Everyone at one point in life stops being independent and becomes interdependent. Groups and organizations are born, resources and ideas are pooled, and then boom, off they go in some direction.
After moving from my first post University job to another it just comes dastardly obvious that if you want to really get something accomplished, then you're going to have to be a part of a team; because there is only so much that an individual can do. The worse part is the smarter that you are, the longer that it takes to come to this realization-- ie. because it is the belief that it is a matter of time and effort to make whatever you want to do a reality. The unfortunate realization is that reality is a moving target.
I should know, because I used to do R&D for the next up and coming greatest hit, but the problem is that after every quarter, management keeps on raising the bar on us. So the lesson here (without getting into too much detail) is to learn to get on an stay on the leading edge instead of the trailing edge. And yes, there will be times in life that you will wish that you could stop time simply just to catch up and that is never going to happen (so get on with it).
So instead, I have since moved on to a Financial company where I now am doing IT support. I know it sounds not particularly sexy but in all honesty, I have incredible oversight into what goes on between business and technology in a company. But enough of that and more on teams.
The speed of light is governed by the medium it passes through.
Excuse the light metaphor but it's what I'll work with. Given a beam of light, in the purest vacuum, it will move at it's theoretical fastest-- the speed of light. From there on in, the denser the medium a light beam must pass through (which is also related to it's in index of refraction) the slower the beam will pass through (though not 100% true, there are other material factors do come into play).
I like to also consider the same thing when it comes to getting a task or project done: that between any project start and end, the refractive index of the organization is the density of the paperwork, e-mails and meetings that you need to go through to get anything done. Thus the higher the density of this kind of stuff that you need to deal with, the longer it takes to get something done.
Why I like this metaphor is incidental; because in optical theory you can also talk about things like "group velocity" or the speed that a packet of waves travel (and again, incidentally waves of different frequency travels at different speeds through a medium). Ah yes, the joys of added complexity, the hall mark of being brought into the "real world."
The one thing that I have learned from having the opportunity of working in 2 large corporations is that never, never over estimate the speed of an organization. There was a time that people thought that Microsoft was the elephant in the room. So long as you weren't pushing against the elephant and you were moving like a cheetah in a different direction, you would be perfectly fine (which would be the lessons to from the likes of Google and Apple in recent history).
Because as of this moment, I am 100% convinced that with enough operational freedom, that I could dance circles around in terms of development speed, testing and deployment of new software systems on my own instead of needing 3 teams to get the thing done (possibly more). Yet some how, this organization exists with multiple teams moving at 1/3 of the pace of what I could probably do on my own.
Suppose that I found several other people like me and put us together. The results would be insane and there exists the problem-- where do I find these people and how do we make the opportunity to work together? There are large companies out there that are willing to pay millions for a small capable team and their assets.
I've already finished the "working on my own" part of life. The next stage in the road to success is to be able to build teams. The question is how and how soon can I start doing that.
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