>IMHO, highly specific expertise is overvalued by young people. Academia is the only place where specialization really shines; everywhere else you need to get along with people who don't understand your field.
really? from what I've seen of the Engineering field, there is rather a lot of tolerance for people who can't communicate with 'normal people'
My experience as a business owner has been that yeah, dealing with people outside your field is the hard part. Sure, if I had a better understanding of law, that'd be great. I'd be able to better choose lawyers.
But would I choose that better understanding of law at the expense of Engineering experience? hell no. I've set up my business so that as long as I don't make completely abysmal legal decisions, my legal decisions won't matter all that much. There aren't any weird legal twists to my business plan. As long as I can avoid getting sued into oblivion, my lawyer is doing what I want him to do.
But even a relatively small difference in the skills of the engineers I can hire for the amount I'm paying can make a huge difference, and at this point, I'm pretty much counting on my ability to spot 'diamonds in the rough' - last week a mistake made by both myself and an employee (the mistake was that it took us 8 hours to spot a problem that we should have seen in 30 mins) cost us north of ten grand in SLA credits. If I was just a little bit better (or had just a little bit more sleep) we'd have saved the SLA credits /and/ we would have saved a pretty big bruise to our reputation.
Obviously, choosing a different business model would have required that i could identify and economically purchase other skillsets; but there really is no getting around the 'It takes one to know one' principle. If you run a business, you better be good at the core things that the business needs to be good at. For me, this is why I chose the business I chose, and why I chose to bootstrap rather than run with investors.
really? from what I've seen of the Engineering field, there is rather a lot of tolerance for people who can't communicate with 'normal people'
My experience as a business owner has been that yeah, dealing with people outside your field is the hard part. Sure, if I had a better understanding of law, that'd be great. I'd be able to better choose lawyers.
But would I choose that better understanding of law at the expense of Engineering experience? hell no. I've set up my business so that as long as I don't make completely abysmal legal decisions, my legal decisions won't matter all that much. There aren't any weird legal twists to my business plan. As long as I can avoid getting sued into oblivion, my lawyer is doing what I want him to do.
But even a relatively small difference in the skills of the engineers I can hire for the amount I'm paying can make a huge difference, and at this point, I'm pretty much counting on my ability to spot 'diamonds in the rough' - last week a mistake made by both myself and an employee (the mistake was that it took us 8 hours to spot a problem that we should have seen in 30 mins) cost us north of ten grand in SLA credits. If I was just a little bit better (or had just a little bit more sleep) we'd have saved the SLA credits /and/ we would have saved a pretty big bruise to our reputation.
Obviously, choosing a different business model would have required that i could identify and economically purchase other skillsets; but there really is no getting around the 'It takes one to know one' principle. If you run a business, you better be good at the core things that the business needs to be good at. For me, this is why I chose the business I chose, and why I chose to bootstrap rather than run with investors.