What a year! I unequivocally enjoyed my time in the MIT Sloan Fellows program - understanding the world so much better and making friends from over 30 countries.
The best (ok maybe one of the best) part of the program was the intellectual gluttony accorded in a gourmet’s paradise. I learned so much about change management strategies, finance and sustainable growth that incorporates traditional externalities.
I loved writing my thesis - the topic itself and seeing first-hand the world’s unabashed and courageous optimism. Onward we march in delivering to the coming generations a world that we can proudly say they will call theirs to cherish.
Thank you MIT, the Sloan Fellows program, my professors, my family, and most of all my friends, the real teachers, in my cohort. A proud and happy year to remember!
Obama’s post-election politics
President Obama’s post-election politics have always raised questions in my mind, as well as for many other people I know who are interested in politics and governance. What gives? Why not put your money where your mouth is? Especially after saying “discover great opportunity in the midst of great crisis” I have mulled this issue in my mind for a good year now and could not quite come to any conclusion other than that times of crisis were the best for bold policy moves even though they set in motion a series of both positive and negative changes. As long as the policies themselves were sound, they would move the country in the right direction, and the President should do what is best for the country regardless of political consequences.
But who am I kidding? As much as I support President Obama for his sensible policies for the country, I am being naive in ignoring the political imperative of leaders. So then what is the way forward? I was pleasantly surprised today to read an article that clearly outlines the leadership aspect of politics from a human lens. Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University wrote a beautiful piece in last weekend’s NYT Magazine explaining how the President must carry forward his policy agenda *while* addressing his political imperative. The thesis of that argument is that humans, and hence our politics, are driven by passions. So the president needs to link his policies to what drives people’s passions instead of providing logical explanations that appeal to cool, rational thinking. He must attend to his political imperative but while being mindful that as President, he is responsible for directing the country with implications not just for the next four or eight years, but our lifetime and possibly beyond, given the horizon of national policies.
Mr. President, you can influence the future of an entire nation, and likely many others, during pivotal times that are seeing changes in global order and socio-political compacts. The US must lead, by making right with its people first. Make us competitive while standing by our ideals (free market, human rights, free speech). Bring back jobs by lowering the cost of doing business via universal health care and re-adjusting our expected standard of living. Be bold, link your thoughts and ideas to our passions even if the country is not ready to listen to these truths. Have our people understand that the technological innovation for lifting the lives of people in the world these days is not necessarily going to come from the ultra high-end, cutting-edge basic science and technology research that the US is so good at but from simpler, inexpensive and practical advancements (see here). We will see countries like China and Brazil rivaling the US’s global standing by simply raising the standard of living of large swathes of their population using simpler innovations. If we remain stuck in our business as usual, we will soon have a bankrupt country with a few very rich people, and increasing numbers driven by bankruptcy and joblessness to poverty levels. Tell us how to compete in the world, Mr. President. Even if the truth is difficult to digest at first, it is better than fantasy.
Education and our future
I came across this article when reading the paper today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html
A few spots in the article caught my eye:
“We have to see this as a wake-up call,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview on Monday.
“I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added. “The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”
A wake-up call? The only reason it hits our nerves is because this is the first time our post-WW II global superiority is in question. Only with China’s rise as an economic force and consequent elevated global status has America started to feel threatened. But does it really take a PISA score to understand that we are no longer globally competitive? There are so many aspects of our national political, economic and social norms and incentives that render us uncompetitive in today’s world. We need to clear our heads from the decades of global success and realize that while we were enjoying our success, we have neglected too many aspects of what made our country so successful in the first place: competitive business conditions, a healthy middle class and the appropriate development of competitive human capital. How much more of a threat do we need to feel the need to make real change to work to retain our lead? How long will we keep hearing about the “depth, breadth and size” of our economy when China and other countries will soon provide good enough substitutes for our products? When will we start understanding that access to the best technology will not necessarily bestow the largest economic power especially in a global world where information flows freely and “older” technologies are good enough for many markets in the world? We have to get off the “high tech” drug that the US is on.
Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.
“The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.
Mr. Schneider, however, noted some factors that may have influenced the outcome.
For one thing, Shanghai is a huge migration hub within China. Students are supposed to return to their home provinces to attend high school, but the Shanghai authorities could increase scores by allowing stellar students to stay in the city, he said. And Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well, he said.
“Can you imagine the reaction if we told the students of Chicago that the PISA was an important international test and that America’s reputation depended on them performing well?” Mr. Schneider said. “That said, China is taking education very seriously. The work ethic is amazingly strong.”
Sounds like poor rationalization to me. Are we seriously going to attribute such a poor showing to the lack of patriotic zeal? Conversely would patriotic fervor really have propelled us to competitive levels? Education is systemic, and is culturally and socially embedded deep in a country.
Chinese students spend less time than American students on athletics, music and other activities not geared toward success on exams in core subjects. Also, in recent years, teaching has rapidly climbed up the ladder of preferred occupations in China, and salaries have risen. In Shanghai, the authorities have undertaken important curricular reforms, and educators have been given more freedom to experiment.
You reward what you value. In our socio-economic system, you get what you pay for. In a low-income part of the country, state or city? Yeah well sorry you cant afford the best schools. Want the best teachers? Sorry independent schools pay a lot more. Our culture needs to start valuing basic education.
Ever since his organization received the Shanghai test scores last year, Mr. Schleicher said, international testing experts have investigated them to vouch for their accuracy, expecting that they would produce astonishment in many Western countries.
“This is the first time that we have internationally comparable data on learning outcomes in China,” Mr. Schleicher said. “While that’s important, for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.”
“Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations,” he said.
We have to shed our stereotypes and understand the import of the fact that significant proportions of the best academics and researchers in the most well-known universities as well as business leaders and entrepreneurs in the US are immigrants. So if their home countries offer just as competitive opportunities, why would they not apply their energies at home? The greatest irony is that this human capital is largely trained in the US.
6 months since the last post
Wow - time flies! It has been over 6 months since my last post and it feels like yesterday. I guess everyone has heard about the MIT firehose that I have been drinking from for the past 4.5 months. Its been a lot of work but a tremendous experience. In many ways it is sad that we are at the halfway mark in the program. Regardless it has been an excellent summer and early fall. I have made many new, international friends; we have enjoyed burning the midnight oil on crazy assignments with wicked deadlines. But most importantly we resonate at many levels and in that discovery have created some pretty strong relationships.
MIT has world-renowned researchers and experts who do not always make great educators. It was our privilege to get some of the finest teachers: Andrew Lo for Finance, John Van Maanen for Leadership and Organizations, Duncan Simester for Marketing, Simon Johnson for Macroeconomics, Don Lessard as our program’s faculty director, Richard Locke on Sustainability and Strategy, Andreas Schulz for Quantitative Analysis and others. We had an excellent visiting professor for finance: Kathryn Kaminski, a MIT OR PhD graduate who is on track to become an excellent teacher like Prof. Lo. And a few excellent TAs: Amy Zhou and Brandon Lee, Finance PhD candidates, Juliane Dunkel, an OR PhD candidate and our own classmate Helen Yang.
Learning at MIT is an intense experience - its a rush for anybody because you learn so much in a short time and have to work really hard to keep it strung together so as not lose the forest for the trees. I would recommend it to anybody however old you are. It is a privilege but also a pleasure to learn at institutions like this.
Looking forward in 2010
Two weeks ago I attended the MIT Sloan Fellows, Class of 2011 orientation. Thats right - I made my decision and it is to go back to school. It was very difficult to walk away from an awesome job. But the idea of being back in school with about a hundred other very smart professionals, some at the top of their institutions and from varied backgrounds, in an intense one-year course on leadership and thinking in business and graduating with a degree from MIT was notionally too good to pass up. What I do know is that after drinking from the MIT SF fire-hose, I shall exit with a brand new set of relationships, an excellent network of alumni from a program that is rapidly gaining prominence in business.
