Two Styles

Chanced upon this article about Indra Nooyi while reading The Man who Destroyed Capitalism. Interesting contrast of style between two CEOs of globally recognized brands. Nooyi's advice on how to move up the food chain is perfect:

“One is to always put your hand up for the toughest jobs.” She added, “It will set you apart from the crowd and contribute to your learning.”

The second is: the politics of your organization, but don’t play in them. And the last is: focus on doing your best work in the role you have. If you focus too much on what’s ahead, you get distracted. Be present."

A person who is able to do all three as she suggests while having a strong anchor in their personal life is likely to see results. Maybe not as spectacular as hers but still good enough results. Her background and culture shines through her wisdom as it does with that of Welch.

Having spent some time in GE right after the Welch years and knowing first hand how larger than life his stature was in the company, I was very curious about David Gelles’s book.

Cut Out

Very sad reading about how interns are being replaced by AI to do menial work. Kids joining the workforce these days already have plenty of disadvantage to overcome but being blocked by a chatbot for an non-paying job is a new low. The short-sightedness of such moves is mind-boggling. Space will be created as people leave and retire and there won't be anyone left with enough subject matter expertise to even fact check the work of these bot-interns. 

The kids who might have otherwise learned something useful and contributed to this workforce will be forced to find the slivers of opportunity and create a patch-work of gigs to survive in the world. It is not surprising then when that difficult college student in your life who has all doors being closed on them get upset with you for nagging them to try harder. They are probably within their rights to tell you they did not ask to be born. Growing up is already very difficult business these days and with moves like this there is less and less to want to grow up for. 

Manager or Mentor

Spoke with me mentee B a few days ago. She is only a few years older than J and an amazing young lady I have learned a lot from. She still works where we first met and I have moved on. A large part of our conversation that day was about the difference between being a mentor and a people manager. The former allows a person to pick who they mentor and the mentee is drawn because of some role-model quality of the mentor. A people manager does not always have the choice to pick who they will manage but they need to derive joy and energy out enabling their team to maximize their potential, scale their own impact through empowering others. At first blush there seems to be a good bit of overlap but some people can be terrific mentors and terrible people managers and the reverse is true as well. 

We chatted about P who is senior level people manager at B's company. He had hired me to the job and was the best manager of my career. P is not a mentor and he anyone seeking that from him would be disappointed. But they would be hard pressed to find a better manager than him - the level of empathy, understanding the person's strengths and weaknesses, the ability to create partnerships that bring out the best in each person and the ability to lead from the front in the most difficult situations - that is P. B said and I whole-heartedly agree, if P left atleast fifty people would follow him out - these would also be the top fifty performers in the company who had had a chance to be part of his team at some point. 

After we got of the phone, it occurred to me that a people manager like P is required in an active, dynamic get your hands dirty mode of engagement whereas a good mentor is someone who is your sounding board, cheerleader and coach who can help you make the right moves on your own. 

Life Operators

Reading this story about the best side hustles these days made me think about what the demand for such jobs tells us about what is going on in our homes and communities. If family assistant tops the list, it seems like many among us have yet to achieve work-life balance nirvana, we are not all working from home and even if are, we have too much to juggle and need help. 

“family assistant,” which usually involves some combination of cooking, cleaning, childcare, running errands, coordinating schedules and handling other household administrative tasks. Though many family assistants live with their employers and work full-time, part-time positions are available.

That sounds like having outsourced most of what it takes to be a family that lives in together in a home. The fact that craftsmen are next most popular, seems to indicate that even after outsourcing most of the mundane work for home and family building to an outsider, folks need help with bigger projects even if they might be creative or rewarding. We don't have time to do dull, monotonous stuff everyday and we don't have time to work on longer more demanding projects. We spend our time and effort earning money to pay for others to operate the life we want to live but really can't

Old Flavors

It will be three decades soon that I have worked with data and I find this MIT Review on modern data architectures fueling innovation quite amusing. The same set of facts and "insights" have been recycled in the form our such papers for the entirety of the time I have been in this business. I have no doubt it will continue to proceed in like manner long after I am dead and gone. There is nothing new here, coming up with new vocabulary words to work in established cliches with a fresh coat of paint is not path-breaking. 

Data product and Data fabric will be replaced with some other creative phrasing. Data mesh was all the range a couple of years ago and C-level execs who wanted to get start with their company's data would call upon domain experts with data mesh experience to make it happen for them. I used to work with one such character who was the authority on Data mesh for retail. He talked a big talk because they paid him for it. Concepts were flowing fast and lose. Two years go by there is no mesh to be seen, now word on the street is the mesh was long dead and unaware of its own demise. If this is not a funny business to be in, I don't know what is. 

