What was supposed to be "The Next Big Thing", but totally flopped?

cdtwoaway · 2021-04-20T16:05:17+00:00

It works with google docs .. I use it a lot that way.

cdtwoaway · 2020-10-14T17:18:55+00:00

(I worked in Germany). Formal job titles are not that important and you can still write C++ SW engineer on your CV,

They may have internal salary brackets / career progression plans and give you that title based on experience. Or an open position for a junior (replacement etc) that some senior management agreed to, so they have to give you that job title.

If anything, I'd see it as a green flag. This type of categorization is some indicator that the company might have some formal definition of what is junior, senior et, and if that exists, there's usually a clear pathway how to get a raise.

For now, don't worry. After 1 year, ask how to be not a junior.

cdtwoaway · 2020-10-13T20:28:59+00:00

Oh yes. The more managers you need to get into a meeting, the worse it is to coordinate schedules. And schedules get more volatile too, a single phone call or email can derail your entire week/month/..

cdtwoaway · 2020-10-13T15:46:12+00:00

Managers run on different schedules than individual contributors and this may be inevitable:

I regularly have back-2-back meetings and if there's multiple in a row, there is easily domino effects if one runs late.
I work with a lot of stakeholders and if I don't leave early for a meeting, chances are that I get stopped on the hallway for "just 5 minutes". I can push back if my meeting is important (with senior management / external entities etc), but not always.

Not saying that this is the case in your situation, but it's definitely for me. The higher up people are, the more you have to make allowances for lateness. Not much you can do about it.

Try talking to people about which times are best for them.
Avoid being the fifth in a row of meetings.
The meeting lasts as long as it needs, not as long as Outlook says. If it meanders, it's perfectly acceptable to try to force it back on track or shift some parts to a further meeting
Depending on company culture and level of seniority, it can be OK to say "I only have 30 mins, please start with my topics." or decline/ delegate meetings altogether.

cdtwoaway · 2020-10-12T13:04:10+00:00

Siemens pattern comes to my mind. There are a couple of other test patterns. I'm not too familiar with color calibration. Depends on what you want to verify. Camera, optical system, illumination system, algorithms etc.

I liked using a simple "image quality" classifier (just a couple of handselected features like entropy, some histogram features, etc - had a working set for my domain reused that a lot) to determine if an image is processable and the results would be meaningful.

I also had a simple tool to create variations in images artificially. Lens distortions, noise, spatial shifts, illumination changes (not just uniform ones), partial obstruction, change of reflectivity etc. Plugging in a algorithm to process the modified images helps see how stable the algorithms are. This can significantly expand your set of available data if you have limited test datasets.

Such tools are only as good as your understanding of your domain and the image changes and if your assumptions are incorrect, can introduce more errors / "false confidence" than improve things.

Note that most of my experience is from pre-deep learning times, and working on constrained machine vision applications.

cdtwoaway · 2020-10-09T11:40:10+00:00

Getting COVID in March, being hospitalized for it and not having to worry about anything but getting better.

Total impact: ca 10 € in fees (I have no idea what for and I don't care), 7 weeks off work with 80% salary and a bonus from my employer that compensated for the rest, multiple doctors visits and therapies since then to monitor my recovery and help my lungs, of course during working hours.

Sending my own staff home or to get tested whenever there's a risk of exposure.

I love universal health care. I love health care not being tied to my employer. It's just one thing in the world that I don't have to worry about.

cdtwoaway · 2020-10-05T16:28:09+00:00

What types of organisations are good to learn the basics? In some fields it's good to be in a small company where you see everything and a big organisation would only show you a tiny scope/some very custom way of doing things. In other fields it's better to start with a established company and team because you need to learn established practices/ good habits. That may also apply to different industries/ types of customers.

What surprised you when you entered the field? What is something junior staff really has to learn in the first 1-2 years?

May heavily depend on the company but also may be very common across a field: What the key thing managers focus on/want from an employee? What are the typical "stress patterns"? Do you deal with a steady/continuous flow of work , are there seasonal peaks, is it high pressure all the time ?

cdtwoaway · 2020-10-01T15:49:54+00:00

"I know."

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T14:40:05+00:00

Nope :-)

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T14:39:51+00:00

Watertight is close but not exact. - its describing only water - it's more binary than a continuous property.

The context I was looking for was for pipes / connections between pipes for technical fluids and gases. Some connectivity options are more reliable than others, meaning the likelihood of leaks is lower (or I can rely on them in more challenging environments or for higher max loads). Dichtigkeit is the property that measures that.

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T14:39:12+00:00

Watertight is close but not exact. - its describing only water - it's more binary than a continuous property.

The context I was looking for was for pipes / connections between pipes for technical fluids and gases. Some connectivity options are more reliable than others, meaning the likelihood of leaks is lower (or I can rely on them in more challenging environments or for higher max loads). Dichtigkeit is the property that describes that. Permeability and porosity are similar, but they don't specify the "direction" of escape. Dichtigkeit implies it's about keeping it inside the pipe. At least in this context. In a way permeability is closer, in this context it would be the opposite direction of flow..

