ATCP, LLC

The IT Manager has no clothes!

If you want to know what a company sells, ask to see their comp plan. If your sales managers are compensated to sell a product/service that the one they are selling can’t be sold under, guess what? Thats right! It fails. This is the primary reason for companies not being able to move their wares.

But not just any comp plan will do. And that is the rub.

Companies today are in a financial bind. They need to spend less and save more. Do more with what they have, and all that. But how do you do this with a strategic product? You know, strategic, one of dozens of words and phrases we throw about as if we know what they mean, and assuming that they mean the same thing to everyone. Wrong.

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It used to be, years back, that a certification meant that you were knowledgeable. Problem was, it really only meant that you were able to pass the kind of test given, and that you had enough short term memory to cram for the test’s material. Certifications do not now, nor have they ever, indicated wisdom or knowledge in the application of one technology into the infinite variety of prospect environments.

If anything, these days too many certifications mean that the person has no time for a real job in the real world, and is virtually useless in a Sales Engineering situation. With thousands of certifications for thousands of applications, which ones do you pick? Oh yeah, and there are more every day! Would you bring a perpetual student on the most important sales call of your career? Of course not. More »

I don’t know why, but the Enum class’ usefulness has always eluded me. Early attempts just didn’t work out, and I just found ways around using it. Recently, I am writing a program that needs to have a certain status be toggled between a known, fixed list of values-with a default value if nothing else matches. This real world project accelerated my learning how to use Enum effectively-much more so that the urgency to simply learn more about the language (i.e. no practical application of said knowledge).

I also wanted this magical class to determine for itself which value from the aforementioned list the thing that had the Enum in the first place should be. In other words, I wanted the method to do the determination to be inside the Enum class itself. I didn’t know if this was possible, but as I went over all the other ways to accomplish this, any other solution was too costly and inelegant.

To give you an idea of what I am trying to accomplish, consider this Test.java:

public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        EventType etX = EventType.Default;

        EventType etY = EventType.Default;

        String sEvent = "this is just a test!";

        System.out.println("etX.getEventType: " + etX.getEventType(sEvent));

        etY = etX.getEventType(sEvent);

        System.out.println("print etX: " + etX);

        System.out.println("print etY: " + etY);

        System.out.println("All EventType(s):");

        EventType allEventTypes[] = EventType.values();

        for (EventType x: allEventTypes){

            System.out.println(x);

        }

    }

}

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