Various information: Summer 2016

Well, trying to write more regularly proved to be difficult, especially when you have your hands full. Some things which I'm going to describe may deserve separate posts... I'll see what I can do about this later. So these are the things I did in the past 7 months:

Leaving old job:

I left my job, which I had for 2 years and 8 months. The decision was long overdue, but better later than never. The long project, on which we worked, was completed (as much as possible), the prospects were unclear and I didn't have an increase in salary since I have completed my internship. So it was time to move on. Two weeks were spent on healing a cold, which I caught accidentally. Immediately after that I got an offer for a position of analyst in a company in Skolkovo (yes, that Russian innovation center). After a couple of interviews and another two weeks I got this job. What happened there is another topic.

Self-improvement books:
I have read various self-improvement and business books in previous years and several more this one. IMHO, most of them can't be used by usual people. It's not that such books are bad, they just work only in certain conditions. If this is the book's target - it is okay, but when the book is aimed at bigger auditory... The reason is that the technics and ideas described in the books can be applied only in limited area of expertise - for people with certain cultural background, in certain countries, maybe in certain work spheres or even only in certain situations with certain people. Often it sounds like a millionaire telling a poor man how to live and work. Of course there are some useful things in these books, but they can be usually summarized in a couple of pages. Also many books blatantly use other authors' ideas. So I think that it is enough to read several suck books, take the key ideas and use them. The books better be good such as Psycho-Cybernetics, Seven habits of highly effective people or even Meditations (by Marcus Aurelius).

Reading Bible:
I'm atheist. And I don't like a principle of "didn't read but criticize", so I decided to read Bible (because Christianity is better known to me than other religions). I took an audioversion of King James Bible and listened to it. I went through Old and New Testaments and decided that my atheistic believes only strengthened. Here are some points which I didn't like. Some of them are borderline jokes, some are my personal opinion, in some points I could be wrong; in any case I have no intention of insulting anyone with these words:

Old Testament was full of violence, adultery, infidelity, stupidity and so on;
New Testament was better, but still had a lot of ideas, which I don't like - for example forgiveness of everything bad which is done to you, propaganda of suffering, humble and insignificance of life in this world, submission of women to men and many other ideas;
A lot of internal inconsistencies;
Bible was written when people had very limited knowledge of the world and wasn't update since that;
There were other people besides Eva and Adam. How did they appear?
Exodus story was very cruel. Considering it was God who made Pharaoh not willing to let the Jews go.. and then punished Egyptians for that. Well, there are many cruelties in the Old Testament;
Jews make the same mistakes again in the Old Testament. For example Moses and Exodus. Jews get angry on something, Gods punishes them or wants to punish them, Moses pacifies him... But Jews start irritating God again;
Why was Judas betrayal necessary? Why Jesus cursed a Fig Tree? How people can understand that they meet the Beast and not the true God?
And many other things...
In the end after having read the Bible I continue living as I have lived before: trying to be adequate and honest and not hurting other people unnecessarily;

Lean Six Sigma:

I did several more things for self-education. First of them was learning about Lean Six Sigma. This is a methodology of quality management. How to eliminate variation of the process (so the results are better and within the necessary limits) and waste (remove unneeded steps from the process). It is a solid and useful methodology used by many companies. And it heavily used statistic methods. I heard about it from my colleague and decided that I want to learn it. There are several levels of proficiency with exams for each level: Yellow Belt (beginner), Green Belt (medium), Black Belt (team lead), Master Black Belt (even better than Black Belt). After two months of study I was able to pass Green Belt Certification! I hope to be able to use these skills and knowledge in my job.

Touch typing:
One more thing which I decided to learn is touch typing - fast typing on keyboard without looking on it. I can type fast enough, but I have to look on keyboard sometimes. As I need to type huge amounts of text sometimes, I need to be able to type fast and efficient. At first my speed dropped dramatically, but after two months my touch typing speed in Russian became faster that typing speed which I had before (almost 400 symbols per minute)! Now I'm going to learn touch typing in English;

New job:
Now about my new job... I'll start from the end - last Friday I left it (5,5 months of working) and was very glad to do it! What went wrong? Almost everything. This is a really long story, I'll tell it some other time, now I'll describe only main points.

So, I was offered a position in this company. Of course, I decided to look for information about this company. I have found this (text in Russian). The company has several contracts with Pension Fund of Russia. The company and some other companies with the same leaders have contracts for 300+ million rubles... Well, it doesn't directly concern me, so not a big deal, but still a thing to ponder over;
So, I got the job. The first task? "Let's see, we have a big client with a system of internal budgeting on SAP BW/BI. You have 1 week to understand how it works and a create a first prototype/design of dashboards for it!" It took me one day more than planned, but I delivered it! And heard about it only a couple of months later...
Then I spent almost two months writing documentation for this budgeting system. It became boring very soon. But there was a possibility of something more interesting and I waited for it. And when I finished it I had to change formatting of all documents and had to stay until late due to poor organisation and communication;
Then a new project began. Developing a web-reporting system for the budgeting system (with the first description done by me previously). The team: junior front-end developer, senior back-end developer, analyst-tester-pm (me), ux-designer, outsourced designer and project leader. And two bosses (who lead the company). It was a mad project, describing all of it would be too long, so just several points. The planned length of the project was ~3 months. Design was thought to be done in one month, but it continued till the end of the project, because the scope of design was revised several times. The scope of project was changed several times. Client didn't take any part in this project. Internal reviews by bosses were full with criticism and unfounded expectations. Project leader and me didn't have any idea about web-development so we had to use a trial and error method. Also I had no experience in managing. So it was crazy. When it was acknowledged that it can be installed for clients (despite a number of bugs and unfinished functionality) I resigned;
Company's bosses preferred a stick and carrot policy. Only without a carrot. They didn't value human resources and were sure that their decisions are almost always correct. Now wonder there was s serious staff turnover;
So I'm really glad I left it at last. Now I can have a rest and look for some interesting job;

HTML, CSS, JavaScript:

While I worked on the aforementioned project, I decided to acquire new skills in relevant spheres. I learned HTML when I was in school and it didn't take a lot of time to remember it. CSS took some time, but I needed only basics - just to be able to understand how it works. JavaScript is another level for me. I don't know programming languages so I just repeated the things which I found. I think I'd better put it on hold for better times :)

Japanese:

I had little possibilities to actively learn Japanese. So I just read raw manga and random articles in Internet, watched anime and so on. Good news is that I feel progress, bad news is that I need to really concentrate on learning Japanese to reach a decent level. I hope I'll have time for that.

Spanish:

More attention was paid to Spanish. I read a lot of news articles, watched news video and tried to immerse - like switching my phone to Spanish. Also I went through La Sombra del Viento one more time, translating unknown words. I even tried to write something in Spanish, but it was really bad, It seems more practice is necessary. Will try to do something about it.

Big Data:

Recently big data became a popular trend. Maybe too popular. But the fact is that many big companies use big data analysis to increase their profits. And it is interesting. After all I'm economist by education. So I want to try myself in this sphere. Two main areas of knowledge which I have to explore are mathematics and programming. I had experience with mathematics in University - linear algebra, mathematical analysis, theory of probabilities, econometrics, statistics and so on. But I didn't have success in all of them, so excelling in this area will be challenging, but it would also prove that I became smarter (at least I hope so). As for programming - I have little experience with it, so it is like a black box for me. But the more difficult it is, the more interesting will the learning be!