Blunt Pain

My friend T is working with her leadership to finalize the list of folks in her team who will be laid off. It is clearly hard for her to do this - T and I have both been on the other side in the past and know what it feels to be laid off. What is more she does not agree with the rationale but has to go along with it.  T is fabulous people manager and any team she built and leads is fortunate to have her. 

But thanks to such capricious decision making and the diktats that come from so called "leadership" T feels like she is done with doing what she does so well. She does not want to be responsible for taking action on people she hired and developed over the years that she does not agree with. Maybe it has a lot to do with how such an event haunts the person personally and professionally.  

The person at the receiving end of the decision feels a myriad of emotions - I have gone through a layoff and know the stages of grief such an event produces. What we hear less about is how one like T copes with taking action on behalf of the powers that be - being the one to talk to the impacted person 1:1 and repeat the lines that she would have been coached to deliver. 

That is simply not what T is about - she is a kind, brave and honest person. Not one to resort to "approved" lines for fear of rocking the boat. I have seen her fight for her team, go up against difficult clients, call them out on their bad decisions and much more. I don't know what T is about if not breaking a lot of glass and making the right kind of trouble.

The only silver lining is that people even if laid off have options - perhaps it blunts the pain of being let go and to be the one who delivers the bad news.

What's more, a tight job market means that hiring managers can't afford to be so choosy. Job growth remains strong: The US added 223,000 jobs last month, more than forecast. Meanwhile, data shows there were about 10.5 million jobs available in November, outnumbering the 6 million unemployed Americans looking for work. 

Setting Stage

Was fun to learn there was a word for what we do before guests come home. My scurryfunge is can be spread across days and feels good to have a reason to take care of over-due tidying up. It also makes me connect with the idea of Atithi Devo Bhava. It is a high standard to reach or uphold but gives a person something to strive for. The realistic goal for my "scurryfunge" is about get to a place where I would feel good if I was invited to, provide the simple things that I would look for if I was staying overnight. My bar may not be high enough but it one that I have full understanding of and can actually deliver to. 

I also think about people I have visited and spent time with over the years that made me particularly comfortable. Trying to emulate some of that experience at my home is another way to get prepared. Some of my friends live a good hundred miles away from me and it is asking a lot of them to travel the distance. So I ask myself what would it take more me to prioritize such a trip over everything else I have going on. The one thing that is relatively easy for me to do is put thought and time into preparing a meal. I want to feed my guests food that is comforting but novel in their experience and connects them to my roots.

School Options

I have a couple of friends whose have kids in middle school getting ready to transition to high school. The timing of the pandemic relative to the child's age and engagement at school has led to different outcomes for them and other parents like them. My friends are able to work from home for the most part and their kids are generally doing better than they were before given the increased focus from parents. Neither has decided to go the home-schooling route but they are definitely augmenting the learning at home much more than before. It is no surprise than parents have come to see that they have options other than public school. 

.. a dramatic pandemic increase in work-from-home employment has endured up to the present, accounting for a persistent 30 percent of workdays, despite the efforts of corporate leaders to encourage a broader return to offices. These flexible work arrangements, coupled with the push of high housing costs in many cities, likely contributed to the demographic realignment reshaping school enrollment.

If it turns out that moving to a lower cost home in a neighborhood with a worse school district allows a family to get by with lower income, chances are they might do that, scale back on the career of atleast one parent so they can homeschool the kids. This would be a win-win situation for the family. More time with kids, better education for them and a saner schedule for the whole family. If one or both parents now have the choice of remote or hybrid work then even better. It turns out that all those things are now options for many people and they would be foolish not to take advantage of it. That leads to enrollment rolls this article talks about

The financial implications of enrollment loss have already begun to pressure districts to discuss school closures as well as teacher layoffs. Adapting to this new normal in a way that preserves community engagement and limits further learning disruptions to students will compound the already difficult task of addressing the pandemic’s direct impact on student learning and engagement.

Food Stories

We had a few people over for lunch after a long hiatus. Part of it was pandemic induced but also the issue of getting rusty from lack of social contact. I seem to have forgotten how good it feels to have friends over share a meal, have a good conversation and remember happy memories. But that Friday evening after a day that left a sour taste in mouth, nothing felt better than planning and preparing the meal for the lunch on Saturday. I was on my feet for over five hours in the kitchen and trying to make a healing experience of it. The negativity that came from a toxic interaction at work could be turned into a energy that went into preparing a meal for me friends. It was a great time all around and particularly satisfying to have everyone get second helpings of food I had made. 

