You have to love being incompetent

You have to love being incompetent in order to be competent.”
James Altucher
.

Not sure that anyone loves feeling incompetent, but James’ quote is particularly relevant in the world of OSS. There are always so many changes underway that you’re constantly taken out of your comfort zone. But the question becomes how do you overcome those phases / areas of incompetence?

Earlier in my career, I had more of an opportunity to embed myself into any area of incompetence, usually spawned by a technical challenge being faced, and pick it up through a combination of practical and theoretical research. That’s a little harder these days with less hands-on and more management responsibilities, not to mention more demands on time outside hours.

In a way, it’s a bit like stepping up the layers of TMN management pyramid.
TMN Pyramid
Image courtesy of www.researchgate.net.

With each step up, the context gets broader (eg more domains under management), but more abstracted from what’s happening in the network. Each subsequent step northbound does the same thing:

  • It abstracts – it only performs a sub-set of the lower layer’s functionality
  • It connects – it performs the task of connecting and managing a larger number of network elements than the lower layer

Conversely, each step down the management stack should produce a narrower (ie not so many device interconnections), but deeper field of view (ie a deeper level of information about the fewer devices).

The challenge of OSS is in choosing where to focus curiosity and improvements – diving down the stack into new tech or looking up and sidewards?

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