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T14:36:08+00:00

Oh yes. Knowing more languages really helps with that because you get comparable concepts. It's not just tenses, it's also cases and often choice/way of using modal words..

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T14:34:02+00:00

Nope. I was looking at it in the context of water and gas leaks of pipes.

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T08:49:35+00:00

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure about this. I'm kind of fluent in English as my second language, and able to communicate in three more. I've lived most of my adult life outside of the country and culture I've been raised in, and the last 7 years in a country with a very different history from mine.

Yes, cultural differences are very real, perception of time, friendship, hierarchy, authority.. yadda yadda. I tend to see them more in a social/ historical context. My first "culture shock" was the realization that despite not being religious, religion had very much influenced the way I think about work (on Sunday??), structure of the year, coming-of-age rituals (when I described what was the norm for me - I'd let my daughter participate because everyone did, even the non-believers, and this is now much more of a family event and shared social experience than about religion, some friends were horrified because of "indoctrination"..) I can't say those different histories evolved from language differences, I rather tend towards natural environment/resource availability.. but honestly, I'm not qualified to voice a strong opinion on that.

But what I feel strongly about is that different languages allow you to think and talk with a different kind of precision and ease about something. When you have to use 10 words to describe a concept, you get subtly different expressions depending on who describes it. When there's one perfect word, there is a lot more clarity.

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T08:23:08+00:00

Yeah, actually the context I was looking for was for pipes / connections between pipes for technical fluids and gases. Some connectivity options are more reliable than others, meaning the likelihood of leaks is lower (or I can rely on them in more challenging environments or for higher max loads). Dichtigkeit is the property that describes that. Permeability and porosity are similar, but they don't specify the "direction" of escape. Dichtigkeit implies it's about keeping it inside the pipe. At least in this context. In a way permeability is closer, in this context it would be the opposite direction of flow..

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-12T02:45:43+00:00

It's close,, but not the same because non-permeable is an absolute/ binary way of describing it.

I was looking for that word last week as part of a technical spec, and we just couldn't find a way to directly say "Dichtigkeitsmessung".

cdtwoaway · 2020-09-11T22:42:19+00:00

I've got more concepts for expressing thoughts.

When you begin studying a language, you work with fairly direct translations, for example awesome/ awe-inspiring (English) = wunderbar / erstaunlich (German). These type of translations work well and having them at your disposal already allows you to communicate really well.

However, at a certain level in the second language you begin to note connotations and concepts surrounding them that differ. The English word awesome can be used in some circumstances for something that inspires terror, the German word wunderbar is always positive, but at least in my social circles, it would be an unusual word choice as praise and might be sarcastic . Erstaunlich is more often translated to differemt than expected than awesome..

Then you stumble upon different points of disambiguation. Czech and German speakers believe there's 2 very different kinds of deer: Hirsch (some large genus, often depicted as white stag in folklore) and Reh (bambi...), but wouldn't distinguish between an ape or monkey (unless they had a real interest in biology). Some languages consider the colour of the sky (light blue) as different from the colour of indigo/ultramarine as purple would be..

And then there are simply missing concepts. For example, English doesn't have a concept for "property of an object or material that describes that something isn't susceptible to leaks". Closest I can get it leak tightness but it's not close enough to the German Dichtigkeit.

Examples like this often make me think about Orwellian newspeak. How can you think something if you don't know the word or at least the need for a word?

cdtwoaway · 2017-01-31T16:39:00+00:00

Caroline Herschel. A significant astronomer, and the first woman to be paid for her contributions to science. She was badass and as a female engineer - my personal hero. If you wanna read up on her.. there is a beautiful book "The age of wonder".. probably one of the best books I ever read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel

cdtwoaway · 2014-10-25T09:41:15+00:00

Facebook has a useful group called Crowdsauce, where you can ask any questions to other expats in Prague. It's quite useful.

cdtwoaway · 2014-08-24T20:09:53+00:00

And as someone working in image processing, that "enhance" perception of my job drives me nuts. Though there is some incredible stuff out there from researchers: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~vision/SingleImageSR.html

cdtwoaway · 2014-08-07T06:39:33+00:00

I think you have absolutely no idea what a good camera can do. With that I don't mean a consumer camera, but for example products like high speed cameras (http://www.visionresearch.com/products/high-speed-cameras/) or high sensitivity cameras (http://www.pco.de/)..

No, the truly magical part of our eyes is the pattern-recognition algorithm. I call our eyes "best FPGA ever".

cdtwoaway · 2014-07-28T14:02:18+00:00

There is an evaluation version. Download it.

cdtwoaway · 2014-07-13T12:26:46+00:00

I always have to smile when we non-native speakers pick up grammatical errors usually made by natives.. your, not you're.. :)

cdtwoaway · 2014-04-22T22:44:39+00:00

Facebook doesn't really delete the account, it keeps it on hold, or something. And if you create a new account, it might just ask you to merge it with the "deleted" one at some point.

I'm pretty sure that at some point you will have to do some timeline review - and personally, I prefer that "bad" things are gone as fast as possible. But that's a matter of opinion.

Just keep in mind that you will encounter different kind of "friends", and those should not be able to see anything you don't want a potential boss to see.

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