Challanges in TM1

[Cognostm1.ibm]

Hi,

I am in search of a job and the one question which I am not able to answer properly is:

What are the Challenges you faced and how did u overcome??

Can anyone give an impressive answer for this

Radhika

Admin Note: Restored from the backups.

[declanr]

Radhika,

The key part of that question is "YOU" (or "U"...)

If you have not had the opportunity to overcome challenges; be honest about that as opposed to using someone else's response...

HTH

[TheEnforcer]

If you think anyone here will give you an answer to that you need to take a seriously hard look at yourself.

You might as well ask "i want to apply for a job that requires a PhD in Nuclear Physics, can i please borrow yours?"

[Alan Kirk]

Quoted in full in case, yet again, a post is edited out of existence thus rendering the rest of the thread nonsensical.

Something which is getting annoying, quite frankly. Yes, it was a bad question, but once it was put out there and responded to, the correct response is "mea culpa", not "Oh, that never happened!". And I do agree with the responses to date.

Hi,

I am in search of a job and the one question which I am not able to answer properly is:

What are the Challenges you faced and how did u overcome??

Can anyone give an impressive answer for this

Radhika

Admin Note: Restored from the backups.

[Christopher Kernahan]

Last night I saw an impressive talk by Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Exchange. One of the points he made is that Stack Exchange is set up not only to attract the right kind of people, but also to repel the wrong kind of people. For example, in the Maths forum, if you ask a question that can be answered by the average Maths professor, it is not a hard enough question, and is closed. Similarly, if your question is off topic, too local (i.e please debug my code), or has been asked before, it is closed. Worth considering, I think.

Cognostm1.ibm, given that your question was restored, here is my advice.

As an interviewer, I am interested in what you yourself have accomplished. Too often I hear "we did" or "my team was involved in". Ok - but I once had a candidate claim experience with the TM1 API on their CV. When I asked a question about that, they responded "my team used it". "But did you?" I asked. "No", was the response.

To answer this question, consider what has been difficult about your job. Do you have to learn lots of new things quickly? Do you have a lot of complicated models? Is the TI difficult to read? Are the rules complex? Are the time constraints short and your deliverables many?

Consider what challenges you face day to day, and then state how you have managed to deal with them. Have you started documenting new TI functions in a personal file so you have a ready reference? Have you done any extra training? Have you asked your manager for more support or juggled priorities? Have you taken time to simplify a model to make it easier to understand?

If there are challenges you haven't yet overcome, then maybe give those in your answer too - honesty will demonstrate credibility, for me.

[stex2727]

Hi,

I am in search of a job and the one question which I am not able to answer properly is:

What are the Challenges you faced and how did u overcome??

Can anyone give an impressive answer for this

Radhika

Admin Note: Restored from the backups.

I once came across a rather difficult feeder problem and the big challenge is where to look for assistance, Firstly I randomly chose a few of the seperate help files which was a bit hit and miss as you really have to have extensive knowledge of TM1 to know which help file it will be in. But being rather IT literate I thought I would search the IBM website as they wrote the product, right?. Well Mr/Mrs Interviewer if you've ever been to the IBM website you'll know how big a challenge that is. Its not so much as finding a needle in a haystack as finding a needle in a haystack surrounded by cows with bowel problems. I mean as soon as you get close to the needle you are redirected to the back end of the cow. But sometimes dogged determination is not enough and you need to know when to stop flogging a dead cow and take a new approach. Luckily I typed TM1Forums into google and found a wealth of information and knowledgable experts in the field. Before asking the community I did a search of the site as recommended in the FAQ's and found the solution to my problem without even having to ask anyone. Happy Times

Steve

[Alan Kirk]

First off, that was a damn good answer to the original question. I think that everyone else (including me) was assuming that he wanted to hijack someone else's experience but it may have been that he just wanted an idea of how to approach such an open ended question. It's not clear which is the right or wrong interpretation but both are worth considering. However in fact that's one reason why...

Last night I saw an impressive talk by Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Exchange. One of the points he made is that Stack Exchange is set up not only to attract the right kind of people, but also to repel the wrong kind of people. For example, in the Maths forum, if you ask a question that can be answered by the average Maths professor, it is not a hard enough question, and is closed. Similarly, if your question is off topic, too local (i.e please debug my code), or has been asked before, it is closed. Worth considering, I think.

... that isn't likely to happen. (And for clarity, here I'm speaking for me, not on behalf of the other Admins.)

I didn't see the interview in question but if he's being quoted correctly my estimation of Stack Exchange just went down. Not hugely, but just a bit. It comes down to this; what are their intentions? Is it to be a forum for all people, to promote learning and understanding of their chosen subjects orrrrr... is it intended to be nothing more than a mutual back slapping society for the most talented, dealing only in the most obscure and esoteric issues?

