以上是state farm的流程。貌似不具备通用性，问了问朋友，他之前出过车祸，他是直接问dealer找指定的body shop，然后他再联系的保险公司，就没了。他用的是progressive。我的做法是找品牌商网上的certificated collision center，一个个打电话问，问能不能work with state farm。
事件处理记录
11号晚上我向我的保险公司file了claim。
12号的早上，我打电话了解到我dealer附近的collision center是可以work with state farm的。接近中午的时候state farm claim associate给我打电话了解事故详情。同时问我了指定的修车厂并安排了拖车。我决定还是用pocket estimate让4s店的collision center来修。下午时分，state farm又给我打来电话，说明了一下保险libility的决定。
In most cases, you do not have to pay your deductible if another insured driver hits you. The other driver’s liability insurance should pay for your repairs. If you have collision coverage, you can choose to go through your insurance to repair your car, but you still won’t have to pay the deductible. Your insurance company will seek full reimbursement from the at-fault driver’s insurer.
If another person files a claim against you, your liability coverage will cover the costs of repairs. You will not pay a deductible to cover damages to the other party. But you will have to pay a deductible to get your own car fixed when you are at-fault. You can also expect to pay all or part of your deductible in situations where fault is shared between you and the other driver. You may be on the hook for any damage you cause that exceeds your policy limits, too.
现在的问题是我花了deductible修了我自己的车，但是damage是由我撞了前面车和我被后边车撞这两个不同撞击造成的。换句话讲，就是我付的deductible最少也应该被reimburse一多半，因为我车上的damage很大一部分是由后边的车撞上了我造成的。虽然确实有“You can also expect to pay all or part of your deductible in situations where fault is shared between you and the other driver.”这句话，但是我的车的大部分damage是由于后边车撞上我造成的。也就是“In most cases, you do not have to pay your deductible if another insured driver hits you.”情况要占更多一些。准备明天基于这点与保险公司争论一下。
3月16日致电了state farm，试了几个不同的claim team agent，得到的回复如下：
agent2: 告知我整个segregation process在2月11日incident发生的当天就开始了。通常这个需要等车行修完车，该付的钱付清楚之后，segregation team会bill at-fault party的insurance policy。第一笔拿到的钱会用来reimburse我的deductible。并且告诉我下次致电问以下问题就可以了：“Has this （claim）send to the segregation yet？”
This is my brain dump of SIGMOD 2020 conference experience.
First of all, I really like virtual conference. I have been to conference once in the past. One big lesson learned from that experience is that there is no way to attend all sessions simply due to it’s not physical possible. Sessions are running concurrently at the same time. It’s cumbersome to navigate through the venue and get around the crowd to reach the session you like in time. However, with Zoom, the magic happens. I can open up all sessions I’m interested in and mute the speaker via drop audio setting in Zoom. If I find the topic I want to hear more, I can instantly switch to the desired Zoom window, reset the audio setting, and listen to the talk. Analogously, the experience feels like watching some streaming marathon on Twitch or watching the International from your laptop. Also, virtual means no visa headache 🙂 Another good thing about having sessions in Zoom is that I can easily ask questions whether via directly chiming in (Thanks Boon Thau Loo for promoting me to the panel to ask question live) or through typing. Asking questions in person offline can be challenge but being able to type questions online creates a relax environment for me to interact with speakers.
Another big advantage of virtual conference is the cost. Thanks to the COVID, this year’s SIGMOD is free. All I need is to sign up and then I can get into the internal system to attend any sessions I’m interested in. My perception on the academic conference is that everyone gathers at some fancy resort, enjoy the social interaction for a week, and then fly back home. I would imagine how costly this can be given the flight expense, hotel room, and registration fee. The zero cost conference means outreach; means reaching out wide audience. I would really love the organizer publish some stats on how many people actually virtually attend conference. I’ll be in huge surprise if we don’t see a huge number jump there. In addition, the free cost feels like welfare for me: I don’t have to pay a few hundred dollars to get myself motivated for the PhD journey ahead of me. I can see an accessible conference like SIGMOD this year will be a huge morale booster to someone who is struggling in their PhD and will motivate people to do good work.
