re: What are some hard skills younwish you had learned for your career?

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Here’s a skill for you: it is not ‘could of.’

The correct verb phrase is ‘could have

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actually it's coulda

I wish I could increase my three point percentage to 55%. That way I would be doing actually what I love doing with playing baseketball instead of settling for this raggedy arse engineering job.

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I just realized that I should have spent the last year learning SQL and VBA for career long term despite it being mostly useless to me right now. Thought it might be a good discussion for this board.

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Don't become dependent on just being the SQL or VBA guy, especially if you work at a large company. Your job will just be shipped to India eventually.

If you work in a setting that uses a computer, and you have even the slightest tech inclination, LEARN VBA!

You don’t need to worry or waste time developing your own interface, you can hijack Microsoft Office’s.



Even if it’s enough to know how to clean up code produced after using the built in recorder that encodes mouse clicks and keyboard commands, it’s something.

The next step would be the ability to program your own functions that can be used in the spreadsheet.

Icing on the cake is that most proprietary software allows for export into csv, making integration of their outputs into your own programs easy.



There is no better work related cost/benefit effort than the ability to do this effectively. You can tackle a task that turns hours of tedious manual computer labor into a single mouse click, and bask in the adoration of your bosses.

Is 6 sigma still valuable? I know they tried to apply it to our department and it was a huge failure and everyone I talk with hates it.

It sounds like either you are working in a subjective field where it’s difficult to quantify elements, or it was implemented by idiots.

Or management just did it because it looks good on paper and didn’t give the point men of the project the support they needed.

But to say it sucks is like saying the scientific method is flawed.

All it is doing is using an statistics driven approach to identify problem areas for management to target. It’s not a solution in of itself. Just a tool to assist in the effective allocation of effort and resources.

And half decent business will use elements of it, even if it doesn’t have the six sigma red stamp on it.

I’m in funding. We fund investments depending on client investments and where our accounting indicates we have open position. The problem we find is it sometimes 6 hours to find a funding solution. Or 5 minutes . It depends on the markets. So our metrics are completely fricked to measure because our metrics appear random

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Machiavellianism

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POTUS has it mastered

My dad was a good caprenter, but growing up, I was more interested in playing sports than learning that skill from him. Oddly, my son is a very good caprenter as well.

Many football and basketball players probably wish they’d have learned the pull out method.