A Noted Path by Theodore Nguyen-Cao

With the launch of Chrome today, the net is all the buzz around how great Chrome is/can be. But this isn’t yet another post about chrome.

This is about me wanting to track the flight status of my parent’s airline that just came in from Cali. Of course I could go to the American Airlines website, which by the way is at aa.com, but that seemed like a lot of work when Google is my default homepage. So I thought I would just type in the flight information and hope Google would give me a direct link to the flight status page.

Google’s response surprised me with the following:

Wow. Thanks, Google!

…That is, more educated in the formal sense. I think nothing can replace real world experience. However, one of the questions that have been on my mind for the past year or so is if I should be going back to school. I’m 24 and I got a couple of years of work experience under my belt. I recently got engaged. If there was ever a time to go back to school, now seems like as good of a time as any.

If I decided to go back to get more education, should I go for a Masters of Science or an MBA? In the industry I’m in, I find that a Masters in Computer Science or Engineering is not really rewarding as it was for my dad’s generation from a career perspective. Today’s smart IT employers focus on what you’ve done, created, or built more than what you have studied in a classroom or years of work experience (which I think is great). I think if I go back to school for a Masters, my reasons for going would be to surround myself with smart hackers and really dig deep into exciting research. I strongly believe that to get the most out of Masters program, you need to be there for the right reasons. Go back to school to learn more, not to get ahead in a career.

On the other hand, an MBA seems much more of a career booster and would give me the businessy-types of skills that I haven’t been formally trained with. The part about this that doesn’t excite me is all the finance and accounting kinda courses that I don’t seem myself really leveraging in my career path. That side of things doesn’t really get me excited. Plus, all of my friends that are taking MBA courses say that it’s nothing special. It’s just going to be another thing you put on your resume. Which might not be such a bad thing, but for me it doesn’t seem to make sense right now to pursue that avenue.

I would love to hear from people on their reasons for choosing to pursue higher education or choosing not to or choosing to postpone it until further notice.

As for me, I think I’ll postpone until further notice. There’s so much more for me to learn through real work experience and my natural curiosity of emerging technologies.

So apparently today is the happiest day of the year. It is the start of the first weekend of my engaged life. I think the study is pretty spot on.

I wish you Happy Happiest Day of the Year.

Usually, if you are about to leave a job, it’s hard to stay motivated. Other than tying up any loose ends, it’s probably not a good idea to start something you can’t finish.

As my final days with kajeet approached, I seem to be more productive than I think I was in awhile. I really was in support mode so I didn’t have a large number of tasks on my plate. I used this extra time to do some engineering-inspired projects (as opposed to business initiatives). In something that reminds me of Google’s 20% time, I was able to work on projects that meant something to me personally.

I prototyped a single-sign-on application. I built an application based off an idea our engineering team had months ago but never had the time to act on. It got demoed and was received well by the company. It took less than 16 man hours to build and business saw value in it. Hopefully, it will be officially launched.

After doing this, I am a fan of the 20% time. Being able to work on things you’re passioniate about and sharing it with others is, well, the whole idea, isn’t it?

I hope to see more companies, especially startups, adopt this practice. The engineers are happy and the return on investment is tremendous. Of course, this only works if you have an awesome engineering team, people that truly love to code. That shouldn’t be a problem though, you don’t really want the other kind of engineer.

Anyways, back to the point of this post. Leaving jobs is a stressful time. You worry if you are making the right decision. You worry if the relationships you’ve developed are going to continue. You worry if you will get to play ping pong at work..oh wait, we’re talking about startups right?

Regardless, I think it’s important to finish strong in everything you do. I took it as a challenge to see how much I could accomplish in my last two weeks, committing code up to the last day of employment. It’s a great feeling when you know you leave a place better than you entered.

Back in college, I volunteered to help on “Women in Computing Day” to teach middle schoolers programming using Alice. I also helped teach an undergraduate teaching assistant position for Engineering Fundamentals, the class all engineering students were required to take. The course used Alice to introduce the students to programming concepts (loops, methods, conditional logic, etc).

I thought Alice was a really innovative way of teaching programming. It was GUI-driven programming that was expressive enough to do cool engineering stimulations, but with the simplicity that middle schoolers could understand and use it.

The other day, my mom asked me to find the “Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, some professor that made this speech. She had heard about on the T.V. and was interested in seeing what it was all about. I found the YouTube video and began watching it. To my surprise, Dr. Pausch’s work has crossed my path. He is the creator of Alice.

His speech is very inspiring. Watch it.