Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Tag: Productivity

Do Your Employees Follow your AI Guidelines?

IT Leadership, , ,

Unless you override it, your organization’s policy for AI-driven tools is “anything goes.” That’s because your developers want to get their job done as quickly as possible. If that involves having Github Copilot write part of the code or copying a code block into ChatGPT for debugging help, so be it.

If you don’t have secrets, maybe that’s fine with you. But even though OpenAI is not training ChatGPT on user prompts, they have not been very diligent about keeping them safe. You should assume that everything your developers paste into ChatGPT will eventually leak.

That includes your data. AI tools are very good at data cleaning and visualization. Your Data Scientists are surely pasting data into ChatGPT and getting back fully functional Python code to run in a Jupyter Notebook. Unless you tell them not to.

If I asked one of your developers or Data Scientists about your policy on AI tools, would they know it? And would they follow the rules or would they take the 10x or 100x productivity boost?

In Praise of (Useful) Managers

IT Leadership, , , , ,

You do need some managers. Elon Musk is trying to prove that Twitter can be run with only himself and the people who write code, and it’s not going well. It turns out that it takes a little more to run an organization than just coding and tweeting.

For example, Elon had announced that only enterprise customers who would pay $$$ would have access to the API. But he had fired everyone who was able to process an application for an enterprise license. So when the last overworked API engineer committed the change that implemented the limit, there were no paying customers because there was nobody to take the money of the few tool vendors willing to pay up.

Your overhead grows inexorably. Unless you pay very close attention, the fraction of total headcount actually writing code goes lower and lower. To avoid ending up having to take a chainsaw to your organization as Elon has done, calculate your coder percentage today and keep track of it.

Once you Grow up, you Need to Stop Moving Fast and Breaking Things

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, , ,

Moving fast and breaking things can be fine for a startup. They might need to iterate several times and maybe even pivot once or twice before they achieve product/market fit. It is not OK for an established business. Facebook has long since given up on this strategy, but Twitter, under Elon Musk, has rediscovered it. By thrashing around and changing direction daily, they are alienating both the users and the advertisers who were supposed to pay. If you want to move fast, roll out changes to a small percentage of your users. A mature continuous delivery organization practices blue/green deployment, but even if you are not doing CI/CD, you can still test changes with a small subset of your users. Don’t uncritically inflict the latest great idea on your entire user population. #itleadership #innovation #makeitliveuptoitspromise

IT Leadership has to Harness the Power of AI

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, , , , ,

AI has finally gotten really useful inside the IT organization. Most of the examples on the internet are frivolous and amusing, like how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, written in the style of the King James Bible. But ChatGPT is helpful for mundane tasks in IT as well.

I’ve been fixing open issues in a small open-source project recently. One of the issues was that part of the code would concatenate strings to build SQL statements. That’s a classic SQL Injection vulnerability. ChatGPT can fix these bugs faster than I can. So I tell the AI, “please rewrite the following to use bind variables,” and give it the code.

Another example is working we legacy shell scripts. My sed/awk skills are rusty, but I can give a convoluted shell statement to ChatGPT, and it will patiently explain all the options and exactly how it works.

Many of your programmers are already playing with ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and other AI tools. You might as well embrace it. Set up a knowledge-sharing community for those curious about how AI can help IT. Have them present to you and the rest of the IT department. You’ll be amazed if you haven’t played with ChatGPT and its ilk.

Pick the Right Place for Each Task

IT Leadership, , , ,

Peak employee effectiveness and wellbeing depends on finding the optimal balance between working alone and working with others. Microsoft does big studies of their many thousand employees. They found that disengaged employees complained about too little collaboration. Overworked employees complained about too much collaboration.

Now that both office and home are valid work locations, it is a leadership responsibility to make the most of each of them. Collaboration needs to be in the office. We survived two years of Zoom meetings, but at the cost of massive Zoom fatigue. Focused work should happen at home where the employee is in full control of their time. Leaders need to set the rules and clearly delineate what happens where.

Work Where Others are Working

Spiritual Programmer, ,

Are you as productive when working from home? Many people fell they are not, and compensate by working even more hours. The numbers show that the time we save by not having to communte to work have become extra work hours, not extra free time.

If you feel your productivity is dropping when working from home, spend part of your workday working together with someone else. I am not talking about pair programming or collaborative work – in fact, you don’t even need to know the other person. If you take your laptop to a local cafe or co-working space where other people are working, you will work harder. It is exactly the same effect as when people exercise harder in the gym than they do at home. Get out of the house for part of your work-from-home days.

Why Employee Surveillance Doesn’t Work

IT Leadership, Technology That Fits, ,

Do you know what a “mouse jiggler” is? Your most innovative employees do. It is not a device to shake a rodent in a cage. It is a small USB device that sends random mouse movements to a computer.

Who would want such a thing? Employees subjected to tracking software, that’s who. With the mouse moving, the software will record “productivity.” The pandemic led to a boom in surveillance tech, euphemistically called “employee productivity software.” As workers return to the office, that tech is not removed from corporate laptops. But workers are pushing back, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law of IT systems: Whenever the organization implements a policy, the employees will implement an equal and opposite workaround.

Techno-optimists keep trying to replace humans with technology. There are some places where that works. Replacing human leadership with surveillance technology is one of the places where this strategy doesn’t work.

Productivity at 10 pm?

IT Leadership, ,

They call it “productivity” but it’s more likely just busyness. Microsoft research into the use of their Teams product has discovered there are now three peaks in a day. It used to be only mid-morning and early afternoon, but now another peak has appeared at 10 pm. Euphemistically, Microsoft equates keyboard activity with productivity, but keyboard activity at 10 pm is unlikely to add much value for most people.

The workday has expanded by 46 minutes since the start of the pandemic, and most of that has been after normal office hours. It is a leadership task to preserve the health and productivity of your people. Do your employees work at 10 pm? Are you okay with that?

You Need 8,000 Steps per Day

Spiritual Programmer,

You don’t need 10,000 steps a day. But 8,000 steps a day cuts your risk of dying prematurely by 40%. A big meta-study published in The Lancet gathers data from 15 large studies. They conclude that mortality – your risk of dying in any given month – at 8,000 steps is only 40% of that at 5,000 steps. Every 1.000 steps above 5.000 give you a 10% improvement.

If you believe you already take 8,000 steps per day, I have bad news for you: You don’t. Most people significantly overestimate their activity level. There is only one way to know and increase your number of steps: Count them. Get an app for your phone, or use a smartwatch or fitness tracker. Set a goal of 8,000 steps and find a way to track your progress. You will find that it also improves your productivity and your mood.

Save Energy Using Boxes

Spiritual Programmer,

Every item in your field of vision costs you energy. Brain scans show that the automatic effort of filtering out irrelevant objects takes power, and the more items you look at, the worse your focus becomes.

You need to see fewer objects. You don’t have to throw anything out (though that is probably good, too). Simply take a number of items that have some relation to each other and put them in a box. 12 USB cables and 7 memory sticks become one object when they go into a box.

Throwing random objects into a box doesn’t trick your brain, however. Looking at a box you know contains random junk actually costs more energy, because now your brain is also thinking about the task of getting the stuff out of the box and sorting it.

Get out a box and remove some clutter from your field of vision. You’ll find that your energy increases. You just might even get around to that task you have been putting off for weeks.