Orientation was a lot of fun for some simple reasons: I met many interesting people who think big and deep, wrestle with difficult choices similar to mine and seem to know how to enjoy life also. I cant wait to to work and play hard with this community and relish a once-in-a-lifetime transformational experience.
We are already coming together in as many ways as possible - meeting up outside school, joining LinkedIn and Facebook groups and sharing whatever possible to ameliorate our experience together. We have heard that the program becomes what you make of it. From that perspective, I am looking forward to this experiential microcosm of life.
On the left is Francisco (Cisco) Gonzales, a Deputy Judge Advocate with the United States Air Force
The challenge remains but a dream comes true…
… or how one man trudged through the professional wastelands of 2008 and 2009
Life throws practically anything at you, at whatever speed, often multiple things. Some are meatballs, you dont even break your stride. Others purely intend to bring you down. I vividly remember riding high in the late 90s, the rocket that was the telecom industry. We felt invincible because of the industry’s seemingly limitless potential (a little like the teeming community of life science professionals in Cambridge’s Kendall Square today). 2008 and 2009 were the kind of years that pointedly remind you about the exceptional nature of the late 90s: such years are not the norm. The very global growth that telecom powered has rapidly leveled comparative advantages enjoyed by western telecom vendors and firmly tipped the balance in favor of low-cost vendors from Asia. And that is how folks like myself find ourselves to be the COBOL programmers of the ’10s.
Although I chose to pursue a long-standing interest in clean energy in 2007, the impact of deep professional roots in a rapidly shrinking industry hit home after September 2008. I left my first clean energy job in February 2008 with the intention of starting an enterprise in that hot sector. But the long gestation for energy-related businesses in conjunction with the credit crisis ended those hopes by November of that year. By then telecom was shedding jobs like it was shearing time and I was actively pursuing employment in enterprise software, web applications and embedded systems. But the enormous number of job seekers spawned by the recession and the jobless growth that followed has made professional transitions extremely difficult, especially at a time when people need to make those very transitions to become employable.
With all modesty, I think that anybody looking at my resume would conclude that I was a promising candidate even if I lacked specific domain knowledge or functional experience. But the reality is that the two necessary criteria these days for filling the majority of open positions are precisely domain and functional experience. I must have cold-applied to about 60 positions. I got a total of 0 responses. I kept asking myself where I was going wrong; was I:
- targeting the wrong industries
- targeting the wrong functional roles
- unable to clearly explain my potential
- over-qualified
- too experienced
I have come to the conclusion that my lack of success is pretty much a combination of reasons 3, 4, and 5, and selection criteria (likely employed to deal with the sheer volume of applicants) based on keyword matches for domain and functional experience. If my resume was to make it beyond those filters, my application would then likely hit points 4 and 5.
In these last two years I have learned some valuable lessons that I share in this post. My wish is to tell any reader in a similar position: you are not alone in your experiences. And that the only way to keep moving is hope. So lets get to those points.
Never give up - ever! A different way of saying the same thing is: Always keep hoping. When we are being ground into dust by the weight of life and luck, hope is the gasoline that powers our souls. The struggle and trick is to actively find and keep finding sources of this fuel. Dont look for a job - look for the possibility of getting a job: it will broaden your source of opportunities and sustain your hopes.
Network, network, network These days it is who you know, or get introduced to, that gets you hired. That does not mean putting a stop to cold applications. Networking increases your chance of success in any professional endeavor: within a job or otherwise. You never know if your network somehow extends to the organization where you cold applied. One of the top tools to network is LinkedIn: I guarantee you that you are no more than four relationships away from President Obama. The point is that for any professional opportunity you target, you are likely 2-4 steps away from being introduced via LinkedIn. Developing an online presence is another powerful tool: tweeting and blogging are excellent ways of telling people about you. An extended online presence is a tremendous source of information about you and is used by potential employers in more ways than you can imagine. For the same reason you are better off maintaining distinct professional and personal online presences; and, if necessary, ensuring that the two cannot be linked. So go ahead, you may be 35+, but dont be shy to dive into Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Wordpress, (or if you are tech-sufficient you can host your blog yourself), Blogger, whatever else. It can be a lot of fun and rewarding.
