they teach you stuff in grad school
Sep. 26th, 2024 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asrabkinturns out you learn stuff in a PhD. I was sent to present to the senior VP. I was grumpy about this -- it was at 5pm, which is normally family time. But it was important to show the top people that our team was productive. I briefly considered letting Linda-the-junior-engineer do it and then realized this was unfair. Sophie said I could take the time, so off I went.
It went great. I was able to say the things I wanted to say, and I believe my audience understood them. Some of the VP-level guests were heckling with questions like "have you considered doing a complicated thing using the stuff my team makes instead of the simple thing you did?" And, ha, this is child's play for a systems PhD. "We would integrate your thing at this point in our system," I said.
My teammates [including my more-senior teammates] praised me for my magnificent handling of the questions and endorsed the substance of my design approach. (I believe in doing the simplest thing first, and then using experience of the full system to decide which bits would most benefit from complexity.)
It went great. I was able to say the things I wanted to say, and I believe my audience understood them. Some of the VP-level guests were heckling with questions like "have you considered doing a complicated thing using the stuff my team makes instead of the simple thing you did?" And, ha, this is child's play for a systems PhD. "We would integrate your thing at this point in our system," I said.
My teammates [including my more-senior teammates] praised me for my magnificent handling of the questions and endorsed the substance of my design approach. (I believe in doing the simplest thing first, and then using experience of the full system to decide which bits would most benefit from complexity.)
