No lie, the itch of responsibility and determination to bring The Hexagon Lavish into the realm of reality has grown to such a magnitude that I’m unable to scratch it away. Although, I’m still working (for someone else, at the moment), the amount of money that I have put behind my venture [so far] is minute in comparison to the amount of money that I seek, however, that has not stopped me from taking into consideration that perhaps now would be a good time to go ahead and “advertise” as a ways of experimentation. You know, to see if people would really be interested in working for my start-up.
I’m looking for a specific breed of scientists, engineers, mathematicians and researchers willing to push the limitations of both software and hardware. I need people willing to engage themselves in conventional and esoteric fields of mathematics and programming in languages they’re familiar with and languages in which they’re not familiar with at all. I need people on both the business end and the scientific end. I need people willing to relocate to Atlanta (if they’re not there already). It’s okay to want to make money as well as being contributory to science. I need people willing to optimize hundreds of lines of code over and over and over and over and over and over again. The most impressive thing about all of this is going to be the kind of people that I hire to be a part of this journey. Managing a talented bunch is going to be more difficult than being an independent researcher and with that said, I had better be the absolute “best” at something (i.e., theory development) amongst the bunch. At The Hexagon Lavish, you’ll be employed to conduct research, if you have a history of conducting research on your own. I will not teach you how to conduct research but I will allow an employee that has developed his or her own research methodology and adopt their methodology to mine since the goal is to make a profit.
I also realize that there are barriers-to-entry to overcome–and the difficulty tagged along with it–since there are so many scientific research-based companies and that the distribution models associated with the revenue accrued by these companies is positively skewed and only a select few end up doing extremely well. This is why a lot of your so-called “science research” companies are really nothing more than groups of researchers working in academia.Speaking of Academia, most folks are probably wondering how on Earth can someone like me, a person without a college degree, can know so much in regards to science and mathematics. If you must know, I attended Duluth High School in Duluth, Georgia and my high school was always constantly expanding since enrollment increased over the course of the my four-year stint there. The school’s library was considerably large [or, at least had a considerable budget] and there were graduate-level textbooks shoved into a dark corner of the physics section that was rarely visited by a human presence (understand, that at the time, people were still using the card catalog to find materials in the library). However, my curious-self (nh) moseyed around said dark corner of the physics section one day and opened up the first page of one particular book and I had then made the assumption that the workload must’ve been a helluva lot tougher twenty years prior to when I had picked up the book because that marked the time when the last cluster of loan dates that were on the front page of the books I perused through. And perused through them I did–taking note of all of the expressions, equations, theorems, theories and so forth, I knew right then that if I didn’t learn how to master a pattern, I would never end up on the narrow path to becoming a mathematician.
Science, in its industrial form, has to be able to produce some sort of a product or service for other market participants either through economies of scale, developing “better” technology [by being faster] and employing brilliant people (this way, your models will actually say something) and so forth. But employing someone isn’t as easy as it might seem, especially when one has to throw the value of a college degree in the mix of considering someone as employable for a position as The Hexagon Lavish or any establishment for that matter. Truthfully speaking, if there aren’t all that many jobs available, then any sort of degree is not going to be all too useful. In the case of the United States, damn near 25% (every 1 in 4 Americans) of the U.S. population [when factoring in those with tertiary degrees between the ages of 25-64] have a college degree. There are more Americans with college degrees than there are jobs [in their respective fields, to say] in the U.S. This is why it’s somewhat difficult to chose the so-called “right” candidate for the job. In my case, I’m not looking for someone that’s “different”. In the world of work, different is bad–very bad. Employers want the exact same kind of employee that they had hired a million times before. The reason why is because when something goes wrong, the employer will not be at fault. If an employer were to hire someone with a skill-set that is “new” and different, and something were to go wrong, then the employer would be at fault. To have a better understanding of this, put yourself in the shoes of a middle manager that feels extremely uncomfortable with the task of hiring people he or she believes is smarter than they are, especially if he or she is in a position in which the solving of partial differential equations is needed and they aren’t knowledgeable when it comes to solving partial differential equations. Either solving partial differential equations is irrelevant for the job at hand or, the solving of partial differential equations is relevant, in which case any potential candidate for the job will not get the job because, as the middle manager, you do not want someone else taking the position you currently hold away from you.
Despite of that being said, I should have no problem finding the “right people” since most physics and math Ph.D.s work in an industrial capacity. From a professional perspective, I can say that the world has its fair share of incompetent scientists, so I’ve found that furthering my studies and research in science has proven to be more than beneficial inasmuch as having a clue as to whether the person who’s research and/or studies I’m reading regards said person as being competent or not. Once I’m satisfied that said person is competent, that will determine if I’m able to trust that person, especially if I were to employ him or her for a position at The Hexagon Lavish. Trust is valuable; credentials are not. In my case and for others, if you want to be a professional researcher you will have to give your entire life to the system. That’s how it is. With that said, research isn’t for anyone (notice I said “anyone”, not “everyone”). In research, being productive means realizing when you’ve come to a dead end and now you have to come up with a new or newer approach to conducting productive research. Trust me, it can get frustrating. So, when I’m actively looking for a candidate (i.e., place ads for positions on Indeed, Dice, etc.), please understand why I prefer persistence over intelligence. Yes, it is necessary to carry a certain level of intelligence but persistence is of the utmost importance when it comes to being a productive researcher.
Social respect is important because it gives one power–the power of being privileged to make choices. If I were to go to a congressional meeting to tell people that the fate of the world is dependent upon the spending of $X billion on something, no one is going to care or even listen to me. But if Neil deGrasse Tyson were to do it, people will listen because he’s been privileged by the power of influence to do so. People in Congress might not do what he says, but at least they’ll schedule a meeting. Understand something: everyone cares about how someone sees them.
Also, I need to stress to all of you reading this blog post that the world in which you work for one company for the rest of your life no longer exists. People used to think that moving from company to company to company and field to field was a “good thing”. People also misconstrue “free market capitalism” (which doesn’t exist, by the way) and thinks that everyone under the Sun will get the job in which they are the most productive and be happy for the rest of their lives. The world ain’t like that, but that’s okay because being employed at The Hexagon Lavish will assure you that you will be around people that know how the world works. Let’s face it: looking for a job is a brutally humiliating experience. So, with that said, can you think on your feet? I’m looking for people that can come up with new equations, similar to how I’m doing for my research on CMAs, that describes how a problem comes about and the methods to go about solving the problem. You have a Ph.D.? That’s real cool but what can you do to come up with brand new equations, catered to solving a specific problem? You weren’t taught this en route to your Master’s in Mathematics nor did you take the time to learn how to “tweak” PDEs and solve them neither. So, what can you do for me? You see, that right there is something that I look for in a candidate. At the same time that I’m looking to bring people on, I’m also seeking venture capital, but there is a catch–risk taking, for venture capitalists, scares them despite the fact that they like to hide being scared. Not only am I a researcher-with-employer-potential, I also have to wear the hat of someone that’s tasked with the responsibility of assuring investors that they’re not going to be pouring vast sums of money down a bottomless pit.
In all good intent, I should start putting up job ads within in the next few weeks or so. Don’t hold your breath though.
—Desmond
arheliean.com 