The technical skills and people skills are important metrics determining how valuable employees are to a company. In this article, we argue that employees with excellent technical skills may be negative energy, if accompanied with poor people skills. First, let's examine the technical-skills-people-skills chart. The blank squares correspond to the employees who are poor either in technical skills or in people skills, and not excellent in any. Such employees generally do not exist in a company -- they either were not hired in the first place, or have been let go. Majority of the employees possess ok technical skills and ok people skills, although the "ok" bar varies from company to company. Good engineers tend to have excellent technical skills and ok people skills, while good managers tend to have excellent people skills and ok technical skills. It can be rare to get employees who are excellent in both -- they are the super stars. It is questionable whether to h
In the past I've attended multiple events hosted by NECINA . Recently the Director of NECINA-DIG invited me to speak in two events. On May 4, 2017 I was invited to be the sole speaker of a NECINA-DIG meetup event . The title of my talk was "Big Data Platform Landscape by 2017". The talk slides are available at https://BigAnalyticsPlatform.com . There were around 40 professionals who attended. On May 14, 2017 I was invited to be a panelist of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Financial Technology at 2017 Boston FinTech Forum with Ant Financial . My co-panelists included Peng Xu ( Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence, Ant Financial), Charles Wang ( AI and Big Data Scientist/Entrepreneur), and Greg Woolf ( Founder & CEO, Coalesce.Info). There were around 200 people who attended. NECINA stands for New England Chinese Information and Networking Association. Founded in 1996 (the year I came to the United States), it is a non-profi