Oleg Dulin

Re-educating myself

I signed up to take a few courses at NYU towards a certificate in "Financial Risk Management." This fall I will be taking an "Asset Securitization" course.

When I was doing my Masters at NYU I could've taken a few electives at the school of business but I chose not to. I was preoccupied with learning application server design and formal software engineering methodologies. At the time it was useful. In retrospect, though, I wish I had more business training.

So, that is why I swallowed my pride and decided to go back to NYU for some continuing education courses. I wanted to select a course of study that I would find interesting as an individual, something that would be valuable to my current employer and something that I could leverage in the future. "Risk Management" fit the description.

This makes Eclipse Galileo run faster

I observed that the new version of Eclipse appears to occasionally underperform (to put it lightly) and just sit there consuming 25% of the CPU cycles. The following Eclipse startup parameters appear to have helped:

-vmargs -Xverify:none -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:PermSize=20M -XX:MaxNewSize=32M -XX:NewSize=32M -Xmx256m -Xms256m

Eclipse.org home.

What IT Leaders Can Learn From Google's Staffing Problems | The Accidental IT Leader

Here is another interesting article from "The Accidental IT Leader" -- Google is having staffing problems ? Is this an opportunity or an ominous sign ?

What IT Leaders Can Learn From Google's Staffing Problems | The Accidental IT Leader.

If you could go to work for any company out there right now, which one would it be? A lot of us would say Google – everything that we’ve read and heard about the company makes it seem like a great place to work. However, it turns out that even Google is not immune to IT staff problems

The Accidental IT Leader: How Can A Manager Manage IT Workers When There Is No Company Loyalty?

"The Accidental IT Leader" writes:

Welcome to the 21st Century where all IT workers now view themselves as temporary workers. The constant cycles of downsizing and outsourcing have made even the most committed workers view their jobs as being not so much as a career, but rather as a temporary pit-stop.

I can't help but think about the underlying theme of my career since graduating from college in 2000:

• In 2000 I felt a full-time job at IBM Research was pretty much guaranteed to me. I worked my way through college at IBM and had a great relationship with my management there. So, even my boss at IBM was disappointed when he found out he can't hire me after all because IBM froze hiring in the research division as the dot-com bubble burst.
• The manager at a pure-play consulting firm that hired me quit after I was there for about a month.
• The dot-com I went to work for afterwards went out of business within 6 months of my starting there in 2001.
• I had more managers than the number of years I worked.
• I had the best sense of my career path when I worked, ironically, as an independent consultant on an hourly basis. I felt in charge of my career -- the better the impression my customer had of me, the greater my chances were of landing more business with them or their contacts.

With this experience do I have a reason to believe in company loyalty ? I don't think so. I don't go to company end-of-the-year parties, I avoid making friendships with other employees. I do maintain a network outside of my company and I keep up with my skills. I leave the most minimum set of personal items at the office. When I work I do my best but I try not to expect any career development. Perhaps, I need some time to get out of this holding pattern  -- but it is not easy.

Links:

• How Can A Manager Manage IT Workers When There Is No Company Loyalty? | The Accidental IT Leader.
• What Price Company Loyalty?