Four Follow-Up Comments to "Show Your Work!"
Last week’s post on Show Your Work! sparked some great comments. I wanted to preserve these in a post. Here are the four:
One, forget how you were graded in school and don’t think ‘difficult’ is the same as ‘important.’
This comment comes from Ralph Asher. He was reacting to the point that many technical people think everyone will know if they do great work.
Here are his two reasons for this:
One, OR/DS is a field that largely (primarily?) consists of people who have excelled in grade-based technical education. They have been conditioned to mostly objective, clear judgment on their work via grades. So it shouldn't be surprising that the assumption that their work will speak for itself, carries into the workplace.
Two, I think OR/DS types tend to presume that difficulty of the effort is the best marker of their work's value. Building a large MILP model with all sorts of special constraints and variable tricks? Difficult - so of course that will be valued. Building a few data visualizations? Easy - so that doesn't matter. When of course we know that generally, work like data viz enables complex communication and is thus more appreciated across organizations.
I agree. Don’t wait for someone to grade your work- it won’t happen. You need to show it. And just because you know it’s hard doesn’t mean anyone else does (or cares).
Two, when showing your work to executives, use good titles and assume executives are bright but don’t know your area.
This comment came from Ken Fordyce. Here is what he said (I edited the start to make it flow):
…I learned [a few critical lessons] early in my career when I joined IBM in 1977 from seasoned and successful folks doing work in analytics. Two lessons Peter Norden taught regularly were:
Use long meaningful titles - this is often an executive will initially read
When presenting to Executives make two assumptions: they are incredibly bright, but know nothing about the subject you are presenting. Gear your writing and presentation to this audience.
The second point sounds easier than it is: good executives will quickly catch on if you explain your work clearly. But they’ll be coming at it from such a different vantage point that they’ll ask you unexpected but great questions. Be ready.
Three, companies embrace it because it works.
I’m mentoring a graduating senior. She had an internship this summer with Lyric, a Practical AI company. After reading the post, she mentioned how Lyric worked hard to get technical people to share their work. I can see why. At Opex Analytics, we always got good feedback and results because people felt like the place was open and that you could ask (and get) help from anyone.
Four, don’t worry about the number of people who see your shared work.
I had a conversation at NU about webinar attendance. One of the least attended webinars for this group was the most valuable. The people on the webinar were engaged, followed up, and were precisely who NU was trying to connect with.
So, don’t worry about the numbers. You never know what may reach the right person.