Tag: studies

Reviewing recently completed courses and recalling a good point from Remotion Fest, I thought about whether I should spend more time developing my strengths rather than dwelling on my weaknesses. This also extends to paying attention to my subordinates at work.

I can’t recall if it was in the Soft Skills course, but I remember it coming from the book we read with my English teacher. You should spend more time on your strong sides or colleagues. You should also pay attention to your weak sides or colleagues, but not too much.

It was my mistake in past years — I spent more time on my weaknesses. It’s hard to change this fast, but I’ll try, and focus more on my strengths.

I’ve started attending the course PM Soft Skills at IAMPM school. I completed a more general course about soft skills from one author, Viktor Savchenko, a couple of years ago. It was great and now I continue studying the additional books suggested there. That course was for business and personal life. The current one is for business, for PM especially.

I’m not attracted to being PM, but I like leadership and am a team lead of the support engineering team with a PO role. So this course is pretty helpful for me. Even if support is disregarded as something less or it doesn’t have all the cycles that full development of a product has.

The first lesson, by Alexander Kryuchkov, at PM Soft Skills was about working with customers. Yes, it was more for PM, but it’s easy to find analogies with the communications of the 3rd line support, and sometimes it’s the same. I can’t talk about its content due to NDA, but I got some thoughts about setting up deadlines.

I’ve shown my previous post to my English teacher, who spent almost 40 minutes of a lesson editing the text. There are a lot of mistakes made by me there but most of them can be avoided by practice, more reading, and improving my vocabulary. But two types of errors are interesting since I didn’t know about them till now. They are both related to the conjunction “and”.

Most puzzling was that I shouldn’t put a comma before the conjunction “and” in a compound sentence. Spellcheckers are putting coma there and most found English rules suggest that the comma is needed there. Nevertheless, I’ve been learning American English. It’s the most common in the world and more accessible with the most entertaining media in it. However, American English is trying to eliminate unnecessary commas and I shouldn’t put them in a compound sentence if it’s clear that “and” connects different parts of it.

Here is an article about that: http://grammartips.homestead.com/compoundsentences.html It’s over 20 years old, so now, commas are used even less often than described. Furthermore, examples from it are considered wrong by spellcheckers. I’m using Grammarly for that and suggest you use it too. It’s an Ukranian product and especially needs support now.

I attended a four-hour seminar by DataArt's executive director Mikhail Zavileysky, "The Professional Career of an IT and Technical Specialist. A Training Seminar on Personal Effectiveness".

There were some interesting moments here and there. But looking at it as a whole, the speaker said nothing fundamentally new — all of this information can be found on the Internet if you want, and most of what was said is intuitively obvious anyway, or becomes clear after analyzing the situation for a bit. Although I've noticed more than once that what's intuitively obvious and elementary to me turns out to be a revelation for others... Also, everything was laid out fairly clearly and coherently, which you can't always manage with the thoughts swarming around in your own head. So I think many found the seminar useful. He also said that the IT industry in Kherson is only just developing, which is why the percentage of newcomers here was higher than in other cities. A training like this probably doesn't offer much to people who have worked for several years and changed a couple-three jobs. And most of what was said applies to outsourcing companies — it's just the thing for us, but in the other major cities where the seminar was held earlier, an even smaller percentage of those present probably needed this kind of information.

In the end, what I liked most were the various jokes during the talk and the real stories from the experience of companies and people. I was also interested in the bits about how to behave with management, but that's more because I haven't worked yet, and along the way it becomes clear on its own anyway. Also, during the second, longer part I no longer felt like sleeping — that was more because of the windows they opened after the break.

The seminar itself was held for DataArt's PR and for the director's self-expression, which at this stage of the company's development is of very little use. Although promotion isn't really needed here either — they write about it in the newspapers as it is. They'd be better off coming to the technical university to talk about themselves to all the groups, because instead they came to the third-year students, who hadn't yet covered .NET (no point talking about Java, since it's not in the curriculum), and scared them off with the requirements they impose. They didn't show up for the fourth-year students, and as a result, out of my group, 5 of the 7 students who could be called programmers (that's in a group of 23 people) went for an interview at Aricent, whose representative had visited one of our lectures.