Another big win for me is the recording part meaning that each presenter records their talk before hand and the session chair simply plays the videos one by one. In some session, I do experience some technical issue like there is video with no audio. But the issue is fixed within 5 minutes and the small distraction doesn’t impact the whole session experience at all. Pre-recording means high talk quality. The speaker can give his best performance for his talking. I think many of the speakers probably record their talks several times to pick the one they think can best deliver their idea in their work. Another great part is that the presenter is actually standing by to take questions and can give replies in the Zoom chat and even in the Slack channel several hours after the talk. This feature is very nice because we can keep the discussion in asynchronously fashion; both question and answer can be written out for further digest. Talking about Slack, I see PC chairs in SIGMOD and PODS are quite busy: you can see them across almost all Slack channels. Constantly saving questions and comments from Zoom to Slack to spark more discussion; spread Zoom link and session context. I think they deserve some kudos.
A Slack screenshot on a PC chair organized&pasted the content from Zoom to Slack
Being virtual means there will be a lot of writing communication: whether it is through Zoom chat or through Slack. This is huge benefit. I assume important information can easily get lost in the offline conversation. For example, it’s really too early for me to get up at 7am Friday to attend New Researchers Symposium given an 8 hours work ahead of me. However, thanks to being virtual, lots of discussion actually happen both during the Zoom live and more importantly, on Slack. People use Slack to ask questions and some panelist is nice enough to write their answer on Slack thread as well. This is good for me because now, during the lunch break, I can scan through the Slack channel and get some information from the past discussion. I figure this would not be possible if the conference is offline.
I’m not sure how the conference is run in the past but I think this year’s organizer puts huge effort to organize all-in-one page with Zoom link, Slack link, and schedule in one page so that I can easily find the information I want.
A peek of all-in-one schedule web page. Very useful.
As a first time academic conference attendee, matching actual people with their name in paper is a huge win for me. In some way, this does feel like handshake events for Japanese idol. Indeed, those “Japanese idol” are in fact quite approachable. I really do enjoy Anastasia Ailamaki’s smiley face from the camera and her persistent typing to answer the questions both from Zoom chat and Slack channel. There are several sessions I really like from this perspective are SIGMOD Plenary Panel: “The Next 5 Years: What Opportunities Should the Database Community Seize to Maximize its Impact?”, Mohan’s Retirement Party, and Industry Panel: Startups Founded by Database Researchers. So many names that I saw both from paper and from internal codebase. It’s very cool to see some roast and teasing online.
Social wise, I really like Zoomside Chat series. For example, “Zoomside Chat with Jian Pei”. It feels like coffee break and the topic is very relaxing. This is the place where some “ungraceful” question get asked. Also, “Zoomside Chat with Tamer Özsu” is also fun. I really wish there would be more time allocated for this type of social events.
Research wise, taking a look of the accepted papers beforehand is really helpful. On my laptop, I have a list of papers written on the Notes. I write down my thoughts and comments for each corresponding paper on the list. Due to my personal interest, Wednesday and Thursday sessions interest me the most. Luckily, my targeted papers spread out quite evenly through two days. My biggest regret is to not go through the papers I’m interested in beforehand. The result of not doing so is to get lost in sessions that may seem tangible to my research direction. This is worth improving for the next time to make most out of conference. Having said that, I’m still able to learn some useful benchmarks that I can run related to my research. Also, sitting through the talks (even lost) help me to further refine my paper list for future reference. Another thing I notice is that workshops are much nicer for learning. Research sessions usually have only 10 minutes for each speaker. Speaker has to move very fast and cover part of material on paper. However, workshop speaker has 25 minutes (at least for aiDM workshop) and the pace is much slower compared to normal research sessions. Lastly, attending sessions is a great way to discover the knowledge gap: even they may not relate to my research direction, it is still fun to learn for pleasure.
Some downside of this year’s virtual conference is Gather. I don’t know how useful it is for others but it is not quite useful for a working professional like me. First of all, my company “bans” the website: I can get into the room but it will take forever to load the venue floor plan and see other people. If I really want to use Gather, I have to disconnect from company’s VPN. I want to walk around the venue while waiting for the build. However, VPN-unfriendly Gather is not quite helpful here. Another disadvantage for virtual means I don’t have to participate “fully”: I can run errands; check work emails; fix some code bugs for the work. I don’t have to give out full energy to the conference. I guess this is really my bad.
Overall, I’m very grateful for this virtual experience at SIGMOD this year. The overall experience is excellent. I’m hoping they will do something similar next time; maybe partial virtual? However, I surely will miss the chance to see people and attend sessions. That motivates me the most to do good work because I want to attend next time (maybe as a presenter).
