing to worry about really, and hope the markets don’t notice.  The problem is, he lies so much his credibility was suspect.  The markets were nervous anyway but when the truth came out, boom, -8,000 points in a week.  The markets just voted “no confidence” that he won’t bungle the whole affair by trying to lie his way out of it.

So Trump finally got his batch of adversity in 2020.  The economy was overdue for a recession.  It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving administration and party ..on their watch.

Volume off

Volume on

When the mainstream media pulls together a select panel of undecided voters, I know without a doubt that I’m looking at the dumbest voting block in the country.

I wouldn’t say this of a hardcore Trump supporter, … necessarily.

At least with a full fledged Trump supporter you know what you’re getting. They have been paying attention and have made a choice. A horrible choice, but at least they are cognizant of the world around them and let us know where they stand.

The undecided voter gets no such benefit. If you haven’t figured out where you stand between the choice of Hillary or Trump, then I’m sorry but you are a dumb ass.

It’s like standing there in front of the TV and with a straight face saying gosh, I need to find a job but I can’t decide if I should pursue coal mining or go into medicine.

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans were aghast when Bill Clinton met with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix, Az. and chatted for 20 minutes.  And rightfully so, Hillary was under investigation for the now-infamous nothing-burger e-mail scandal.  Given the situation, it was terrible judgement to meet with the active AG when your wife is under investigation.

Now we have William Barr who, if he’s not sleeping at the White House appears to be a de-facto member of the Trump cabinet.  To quote Lev Parnas, “He was on the team” when it came to drumming up opposition research on Joe Biden.   Of course, the Republicans are fine with this instance of abuse of power because well, hypocrisy.