Enjablog

I had a few people ask me about my management posts a couple weeks ago. Just wanted to clarify that these were in response to emails a friend sent me. This was *not* about my interns this summer (who, for the record, were quite adequate).

After a few days of emails going back and forth, my friend suggested I write a book since she was looking for usable feedback like this, even suggesting the title. I was lazy, so I pasted our emails onto my blog. That’s how books get written these days anyway, right?

I came across this picture and found it distracting for a couple reasons:
- Salad course comes after the meat course
- No napkin
- There’s a fork on the right!

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After doing some research, I found that this is more commonly referred to as an oyster fork. I couldn’t find any information on why it’s on the right or how it was developed. But after looking at some image searches of oyster forks, I have a theory.

I think they evolved from oyster spoons that conformed to the shape of a shell. I found very few references to oyster spoons in general, and not at all in place settings. I guess they were more effective with prongs, but already had a place on the table back in olden times. Based on this, I believe that a spork would also be placed on the right of a dinner plate in a formal place setting.

So I thought more about why I am so grumpy. And it’s not because she is a *bad* intern, at all — based on effort alone she gets an A. It’s more that I do not enjoy being in charge and responsible 24/7 for her project and my own stuff. It’s the same feeling of annoyance I get when my day is full of commitments that break up the day so I feel like nothing gets done.

So, it’s not her…it’s me. :-P

My career is doomed, isn’t it?

Welcome to my life! ;)

At a certain point you have to make the trade-off between what you, yourself, can accomplish and what you want accomplished as an end-goal.

I can be the smartest person in the world, but I can only do as much as 1 me can do. Even if I could automate processes and be more efficient than 10 average people (I wish!), I can still only do as much as 1 me (by definition).

If I can train 1 person to be half as efficient as me, moving forward, we’re producing at a rate of 1.5 mes. So, the end goal can be set higher than what I’d do myself. And then… welcome to management. I’m worth more training more mes than I am actually doing the work. Still coming to terms with this*. Intellectually, I get it (why CEOs are worth so much). But it’s so not what I want to spend my time doing.

As for your career, no, it isn’t doomed. Well, not necessarily. You’re going to have to deal with this more as a requirement in academia than you will in other careers. So either you tolerate it or you find some way to convince yourself it’s worth the investment. For me, I always have the option of finding a dark corner and going back to my technical work. If you’re headed for research/teaching, you have to convince yourself it’s worth it.

The way I see it, if you want your career in research, you’re definitely going to be in charge of projects 24/7. At least if you want to do anything really interesting. And that means baby-sitting. A lot. But that also means, once you reach a certain level, you’re going to be able to pick the people you want around you to baby-sit the next generation of minions. And then you get to do really cool stuff! :)

*This is all stuff Ian has explained to me on numerous occasions. I just keep forgetting/losing perspective. He definitely has the people skillz in our relationship.

This all started when I emailed a friend to express my regret for not starting a Crazy Log at work years ago. The conversation quickly evolved into one of dealing with people at work… and harnessing the few people skillz we have at our disposal.

I am the worst mentor/intern supervisor ever. :( I am getting annoyed at little problems because we solved them two weeks ago, why aren’t you doing what we decided to do? WRITE THINGS DOWN. And I realize that I am not an expert at using this software either, but if you have the same problems over and over, but I never do, it’s probably not the software. That’s a failure to do each of the steps in the right order. Remember my suggestion to write them down?

I’m also grumpy because I’ve had to adjust my schedule to accommodate her (her carpool gets her here about an hour before I would like to arrive), and coffee only helps so much. And she is super sweet and really excited and interested, but I just. can. not. hide my frustration, and I don’t think I’m being fair to her at all. I owe it to her to be all “hey, this took me awhile to learn, but writing things down when there are lots of steps turns out to save a lot of problems” and try to TEACH her how to work through these things, instead of hiding in my office with my coffee.

Uggghhh. Suggestions?

A few years ago, we had this intern who did a terrible job following instructions and completing a list of tasks. He would always forget to do a step or only incorporate some untrackable subset of the comments given on a deliverable. We resorted to asking my friend’s mom (a special ed teacher) for suggestions.

Recycled for current intern:

1. Tell her to write things down.
2. Remind her to grab her notebook before you talk.
3. Tell her “you should write this down.”
4. Write it down in your notebook when you talk to her to give her cues for things she should be writing down. (And to document what you told her; more for my kind of work environment than yours, since I need documentation for performance reviews if things escalate.)
5. If you’ve already done these things or this is ineffective, follow up face-to-face talks with emails with the instructions listed out.
6. Have her check off each step on the list before asking you questions.

Basically, use every mode of communication available to you and remind her when she asks questions to follow *all* the steps.

I go through this pretty much every year. I started the cycle again 2 months ago! We get these enthusiastic new grads/interns in… I remind myself that they don’t know anything, teach them to carry a notepad around & when to write things down, and baby-sit them. A month (a week?) goes by and I get endlessly frustrated that they can’t do 2 things without asking a question they’ve already asked 10 times!!??

So, it’s normal. Or at least what I consider normal. ;) It’s good to recognize your frustration. Feel free to share with her that you know you’re frustrated, but you really do want her to learn this or whatever would sound sincere from you.

I’ve gotten to the point that I just tell people I’m not naturally a patient person and I’m working on that. If I seem annoyed, it’s not personal and it’s my problem to get over. And they should please look past that and ask me questions anyway because I’ll be even *more* annoyed if I find out later that they could have avoided wasting time doing something wrong.

Plan to set aside half an hour every day, like office hours, to answer questions all at once or walk her through that day’s task for the 20th time. If it’s scheduled into your day, it’s less disruptive and gives her an easy opportunity to re-ask questions that would otherwise bug you when you’re trying to get work done. Do this at her desk/computer so she can walk you through what she thinks she should be doing and you can add in extra steps as needed.

Reward her for doing anything right. Once she’s a little functional, you can pick and choose what’s actually useful for the task at hand. Think behavior modification: reinforcing successive approximations.

P.S. The best thing I did for my engineering career was study psychology. The classes I use more than anything else in my day-to-day life:
- PSYC 3044: Behavior Modification
- PSYC 2044: Psychology of Learning