UPDATE (06/19/20):
Received an email from organizer
The last workshop has finished, and SIGMOD/PODS 2020 is now history. We suspect it will be a landmark in most of your minds, separating SIGMOD/PODS Conferences into those pre-2020 and those post-2020. Even before all the adjustments brought on by the COVID-19 crisis, we planned to stream more of the sessions. Our registration of ~3000 shows that there is high demand for online access to the conference. If our community is serious about fostering diversity and inclusion, then remote participation should become a permanent option.
Looking forward to the remote participation in the future.
Appendix
This section collects some useful comments I gathered from Slack. It is for my future reference; might be useful to you as well.
From SIGMOD Plenary Panel: “The Next 5 Years: What Opportunities Should the Database Community Seize to Maximize its Impact?” on whether researcher should be “customer obsession” and solve real problem:
I would never discourage work that is detached from current industrial use; I think it’s not constructive to suggest that you need customers to start down a line of thinking. Sounds like a broadside against pure curiosity-driven research, and I LOVE the idea of pure curiosity-driven research. In fact, for really promising young thinkers, this seems like THE BEST reason to go into research rather than industry or startups. The best reward is the joy of the idea.
But I think I share some of Anhai’s concern about improving the odds of impact and depth in our community.
What I tend to find often leads to less-than-inspiring work is variant n+1 on a hot topic for large n. What Stonebraker calls “polishing a round ball”. The narrow gauge for creativity in a busy area makes it really hard to find either inspiring insights or significant impact on practice; but at the same time the threshold for publication is often low because social factors in reviewing favor hot topics (competition, familiarity, and yes — commercial relevance of the topic, which can lead to boring research too!) That’s something we can try to address constructively.
Now I am guilty of going deep and narrow sometimes myself, e.g. in distributed transactions and consistency in the last many years. But it’s been rewarding and fun, and I like to think we had a new lens on things that let us hit paydirt a few times. Certainly outside my group, work like Natacha Crooks’ beautiful paper on client-centric isolation in PODC 17 demonstrates there is still room for major breakthroughs there. So some topics do merit depth and continued chipping away for gold.
Bottom line, my primary advice to folks is to do research that inspires you.
To align with @AnHai Doan a bit more, if you are searching for relevance, you don’t need to have a friend who is an executive at a corporation. Find 30-40 professionals on LinkedIn who might use software like you’re considering, and interview them to find out how they spend their time. Don’t ask them “do you think my idea is cool” (because they’ll almost always say yes to be nice). Ask them what they do all day, what bugs them. I learned this from Jeff Heer and Sean Kandel, who did this prior to our Wrangler research, that eventually led to Trifacta. It’s a very repeatable model that simply requires different legwork than we usually do in our community. http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/enterprise-analysis-interviews
As for where to find the customers, I really like your suggestion. Another thing I may add is that one can go talk to the domain scientists in the SAME university. Many of them now have tons of data and are struggling to process them. These domain scientists are often sitting just ten minutes from one’s office, and they are dying for any help. Talk with them to really understand the kind of data problems they have. Often at the start those are very mundane basic problems, such as querying a big amount of data. But if one can help them solve those basic problems, then often many more interesting problems come up.
Yet another thing to do is go talk to companies in the SAME TOWN. They often are downed in data too and would love to get some help. One can very quickly get to know the kinds of problems they have. This has worked at least for me. My group started out working on data problems with several domain science groups at UW-Madison. We developed solutions that were used by them and in turn they gave us feedback. Then we took those solutions to local companies (insurance, health, heating/cooling, three companies), and they helped us improve the solution. Then we got funding to do a startup. This is perhaps also a possible roadmap.
New Researchers Symposium with a question asking about how to fix “the despicable but common toxicity of the database community in the tone of their reviews and often during in-person questions/discussions?” and ask about how to write a good review.
Joe Hellerstein7 hours ago I sense there are stories here, and I’m sorry to hear this. In my experience, the face-to-face interactions in our community have gotten more professional over the years. I’m very sorry if the questioner has witnessed bad public behavior.
But in my experience the reviews have actually gotten worse in recent years. I believe we need a process change. The root of the problem is that reviewers are generally not held accountable for what they write.
One thing I learned in my startup is that team members who voice concerns are not very valuable — startups are risky by nature, and concern-mongering just contributes to negativity. However, team members who voice concerns and propose solutions are gold. We should ask the same of reviewers.