Believe in yourself In difficult times it is very easy for the lack of success or judgments from others to shake fundamental faith in yourself. Belief in yourself is least volatile when based on a solid understanding of yourself. So go ahead and take the time to do that if you need to. Once you know and understand yourself: your interests, strengths, emotional triggers, etc you will have a better sense for why you react to things the way you do and consequently why you take the decisions that you do. Ultimately knowing yourself and being honest with yourself is the only way to keep believing in yourself. A related point: trust your gut because deep inside, you know who you are. Often people hold their gut reaction culpable for some particular negative outcome. I believe (not based on any rigorous empirical data or theoretical basis, so take it FWIW) that in the majority of cases there are other reasons e.g. execution, circumstances etc.
Dont be afraid to get help Vanity can kill you too. As you learn about yourself, reach out for help in any area you could benefit from. Dont be proud: focus on removing obstacles, remaining happy and keeping the hope alive. If that means you could do with help, then get it. Friends and family often come to mind first, and given their disproportionate impact I elaborate on them in the next point. But most folks could benefit from all kinds of help. Even if it is admitting your job-search struggles to a professional acquaintance and discussing your strategy with her. People love to help; it makes them feel better. I recommend being judicious in choosing helpers and the time you spend with them. But that should not stop you from reaching out.
Seek the support that comes from the love of family and friends that truly care for you. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. When there are no more facts or intellectual rationalizations to keep you up, to keep up your hope and self confidence, it is their unflagging support that will fuel you. Take time to love them back; dont postpone it simply because you are down. Loving them back is empowering in itself - it produces a happiness that mysteriously nourishes you and gives strength. We are social animals. However cliched that sounds there is no other way to say it. Regardless of where you fall in the Myers-Briggs profile, whether you are an I versus an E etc, every human thrives on positive emotional reinforcement. Commonly found in familial relationships and friendships. Intense manifestations are known as love. Is nourishment for your soul, mind and body.
These are difficult times. But perspectives can be reshaped if you think about how the majority of this world subsists. While incorporating the five points above and keeping myself moving, I sensed that perhaps I was experiencing a tiny sliver of how that majority struggles for entire generations. I felt that in the grand scheme of life my own struggles, although not unimportant, are far removed from the catastrophe I sometimes imagined them to be.
March 2010 has brought good tidings for me. I have the surreal privilege of contemplating a good problem: choosing between two excellent opportunities, the MIT Sloan Fellows program or a full-time position with a tremendous software startup in downtown(!) Boston. After a scorching professional drought, this is like torrential rain.
Note - if interested in viewing struggle from the perspective of an extremely disadvantaged person, read the uplifting novel A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.
First Boxee. And now Google?
These are exciting times for anybody dying to break free from their provider’s cable captivity. If my wife was not a die-hard tennis fan I would have switched to internet-only TV. Consequently we are smack in the middle of the bell curve. I pretty much use Boxee exclusively on my MacBook and will sometimes sync to an AppleTV. But I can’t wait to build my own home theater on a netbook and convince my wife that we could cut the cord once and for all.
With Google/Intel/Sony’s entry such transformations could be significantly accelerated. The Boxee experience has already raised the quality of internet media channels easily available on the big screen at home. So Google/Intel/Sony’s launch is happening at an excellent time. The question remains: how quickly will the incumbent media providers (cable and telcos) turn into plumbing for bits? I think the answer is complicated because it depends on a couple of factors:
the availability of good quality broadband: yes, broadband alone will not suffice. You need decent quality of service to support large-scale delivery of media over data connections
the incumbents’ revenue profiles: the largest sources of revenue for incumbents are also the largest consumers of internet bandwidth and hence best positioned to take advantage of internet-delivered media. But the same affluent consumers will continue to seek the deterministic quality and convenience advantage of the incumbents until the internet plays catch up.
