This week I've become very aware of how much my college classes had an impact in my professional life. Not my lecture classes mind you. Everything I needed from lectures I learned in the first year-and-a-half. No, it's the five project labs I had in the final years that made the deepest professional impact.
For those not in the know, Project Lab began with the instructor organizing us into groups and assigning semester-long projects, (though in later years we got to choose our teams and projects.) Each project involved designing and building some electrical device such as an electronic blood-pressure reading gadget. The projects also had an attached professor that served as the customer/advisor. We would develop a semester-long schedule and budget and then execute it with the professor signing off on our weekly progress. The majority of our time, though, was spent making power-point presentations (how accurate is that to professional life?!) and present them to the course instructor and our peers, one after another for three hour stints which can only be described as the death-march of academia.
The toughest part by far, was the firing line that came at the end. Each presenter would end with the obligatory, "are there any questions" and then the real learning would begin. The instructor would typically ask the presenter to go back to the first slide and we'd work through the presentation nit-picking every fault in the presentation. Although in retrospect this taught me the most, at the time it was sheer torture.
"Blue text on a black background means only the first row of your audience can read that, Mr. Wetz."
"There's too much information on this slide"
"There's not enough information on this slide"
"You call that a voltage divider? What have you been doing for the last three years of your life that would make you think that?"
“So you’re going to use an unsigned integer to store an angle between -pi/6 and +pi/6?”
One time a person had a picture of red and green wires he had twisted together to reduce the impedance of some network device. During the 'question time' the professor released both barrels on him for using "two of the same colored wire". "By doing so, every time you pull this out to work on it you've got to ohm out both ends to make sure you've got the right ones. You should have used two different colors!" Like good sheep the presenter and the entire class of about thirty sat there quietly taking this. Finally the presenter, at his whit’s end, did the unspeakable and said, "but sir, these are two different colors - they're red and green!" to which the instructor replied, "Oh... I guess I should inform you I'm color-blind."
In the final two project labs, the instructor raised the ante by announcing part of our grade would be determined by our active participation during the question time. Rather than the presenter being thrown to a great white shark at the end of their presentation, he would now be thrown to a great white shark and a school of piranhas.
Again, I did the most learning here, but it turned you into a person that you didn’t want to look at in the mirror!
I bring all this up because this week groups at work have been presenting their results of a month-long development. During the times I was presenting, I found that I was calm during the moments I would speak, but the anxiety wouldn’t build until I’d get closer to the “Any Questions” slide. In addition, I find that anytime a manager asks a question, I find myself wrapping it in a ‘bail-out clause” in case I’m wrong – “Well, last time I checked…” or “I was under the impression…” Thanks to project lab, I think I’ve been conditioned to believe that any question from an authority figure is just to test me and bring me down a notch. I need to either become a resident expert (not a bad thing) on whatever it is I’m talking about, or at least have the gumption to assert myself with confidence.
In addition, yesterday a person posted an object model diagram that was riddled, I MEAN RIDDLED, with errors! After confirming that I hadn’t fallen into some twilight zone or I wasn’t the center of a prank of conspiratorial proportions, everything from project lab was screaming, “Be the first to say something! You’ve got this!” And yet the other, wiser half of me was saying, “You’ve got a half-dozen managers and another half-dozen senior developers in here, surely they’ll point it out.” Yet NOONE did. We sat there in complete silence looking at the biggest travesty to software engineering and didn’t correct this error!
I don’t think I like the idea of “a time and a place” to correct programming errors. Or things that are Worse Than Failure - things that technically compile and run, but do so in such a wrong manner that it self-induces a face-five.
Software Engineers and co-workers, what do you think?
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