Anecdote: Doug Terry often signs his reviews. I went through an exercise last CIDR where I decided to try that, and I found instantly that I became much more helpful and constructive in my reviewing, even for papers that I did not recommend for acceptance. It didn’t feel OK just to criticize; I felt more responsible to suggest and encourage changes.
I’ve heard arguments why this isn’t a reasonable global solution—e.g. junior researchers could face retribution for signing negative reviews. But we might consider other mechanisms for ensuring that the reviewers are (a) held to account and (b) required to be constructive.
This post is a summary and reflection of the critical mistakes I have made throughout my post-secondary academia career. This is a gift for my child (if there is one) and it might be helpful for others.
Diverse interests without focus
I have three majors from economics, computer science, and mathematics after I finish my undergraduate degree. I often get wowed from other people. However, the more I focus on one field, the more I feel three majors are diversified enough to have no focus. Even I have a major in computer science, I didn’t take courses in computer architecture, operating systems, networks, compilers, which are essential courses for a computer science major. I have to take hard way to catch up with those missing material: reading classics. This process takes a long time and I’m still on my way finish studying them. If I have an end goal of becoming a computer scientist, there certainly no need to obtain a major in economics and I should become more focus on the mathematical branch related to topology, combinatorics, and logic. Taking extra unnecessary courses may not be the only waste. Lacking of background incurs extra cost during the PhD and job applications. Even though I manage to secure a position in industry, I still need lots of work to catch up.
Doesn’t know the end goal
Even though I have foreshadowed this point in the previous paragraph, I want to emphasize how important it is to know the end goal. Ideally, people should discover their interests from high school. However, start the exploration in college is not too late. But, the exploration should end after freshman so that there is enough time to become specialized and concentrate on something. Knowing the end goal cannot happen immediately but at least, it should happen by Junior. During the college, I hopped around three majors with no common theme at all: what I want to do for my future? I avoid to answer this question by taking the majors that may seem to offer the greatest flexibility in the future. However, the cost of doing so is the lack of depth. In addition, I didn’t know what I want to do for the computer science career: research or software engineer? That leads to one huge mistake detailed in “Failure in seizing ‘the’ opportunity” section. Knowing the end goal is very very important and the book “The 7 habits of Highly Effective People” should help.
Doesn’t engage in research with long term vision early
People often emphasize how important to get involved with research in college mainly because research is a critical component of higher education. I certainly did but my mistake is that I’m involving in research in ad-hoc way: I did research in math, in psychology, and in statistics without a common theme that connects them all together. In math, I did research in probability; in psychology, I did research in early childhood education; in statistics, I did research in fMRI. Those research experience is helpful only in the sense that they help me to discover what I don’t like. I always admire the people who can discover their interests early: there are lots of options; how can one settle on one without trying out others first? That’s my unresolved question. Technically speaking, I don’t think this section should be considered as a mistake but certainly, it is something that incurs lots of detours in my short-lived academia career.
Failure in seizing “the” opportunity
I started to compose this post when I was on the spring break trip in Alaska. I ran into a group of people who were from my undergraduate institution – University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had a brief chat with them. One question I asked one of them who happened to be a CS major was: does Wisconsin start to set bar for people who want to declare CS major? “No! Everyone can do it! That’s the amazing part of Wisconsin: the university gives everyone opportunities to try!” She answered. “I know a friend who transferred to Wisconsin from University of Washington to study CS because he cannot study CS at UW. Students in UW can study CS only when they are admitted to CS directly from high school.” Her replies don’t surprise: that’s the same impression I have about Wisconsin. However, her answer stirs a huge pain in my heart. I suddenly have guts to admit a huge mistake I have made during my first year study at UT-Austin.