These two reasons make me think that the shift will not be quick and will likely require significant shifts such as large content providers cutting deals with the internet-delivery enablers versus incumbent providers. Or consolidation of incumbent providers by the enablers who will then split out the pure plumbing business. Or incumbents morphing into enablers or perhaps even into content providers: could this be the path that Comcast gets on with its recent purchase of NBC? Will they ultimately choose to exit the plumbing business ala Verizon and its once-upon-a-time-cashcow landline business? Or is the purchase simply a defensive move to stave being pushed into pure plumbing?
This is going to be very interesting to follow: the continuation of the story that started when the internet became the marketplace and ecosystem for music. Now instead of the record distribution companies being the middle-man, it is the incumbent providers and the new kids on the block are the enablers versus Napster, Kazaa and their surviving descendant {Lime/Frost}wire and the legit guys, Apple and Amazon.
Some of the computer science behind the internet giants
I recently became interested in the structure of large internet systems but did not get to take a deep dive until today. I followed a bunch of links, ended up wiki-ing NoSQL and landed on a couple of excellent articles that explain the architectural concepts underlying some of the infrastructure technology deployed by internet giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook, eBay and Twitter.
Chirag Mehta is the pellucid writer of an excellent blog cloud computing and his March 5 article NoSQL is Not SQL and that’s a Problem is a good primer on the complexities of implementing internet-level distributed systems. Many, if not most, concepts of distributed systems were well understood even as early as 20 years ago but Chirag’s article sheds light on the issues faced by commercial internet distributed computing implementations and their approaches to dealing with well understood problems.
For a deeper dive into fundamental concepts consider this excellent writeup on Brewer’s CAP Theorem by Julian Browne, who I would argue is an even better writer given his ability to explain core technical concepts in simple language. This article can be followed by anybody with some systems-level (probably not with just programming alone) experience and explains Berkeley professor Eric Brewer’s CAP Theorem and its proof.
These two articles were tremendously helpful for understanding the conceptual domain, historical context and next level of technical issues surrounding the development of technologies such as Hadoop, BigTable, Map Reduce, PIG, Cassandra and others. I will write a technical overview of these technologies in a forthcoming post.
Update (3/15/10): tweet by julianbrowne: Interesting debate on Google Groups over whether CAP Theorem is false or not: http://bit.ly/ayUxLw 6:37 AM Mar 2nd from bit.ly.
A software keyboard for and search in Boxee
Boxee is a wonderful application that brings the convenience we normally associate with using a TV. It aggregates so much content via an excellent interface and any imperfections are merely feature or bugfixes away. The one thing I do consider a nuisance is having to type using the remote-control operated keyboard. I would love to use one of my home computers to enter text instead. I know there exist several phone apps for this purpose and then there is the Boxee remote also. But since I have none of those, I am curious if there exists a Mac OS X (or even Windows, he says grudgingly) software rendering of the same functionality? If I can do all typing and control of the UI from my MacBook, it would make things a lot faster and convenient. As a starter even a tiny app that simply lets me perform keyboard entry when required would be phenomenal.
The second point I wish to make is about search on Boxee. The application brings the internet to your TV and although today our TV use is primarily entertainment-driven, we will soon be consuming different kinds of content, changing the way we find content and taking our usage paradigm beyond entertainment. You can bet that somebody is conjuring some new type of content, some novel means of communicating or consuming content via an internet-connected TV that will drive such changes. I see the Boxee bookmarklet as an early example of such change. And having a system ready in place to allow users to easily adopt these changes will be a strong advantage.
