Consulting - People Relationships

Consulting - People Relationships

• Be transparent of skills - Do not cook up what you don't possess
• Document what you know, Be aligned with assumptions
• Frame better and be clear on the formula
• When you do not know something, Provide context with some prework than blanket statements
• Know when to disagree with respect, When to ask for help, and When to provide help
• Apologize if you made a mistake and call out how you avoid it
• When dealing with touch people be slow before you try to defend
• No matter what some people will hate you for no reason, Just don't focus on them

What makes a Team Player

• Not a red flag raiser every time
• Be clear-cut in your deliverables
• Ability to prepare/ask questions upfront
• Proactive to connect dots 
• Think with clarity or take time to connect the dots
• Take vacation but ensure people don't get blocked in your absence
• Focus on few things than faking everything

Knowledge vs Experience

• I always use to say common sense and domain knowledge helps me more than ML out of box techniques
• Leveraging any out of box techniques is good to solve the problem but being able to communicate to business is key
• I would pick a domain + common sense solution before applying any technique which I cannot justify in business-acceptable discussions
• Consulting makes you take multiple roles - product manager - data engineer - tester - program manager - developer - ML engineer endless :) :) 
• Goal-based not task-based, Ability to foresee what others don't see makes an experienced engineer :)

An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding

• How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it
• How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of time
• How to explain a technical concept behind closed doors to a senior person too embarrassed to openly admit that they don’t understand it
• How to lead a project even though you don’t manage any of the people working on the project
• How to give up your baby, that project that you built into something great, so you can do something else
• How to craft a project proposal, socialize it, and get buy-in to execute it
• How to tell someone they’re wrong without making them feel bad
• How to pick your battles

Keep Going!!!

Questions about my Work ?

Do you code? Are u a Coder / Non-coding manager?

I code whenever I have to do a POC, Evaluating an approach. In a distributed work, when someone is struck if it's Vision / Model Training Code / Clustering / Approach / DB / Design I review/debug. If it's for algo I reuse my past domain inputs to see what are alternatives. 

Can you write code and demonstrate capability?

Mind visualizes in a different way, not as methods and packages :)

• For string search, c/c++ for loop comes to mind
• There is regex in python
• semicolon for java statements
• I only remember logic / I StackOverflow it and put syntax
• Do i remember syntax heavily, No
• SQL Server I had spent a considerable time I can write about it anytime

Do you know how Transformer works, can u rewrite it?

• Get back to basics, 1st cut - LSTM you have attention, cell state, memory, forget gate
• Build your blocks - 2nd cut - A bit of encoder (encode input), and a set of decoders added, from a given list pick where attention is maximum
• Code up basics, 3rd cut - Rework / check similar simpler examples/paper on the transformer
• Customize examples - 4th cut - logic/approach/code / keep iterating/building from other repo / customize/working to see if a prototype helps, Still coding / experiment.

Do you know about product management/program management / Data engineering?

Over years I have moved across several roles. You have to collaborate/influence big initiatives/projects. Deep domain knowledge gives us clarity on what solution works and is relevant to our problem statement. I may not have those titles but I have collaborated/delivered with partners in each domain. For bigger initiatives it's Teamwork. 

How often do you code?

Out of 10 git codes, I experiment / 1~2 work and for the rest I end up with environmental issues. You keep changing tabs reading products/code/experiments. It's never fixed but it's more about a solution to build and the rest is part of solving the problem.

Everything does not contribute immediately but every type of error adds up to a backlog of 'Oh I have seen it, ' This could be due to this'

Learned knowledge / applied knowledge / inferred knowledge / connected knowledge.

Domain vs Data vs Code vs product balancing all the aspects.

Seniority in software engineering is more than money and promotions.

It's about taking on more responsibilities:

• make the right trade-offs
• add value to the business
• give reasonable estimations
• mentor and share knowledgehttps://t.co/ziIiIxWVOr

— Fernando 🇮🇹🇨🇭 (@Franc0Fernand0) December 30, 2022

Why do we Change Roles / Jobs?

• Experiment with different roles/projects
• Impact / Change of Environment
• Learn new things
• Change of place/people
• Growth / Financial benefits
• Money, Work-Life, Win / Failures, Impact, Learning everything matters but at the end of the day pick and choose battles

It's one life, learning never ends, and Nothing comes for free. Keep learning, aware and aligned.

With Covid, I do feel age catching up in my 40s. Pick and choose your battles in Life :). Keep going!!! 

• How to Build a Strong Career in Tech
• Sharing Our Engineering Ladder

How do I learn as a Manager?

• As a manager, if you manage people who can manage themselves then you have time to learn
• As a manager, if you manage people you have to manage then your focus and attention will be divided
• The most painful thing is making someone understand and aware of their weakness
• It's difficult to see other's points of view if we defend, Consulting is all about the right tradeoff time vs effort vs impact.

What are opportunities to Learn / Create Impact?

• Code to prototype solution feasibility
• Learn to review other's domain use cases
• Bridge product vs tech wherever possible
• The lookout where you can resell solutions
• Collaborate for success, Success needs credits shared, and Failure needs credits owned up

We always keep refining our 'best-fit' architecture

Learning is an endless process like layers of an onion, Same approach / never-ending

• Know what you speak
• Code what you speak
• Speak what you code
• Improve on the feedback you hear
• Improve every time when you get an idea

Knowledge is a reflection of your questions, opinions, the code that you deliver, and the design you put on the table. Communication vs Competency vs Consistency all are different skills that you can discover over time.

Keep Exploring!!!