Mircea Baldean

Having graduated Computer Science a while ago, I totally concur to Eric Lundquist’s awesome article in eWeek. There are three Lessons you should know:

• Lesson 1: “Pay attention to the economics and politics of your profession and figure out a way to gain leverage not just for yourself but also for your peers.”
• Lesson 2: “Your leisure is your future. Your parents and your professors thought you were wasting time with YouTube, Facebook, texting, mashups and GPS social networks. They were wrong. Thanks to all that time you spent thumbing messages and sending photos and videos around the Web, you know much more about what companies need to understand technologywise than the companies themselves do. You’ll walk into the office of your new employer with a better comprehension of what the company needs than all those suits running around on the top floor. In fact, most of those suits are spending their time and the company’s money trying to buy their way into businesses about which they don’t have a clue. Don’t be afraid to clue in the clueless and, failing that, don’t be afraid to start up your own business based on what you know and they don’t.”

• Lesson 3: “Innovation versus the cubicle. There’s probably no word that large bureaucratic companies like to bandy about more than “innovation.” You’ll hear innovation championed by the company president, highlighted in companywide memos and held up as the gold standard of corporate aspiration. Alas, you soon learn that, in the cubicle culture, innovation’s high goals can be recast by micro managers as tiny improvements in current product lines, as the creation of obstacles designed to trip up competing products or as patentable concepts meant only to cast a legal chill over the economic landscape. But innovation doesn’t have to live only within the confines of corporate edicts. […] Understand the difference between innovation in a straitjacket and intelligent invention.”

You should read the whole “Go to the Head of Your Class” article!