You should go read this post to fully understand the new definition of irony.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
on being senior
John Allspaw wrote a great blog post titled On Being a Senior Engineer. I read it, nodding along, and realized that his post isn’t really about being a senior engineer. As Allspaw puts it, “I expect a ‘senior’ engineer to be a mature engineer”.
He’s totally right. A senior engineer, or a senior user experience professional, or (I think) a senior anything is about maturity. It’s not just about the number of years that you’ve worked with a given technology or done a particular job. It’s about how well you get your job done. These items from his post particularly resonated with me:
- seek out constructive criticism of their designs – When you’re senior, you know that your work isn’t automatically perfect. You know that others have valuable perspectives, that they have knowledge that you don’t have, that others can be the source of a valuable insight that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
- understand […] how they are perceived – Allspaw said it well here: “Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes.” Oh, and this too: “Be the engineer that everyone wants to work with.”
- understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work – There’s a lot of work to get done. Being willing to do the work that needs to get done, not just the high-profile work, is one of the ways that you become senior. This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being the person who everyone who everyone wants to work with.
- lift the skills and expertise of those around them – One of the most important things that you can do in a senior role is to help your team be better. If you’re the rockstar on your team, but everyone else around you is floundering, you’re not senior. You need to help those around you so that they can be rockstars too. Create a team of rockstars, and that’s one of the ways that you become senior.
- make their trade-offs explicit when making judgements and decisions – Nothing is perfect. Life is a balancing act. When you’re making trade-offs, document them. It will help others understand your thinking, which makes the team better and which helps with gathering constructive criticism. It will also help yourself in the future so that you remember why it is that you decided on one thing over another.
Allspaw makes a lot of other awesome points, and I feel like I’ve lifted enough from his post as it is. His blog post is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking that I’ve read in quite some time. It’s long, but I recommend reading all of it and thinking about how it applies to your career and your life.
VMware User Experience 2013
In November 2011, I led VMware’s very first internal conference for its user experience community, with the creative title VMware User Experience (vUE). VMware’s user experience community is spread across the whole company. There’s my team, which works on the vCloud Suite and related products. There’s a few other small user experience teams across the company, in places like Customer Advocacy and Socialcast. And there’s a lot of interaction designers who are embedded with their teams, one or two people sprinkled here and there throughout the company. Our goal for the first vUE was simple: get everyone together for two days and get to know each other. We ended up with 60 people attending, representing a diverse array of products, with people coming from as far away as Sofia, Bulgaria; Herzliya, Israel; and Sydney, Australia.
After vUE 2011, we instituted some new practices to help our user experience community keep its momentum going. I created and am leading a series of UX tech talks, in which we as a community come together and share our experience and expertise about user experience. The UX tech talk series isn’t limited to just user experience people, and we usually get ~100 people attending each tech talk. We also have a monthly UX all-hands meeting, which is led by one of our Directors of User Experience at VMware, and gives us an opportunity to share things that are of interest to the whole community.
I’m also chairing vUE 2013 1. We’ve had the opportunity to meet each other, and we now have other ways to keep in touch and be able to share our expertise. This time, our goal is to build upon all of that, and talk about ways that we can improve the user experience at VMware. We have 22 UX people across the company who are going to give technical talks (10-20 minutes each) about a topic that they’re passionate about, and we have several invited talks, including each of our Directors of User Experience as well as members of our executive team. We’re also having breakout sessions to give everyone a chance to dive deeper into specific topics, and the all-important social event to share cocktails and swap stories of user experience.
vUE 2013 is five weeks away, and we’re wrapping up all of the final details. I’ve got a great committee to help me out, and I’ve also worked to ensure that we’re set up for success for vUE 2014. We’ve already identified the vUE 2014 conference chair and technical chair, and they are responsible for everything. I will act as a mentor to them as they go through everything, and I’ve tried to document what I think they’ll need to know, but I won’t be on the committee myself. vUE needs to continue to grow and evolve, which means that it can’t have the same person running it.
I’ve got a lot to do in the next five weeks, but it’s going to be worth it. vUE 2011 was a smashing success, and I’m hopeful that we exceed the high bar that we set for ourselves.
