I'm excited to report that my Carnegie Mellon teammates and I completed the first course in the Software Management program, the "Elements of Software Management" (ESM).

If you are interested enough to be reading this post, you are probably already familiar with the general overview of the program and are rather looking for insider information. I will try to break down that information from the following perspectives:

Summarized in two words, the ESM course is about "Business characterization". In your first course ever in this program, your goal is to analyze the vitality of a randomly-assigned, publicly-traded software company. You have all the publicly accessible information on the Internet as research material, 4 books and 1 course reader as the means of learning the mechanics of how to research, three other partners in crime to collaborate with (who each are assigned their individual companies), 45 minutes per week of your coach's time to share among your team for seeking guidance, and weekly lectures to discuss readings with the class.

Although you have a team, the work is team-ish. This is only a warm-up course in terms of collaboration, so you are responsible for your own individual research. The team is there to discuss the learning process on a high level, but you produce results individually about your own target companies. The two months for this course are divided across different aspects of business characterization: An executive overview of the company, market analysis and business strategy, financial analysis and business prognosis. Most of those concepts were foreign to me before I had to dive into them. I found myself reading an average of 1.5 hours a day, writing 1 hour a day (mostly deferred till the end of the week) and spending 3 hours a week on collaboration.

Every week, or sometimes every two weeks, an analysis paper is due. The very last assignment was an 8-minute oral presentation of the researched company to imaginary executives, that is, the class instructors.

Let me begin this subject by mentioning that I started writing this post 15 days ago. Balancing your family role, your job or career and your role as a part time student are not easy feats. In the last two months I have at times had to switch to damage-control gear and concretely demonstrate to those both at work and at home that I am still fully committed to them. I've had to skim chapter summaries instead of reading them in detail. I've traded some of my sleep for a well-researched late analysis submission on a Sunday night, a four hour commute on Monday morning from my girlfriend's place and showing up to work at 8:30am to show my team at work that they can still count on me.

Despite those moments of pressure, and without incentives, I like to write. I write because, to recite an anonymous quote framed on my girlfriend's wall, "life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain." I signed up for this program not to trade jobs, but to trade confusion for leadership. For two years I've contemplated that there must be a more direct and powerful way to make a change along the path I have chosen. I chose management because it would give me a leverage from a higher level to effect that change. A part of my commitment is to lead, and I know that there are hundreds of people like me out there who feel confused about what to do with their engineering careers. I write despite the pressure for time, because I chose to follow the passion for freedom of personal and social expression. I'm seeking my passion through learning to direct software development; and I know there are leaders out there without their wings. My fourth role is one that I have assumed individually: to be the seductive call, in the ears of the undiscovered software leaders of tomorrow, to the fulfillment of their true purpose.

My typical week right now is very different from what it was in the past few years. I used to work for 8 hours, then come home and work up to another 8 hours on a start-up prototype. Nowadays I work up to 9 hours a day, reserve 3 hours for school work, and spend the rest of the time with my girlfriend. The main difference is that at school I try to learn about what might help my work, at work I pay attention to what might be a good case study at school, and at home I share most of my experiences with my girlfriend. You don't realize how fractured your identity is until its incompatible parts start to compete with each other for time. One reason I left Seattle for the Bay Area was to leave behind a lifestyle built around a fractured sense of identity and start a new one as a whole person. So far I feel I've been successful at that.

As an engineer, nowadays I look at my company from a new perspective. I used to look at my sphere of influence from a short-sighted point of view. I used to either want to integrate against cool platforms, optimize things that were functioning terribly but were not broken, and generally make life better for engineers. Since understanding the concept of branding, market segmentation and market-driven development, I have completely revised my system of "importance" evaluation. In my career so far I have never seen someone on the engineering side of a software company reason based on the impact of a decision on the balance sheet, income statement or cash. I have never heard of a developer point out how a cool project doesn't fall within the current strategy of the company, or suggest that a new application is too generic to be branded as something purposeful.

I now understand why several of my boot-strapped startup attempts have ended in failure: The first one attempted to compete with a large company (Facebook) in their own turf without hiding in a niche spot; and the second idea had no customer, purpose or branding strategy in mind - it was just a very cool idea waiting to be recognized. I now understand what turns off a VC and whether to run away when I hear "we want to become the next API consolidating XYZ data and we're launching our first app in two weeks. We're just looking for a rock-star engineer to scale it." (read: nobody recognizes us, but we want to become the standard that the currently recognized companies should follow, and we want you to spend 4% of your life time on this idea.) I kindly declined one such flattering invitation thanks to my new learnings just from this course, and several weeks later I'm helping some of the founders find work.

If I sound like my entrepreneurial spirit is defecting to the managerial world of conservatism and pessimism, it isn't. On one end of the spectrum, I look at people such as Dr. Stuart Evans, my coach this semester. As part of his research area, he studies the behavior of software companies of various sizes in different environments. While he has been involved with several software start-ups, he has not focused on the actual writing of software. On the other end, there are people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Peter Norton, Mark Zuckerberg, Jimmy Wales and Craig Newmark, who knew most things about writing software and not as much about business when they ventured to change the world.

There is no knowledge or merit you can acquire that will make you a wise Wizard or an experienced King overnight. Most good engineers I know have a similar personality to Aragorn, the lone ranger of the Middle Earth: anonymous, wise enough to listen and potent enough to move the world. And yet, they wait for the day when a higher power restores their confidence, the broken Sword of Elendil. As long as there are dark forces in this world, there is a place for those who embrace ingenuity: those who are neither all-wise nor all-knowing, but both ambitious and sympathetic, to put meritocracy aside and become a leader. There are problems to be solved, while the status quo of the world are solving problems that don't need solving. I call doing the right thing, in its technological contexts such as in this one, the "entrepreneurial spirit of software management".

Sometimes the only evidence that you are is what you feel when you stand against the wind.