I've hired and worked with pHD's and literal rocket scientists from JPL and Caltech: education is irrelevant to actually building things that work! The best creators I've worked with have been dropouts, English majors, biology majors, psychology majors, and musicians. I could care less about one's education on paper. What I do care about is their prior work history in creating things that actually work, especially skill at making complex systems simpler. Making complex, hard to use pieces of junk is pretty easy (sure, I'm guilty of that in the past too, and my writing is (still) over dense with information haha (working on it)). A lot of people are impressed with complexity. I'm impressed with simplicity. Compare ARRI's menus to Sony's. Which is more popular? ARRI cameras don't have a lot of options, it just works. With the other camera brands one has to waste a huge amount of time messing around with settings trying to get the best results. I've done it, even created industry leading products which showcase that I figured it out: http://brightland.com/w/downloads/filmic-skin-for-canon-c300-ii/ , https://brightland.com/w/downloads/filmic-skin-pictures-styles-for-canon-dslrs/ . Shoot me a link to someone, anyone who's done a better job and I'll be the first to congratulate them. As much as a pain in the *ss to figure out these solutions, I still classify the problem solving aspect as easy, just painful time consuming work. Which no one should have to do- these cameras should produce this quality with stock settings. And that's what ARRI does (that was my goal/target- get as close as possible to the ARRI look). I think Black Magic and Red have made amazing progress in color science in the last few years: stock color science that just works is what everyone wants. No one wants to mess with settings anymore (OK, I'm sure there's a few folks who enjoy it haha; most don't). Even Sony's $900 A6400's stock setting looks very impressive for skin tones- Sony gets it now too. Fuji also provides nice color without too much work and the GH5x have come a long way since the GH4 (my last Panasonic camera purchased).
Sure I've done some computer coding (doing some DNA coding would be fun too, just need a bucket of PCR-in-a-bottle and a bit of CRISPR and we'll have some velociraptor unicorns running around in no time lol). I've personally designed and built the entire capture and recording pipelines for video products, with millions of customers/viewers, including MySpace Music's* real-time A/V capture systems running in all browsers and both Windows and OSX (and later for a different product running in iOS, which also performed real-time audio effects on the CPU and video effects on the GPU). One of the most rewarding projects (which I thought I would get fired/not paid because I wasn't allowed to actually write code when on the client's site in the UK) was where I convinced people who didn't work for me, and were adversarial to the company who hired me (I didn't know this beforehand!), to solve problems they thought were impossible. The results were so good Microsoft's Advanced Technology Group offered me work (turned it down- don't want to live in Seattle again re: weather haha). I didn't write a single line of code, couldn't even look at the code. So what's the lesson? Believing that something can be done, even when people think it's impossible, even in 'battle', figuring it out and helping others to figure it out with you, for the common good.
If someone came to me and said, "hey John, help us build a great camera system!". The first thing I'd do is this. Short summary: let any and all team members go who make others on the team unhappy and/or project limited beliefs and constantly complain or in any way cause energetic or emotional drag on the company. The team needs to operate as a team- with constructive, problem solving thinking and the old fashioned can-do attitude!
. Does this post annoy you? Great, you're fired or not hired haha! If you're laughing with me, about the silliness of this debate and serious about the kindness to others aspect, then you'd make a great team member for any project in any company.Ask yourself (anyone who this applies to), why did(do) you downvote jcs's comments, what is it that made you annoyed/angry? Is it possible to disagree without getting annoyed/angry? What evidence can you provide that directly counters what jcs said?
Anyone hiring a bunch of pHD's and not getting results and hearing "it's not easy" over and over again might think about hiring different people who can actually build things that work. A lot of pHD's are pretty smart and creative, the challenge is when there's a bunch of smart and creative people in the same room, ego and competition can take over, leading to disaster (also a common problem in the video game development space: top game developers are some of the most talented software developers in the world along with some of the most underdeveloped social skills (autistic traits can be grown out of and better social skills can be learned: it's done with love, compassion, and empathy)). That's the point of the video link earlier in this post. Regarding the video- I think it's fair to give people a chance to change once they've learned what they are doing is toxic. This change must be quick- in my experience if people are going to change, they'll do it pretty fast, especially in a work environment.
So is everything easy? That would be a pretty boring reality, wouldn't it? What we can do, is remember that we can choose to feel good and be happy while working on life's challenges, in work or for fun. If projects aren't going smoothly, is everyone at least getting along, supporting each other, and having fun? If not, why not?
* I left MySpace a long long time ago, sorry to hear they recently lost a lot of user generated content. Still not at the level of shenanigans done by other social media giants (selling private data and worse).
..