Tales from the jar side: Luck and hurricanes, a Podcast, a Webinar, a User Group meeting, and other jokes
Best line I heard all week (courtesy of Rob Fletcher, @_fletchr): We'll burn that can of worms when we come to it
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of August 15 - 22, 2021. This week I made a presentation on my book to the Atlanta Java Users Group, taught an NFJS virtual workshop on Java Testing with JUnit 5 and Mockito, taught the third week of my Spring in 3 Weeks course and my regular Reactive Spring course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, taught day 2 of 3 of a private Spring training class, and finished with an NFJS webinar on my book, called Help Your Boss Help You, on Friday afternoon. I also played in an online chess tournament on Saturday. A busy week.
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A Lucky Hurricane
Today is Sunday, and we’re being drenched by Hurricane — now Tropical Storm — Henri, which made landfall in Westerly, Rhode Island, which is about an hour east of us on the Connecticut / RI border. So far we still have power and, more importantly for me, Internet connectivity. We’ll see how long that lasts. We have lots of trees in this state, and my house is surrounded by them. The power outages are generally connected to downed trees, so that’s the risky part.
Lisbon, CT (as opposed to Lisbon, Portugal) is about half an hour east of me. For reference, here’s the current Eversource outage map of Connecticut, with a small highlight around Marlborough, where I live:
I expect this map to get a worse as the day goes on, but it mostly looks like it won’t be a real disaster.
We’ve been very lucky. The winds aren’t as bad as they were expecting (thus the downgrade to Tropical Storm, though TS Henri sounds like the author of a book about French cats), the really heavy rains are both south and east of us. Plus, we have a backup generator if we need it.
That combination of luck and preparation reminds me of a topic that I discussed in my NFJS presentation Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success. In my talk, I reference a Scientific American article entitled, The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized, which is based on an article in the journal Advances in Complex Systems called Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure.
The paper is worth a read, but let me summarize the main idea here: the authors (Pluchino, Biondo, and Rapisarda) built a simple agent-based model, gave the players a normal distribution of talent, and simulated the effect of luck. They found that “if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals.”
The problem with that assessment, true as it may be, is that it manages to offend anyone who has had any success at all. Doesn’t talent matter? What about dedication or hard work?
I like to reframe the issue this way:
Success equals opportunities plus the ability to exploit those opportunities.
The ability to exploit opportunities is where each individual’s combination of talent, drive, and resources comes into play. The luck — or, more properly from a statistical point of view, randomness — affects what opportunities come along.
This also, by the way, helps clarify the challenges faced by women, underrepresented minorities, and anyone with a financial disadvantage. Those groups receive far fewer opportunities than higher-income white males. Their opportunities are rarer, and the are also harder to exploit given the additional obstacles they have to overcome.
My own career has had some rather dramatic turns, though I don’t like to talk about them. You can imagine me like one of those “can’t miss” prospects coming out of college entering your favorite sport, and somehow, mystifyingly, struggling to perform as an everyday player, much less the star they’re supposed to be. Whenever sportswriters talk about early round draft busts, I empathize and I wince in response.
I came out of college with multiple degrees from some of the finest universities in the world. Seriously, when I entered the workforce I had BS degrees in both Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and an MA and a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, which is an academic resume I’d put up against anybody. I also had excellent written and oral communication skills, and a talent for working well with others. How could I miss, right? Yet, for the bulk of my career as a research scientist, I constantly felt my managers were looking at me with a sense of disappointment, wondering when (or even if) all those credentials were going to turn into comparable results. I came very close more than once to being let go, managing to dodge that by moving to a different group and selling my resume yet again.
In retrospect, my biggest problem was that my job at the time focused on my weaknesses rather than my strengths. My written and oral communication skills only came up a few times a year, at conferences, which weren’t all that visible to my company. The rest of the time I had to do difficult, detailed work (which I find challenging) in areas filled with uncertainty (which I really don’t like), combined with constantly having to justify my work in order to get future funding (which I hated), in a large company filled with policies and procedures that I found constricting and against which I tended to rebel. I also have a strong streak of empathy and a desire to help others, which is great, but again rarely affected that job. It’s probably surprising I survived as long as I did.
