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Events

A student talked to me about his team. He had done some very nice, artistic work on his own and wondered why this client and his teammates had not seemed as excited as he was when he presented it. My (edited) advice:

My roll is

• help each student learn and grow
• help your client get a good product

Your points are well taken. From where you are, I want to help you grow in ways that may advance your career.

What is your client's requirement that his site be attractive? I don't think there is one. There absolutely is a requirement for easy-to-use by untrained operators, but artistic is at best a nice extra. His end users are a captive audience. Hence, it is hard to justify on this project spending much time on pretty. Unless your client wants a logo, he'll see the time you spent as wasted because it could have been spent elsewhere.

It is similar with class web pages. Good navigation is important. Not being TOO boring is important. But I do not have to attract you to come. You MUST come to get assignments and class notes. My time is better spent on content than on pretty.

The essence of teamwork is a shared vision and agenda. The team decides the tasks to do, and individuals execute their share of the tasks, communicating constantly to ensure that the separate tasks continue to obey the agreed-upon interface. By inventing your own tasks, you appear to your teammates to be not part of the team and to be wasting valuable team resources (your time) on unnecessary tasks.

By considering yourself special, you reinforce a tendency to work alone. That is VERY counter-productive for an engineer. We might think an artist or a novelist sits in his studio and creates as the spirit moves? A starving artist or novelist might work that way, but one who expects to sell his work needs to be more sensitive to the needs and wants of the customer. For an engineer, our entire focus is on serving the needs of our customer. The thought that you'll go away by yourself, work alone, and create something great does not work. What you create in isolation is almost never the right answer. That is why we do prototypes.

Do you understand the power of diversification in investing? If you would consider holding 10 stocks, the expected value of a portfolio consisting of all 10 stocks is almost always higher than the expected value of choosing one stock randomly and putting all your money there. Once in a while, you'll luckily choose a winner, but the mutual fund approach guarantees that you'll always have at least SOME of your money in the winner, rather than only when you are lucky.

There is an analogy with teamwork. A team working by consensus is almost always more cautious than entrepreneurial individuals. The nature of the group process "owns" a part of most winning (and most losing) ideas, but you are never 100% committed to either the winners or the losers. If you go by yourself, you you might have a big win, or you might have a big loss. The diversification of the team consensus will almost always have a higher expected value, in the statistical sense.

If you convinced the team of the value of a nice logo, how should you proceed? You should talk to all stakeholders about their vision of the company, what it represents, the general image they want to project, the spirit of the place, potential customers, what they think, and lots of other similarly soft impressions. That body of impressions forms the basis for your artistic expression. You do not do this kind of art in a vacuum any more than you do good systems engineering in a vacuum. At the ABSOLUTE minimum, you would let your client and me know that is what you are doing so that we'd have the opportunity to object.

Yes, besides teamwork, we DO welcome initiative, but not initiative in secret. Sometimes, you ask permission in advance. One good strategy is to tell people in advance, I'm going to work on ___, or I'm thinking of attacking ___. That notification both exercises your initiative AND gives your teammates and bosses an opportunity to offer guidance, to say, "Great," or to say, "Absolutely not."