On Web 3.0

Recently Mohtashim had written that it is possible to be a 3-person shop sitting in Karachi and become millionaires.

I had added to his post that a good timeframe for a web-2.0 product would be 3-6 months, while a good web-3.0 product could be built from today for a release late next year.

Interestingly enough, wikipedia has an article on web-3.0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0

Also here:

http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2006/06/26/wikipedia-30-the-end-of-google/

Nice Quote from one of the linked articles:

The question, to rephrase in Churchillian terms, is wether the combination of the Semantic Web and Wikipedia signals the beginning of the end for Google or the end of the beginning. Obviously, with tens of billions of dollars at stake in investors’ money, I would think that it is the latter. No one wants to see Google fail. There’s too much vested interest. However, I do want to see somebody out maneuver them (which can be done in my opinion.)

Professionalism series-1: The 24-hour job

In this series of posts I want to address our young professionals directly. These are just a number of small tips that can help you go a long way if you keep them in mind. Whether you choose to take these to heart is up to you, I am just trying to help.

The first is a simple one: Your profession is a 24-hour job.

If you choose a certain line of career, it is not just a job you do in some office in the day, it becomes an extension of your personality. You should expect to be ‘on call’ at any place, at any time.

As such, your career is helping you build a certain perspective of the world — a finance person would start looking at everything in cost-benefit terms, an economist in supply-demand, an engineer in abstract modelling.

Life in companies does not give you well-defined sets of problems like you get in college. It is usually problems with many missing variables, trade-offs, unknowns. Based on your total knowledge and your total experience, you and the company can work together to set a path for finding solutions and achieving results.

Thus in essence, being an ‘accountant’ or ‘engineer’ does not mean that you have read enough books and know enough terms that you can do what you are asked to do. It means that you should now be able to harness your knowledge as a whole to make ‘actionable’ recommendations in situations that relate to you.

Thus your perspective can be valuable to a company, and good-companies-to-work-for will do their best to understand those perspectives. However, if they are relying on you to present solutions based on your specific perspective, knowledge and experience, you will succeed if you take your job to be more than just ‘what someone wants me to do in order to get paid’

This is a simple perspective but keeping it in mind is important. The perspective will help the people you work with start to rely on you. It will certainly help you get out of the trenches and be recognized as a person doing more than just his assigned work to help the company.

My Ideal Employee Series Part 2: Commitment

Perhaps one of the overused and abused yet often overlooked terms in interviews, commitment to me is perhaps the most important virtue that an employee should measure him/herself up with before applying for the job.

Here I want to clearly define my perspective of commitment from employees.

The first aspect of commitment that I seek is dedication to your profession. Other than all the tips I post on professionalism here, you should realize that your chosen line of work is more than a means to a living - it is rather an extension of your personality. People committed to their professions know that education is a never-ending journey and continue to keep building insight in their line of work. There will be times when the team will rely entirely on that insight from you in your chosen line of work to recommend a course of action, and without commitment most people will take the team down with them in those moments.

The second type is the commitment you bring to the team, not to be confused with the enthusiasm you bring when you join. There will invariably be tough times within teams — you may disagree with people; may face high stress or high pressure situations ; may often (in today’s demanding economy) have larger workloads than you had anticipated ; will certainly (within my teams) be expected to start your work running and to be flying by the end of it. Most significantly, you might be faced with having to do something without fully understanding why it is important for the long-term vision of the executive board. These ‘moments of truth’ define true champs. If you are commmitted to the company, you will have faith in the vision of the execs even if you dont understand it; you will push yourself just that extra bit when things are getting tough ; you will be quick to adopt to the work ethics and pace required by the team to get the job done.

The last aspect of commitment is how focused you are to your own tasks. This I define as the likelihood of you putting off today’s tasks to tomorrow. Your own view on this will determine how you will prioritize the often conflicting demands of your time — how important are deadlines to you? How important is the short and hence long-term success of the team to you? How important is it for you to perform you role in the company better than any other person before you? How much sleep are you willing to lose when push comes to melee attacks?

The implicit benefit of this commitment is the proactive initiatives that you bring to the table. The ideas and suggestions you bring for improving business. The team and company can simply not grow as needed without the commitment and of the people that make it up.