New career [Previous ¦ Next]
A decade after I left my first employer, Shell, and my original petroleum geological career, I had firmly set my sights onto computing geology, and more specifically geographic information systems (GIS). It would take me another five years to land on my feet at the premier GIS company worldwide, but everything seemed to gradually converge toward that: my flexibility toward changing directions when the job market demanded it, an intuition which I trust even when poorly understood at first, an ability to listen to clients and friends and sort out the real issues, and a global outlook which allows to see things in different contexts and formulate new answers. Take my languages for example: I learned French, Hungarian and English in rapid succession as a toddler, then German, Latin and Spanish as a teen; I thus was fluent in the first batch and had a good grasp of grammar and syntax in the last batch - did you know I was in the last cohort in French lycées or high school, to take a full eight years of Latin... the last one conversational as we'd run out of written materials? - I used this however as an adult not as languages per se, but as an ability to pick up programming languages with no formal training in computer science!
Note: in those days, geological and geophysical programs were run as plain-text scripts via command-line on Unix workstations. Programmers aren't stupid, they're inattentive or careless, and often forget to close, say, parentheses or semi-colons in their scripts. Scripts were most often customised to meet local customer needs. SO if a script failed, I was able to scroll down it, follow the syntax - from my knowledge of Latin mentioned above, a very structured and logical language - and pinpoint missing bits... with no formal computer training!
As programming was in such high demand however, I was constantly pushed toward the technical realm. I quickly fell in then out of love with the technology (see quote in my home page), and learned that I really wished to help people help themselves with it. I also learned that this is best performed in the context of my original geologic profession, chiefly in petroleum but also in surveys (government) and mining. Having earned what I call an untitled MBA, in launching then winding down my own business, I augmented my broad global outlook with a deep business sense. And I was well on the path to understanding my own psychological strengths and weaknesses: an intangible that proved so useful in helping me manage my colleagues and organise associations of all sorts.
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