Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 28

On Khakhanov’s Dismissal

2017-01-28T00:30:00+02:00

On 01/25/2017, a conference of the labor collective of the CEU faculty was held, at which they voted to give Dean Khakhanov’s work an unsatisfactory evaluation.

Large organizations are hard to manage. Not everyone can manage themselves. Let alone manage another person, a dozen people, a hundred, or thousands. Over the past few centuries, nothing has changed in managing organizations. The method invented by Peter Drucker, management by objectives, still works in large corporations: Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Samsung. It is the best thing invented in management over the past hundred years.

The CEU faculty took first place in the ranking of all the university’s faculties in the 2015–2016 academic year. The ranking is calculated using a special formula and indicators. The indicators are chosen in such a way as to motivate departments to work better. For example, to bring money into the university, develop research, create a positive image of the university on the international stage, and so on.

And by these indicators, the CEU faculty under Khakhanov’s leadership took first place.

What would they have done at Intel or Hewlett-Packard? Khakhanov would have been given a big bonus, and the other managers would have been told: “Go learn from Khakhanov.” Oh, I forgot to add: one or two managers from the other end of the ranking would have been fired. Well, that’s in organizations like Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Google.

But at KhNURE, after the ranking has already been published, the collective gets together to argue about which is bigger: 5 or 7? The result is Khakhanov’s dismissal. I wonder what it was like at the meeting of the labor collective of the RT faculty, which took last place in the ranking? I bet everything is fine, they’re satisfied with the dean’s work?

I understand that university employees don’t get examples from business, because none of them has a business education. They’re all scholars there, after all. I’ll give an example from mathematics: there is an objective function, and at the university Khakhanov has no equal at optimizing it.

When I studied at the Department of Computer Engineering, I thought it was about 20 years behind the times. Turns out it was behind forever.

Dual Education

2016-10-28T07:58:00+03:00

Our university is currently discussing dual education. In dual education, a student gets part of their knowledge at the university and part at a company. For example, Germany has had a system for 40 years where the student gets 50% of their knowledge at a company and 50% at uni. Without a contract with an employer, you can’t enroll in a higher education institution. The company pays the student a small, but still a salary.

In Germany, they split the semester into two-week blocks: one block the student works, and the other they study. That’s more convenient, because the company may be in one city and the uni in another.

At the end of the semester, a committee meets: a university instructor, a company employee, and they assess the quality of the student’s knowledge. In other words, they hold an exam. It’s noted that requirements at companies are usually higher than at uni, so the student’s knowledge is much better too.

In this way, the Germans solved several problems at once:

— the gap between theoretical science and practical science;
— 90% of bachelor’s graduates are employed and work well at their companies;
— students have money to live on.

The dual form of education is not new. Henry Ford writes about the same kind of system in his autobiographical book. He organized a school for 700 boys, who studied in the classroom for one week and worked on the shop floor for three weeks.

In Kharkiv, a great many students work while also studying at the university. We have the very same problems as the Germans and Ford did: the gap between the university and real life, issues of employment and earning money.

Students have been working in my organization since 2006. How could we gradually start legalizing this situation?

The university publishes curricula and requirements for the quality of knowledge in the disciplines.
The company and the student choose which disciplines they could close out. For example: programming, databases, OOP, data structures and algorithms, internet technologies can very easily be learned at the company in the course of developing a mobile application or a website.
The head of the company sends a letter addressed to the rector of the university.
The university automatically arranges free attendance for the student in the selected disciplines.
At the company, the student puts the syllabus and the discipline requirements on the desk next to them and works from it every day.
At the end of the semester, a committee meets: an instructor, a company representative, who assess the quality of the student’s knowledge.

I want to emphasize that this is not some form of “mutual credit,” like, if you work as a programmer, then I’ll give you credit for programming. The student still has to pass the exam, because the requirements for everyone’s knowledge have to be the same. For example, students with 1.5 years of work experience have come to my exam who didn’t know unit testing, and unit testing is a required topic in my course.

We could start with at least one discipline per semester.

The Germans did this in 40 years. Maybe we’ll manage to do it in at least 20. Then, who knows, maybe 50/50 will work out.

Students Are Curious™ 7: why write term papers?

2016-08-28T14:06:00+03:00

Students are curious:

Volodymyr Ihorovych, why do we need to write these hateful term papers?

A bit of background. A commission at KhNURE found plagiarism in the reports for term projects by a number of students. The meaning of the word "plagiarism" is the deliberate appropriation of authorship of someone else’s work of science or art, or of an invention [Wiktionary].

Five years ago I already wrote about plagiarism: "Plagiarism at a university". In the civilized world, when plagiarism is found, an instructor has the right to: make the student redo the work, give an F for the work, give an F for the course. In the case of plagiarism in a term project, the recommendation is to give an F for the course. For repeated plagiarism in the civilized world, the student gets a jumping kick in the ass, and with a running start, too.

But the question is something else. Students understand that stealing is bad. They don’t understand why, for a term project, it’s not enough just to write a computer program and defend it. Why do you also have to write an explanatory report?

