What Greg Learned… #4 to the end

I lose track of the numbers, but let’s be frank… they don’t matter. It’s the countdown to the end, and after this weekend that leaves 3!

What? I seem focused on the end, not on the now? Would a 22 minute podcast change your mind? A, um, partial transcript after the break.

It’s a whole new week, after a week off to be grumpy. I’m Greg, this is my podcastblogdiary thing that I call What Greg Learned. And maybe part of the frustration this term is that the literal answer… what I really learned this weekend… is hard to work out.

Let’s face it, though- it’s the last term. I’ve put in five good solid terms of hard effort, a few classes aside, and I’m about to have some credentials to go with some newfound confidence to feel like I can go out and have a shot in all sorts of places. It’s starting to feel occasionally like Spring, we’re into the last half of the last term… heck, it’s time to relax a bit. And, where classes aren’t the brutal boot camp of knowledge that I fantasize about, maybe it’s my place to accept that, in education like in so many other aspects of life, my insistence on not fitting in with an easily generalized target segment of the market means that there’s no money to be made for anybody – television studio, game maker, clothes maker, or even academic program – if their business plan is “Make what Greg wants”.

Maybe that’s what I learned.

Anyway! Strategic management is the most laid back class I’ve had. For one thing, it’s a weird subject to teach. It seems almost like you have to take one subject in business – finance, marketing, leadership, data analysis, microeconomics… and teach the entire curriculum through that lens, because you can describe all of business through any one of those. When you teach a generalized curriculum that has an introduction level course in each of these subjects… like we have… what you end up with are a lot of overlapping bits of subject matter. Strategy consists largely of analyzing what’s going on so you can act with some freakin’ idea of what you’re doing. In a business community, it often means doing pseudo-science and pseudo-math to be able to convince people who aren’t good at either of those disciplines that what you are proposing is based on incontrovertible FACT. Of course, it’s really based on simple arithmetic performed on numbers plucked out of the ether and extrapolated with the business world’s hilarious love of linear relationships.

I don’t mind the class, and do take pretty extensive notes during it. My classmates are… well, less enthusiastic, and can’t seem to get past the prof’s new-agey bearing. So far, though, it’s the class I’d say has the most potential that if I delve into it more I’ll get more payoff.

Research and Development Management certainly doesn’t fall into that. I’m actually pretty impressed that somehow fate worked out that somebody would take all the professors I haven’t liked much up to this point and made a single hybrid professor out of all their worst features. This is the guy who I talked the first week about how he’d mention some obscure person or topic or journal or whatever and ask if anybody knew what he was talking about. I’m starting to think he does that to establish mostly that he knows more than anybody else in the room. He also tends to cycle through that same dozen or so factoids almost as often as each class, and there’s no sign each time that he remembers that he mentioned them before. The lectures are rambly and disorganized, with bad slides that look like the internet was copied and pasted in, and he doesn’t always seem to remember why he put something in there and just reads it to us. Amusingly, you could boil down the sum total of this class to the same as strategic management – you need to analyze the situation and what you’re doing. And when you look at the infantile methods set up for doing this, and realize that many huge and wonderful companies don’t even manage that much thought… you start to wonder how the heck our race managed to beat out the chimpanzees for supremacy. Taller, mostly.

Saturday mornings bring a pleasant enough couple of hours in enterprise software. Which is a fun few hours talking about stuff I do give a damn about, but unfortunately in the context of stuff I already know. I’ve been building software now, professionally, for some fifteen years, and a lot of the concepts are things I’ve had to explore and deal with, even if I didn’t know of the formal names and best practices involved. On the other hand, the funny thing is that I tend to break every rule of formal software engineering and enterprise design. And my code works a hell of a lot better than many code shops that follow all the rules, gets generated faster and cheaper, and as time gets on is getting more and more simple, straightforward, and compact. But that’s all about the luxuries of my environment. Working alone and without a service level agreement means a lot of overhead I don’t have to worry about. Of course, some people would have no idea how to operate in this setup, but my comfort level here is a big reason why I can’t imagine programming in a “real” environment. Most companies have very strict legal and contractual reasons for those rules I poo-poo.

So – like I said. I love the subject matter. Unfortunately, I kind of already know it. Computational Finance is still a big of an enigma to me. Content is provided at a glacial pace – the mathematical underpinnings of every minor logical step carefully presented and re-presented. Homework continues to include algebraic proofs. The full content of each class is provided on a PDF for download and it’s a far better way to learn than the actual class session. Honestly, at this point, I just surf the web all class, keeping one ear open and often still being the one who can answer questions when he stops with one. It’s one of those classes that I still can’t really read. All this could be foundation work… an amazingly careful structured process of setting up a bajillion dominos so that, once set loose, we’re treated to an amazing display. Or maybe the entire class consists of setting up dominos and we never get to knock one over.

So… as you can see, not a ton to get super enthused about, but I’m also beyond the point of minding much. These classes won’t kill me, so I’ll graduate and be done. And maybe if I start devaluing them, that frees up time and energy for everything else that matters, like home and garden and taxes and getting exercise and getting back to my Japanese lessons. I’ll leave off on that thought, since this is all sorts of long. ’til next time, this is Greg, and that’s what I learned. ‘Til next time!

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