Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

How Could That Happen?

IT Leadership, ,

How could that happen? We always ask that question after a scandal or disaster, because all that went wrong seems so obvious in hindsight.

Here in Denmark, one of the news stories today is about a sperm donor who turned out to have a potentially cancer-causing mutation. Firstly, it should have been detected before his sperm was accepted. Secondly, one person should never have been allowed to father 197 children across Europe. But the system to limit harm was implemented piecemeal, and apparently nobody verified that sperm banks adhered to national laws or their own rules.

When you implement an IT system, things can go wrong. But the people building the system cannot see where. All experience shows that builders are unable to see beyond the “happy path” in which the system delivers the benefits it was designed for. We try to compensate for that with separate testers who did not write a line of code. But that only covers programming errors. Most significant failures involve the processes and people around the IT system.

Do you have an imaginative Red Team that will challenge both the system and the processes around it?

Meet People IRL

Spiritual Programmer,

Humans need connection to other humans. Social isolation is strongly associated with depression and poor physical health. But we need real connections, not just online chat or video meetings.

Neuroscience shows that many more parts of the brain are engaged when you meet someone in real life. Only real-life encounters release oxytocin. On the other hand, video meetings and online messaging show increased cognitive load – you have to work harder to decode social cues. That’s why you can have a productive whole-day in-person workshop but feel exhausted after two one-hour video meetings.

Make an effort to meet people in real life. Online meetings don’t count.

Business knowledge beats technical skill

IT Leadership, ,

Business knowledge is more valuable than technical skill. I see again and again that organizations get rid of experienced IT people because they don’t have the latest buzzwords on their CVs. They are replaced with offshore resources or eager young things who tick all the boxes and cost less.

That is a misguided strategy. It takes a long time to accumulate business knowledge because it is not, and cannot be, taught. Someone who has been in the organization for years knows how the business works. That gives them context to interpret requirements and build software that matches how the business really works. A new hire without that knowledge can only build what is written in the spec, which rarely matches what the business needs.

Your technology changes much faster than your business. If you keep hiring new people every time you decide to switch to the latest and greatest technology (AI, anyone?), your people will never have more than 2 or 3 years of business knowledge.

If you need to change technology, it is a much better approach to hire one expert on the new tech and have that person teach your experienced employees. Don’t throw away decades of experience. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Buy more, goddammit

IT Leadership, , ,

The reason you fail is that you are not spending enough. Said the vendor.

Lack of self-awareness is a common human foible, and it seems to be one of the characteristics that AI leaders are hired for. Kellen O’Connor, leader of AWS’s Northern European business, is an example. Interviewed at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, he dismisses the clearly documented failure of almost every AI initiative by saying that the customers are not thinking big enough. They need to apply AI to business-critical functions and let AI agents loose.

Translated from AI hype to plain talk: Yes, our software hasn’t proven any business benefit yet, and the way to achieve business benefit is to buy more of it. Good luck with that chain of reasoning in the CIO’s office.

Get Outside

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

We had 7 hours and 23 minutes of daylight today here in Denmark. It’s dark when you go to work, and it’s dark when you head home. That means it is even more important at this time of year to use your lunch break to get some light and fresh air.

Don’t just stay at your desk and just eat a sandwich. Or even worse, eat whatever is still available in the vending machine or the snack cabinet. If you don’t believe it matters, find some kind of productivity metric and track your morning and afternoon. It can simply be how much time you spend on each application on your computer. Do one week with lunch at your desk, and one with a short walk outside. Compare. You’ll find that your afternoon in the week with lunch at your desk will show way more YouTube, social media, and aimless procrastination.

Break the Law More?

IT Leadership, , ,

Do you want your AI to follow the rules? That’s not as clear-cut as it seems.

You do want your AI to follow your instructions to not delete files. The Google Antigravity “vibe coding” tool achieved notoriety this week after wiping a developer’s entire D: drive instead of just clearing the cache. It said, “I am deeply, deeply sorry.” Google has promised to look into it.

On the other hand, Waymo self-driving cars in San Francisco have been notorious for meticulously following traffic rules and blocking traffic. Waymo just updated its software, giving its cars more of a New York taxi driver attitude. They no longer block traffic, but on the other hand, they now do illegal U-turns and illegal rolling “California stops” at stop signs just like humans.

Before you start getting a computer – whether deterministic or AI – to do a process, make sure you understand both how the process is documented and how it is actually done today.

Don’t Assume Malice

Uncategorized

Do not assume malice. Humans are hardwired to search for meaning, so when something happens, we assume someone is intentionally causing it.

When the boss assigns you a crummy task, it is not because he hates you. He just has a task that needs to be done, and it happened to be assigned to you. When your friend doesn’t text you back right away, that might be because she is watching a play or has her phone on silent to spend time with loved ones. She is not deliberately ghosting you.

Robert J. Hanlon summed this up in what is known as “Hanlon’s Razor:” Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Or indifference, I might add.

Assuming that everyone is out to get you puts you in an unproductive frame of mind. Do not assume evil intent.

Rollback plans

IT Leadership, ,

What differentiates a professional software organization from a bunch of amateurs? One thing is the ability to roll back.

It’s not a good day at the office when the Federal Aviation Authority issues an Emergency Airworthiness Directive, grounding 6,000 of the aircraft your customers are flying. A JetBlue flight on autopilot suddenly turned nose-down in mid-flight, and it turns out that the L104 version of the ELAC software was vulnerable to memory corruption due to solar radiation.

But aircraft manufacturers and airlines have procedures in place, and engineers rapidly fanned out to airports around the world, rolling back to the L103 version.

It is impossible to test every situation, and every once in a while, something unforeseen happens. Professional software organizations can rapidly recover. Do you have rollback plans in place every time you roll out new versions of critical software?

AI Agents are a Stupid Idea

IT Leadership, ,

AI agents are a stupid idea. Consider that we’ve had the option to program deterministic agents to handle most of the suggested AI workflows for a long time. Yet we didn’t do it? Why? Because it turned out to be hard. We did not have good data or good APIs for the actions we wanted to take, and we always encountered lots of difficult edge cases.

Yet the AI vendors are proposing that we now try again. This time with stochastic algorithms that we are never quite sure what will do.

Agentic AI means that we take a problem that we could not solve with deterministic programming, and add another problem on top. And that is supposed to be the future? I don’t think so.

What does work?

Spiritual Programmer, ,

Two factors affect your happiness. For most people, one of these is clearly dominant. For happy people, they are in balance.

The factor that decreases your happiness is all the things that don’t work. It is the bugs in your code, the meaningless bureaucracy you are subject to, and the constant deluge of bad news from our media. This information is constantly forced upon us from the outside.

The factor that can increase your happiness is all the things that do work. But the media rarely report good news, and your boss rarely comes by your desk to express his appreciation for all the systems that are working flawlessly. That means that you have to provide the good news yourself.

Make a habit of appreciating something every day. The code that runs just as it should, the train that was on time, the friend that called you. It is up to you to keep your life in balance.