It being my brain in applications besides recruiting activities, worrying about apparel sizing, and making phone calls all over the world. I'm coming out a cycle of being overwhelmed when I realized how much pain there is with taking over my ops team directly - so many needs: process, development, goals. Add in that I now have calls with Europe and India all the time. Blech.
Anyway, on a happier note, I am still stunned by this Buzz Aldrin
video. In my long ago past, I went to space camp, loved the thought of space travel, and even worked on a satellite project a few summers. Well, suffice it to say the cognitive dissonanace of seeing Buzz Aldrin with Snoop was a whooper.
In related news, I can officially say that hiring an operations manager is a very different process and mindset than hiring software developers. I've been learning on the fly and I feel bad for the others that I've subjected to my errors. It's pretty shameful when you bring someone in for an interview and there are people are not-inclined to strongly not inclined. Yikes. I even tried reading Who? and applying portions of it. (not recommended). I think the hardest part about operations in general has been trying to calibrate expectations for positions. Like, what can I fairly expect out of one of our ops specialists and an ops manager. My expectations are being managed down by many people - the phrase 'looking for a unicorn' was used.
Catch phrases are interesting because a single person uses them and some seem to make the rounds like a virus. One that has come through is "above (or below) their paygrade" (CK). Ugh. Such a big company term. I was in a staff meeting recently where it was painfully obvious I work at a big company where things happen slowly. My officemate likes the word "pathology", but it hasn't caught on yet.
"How innovative is A?" and "Has A jumped the shark?" are questions that I ask myself quite often. Mostly because I find the questions interesting and there are so many trends toward ossification that I've seen in my 4 years. MG and I just talked about this today. But, perhaps my view is from looking too narrowly at the organization. If you assume Amazon's circle of competence to be media and electronics (I'm reading
Poor Charlie's Almanack each morning - buy from
A, with shipping its cheaper), A has a reasonable set of fruit bearing trees spanning off of the core business (AWS off IT infrastructure, digital media off physical media, FBA off logistics infrastructure). It is natural to wonder if there is a business based off the catalog - similar to where MG sees Wolfram Alpha going. So far in our discussions with MGr, the view of such a business have been low. Classic cool feature that you can't make a business out of. e.g. here's google with a
feature using "population of alaska". (MG is right that Alpha does seem to be forcing Google to move beyond simple searching.) I guess the key is in the structured data and if the government is going to structure and expose a lot of it, making it accessible to everyone is a great thing.
Oh yeah, Alaska. We are headed there. We will just miss DM by hours. Very disappointing, but its what fit in our schedule. Woohoo for gear. Staring at our neighbors through various pairs of binoculars we are testing is getting old. Bring on the bears!
Finally, I'll get back to work with this blitz of comments:
- JD is the lowest cost source of cupcakes in the world
- excited that W&U are heading up this wknd
- S is running her half-marathon this wknd.
- I need a vacation
- Chiefs and Royals suck. Mariners suck. Seahawks are good. In 5 years, the most likely to change is the Mariners.Damn you DM
- I can't believe the US beat Spain. Unbelievable. I watched US-Brazil live and was so disheartened I turned it off after 60 minutes.
