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Office hours

A few co-workers have started offering office hours, seemingly spurred on by a post by Robert Heaton. I’m going to try this a little closer to Robert’s original idea, and make this offer to strangers too1.

If you want to chat, I want to help.

What topics?

You choose, that is the point. That said, here are some thoughts…

My career thus far has mainly been focused on navigation systems, both GNSS and land-based; if you’re interested in chatting about that absolutely get in touch.

If you’re heading for your first clearance interview, and want to practise with someone who has both passed and failed get in touch.

If you don’t have many connections in industry and are just looking for general advice, then by all means get in touch.

You just need a little rubber duck time, let us make it happen!

Basically, get in touch and we’ll see what happens!

What do you need to know?

Be aware that if this works out I’ll likely write my own retrospective, so don’t expect total privacy. I’m also a fan of writing tips, so I might take any questions and run with them!

I’m not going to lie to you, I do plan on having a quick poke around before agreeing to a call. If you’re socially or professionally poisonous to me, I won’t make time for you. It sounds harsh, but I want to be upfront about that.

I often have a rough schedule, but I’ll try to make time. Even though I’m UK based, my schedule pins me to other timezones on occasion and I may be able to accommodate you even if you’re far away.

I am a native English speaker, confident social German speaker, muddling Castilian speaker, and I’m told by my French co-workers that I’m fluent in French docker… so you will need to be able to communicate in one of those or wish to teach me another.

How?

The easiest way to make this happen is to drop me a mail. If the idea gets any traction I’ll look at better ways of scheduling, but until then mail should be fine.

Updates - 2019-01-15

So, I’ve just completed my second appointment, and it seems to be working out okay. Both have been fun(at least for me), and I’m planning on continuing this experiment for a little while longer. Do get in touch!

I’ve also passed on two “applicants” who I felt would be better served by other people, and that seems like a very valuable feature to add to the idea. I passed both of them on to co-workers, and I could only do this easily because I knew they were playing around with the idea of /office-hours. It would be nice if there was a register that made it is easier to link poor matches with better matches. Obviously it needs to be weighted in some way, “show me $connections using office-hours with $tag” for example, but it might be a nice idea for a weekend hack.

Footnotes

1

It seems that the norm for my co-workers is to make this offer on our semi-private mastodon instance, but I’d like to think I was implicitly offering help there anyway.

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