I’m unsure about what to do with summer: whether I want to go to a research lab to prepare my PhD application or finding an internship in industry. As you can see, here I have the mistake of not knowing my end goal: I’m not sure whether I want to pursue a career in research or in software engineering. I contacted one of my former professors in Wisconsin and he was kind enough to offer me a position in his lab over the summer. He is a famous researcher and people are dying to work with him. But, guess you already know, I blow up the chance and work on a software engineering internship over the summer. Of course, the professor is unhappy but he is kind enough to not saying that explicitly. In the following Fall, I applied for PhD programs and I asked him for a letter. Without big surprise, I got rejected by all the programs including the school the professor is in. After learning the admission results, I keep lying to myself about all the drawbacks of attending a PhD program and I constantly have debate in my heart about whether I have made a good decision for the summer. After talking with the girl from my school during the trip, I suddenly realized that how upset I am in my heart and how I keep avoiding facing the fact that I have made a huge mistake and blow up “the” opportunity. I couldn’t help to imagine that if everything works out over the summer, I may already have the admission from his lab to have the privilege to study for PhD program. Of course, in real life, there is no “if”. Failure in seizing “the” opportunity can be treated as a pivot point in my life. A person’s life might be settled after a few pivotal decisions. I think I just made a mistake in one of them.
The only takeaway: Never ever give up your interest
Basically, it says that there is no such thing has higher worth than one’s dream. After getting rejected by all PhD programs, I know that getting an internship in industry over the summer signifies my give-up my interests in becoming a researcher for the money. I didn’t upset at the very beginning but the more I think about, the more I think I should stick with my interests no matter how poor or how old I am. Now, I’m in a situation about I should hog onto something that is not my interest: money in this case. I’m not sure eventually, I can have a way to switch back to my dream but I know it’s going to be a long and hard way
这个又是罪过了，完全没有达到预期。如果把全年以出国日期8月5号作为切割点的话，两段时间各自出现了一些问题。出国前看书偏细致，算法书逢题比作，看的实在是过于精细了一点。同时，自己文学类书籍看过一些，但是频率还是不及。出国后看书效率明显提升。这个主要得益于跳着看这个方法。 这里非常感谢Prof. Dana Ballard教的Machine Learning以及其他courses的老师们，自学成为主要学习手段。疯狂的project进度逼迫着我这个完美主义者向能用就行主义者的进化。看一本书直接就看最相关的章节，所有背景知识都是后补，并且如果又不理解的但又不影响阅读的，就画个标记搁置起来后边再看。意识到一本书可以看多遍的道理，所以第一遍读时的贪欲就少了很多，就不求每个点都读懂了。是的，写这段话的时候，我脑海里浮现的书名就是PRML。但是，一本书没有看完大部分章节终究还是不能说看过的，所以8月份后问题主要出现在时间不够上边。介于未来几年希望能读完PhD的我来说，状况可能改善不会太大。
It’s October 30th today. I only have one more day left to compose a post for October. Blogging can be very hard during school time because there are endless tasks you need to get done in a timely fashion with certain expected results. Even though I have given up watching videoes, playing video games, writing technical blogs (almost) for this semester, I still want to write something here to keep the blogging trend going: I have written at least one post per month for the past two years. So, here it is.
There are many things happened in October and surprisingly, those things are all about the relationship: I got baptism to become a Christian, which indicates a new relationship with the God; I start seeing a woman, which is a relationship in a normal standard. One thing I am always curious about when I don’t involve those relationships is: how life can be different when you are in a relationship. Most of my knowledge on this matter is from the media and the people I observe. For the relationship with the God, I barely know anything. I haven’t actively thought about this since I graduated from the college and I won’t even think about being a Christian before coming to Austin. For the relationship with a woman, that I have been thinking about quite actively especially when I was a high school student. I always want to know the taste of being with someone. However, quite surprisingly, if you ask me now how life changed after being with God and being with a woman, I would say: the former one is quite significant but the latter one doesn’t change much.
Being with the God
Being with the God is a huge decision to me. I went to a church back in Madison for two years but I could barely feel anything internally. I always treat going church on Sunday morning as a way to sing some songs and take a break from study. However, after arriving in Austin and thanks to some incidents, the picture of God becomes clear to me. I start to feel the life journey I have been through is perfectly designed to me. Attending Madison for undergraduate makes me mentally strong to the setbacks and going back to China for work makes me grow up like an adult and start to learn all the soft skills I previously ignored: communication, love, and family. All those things prepare me to head back to the States and pursue the further study. In addition, I always know that I have sin but I don’t know what way can help me to get rid of that and start a new life. Even worse, I constantly get seduced by Satan to do the things that hurt my friends and my family. I know I’m wrong but the pleasure coming from the crime is just too much and that gives me the pulse to commit again next time. Thankfully, I have the chance to know the God and I get my way out of the vicious cycle. After becoming a Christian, I learn to view things in God’s view and try to pass the love to others. I learn to forgive the conflict and do things in the honor of God. Thanks to God, he prepares a woman for me.
