Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Detecting Bias in Yourself

Spiritual Programmer, ,

Can you see your own biases? Most people can’t.

I recently posted here and on social media about product design trade-offs and being able to see the downside of a design decision. I used Tesla as an example. Bad choice.

The comment track was immediately swamped with Elon-haters and Tesla fanboys (in about equal measure). Not many people wanted to participate in the discussion about product design decisions and blind spots.

Interestingly, this proved my point exactly: We all have blind spots. Once we have made a point publicly, it becomes part of our identity. And society appreciates people who stand their ground, while people changing their minds are written off as flip-floppers. But if we want to make good decisions, we have to overcome our biases.

Ideally, you have a group of trusted friends you can discuss important issues with before you make a decision. Failing that, you can borrow someone else’s viewpoint: Ask yourself what that other person would say.

Only Outsiders Can See the Faults

IT Leadership, , ,

Would you design a product with a sleek but potentially deadly feature? Most people wouldn’t, but aerodynamics and design have led to at least 15 people dying in burning Teslas when the electric doors wouldn’t open. The Chinese are no longer having it, and are ordering all cars to have a mechanical door release both inside and outside the vehicle from January 1st next year.

Thousands of trade-offs are made when designing products. But some outcomes are so bad that they ought to disqualify a feature. Product owners want a great product with awesome features, and are not capable of imagining all the bad things that could happen. Even if you don’t have a dedicated Red Team, you need someone outside the product team to probe your products for weaknesses. The people building it can’t see them.

Morning Routine

Spiritual Programmer, ,

You don’t need an elaborate morning routine. Online coaches and influencers describe theirs ad nauseam. If you have the time, by all means spend your morning with strength training, affirmations, a home-cooked breakfast in accordance with your chosen macros, a walk outside, meditation, tai chi, and a success visualization. But most of us have a job to do. We get up, shower, brush our teeth, have coffee, and head to the office.

But as so often, there is a grain of truth behind the hype. It is true that your brain is reset when you wake up. But as soon as you open your email, messages, or social media, other people’s concerns and agendas take over your life.

The one thing that matters most in your mornings is to set your intention for the day. Before you reach for your phone, identify one thing you want to achieve this day. Just one. Your brain is not good at holding dozens of tasks simultaneously. It gets confused, and you start task swapping and spinning your wheels. Set your sights on one task in the morning. You’ll find your brain will keep reminding you, and that one task does get completed.

How Many People are Indispensable?

IT Leadership,

How many people are indispensable in your IT organization (you included)? The right answer is zero. The typical answer is in single digits. It is your job as an IT leader to bring this number down.

It happens automatically as you try to reduce headcount. Just as optimizing your supply chain makes it brittle and prone to disruption, cutting headcount to the bare minimum risks chaos when a key person leaves or is hit by a health or family issue.

There should be two people who can handle every important job. Make these buddy teams explicit and allocate a budget for them. It costs you very little to give each two-person team an allowance for a restaurant meal every two months and to let them attend a conference or event together once a year.

Do you have a list of your key people, the jobs they do, and who could take over? If you don’t, it might be a good idea to start one.

Backup Communication Channels

IT Leadership, , , ,

What is the difference between 30 individual soldiers and a platoon? Leadership and the ability to communicate.

The first step in your resilience planning is to ensure that you can still communicate, even when faced with an onslaught of Russian hackers or American government officials.

That could mean an on-premise open source mail server and a basic web server. Every workstation and company smartphone could have a separate open source mail client and web browser preconfigured for those servers.

There are many other options – the paranoid and those with high threat levels might have spare phones running GrapheneOS and Briar, or even establish their own Meshtastic mesh network.

If you don’t have a backup communication channel, you urgently need to establish one. Especially if you are outside the U.S. and depend on U.S. services.

Could, not Should

Spiritual Programmer,

There is nothing you should do. There are any number of things you could do.

Our language affects our mental state, and there are some insidious words you must be on the lookout for. One of them is “should.” Whenever you use that word, it indicates that you are allowing an ill-defined social norm to push something onto your plate. It stays there, taking up valuable mental space, but you never get around to it. Because it is not really your goal.

That is why “I should lose weight” invariably fails. If you made New Year’s resolutions, how are you doing with them? If you accidentally formulated any of them as “should” goals, you’ll find you haven’t made much progress.

The alternative word is “could.” I could go running each week. It is totally possible. I might decide that other things in my life are more important, and not go running. But “could” empowers you. You could start writing a book today. You could decide to only eat one donut today. But there is nothing you “should.”

Book Review: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Book review

An interesting view at the man behind so much of the news. Definitely not a hagiography. Like in his also excellent Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson seems to have had very good access to the man and the people around him, and to give an unbiased account of what he hears. For many contentious episodes, he reports how Elons sees it and how the other party sees it, and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

After reading this book, you come away with a better understanding of Elon Musk and his way of thinking. Some of his philosophy is useful – like “The Algorithm” for simplifying everything. Other parts of his mindset, like his approach to other people, should not be emulated.

Recommended.

Hike Your Own Hike

Spiritual Programmer,

You can learn a lot from long-distance hiking. One of the life lessons I took from my 1,800 km on the Pacific Crest Trail is HYOH – Hike Your Own Hike.

We’re always comparing ourselves to others. Today, presented with an endless stream of carefully curated social media feeds, it can more than ever seem like everybody else is living a better life.

That’s why it is important to live your life the way you want. On the trail, some travel ultralight, using their trekking poles to stretch a small tarp over their lightweight sleeping bag atop a thin foam sleeping pad. I travel with a real tent, a good air pad, and a warm sleeping bag. They move faster than I do, but I am more comfortable. Long-distance hikers all accept the HYOH mindset – the ultralighters are not judging me for my heavy pack, and I am not envious of their higher mileage.

Live your own life.

Rational Decision-making

IT Leadership, ,

As an individual, you are free to make emotional decisions. You can decide to evict some software product from your laptop because you don’t like the vendor’s nationality or stance on today’s hot-button social issue. As an IT professional, you can even set up an open source solution that does almost the same (though invariably with worse UX) in a few days.

But as an IT leader, you are expected to make rational decisions. That’s why you don’t throw out all your Amazon, Microsoft, or Google Cloud on a whim because you are unhappy with U.S. policy. The rational choice is to minimize your risk. That means building new systems outside U.S. clouds so you don’t add to your problems. And migrating away from disfavoured platforms in an orderly, cost-effective manner.

Measuring Productivity

IT Leadership,

How do you measure productivity? The research suggests that, with AI tools, perceived programmer productivity increases, while objective productivity decreases. In addition, maintainability decreases as more of your code base has never been seen by the human sent in to clean up the AI-generated messes.

That should indicate that we need to prove a massive increase in productivity to justify the use of AI tools. But how to measure it?

Lines of Code (LoC) was already a bad measurement. In the days of AI, it is a totally random measure, and a higher LoC might just as well indicate a decrease in functionality as an increase.

If you’re in the big enterprise/government world, you might use Function Points or Use Case Points. If you are running Agile, you can use team velocity (within each team). Ideally, you would measure business value. Unfortunately, few organizations can articulate and calculate the business value of their IT.

If you want to argue that AI tools increase productivity, you need to put a number on the productivity you claim to increase.