- It was originally supposed to be vUE 2012, but we had to move the dates to accommodate a few things. ↩
VMware Take 3
One of VMware’s benefits is the Take 3 program. For those who have been with VMware for at least five years, they can take 3 months off to do something completely different from their usual job. One option is to work on a different project or try out a different discipline. Another option is to work with the VMware Foundation and spend 3 months working for a charitable organization.
Deanna McCusker is a UX designer on my team who has been with VMware for 9 years. She’s on her Take 3 project now, and she’s taking the latter option. She is working for the Community for Open Source Microfinance on an application called Mifos. She’s also keeping a blog about her experience, and you can follow along here.
I’ve already informed Deanna that she’s signed up to give a UX tech talk when she’s completed this!
Liquid Data Center
This is cool. Someone has taken the SilverLining fling that we released a few weeks ago and implemented a data visualization UI on top of it to show you a map of your vCloud Director virtual network. It’s called LiquidDC, and you can download it now.
good jobs vs good husbands
In the New York Times obituary for Yvonne Brill, she is quoted as saying, “Good husbands are harder to find than good jobs.”
I think she’s got a point, although I think that there’s also a difference of expectation between jobs and husbands (good or otherwise).
| jobs | husbands |
|---|---|
| can change every 3-5 years | generally frowned-upon to change every 3-5 years |
| can look for a new job while still holding my old job | dating while married isn’t generally acceptable |
| leaving a job needs two weeks of notice and a little bit of paperwork | leaving a husband requires (at least) several weeks, a lot of paperwork, and a lawyer |
| can accept a new position because it’s an awesome opportunity | taking a new husband because it’s an awesome opportunity would earn me the label of “gold digger” |
| can try out something new and go back | can’t try out a new husband and go back to a previous one1 |
| a software engineer who has 7 different jobs in the course of their 40+ year career is normal | a person who has 7 different partners in the course of their 40+ years as an adult is not normal |
I’ve got a good husband, and we’ve been married for nearly 4 years. By Silicon Valley job standards, I should be out hunting for a new one, but I think I’ll stick to societal standards instead of job standards on that one.
- Even Liz Taylor, who did marry Richard Burton twice, didn’t have an intermediary husband between her first and second marriage to him. ↩
on blind design
Alex Griendling wrote an awesome blog post about the predilection of the design community to redesign something that they glance at and decide that they don’t like. His post concludes with this, which I think applies to more than just design:
Were designers to simply offer their opinions on newly released identities or logos, that’d be one thing. Instead, by offering an opinion and an alternate solution that is presented as being better, we’re disrespecting the designer(s) that made the work while completely ignoring that the piece being critiqued went through the same process that we deal with every day. A little empathy towards work produced and, in turn, the designers that produce said work, would go a long way toward elevating the community’s discussion next time a redesign descends upon us.
It’s important to remember that, when you’re not involved with a project, you don’t know why design decisions were made, what constraints they were under, or what inputs they had to consider. Coming in as an outsider, criticizing a design, and then presuming that you can create a new design in a day or two in a vacuum is a bad example of the design process, and it sets a bad precedent for all of us in user experience.
I’ll be speaking at Women in Advanced Computing ’13
I just got notification that my proposal for Women in Advanced Computing ’13 has been accepted. My proposal was “The Mid-Career Donut Hole”, and here’s my original abstract (which I reserve the right to revise!):
As a woman in computing, you usually start off being comfortable with having few peers of your gender. When you start out in college, perhaps you had resources available to you like a campus group for women in computing. When you get your first job in the field, perhaps you work for a company that’s large enough to have an organized group for women, or perhaps you just band together with friends for wine and story-sharing.
As you get older, you begin to notice that you have fewer peers of your gender. We know from the research that women drop out of STEM fields in their late 20s and early 30s. There are many reasons for this, and they’re outside the scope of this talk. There are also plenty of women who switch from a technical track to a non-technical track in their career, such as trying out management.
I want to talk about what you can do if you’re in that spot: you’re in your 30s or 40s, and you somehow find yourself the only senior technical woman in the room. I want to address the following questions:
- How do you stay up-to-date technically?
- How do you effectively communicate with younger team members?
- How do you ensure that you maintain credibility?
- How do you find mentors?
- How do you continue to grow your career and decide what your next steps are?
- What can you do to help address that problem of women dropping out of STEM fields?
- How do you find your peers again?