[lore] Article submission: Everything I Know...

[Peter Cooper]

Hi guys

Here's a draft of the article I suggested I might write. Comments 
appreciated.

Peter

-- 

Everything I Know About the Technology Business I Learned at the UCC
(or, Lectures Were a Waste of Time and I Don't - Often - Regret Never 
Graduating)

It's funny. I can't remember doing very much in lectures except being 
bored or frightened (exams were coming), playing cards, reading comics 
and checking out the talent (not easy in UWA Engineering in those 
days). Engineering Entrepreneurship 310 - or whatever it was called - 
was meaningless and dull, and hasn't done a thing for me in later 
years. Signals and Systems gave me some good lines for meetings, but 
not much more of note.

But stuff I did at the UCC has proved to be a great preparation again 
and again when starting businesses, buying time to  extracting money 
from bank managers, bullshitting at interviews, and doing jobs I was 
never trained to do. I believe I use these powers for good, not evil. 
But you never know ;-)

Lessons for work

Scamming Internet connectivity for club members and later the clubroom 
itself back in the days when UUCP was it for commercial access to 
Internet content in Australia has made me a much cannier security 
specialist looking for social engineering attacks on my customers.

Being on Soc Council and doing work for the Guild taught me much about 
the sacred bureaucratic art of a quick thust of the dagger between 
vertebrae. Certainly the business world seems like plotting with naive 
children after that kind of experience. Achieving a three hundred buck 
grant or two for the club showed that doing your (funding) homework 
and taking a couple of mendacious chances with documentation and 
actually getting involved in decision-making processes was feasible - 
amazing how these skills transfer into multimillion dollar project 
activities!

Sitting around wirewrapping the (original) coke brain, chatting to 
people who really have a clue, who had built whole operating systems, 
file systems, interactive gaming environments and the like, talking 
about design decisions, and how problems were solved, and then 
watching them do deep design and very elegant problem solving, to 
actually getting my hands dirty solving other problems and doing some 
design work (not elegant but sometimes pretty cool) might be one of 
the things that has made a difference when hiring and firing time 
comes around.

Lessons for life

It's pretty easy to wrap yourself up in comfortable groups with high 
school friends and/or dinking society buddies or even your lecture 
theatre scalies. But getting involved with UCC is a bit different. 
Sometimes it's socially much easier (you're likely less of a geek than 
the dude wirewrapping that robot brain next to you ;-) but more often 
it's harder - people with different ways of dealing with others, 
sometimes with heartbreakingly few social skills. A word to the wise: 
work places are full of people who are much more difficult to deal 
with - no shared hobbies and personal habits - I've worked closely 
with significantly more scary colleagues than anyone I ever met at 
UCC.

If all you've ever done is group projects with your buds in CompSci 
labs, things are going to get pretty grim during deadlines at work 
with people with whom you really have to work hard to build any 
bridges. Learning to motivate volunteers (and those who are 
volunteered!) at UCC is a good way to gain some useful 
manipulation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H convincing skills.

You'll probably be the person everyone else trusts to arrange pizza if 
nothing else.

Being lucky

I was pretty lucky getting to go to UWA and meeting some amazing 
people in the clubs and societies I was involved with. Some are 
probably going to be friends for life, and some have (secretly) 
changed my world.

Pass some of the luck around, get more involved, help others do so and 
reap the rich rewards.

[com]

Author bio:

Working in Europe for a variety of disturbing and sometimes very 
broken organisations, after abandoning UWA with an uncompleted triple 
major in Sex, Drugs and Rock-n-Roll. Normally working as a 
jack-of-all-trades with a telecomms and security twist with titles as 
diverse as "programme manager", "technical consultant", "information 
assurance manager", or  "business process specialist". Laugh.