This place is named TM1Forum, not TM1ExpertsOnlyForum and my own preference is that we lean toward the former demographic. There's the old saying that "there's no such thing as a stupid question", though a lot of us have been around this place long enough to know that isn't so... but there's a huge difference between a stupid question and an inexperienced question. Things that may be obvious to those of us who have used the tool for ages may not be so to someone who has only just started out in it. Alternatively the nature of a question may seem obvious... and yet someone else may see another possible side to it, much as you've done here. It would seem to me unfortunate if someone, even me, were to arbitrarily start locking off threads on the basis that they seem too easy or too obvious or just plain wrong in some way.

Encountering a complete newbie question doesn't bother me. The questions that do tend to grind (not only with me I've noticed) are:

- Ones where the poster clearly hasn't bothered to read the Guidelines or even skim the FAQ, since both are sitting right up there at the head of the forum. This is grossly disrespectful because it assumes that the asker's time is more important than the answerer's time, though this is the backwash of the current belief that no-one should ever try to figure anything out for themselves since they can just jump on the web and ask. The one time that I did ask a question on Stack Exchange I made daaaammn sure that I explained all the references that I'd checked, and the past answers I found which were vaguely similar but which didn't apply to my case. The question was rated up by a few people in no small part I think because of that and I'm sure that questions which do the same here (especially since it is part of the Guidelines..) are received more favourably and tolerantly. I can understand if they don't even know where to start in the documentation, such is the arbitrariness of some of the divisions in it and such is the absurdity of retaining the 7 separate documents to be searched one at a time from the HTML help. (And Steve's poetic description of the field, haystack and needle is is the most apt metaphor for the IBM web site that I've ever heard.) But it's nice if they take the time to do something to try to understand / figure out the issue before they post.

- Ones where the poster doesn't take the time to think the question through and ask it clearly. I can think of at least one person who pops up from time to time and who occasionally asks a question which omits a key piece of the puzzle because thinking out the question and explaining it in full detail would be far too time consuming. (See also: "My time is more important than yours".)

- Ones which are posted by people who are selling their services as "Professional" consultants but have no clue about the product, and who expect the very people whose livelihoods they're undercutting to supply the answers. Worse, the ones who pretend that that's not the case and that they're just end users. While I generally think that the TM1 community is too small to try to divide it into the right and wrong sort of people... these are as close as I'd come to saying "yeah, wrong sort".

- Ones where someone will post a really bad idea, usually involving some Heath Robinson-ish method of doing a simple data movement, half a dozen people reply giving them a simple, straightforward way of doing it, and they still keep posting "Yes, but I still don't understand how can I have a TM1 chore write a value to my Oracle database to run a trigger to send an e-mail to Outlook so that it can open Excel and run a macro to log on, open Server Explorer and type the number 2 into my cube?" Oh, and then 5 days later they open a new thread to ask exactly the same question.

However with the possible exception of the third group, the objective isn't really about discouraging people from participating in the forum (and group 3 isn't actively discouraged though when people find out about their game answers may be thin on the ground)... though I'd agree that certain behaviours should be discouraged. Not necessarily for relative newbies; pointing out to them that they may need to consult the FAQ/Guidelines may be done quite curtly at times (though personally I'm trying to avoid even doing that (not always successfully) to try to keep the overall tone positive) but when you have people who tend to be repeat offenders it's inevitable that some will get verbally snarled at occasionally. Not always pleasant to watch, but certainly better than arbitrarily censoring their threads, I think.

[Olivier]

It comes down to this; what are their intentions? Is it to be a forum for all people, to promote learning and understanding of their chosen subjects orrrrr... is it intended to be nothing more than a mutual back slapping society for the most talented, dealing only in the most obscure and esoteric issues?

I think this is good to underline the bad posts so people can improve their way of participating when they want to improve.

For a while now,
I have been hesitating to issue new posts as I did not want to take the risk of getting bashed by Lotsaram or some other member of the elite crew for being a Noob or posting like one...
(The implementation I am on is not quite at the edge so probably I don't have to dig very deep to technically deliver the requirements...)

But I have to admit generally not posting to quickly has been to my own benefit
as I have manage to get pretty much any answer I am looking for from either the Tm1 documentation itself or this forum

You learn a lot by reading through other people threads and most of the time your problems/questions have occur in other places,
with different background and perspectives and you can benefit from the experiences detailed in the various posts. ( not to mention FAQs and Versions highlights and the rest...)

I am quite impress by the admin team and other gurus dedication to provide valuable answers to any reasonable questions
but I have seen a trend in some comments on the lines of : - I suggest that you call in somebody who knows what he is doing with Tm1 to resolve your issue...

