Here are some blog posts and articles I thought found interesting the last month. (Books will be covered separately.)

Bob has written two good blog posts with scathing critique on how many organisations adopt AI and neglect solving their real issues. I found them very interesting and funny, even though I don’t agree with everything.
AI won’t save your dysfunctional organisation
“I recently watched a team use AI to generate a comprehensive competitive analysis. The document was impressive: well-structured, extensively detailed, professionally formatted. It was also built entirely on the team’s flawed assumptions about their market position, which the AI had helpfully elaborated into fifty pages of confident wrongness.” Ouch.
I don’t fully agree with point 4, there are lots of good managers as well and in a best case scenario, they get to spend more time doing valuable things - spread knowledge, improve clarity, solving problems, coordinating, helping their teams grow and develop.

Zero. None. Not One: Why No Organisation Is Truly Ready to Adopt AI in Software Development “The models that power these tools were trained on clean, public, well-structured code. Your codebase was built over fifteen years by forty different teams, three of whom no longer exist, using frameworks that were deprecated twice, with documentation that was ‘temporarily’ skipped and never revisited.”

“For years, experts thought the brain was capable of keeping around seven items in mind at once; however, recent studies have shown the true number may be closer to three to five. (…) More recently, neuroscientists have discovered a layer of “intermediate term memory” as well, or the brain’s capacity to hold information in mind over a period of hours. Intermediate term memory is also highly constrained, often more than we like to believe. We may think of ourselves as expert multi-taskers, but science shows that just isn’t the case. Our brains are poor jugglers of information.”

Elena Verna’s blog post Confessions of a Millennial in Tech covers some philosophical thoughts of future skill sets and AI.
“And of course, the reward for becoming more efficient is exactly what it has always been: more work. If AI makes you 10x faster, nobody says, ‘Amazing. Please enjoy your afternoon!’ They ask why you’re not doing 10x more.”

“We built careers on knowing how to operate software better than other people. We are also, unfortunately, the sandwich generation that has to explain software to our parents and now AI to our kids. But if software starts getting built, configured, and operated by AI, what happens to the people whose edge was being good at creating software?”

More:

Leadership and organizations

Viktor Cessan has written a very good post about how much a software team actually costs. The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Organizations Are Flying Blind
I remember many years ago, when I was in a very unproductive meeting, I opened an app that calculated what the meeting was worth (hourly rate x people x time) and put it visible on the table. My colleagues laughed, but then stared at the app and quickly got productive – we finished the meeting in record time.

“The people making daily decisions about what to build, what to delay, and what to abandon are rarely given the financial context to understand what those decisions actually cost.” A team of 8 engineers cost roughly €4,000 (~43 600 SEK) for every working day."

“A team that examines its work through this lens will sometimes discover that it has spent a quarter on things that do not connect to financial outcomes in any meaningful way, and that is a difficult finding to sit with.”

Arbetsmiljöverket (The Swedish Work Environment Authority) has released new guidelines for supporting NPF employees. (In Swedish only) Riktlinjer vid autism eller adhd på arbetsplatsen – hälsofrämjande insatser och arbetsanpassningar

All of these things would benefit everyone:

  • Clear expectations, what, when and how.
  • Clear communication
  • Possibility to work in a calm environment when needed
  • Possibility to take short breaks throughout the day to move around, lunch walk or walk and talk meetings
  • Working on including everyone in the workgroup, belonging

HBR (subscription needed)

What’s Lost When We Work with AI, According to Neuroscience
“When you think about an idea, this thought process activates a certain number and pattern of circuits across the brain—a neural chain reaction. When you then speak about that same idea to another person, you activate a different set of circuits—a lot more circuits, in relation to that idea—in other parts of the brain. The result? Spreading the neural activation in real time across the brain. This activation triggers thoughts or ideas about other concepts, enabling us to find implications and applications for ideas more easily, consider multiple angles, recognize patterns, and integrate new information with existing knowledge. The stronger the network, the easier it is to connect to other networks, in the form of implications, concerns, or next steps. When AI tools short-circuit this physiological process by providing instant summaries or answers without the space for discussion, there aren’t opportunities for spreading activation to occur, and our thoughts remain surface-level and one-dimensional. ”

Very relevant article: Leaders, Treat Resistance to Change as Valuable Data
“All resistance is meaningful data. As a leader, your job isn’t to determine whether it’s valid; it’s to understand what it’s telling you. No one wakes up in the morning thinking “I’m bored today. I think I’ll give my leader a hard time about this change that doesn’t make sense anyway”. In my experience, what we call resistance is almost always something else: fear, loss, confusion, overload, or sometimes a legitimate flaw in the change itself.”

More HBR reading:

Other

Scary: We’re losing 338 spoken words every day. (BBC Science)
I wonder if this number is even higher now with lots of remote/hybrid work, this was before the pandemic. What impact will this have?
“the scientists found that between 2005 and 2019, there was a 28 per cent decline in spoken words.”
“Speaking less means spending less time connecting with others,” said Pfeifer. “If people are having fewer conversations, they may be losing both the immediate emotional benefits of social interaction, and the long-term benefits of maintaining strong relationships.”

Immersive Dreaming is the Secret to Feeling Well-Rested (Neuroscience news)
Fun fact: You might feel more rested in the morning if you’ve had bizarre dreams. “Bizarre and intense dreams are more ‘immersive’. This intensity creates a stronger barrier between you and the outside world, allowing your brain to feel more profoundly “offline” and disconnected from reality.

Our old assumptions about cognitive decline in old age is wrong. Your Mindset is the Secret to Aging in Reverse (Neuroscience News)
“Nearly half of adults aged 65 and older showed measurable improvement in cognitive function, physical function, or both, over time.” “Over a follow-up period of up to 12 years, 45% of participants improved in at least one of the two domains, according to the study. About 32% improved cognitively, 28% improved physically, and many experienced gains that exceeded thresholds considered clinically meaningful.”

An article in The Guardian about how climate emissions from airplanes could be halved. Revealed: how aviation emissions could be halved without cutting journeys


What interesting posts and articles have you read lately? Send me tips!