The motivation "because the explanatory report teaches the student to formulate their thoughts" obviously doesn’t motivate anyone anymore. Here you have to explain what the benefit is of being able to formulate your thoughts. Let’s consider a graph model of a small organization, where the vertices are employees and the edges are communications between them (assigning tasks and reporting on completion):

In other words, at the bottom level are rank-and-file employees, a bit higher up are supervisors and middle managers, and at the top is the director. In such an organization, the role of communication increases from the bottom up. A rank-and-file employee has a very small area of responsibility and practically no freedom to make decisions. Everything he needs to do has already been decided and planned by his supervisor. At the very top level, though, is the director, who bears full responsibility for the entire organization. Any manager spends 70% or more of his time communicating with people lower and higher in the hierarchy.

Formulating and conveying your thoughts competently is an important function of any manager.

Can’t competently document a system architecture? You’ll never become a lead programmer, and no one will trust you with subordinates. After all, you’re not capable of assigning a task and explaining it to another person.

Can’t competently draw up work plans and report to higher-ups? No one will ever trust you to run a project.

Can’t competently put together a business plan and convince investors your startup will succeed? No one will ever trust you with even a hundred bucks.

Can’t formulate and convey your thoughts? Stay a simple doer at the bottom of the organization’s hierarchy, with the corresponding level of responsibility and a proportional level of pay.

In previous installments:

— Students are curious about the reality of expulsion.
— Schoolchildren are curious about whether fiction is needed.
— Students are curious about choosing a major.
— Students are curious about completing a course after the deadline.
— Students are curious about choosing a programming language.
— Students are curious about submitting a diploma project.

Interested in my opinion on any question of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. Questions can also be asked through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan

Talk at Kharkiv.py

2016-01-28T21:38:00+02:00

There is a small community of Python programmers in Kharkiv — Kharkiv.py. The community meets rarely, once every six months. The next meeting will be on February 13 (Saturday), where I’ll talk about using Docker in automated tests in Python.

Besides me, the speakers will be:

— Roman Podoliaka – on profiling Python applications
— Igor Kalnitsky
— Denys Matiichuk - UI automation in Python

The meeting will take place on February 13 at 12:00 in the office of the company "Ciklum" (18-D Otakara Yarosha St., 3rd floor, “Dvizhenie” shopping center, Botanichnyi Sad metro station). Admission is free with registration: http://kharkivpy.org.ua/kharkiv-py-12-13-fevralya/

The Book “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time”

2015-10-28T23:21:00+02:00

When I was young and didn’t have any profession yet, I was interested in various project-management methodologies and methods. I wanted to be a great project manager! I still remember those thick, bright-red Microsoft Solutions Framework books. Or the gigantic IBM Rational Unified Process website with a hundred different document templates. Or its simplified and open version, OpenUP. Back then it seemed like — this is happiness: do everything according to the templates and any project will succeed.

Then I was lucky enough to work as a project manager for a whole year and try it all in practice. We stepped on every rake there was: we made half the team out of friends, underestimated the scope, and took on unfamiliar technologies. All of that turned into missed deadlines, 80-hour workweeks (6 days at 12 hours, and 8 hours on Sunday — well, come on, you do need to rest, it’s a day off!), and a product with a pile of bugs and nonworking features. Since then I’ve sworn off being a manager. Better to do something with your hands, like programmers, for example.

Many years passed, and I got a little smarter. There’s no avoiding project management. Even experienced programmers, without the right method, won’t be able to bring a project to success.

The other day I finished an interesting book by Jeff Sutherland, “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” (375 UAH on balka).

The main idea of the book is very simple: “Who are you trying to fool when you plan more than one week ahead”? Raise your hands, whose week’s plan gets done 100%? A forest of hands. The second idea is that the most important thing should be done first. The third idea is to regularly analyze the workflow, identify weak spots and obstacles, and remove them.

You’d think: obvious stuff, but it’s nice that all of it is described in one book.

Among the interesting bits:
— Scrum guarantees that the project will be completed within a fixed timeframe and a fixed budget;
— the author reports a 4x increase in the productivity of Scrum teams as work on the project progresses.

Among the uninteresting bits: the author regularly gets sidetracked into stories about how, as a pilot in Vietnam, he shot down Soviet fighters. You can safely skip these passages; they add no value to the Scrum method.

If we turn to the metaphor “Do you want the checkers, or do you want to go?”, then all those thick MSF and RUP methods are the “checkers,” and Scrum is the “go.” You can use Scrum not only for software projects but for any others too, for example, renovating a house, a rocket engine, a term project, a thesis.

I recommend the book.

The Answer to the Three Black Things

2014-09-28T20:04:00+03:00

Yesterday I posted a riddle about three black things:

These were the guesses:

— "The Steam launch button" (apparently because of the similar logo)
— "Keyboard keys"
— "Magnets!!! For sticking photos on the fridge!!! )))))"
— "Share buttons"
— "Disassembled headphones)"
— "3 x BlackBox"

Thanks to everyone who took part for the guesses. Special thanks to the good folks who knew what it was and didn’t kill the intrigue in the very first comment.

