The Risk of Skils Not Required
I enjoy this clip of Rod Blagojevich on The Celebrity Apprentice:
On the one hand I can understand how Rob has had administrative assistants who have handled technology for him, I still think this does reflect badly on him. In stark contrast is Barack Obama who refused to give up his BlackBerry when he was made President of the United States. Rob’s computer blunders illustrate a greater problem: there are important skills that our jobs specifically don’t require us to do.
For example, to be a software engineer is to live, breath, and sleep code. Anything that’s not code is auxiliary. Therefore we need not to know the business or political side of the organization. However we live in the organization. The success of our code is a commerical equation consisting of marketing, sales, accounting, and executive decisions. If we just keep to our job description we’ll find ourselves affected by these forces.
Anyway, I think I’m going to go off and review my company’s financials….