Being with a woman
Surprisingly, being in a relationship doesn’t change my life that much. I simply have one more person to care about and I need to allocate certain time for that person. This doesn’t differ from spending time with my parents previously. She is a Christian as well and we adhere to the same core values. All the rest of difference seems trivial to reconcile. However, we have been dating for like a month and we are still in the calibration period: we start to know more about each other and be careful with the relationship traps that people usually fall into. However, with the help of the God, I think I’ll be fine.
To be honest, this is probably the most difficult post I have ever written. This is majorly because there is a ton of stuff I want to say but I’m unsure whether I should keep them public or should keep it to myself. Another factor that makes this post hard to write is because the span of drafting. I have been drafting this post since April in 2016, right after when I decide to start the whole process of quit-IBM-and-get-a-PhD project. I used to use this post as a log to record things and feelings when somethings happens around me at IBM. Frankly, if I take a look at the stuff I record (mostly are rantings) retrospectively, lots of stuff still hold but the anger just passes away with the time. So, that year-long drafting really makes me hesitate even more because the mood when those stuff are written are gone. However, two years can be a significant amount of time and quitting IBM can be called “an end of era” and I should give a closure to my happy-and-bitter experience with IBM anyway. So, here it goes.
Thank you, IBM!
I’m really thankful for the opportunities working with IBM. This experience really makes me grow both technically and mentally. Technical-wise, I have the opportunity to get hands on experience with DB2 development. DB2 as a database engine is extremely complex. It has over 10 million lines of code and it is way beyond the scope of any school project. Working on those projects are quite challenging because there is no way you can get clear understanding of every part of the project. I still remember when I attend the new hire education on DB2, there is one guy says: “I have been working on the DB2 optimizer for over 10 years but I cannot claim with certainty that I know every bit of the component I own.” This fact really shocks me and based upon my experience so far, his claim still holds but with one subtle assumption, which I’ll talk about later. There are lots of tools are developed internally and reading through both the code and tool chains are a great fortune for any self-motivated developers. I pick a lots of skills alongside: C, C++, Makefile, Emacs, Perl, Shell, AIX and many more. I’m really appreciated with this opportunity and I feel my knowledge with database and operating system grow a lot since my graduation from college.
Mentally, there are also lots of gains. Being a fresh grad is no easy. Lots of people get burned out because they are just like people who try to learn swim and are put inside water: either swim or drown. I’m lucky that my first job is with IBM because the atmosphere is just so relax: people expect you to learn on your own but they are also friendly enough (majority of them) to give you a hand when you need help. I still remember my first ticket with a customer is on a severity one issue, which should be updated your progress with the problem daily. There is a lot of pressure on me because I really have no clue with the product at the very beginning. I’m thankful for those who help me at that time and many difficult moments afterwards. That makes me realize how important is to be nice and stay active with the people around you. Because no matter how good you are with technology and the product, there are always stuff you don’t know. Staying active with people around you may help you go through the difficult moment like this by giving you a thread that you can start at least pull. In addition, participating with toastmasters club really improve my communication and leadership skills and more importantly, I make tons of friends inside the club. Without working at IBM, I probably won’t even know the existence of the toastmasters club. If you happen to follow my posts, you’ll see lots of going on around me when I work at IBM. Every experience you go through offer you a great opportunity to learn and improve yourself. Some people may look at them as setbacks but for me, I look at them as opportunities.
( the picture on the left is all the comments people give to me about my speech and on the right is the awards I have earned inside the club in these two years)
With the help of all those experience, I have developed a good habit of writing blogs (both technical and non-technical), reading books, and keep working out six days per week. All those things cannot be possible if I work at a place where extra hour work commonly happened. I’m very thankful for IBM for this because staying healthy both physically and mentally are super critical for one’s career. Even though those stuff don’t directly come from IBM, but IBM does provide the environment to nurture this things to happen.