Attention, the correct answer.

The black things shown in the photo are beacons: radio-electronic devices that are installed indoors. The beacons transmit their identification number by radio. Mobile phones, iPhones or Androids, read this signal and determine their position indoors, provided that you enter the positions of the beacons into the phone. The photo shows beacons made by "Kontakt" (http://kontakt.io/), whose logo really does look a bit like the "share" button and the Steam logo.

You might think, why are these beacons needed if GPS technology already exists and is successfully used to determine a phone’s position in space? GPS has a drawback: the signal from satellites attenuates very strongly when it passes through the floors and walls of buildings. All you have to do is step under a roof, and the GPS receiver will show coordinates with a substantial error. So it is precisely to solve the problem of location (position determination) indoors that alternative technologies have been developed.

A Chance Came Up to Take a Chance

2014-08-28T23:13:00+03:00

The day after the 2014 Ukrainian presidential election, public-service ads appeared in the Kharkiv metro in the format “A chance came up to do something. Ukraine, we’ll make it.” For example, a young man announces: “A chance came up to build an international career in Ukraine.”

And here a girl says: “A chance came up to promote new regional leaders.”

“A chance came up to lift up your region.”

The posters mentioned above are fairly vague and don’t raise questions. But there are also some rather debatable ones. For example, a person with signs of obesity on his face tells us: “A chance came up to do business without kickbacks.”

I picture it like this. An entrepreneur walks into a fat official’s office and asks:

— So what, now we can do business? And without kickbacks?
The official, smirking and looking up from under his brows:
— My dear fellow! My dear man! What are you saying, what kickbacks? What 25%?
— I didn’t say anything about 25%, you did!
— Quiet! Quiet! No kickbacks! Come into my office, we’ll sort everything out now. So what’s your business’s turnover, you say?

What interested me most was the poster with the student: “A chance came up to pass exams, not money.”

Every one of us has been a student, and some still are students. I was lucky enough to become a teacher too. I know the subject from all sides.

Let’s break down the student’s statement. “A chance came up” means that this chance didn’t exist before. That is, before May 25, 2014, you could pass the exam session only with money, not knowledge. I see two possibilities here: a) students are so dumb that knowledge just won’t do; or b) teachers are so corrupt that you can pass the exam session only for money. But options a) and b) are false, and I know students and teachers who attest to that.

In September 2011 I already analyzed a similar swipe at higher education (see “Blgъ: A Grade for Domestic Higher Education”). This time the copywriters at the Ukraine Crisis Media Center have lost their fucking minds, daring to state something like that on big posters. These pricks haven’t done anything for higher education yet, but they’ve already shit all over it.

By the way, one exam session has already passed since then. Students, so how’s it going, did you take the chance to pass exams, not money? And did the teachers take the chance to accept exams, not banknotes? What, fucked it up again? Know why? Because a chance is a magic wand that doesn’t work in the hands of the lazy.

I’ll explain how a chance works using the graph of the function 1/x. On the y-axis is the probability of successfully taking the chance; on the x-axis is time. The longer you put off actions toward your stated goal, the lower the probability of success.

For example, every person has a chance to take up sports, but if you don’t get up from the computer right now and do some exercises, go for a run or to the pull-up bar, or do push-ups, you’ll miss that chance. I guarantee it. If you want to learn a new language, you need to open the textbook right now, immediately. If you want to do it “tomorrow,” “on Monday,” or “in the new year” (ha-ha-ha), nothing will work out for you. I guarantee it.

You have just had a chance to stop missing chances.

Started an article about Aldec on Wikipedia

2009-06-28T20:03:00+03:00

In my view, the Russian-language Wikipedia suffers from a shortage of articles in the field of microelectronics CAD. For example, there are no articles about giants such as Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics. I’ve just made a small translation of the article from the English-language Wikipedia about Aldec. Have a look: Aldec. Properly speaking, articles about Active-HDL and Riviera should also be made.

The first time I heard about the company Aldec was in my first year. After my second year, I went to do a summer internship with them in Katowice. That was where I first understood what software testing is, how cool it is to be an SQA engineer, and also acquired skills that are still relevant to this day. Fortunately, the knowledgeable locals gave pointers, helped, and taught me. Workdays were supplemented by numerous ethnographic expeditions around the area: Gliwice, Kraków. It was a revelation to me that the Auschwitz concentration camp is located some ten kilometers from Katowice.

The company Aldec taught a lot and gave a lot not only to me, but also to my friends. Close acquaintances of mine, graduates of our university, work in different offices in Kharkiv, Katowice, and Henderson. Therefore, we’ll start filling out the Russian Wikipedia with this particular EDA company.

The photo below shows the company’s office in Żarnowiec, very close to the Baltic Sea. A picturesque place — nobody lives for kilometers around, forest, a pumped-storage power station, and an unfinished nuclear power plant. It’s very cozy there.