Not to say that I don't find some questions a bit abusive :
Can you please post the exact TI code I need so I can go home at 4pm this evening and shine like one of the tatoine star in my office ?
It is never a good approach in your life anyway...

But sometimes, the life push you in places you did not really wanted to be...and you have to deal with it...
I strongly believe that most of the people ending in these funny positions and have to maintain a system they don't even understand is not from their own initiative (hopefully in most cases).

This forum could be their life jacket

I am sure you all are aware of these body shop companies that ship 20 years old experts into the corporate world.
I have been one of them and know how difficult being in their shoes can be.

Without the Tm1 forum,
I would not have make it when I had the Tm1 install cd dumped on my desk and was told to see what it could do to improve our reporting process,
but it does not mean that one of the real Tm1 consultant at the time would have get the job as a consequence...( the main reason being it probably did not exist in my country at the time...).

We did stupid things with the tool like implementing a multi country reporting system based on local Tm1 database synchronised through replications
Yes it did cost a fair bit of man hours to go through the tool capability before realising what to do with it and how...

And very likely in the old Olap forum you could find some of my old posts pretty basic and why not stupid with a mix of frenglish vocabulary.

If I would have been systematically censored or bashed by the admin surely my Tm1 career would have been much shorter.

I hope you will not go in the direction of deleting the posts that are not up to the standard
and keep your collaborative / educative orientated approach instead of going down the path of the mutual back slapping society.

[Christopher Kernahan]

Is it to be a forum for all people, to promote learning and understanding of their chosen subjects orrrrr... is it intended to be nothing more than a mutual back slapping society for the most talented, dealing only in the most obscure and esoteric issues?

Hi Alan,

The point I think Joel was trying to make is that unless there are some boundaries, you end up with a Yahoo Answers forum with school girls posting makeup tips in the Stocks group. The Maths forum I mentioned earlier is designed to be an elite forum, but for simpler questions they apparently have a Mathematics forum. I'm certainly not advocating we delete what may be considered basic or simple questions - if they're on topic and fit within the identity of this forum.

I think the OP's question is pretty tenuously linked to TM1 by virtue only of it being posted in this forum, and would probably be better served by using a careers site or LinkedIn. All that being said, the Admins on this site have built a great community and resource, so take my input with as much salt as it deserves.

[lotsaram]

This place is named TM1Forum, not TM1ExpertsOnlyForum and my own preference is that we lean toward the former demographic. There's the old saying that "there's no such thing as a stupid question", though a lot of us have been around this place long enough to know that isn't so... but there's a huge difference between a stupid question and an inexperienced question. Things that may be obvious to those of us who have used the tool for ages may not be so to someone who has only just started out in it. Alternatively the nature of a question may seem obvious... and yet someone else may see another possible side to it, much as you've done here. It would seem to me unfortunate if someone, even me, were to arbitrarily start locking off threads on the basis that they seem too easy or too obvious or just plain wrong in some way.

Encountering a complete newbie question doesn't bother me.

Likewise, this about sums it up for me. Although Olivier may think I'm scary I have nothing against newbie questions. (Although of course I'm much more inclined to answer them if a reasonable amount of thought has gone into the question and there's obviously been some effort put in on behalf of the poster not only in writing the question but also in thinking the problem through and solving it themselves ...

I have no idea who Heath Robinson is, and yes poorly written or incomprehensible questions are an annoyance but hey you can always ignore such questions. The one set of questions that really get on my nerves are the type Alan summed up as the following

The questions that do tend to grind (not only with me I've noticed) are:
- Ones which are posted by people who are selling their services as "Professional" consultants but have no clue about the product, and who expect the very people whose livelihoods they're undercutting to supply the answers. Worse, the ones who pretend that that's not the case and that they're just end users. While I generally think that the TM1 community is too small to try to divide it into the right and wrong sort of people... these are as close as I'd come to saying "yeah, wrong sort".

Couldn't agree more. Couldn't put it better myself.

I do like the general camaraderie on the forum and the odd entertaining twist or diversion fro a thread topic such as this one I think shows the real intent and spirit of the community that does post and read topics here regularly. I don't think we should do anything to discourage people from posting. Places like stack exchange, and even Ozgrid I think are a but over the top in terms of over moderating and shutting down legitimate questions

[Alan Kirk]

I have no idea who Heath Robinson is,

Even if you don't know the name, I doubt that there is anyone outside of a monastery who has never seen a drawing of his, or a drawing inspired by him, or one by his US equivalent Rube Goldberg, or at least seen if not played the ultimate physical manifestation of both, that ancient and ridiculous (in a non-pejorative sense) game Mouse Trap.

Certainly I've seen more than a few TM1 systems which employ the same design principles over the years.