…
IBM has its own problem. The problem is centered around people. There are many words I want to say but I think I’ll keep them secretly but I want to show my point with a picture:
I don’t know why IBM’s term “resource action” on firing employees and the sentence “IBM recognize that our employee are our most valuable resources.” bother me so much. I probably just hate the word “resource” as a way to directly describe people and how this word get spammed so much around IBM. I know everyone working for a big corporation is just like a cog in a machine. However, what I feel based upon lots of things happened around me is that IBM as its attitudes represented by its first-line managers (because those people I commonly work with) makes this fact very explicitly. It hurts, to be honest. No matter how hard you work and no matter how many prizes you have earned for yourself and your first-line manager, you are nothing more than a cog in a machine, which is not worth for high price to have you around because there are many cogs behind you that are ready to replace you. They are much cheaper, much younger, and more or less can work like you because your duty in the machine is just so precisely specified, which doesn’t really depend on how much experience you have had under your belt. To me, that’s devastating.
This leads to the problem that talented people are reluctant to stay with company. My mentor and the people are so good with DB2 have bid farewell to the team. That’s really sad to me because they are the truly asset to the company and the product. The consequence of this is that crucial knowledge is gone with people. Some quirks existing in the product are only known by some people and once they leave the company, the knowledge is gone with them. That makes mastering of the product even harder. That’s the subtle assumption that the person makes during the new hire education and that’s also part of the problem when working with legacy code. The whole legacy code issue is worth another post but one thing I now strongly believe is that any technical problem has its own root cause in company culture and management style. To me, I’m not a guru now but I cannot see the way to become a guru with my current position, which scares me the most
That’s it for this section and I’ll leave the rest to my journal.
Focus on your own product is quite important. However, it’s even more important to see how your peers doing. I’m not an architect yet but I feel it’s helpful to begin thinking like an architect and see what the problems that your peers are facing and how they try to solve them. In addition, by knowing how’s the going with your peers, you may get a measure of yourself: is the work you are doing on the same level as your peers? Are you in a good shape in the job market? What’s the gap you need to fulfill skill-wise?
Deepen the understanding of the field
Even almost two years working on the database field, I still think myself as a newbie. This is mainly because database is arguably the most complex software that people can ever make and there are tons of stuff I don’t know. So, I want to see in a high level that what’s the trend of the field and what kind of reflection that people derive from their day-to-day engineering practice. I think this may help me to catch-up with the masters.
AI or System?
As I disclosed in my last post, I decide to head back to school and get a master degree. To be honest, my ultimate goal is to acquire a PhD in Computer Science and currently I’m actively preparing for it. The most important question is that which field I want to study? I have two options and I have some interests in both fields: AI and System. Why these two options and not others is worth a whole new post and I don’t want to discuss here. So, my task for now is to gather as much information as possible about these two fields and see which one looks more attractive to me. This event is extremely helpful because it has sharing on System as well as on AI.
先说下结果。这次我录取的项目有： CMU-SV MS-SE, Brown MS-CS, NYU MS-CS, GaTech MS-CS, UT-Austin MS-CS, UCSD MS-CS, CornellTech MMeng-CS, Columbia MS-CS. 最后我选择了UT-Austin MS-CS。
Know your goals: employment or research?
这里说的是上Master的目的：是直接毕业找工作还是想要为未来PhD做准备？这条在本质上决定了选择offer的大方向。很少有项目能做到两者兼顾的。首先说说直接毕业找工作。如果是为了直接毕业找工作的话，那么学校placement statistics, 地理位置就要在决定过程中占有相对大的比例。与之相应的research实力，课程设置，导师等就不是考虑的重中之重了。如果以这个标准来看，CMU-SV MS-SE，Brown MS-CS, GaTech MS-CS, UCSD MS-CS, Columbia MS-CS， NYU MS-CS， CornellTech MMeng-CS就是些非常不错的选择了。再来说说研究方向，这里我们要看的就是教授，研究方向了。这里我并不是要说鱼和熊掌不可兼得，我想说的是每个项目都有不同的侧重点。
Big Department or Small Department?
系的大小也是影响决定的一个重要因素。Brown是第一个给我offer的，同时也是让我心动了很长时间。原因就是以Brown为代表的这种小而精的系，每个教授可以给每个学生最大的attention, 系里的氛围像大家庭一样。换句话讲，人均资源相对于那些大系来说会多一些。但是任何事物都不是完美的。系小的缺点就在于课程设置不会那么丰富并且研究领域会出现侧重：不会每个领域都会有教授的。我再来说说系大的特点。系大基本上就是系小取反。你面对的可能是更加激烈的竞争，资源就这些，每个人要去try their best to fight for the resources. 这里没有人会去babysitting，所以学生会被要求更加独立。但是，这不就是现实社会么？
Randomize stuff... 