What’s different now? My current job consists almost entirely of teaching technical training courses and giving presentations on difficult subjects. That means I get to learn new things all the time (which I like), break them down so others can understand them (which I love), and I have enough good clients that I rarely have to go looking for more work (for which I count my blessings every day). Plus, as a one-person company, I make the decisions, so I get all the rewards, and I pay all the costs when they go wrong. But since I’m flexible, whenever I discover I’m wrong, I adjust so I don’t stay wrong. That’s a lot easier to do when working for yourself.
I should also mention I did a lot of work on myself, to address the underlying reasons why I was so self-destructive early in my career, but that’s a story for another time. I’ll just say that worked hard at it. Both changing myself and changing my career were necessary for me to be successful, however you define it. As the saying goes, if you find yourself unhappy at work, you change your situation, or you change your situation. I did both over the course of a several years, and now I get the benefits.
Why bring all this up? The near miss of Tropical Storm Henri reminded me that:
Over the past few years I’ve moved most of my work online, which was a great help when the pandemic hit.
I’ve been lucky enough to find the right clients to make me financially secure, and I’ve worked hard to exploit them (for want of a better word). Mostly that means staying on top of recent developments in my field and learning to teach them.
I recognized the reality of living in New England (and the appalling record of the Connecticut power grid and service company — yeah, I got your Eversource right here) to invest in a serious backup generator that can sustain us in case of power outages.
Though I can’t do anything about Internet service interruptions, I have both a high-speed cable line and a reliable cell network in case that goes down.
Some of that was definitely luck. Some was talent and hard work. The client opportunities were luck, but when I found those clients I worked hard to establish myself as a primary resource for them. I work hard at my job. It doesn’t hurt, though, being an older, white male in the IT field, and while that was just an accident of birth, I’m lucky the chance to teach online came after I was already well-established in my field.
So yeah, I got lucky with the storm this time, and yeah, I’ll take it. :)
The Question You’re All Wondering About
Three events related to Help Your Boss Help You occurred this week (and one happened last week):
I gave a talk by the same name at the Atlanta Java Users Group:
Did you miss Ken Kousen (@kenkousen ) giving his Atlanta JUG talk on Tuesday? No worries. You can watch it on YouTube!
That involved a flight to Atlanta and back. I’m glad to say everybody was masked in the airports and on the planes. Atlanta got hit with a storm that day, though, so attendance was lower than expected, but it was still fun. Plus we had a fair number of attendees online.
I gave the aforementioned NFJS webinar on Friday, which you can view here if you like.
The latest Pragmatic Hero’s Journey podcast was released:
The latest Pragmatic Hero’s Journey podcast Incidentally, for a company that really impresses me in terms of their marketing savvy, they’re terrible at publicizing their own podcast. It only gets mentioned in their newsletter, and there are no tweets or other announcements at all. I find that truly surprising.
I mentioned this last week, but the book got a fantastic review by Geertjan Wielenga on Foojay.io, and later added to the Amazon page:
I have no idea which of these, if any, made the difference, but my book at Amazon made it back as the #1 New Release in both Business Communication and Business Ethics. Whether that translates to two new sales or twenty or even two hundred, only Amazon knows, at least until the statistics are updated next month. But I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.
Java Records and JPA
Even though this newsletter is getting long, let me at least point you to a great article that came out this week:
I don’t know that Java Records have me excited, but I was interested to see if they would play nicely with the Java Persistence API. I didn’t think they would fit, because JPA requires classes to have a default constructor, have non-final fields with setters, and not be final classes. Those are some of the same reasons Kotlin data classes don’t play well with JPA.
I was happy to see the reference article by Billy Korando discussing how to use records as JPA projections. That looked fairly painful, but I was quite heartened to see that Spring Data works with them with almost no additional work. Excellent.
Other Humorous Tweets
I think I’ll leave the discussion of OnlyFans to others, but this tweet cracked me up:
If they really do follow through, they’re done. The same thing happened to Tumbler, and adult material wasn’t even their primary business model.
I’m in the wrong generation for tattoos (thank goodness), but given this:
I now see their value, and I now respect anyone who has one (or more, but yikes).
I have several friends who will love that joke. If you don’t get it, see the Ship of Theseus page at Wikipedia.
And finally:
Now we know.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Java Testing with JUnit 5 and Mockito 3, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
Week 3 of Spring Boot in 3 Weeks, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Day 2 of an online private Spring course.
Reactive Spring, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
NFJS webinar on HYBHY, Friday at 1pm EDT.
This week:
Basic Android Development, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Final week of a Spring course for a private client.