I have been known to cook in stress and often much more than is needed and the quality can be questionable. I made a very conscious effort to focus on who I was cooking for and how these folks were good and positive sources of energy in my life unlike the person whom I had a had a contentious time at work. That made it easy to give cooking the love and attention it deserved. I wanted it to be a happy and memorable meal for us all, for the afternoon to make happy memories for all of us. I met C's boyfriend for the first time that day and it seemed like my efforts had worked. He looked genuinely happy to be around us all, be invited to share our meal and the stories that got us together. 

Hall Pass

I have a history buff co-worker who sent this to me. It was in the context of people making lame excuses for not doing what they were required or supposed to do. The excuses that these ancient Egytians are making for missing work sound plausible

On that date, a worker named Pennub missed work because his mother was ill. Other employees were absent due to their own illnesses. One Huynefer was frequently “suffering with his eye.” Seba, meanwhile, was bit by a scorpion. Several employees also had to take time off to embalm and wrap their deceased relatives.

In our case, we were waiting on B to provide us information to complete a project we are working on together. B would be habitually non-responsive, no-show for meetings that were scheduled based on his preferred time. There was that one time when he said he could not do the job we needed him to do because he was having to work on getting promoted - it was wildly funny but he might have the last laugh yet when he does get promoted to the level of his incompetency. 

Expert Fool

Interesting article on the expert witness business. Court room dramas while a very popular movie and TV show genre, almost never show the havoc time in court wreaks on both plaintiff and defendant. Maybe the damage could be skewed more in one direction than the other but the whole system is set to peck at both sides like vultures cleaning up a carcass. Where the two sides don't have it in them to settle, the eco-system of service providers can bill away until there is nothing left to bill. 

Having a few expert witnesses on both sides will get the parties to that finish line much faster. A less cynical way to look at it would be that the legal system is designed to be be freakishly expensive, completely uncertain and wildly stressful to incentivize disagreeing parties to find another way to resolve their differences. Works in theory but not all parties are evenly matched for one. The big guy can squish the little guy to death in court. And even when there is parity not all people are rational actors. And that is not even talking about the lack of any real expertise among the expert witnesses

When selecting an expert, lawyers often look for traits beyond scientific rigor, like confidence, attractiveness, and poise.

“[A] fool with a small flair for acting and mathematics might be a more successful witness than, say, Einstein,” wrote one scholar. “They’re not chosen for their knowledge but for their ability to persuade.”

Uneasy Dream

Dreams of T kept me tossing and turning most of the night recently. T is a young man I have known for a couple of years as the boyfriend of a kid I have known for years. They have been to my home together and I have met them at T's when I traveled to their town for work a couple of years ago.  The child I saw growing up alongside J is a wonderful young woman - I could be biased because L is like family to me. 

So when  I first met T, I was as protective as her own mother would be. Was this man good enough for her, was she really happy with him, was she wasting her time. T turned out to be a nice person, very well-mannered. It was easy for me to feel maternal towards him, It did not hurt that he loved my cooking. I learned that L had broken up with in over the holidays, when I met her mother recently. It sounded like both sides were coping alright and moving on with their lives. 

Yet, in my dream I saw T looking forlorn and lost. Part of me wanted to go rescue him as if he were my child and suffering alone. The dream made me think about children we meet in life that are peers to our own and how we might grow attachments to them weak and strong. The ones that make a stronger more positive impression on us, lay claim to our affection and cause our concern for their well-being. 

I hope that in J's life, she comes across many who feel parental affection for her, root for her success and happiness. Despite L having parted ways with T, I think he is lucky to have some fairly random woman his mother's age, wishing him peace and love from afar.

History Lessons

Not knowing any of the facts of history that this Time article uses to draw parallels between ancient Rome and the present day, made for dissatisfying reading. It was unclear what we can expect to happen next given our scenario was played out in the past. To a reader who does not know history, it's not possible to connect the dots correctly, but the final analysis is a bit easier for the lay reader:

Back in Rome, the two remaining heads of the three-headed monster were soon at each other’s throats. Caesar, on the side of the populists, defeated Pompey, leader of the establishment, and ruled briefly as a dictator before his assassination on the Ides of March, 44 BCE. His chosen heir, Octavian, won a final civil war before establishing a system of one-man rule, supported by frail, almost fake, democratic institutions, which survived for centuries.

Maybe we have to look forward to the end of democracy as we currently know it and autocracy. The democratic institutions already look "frail, almost fake". There is no real security for people who are not rich enough to have such certainties for themselves. This trend of people retiring as soon as they are able and not dragging out their working years might turn a different direction 

Baby boomers, the huge generation of people born between 1946 and 1964, continued working later in life than previous generations had, providing an unexpected source of workers. Their importance is hard to overstate: The U.S. labor force grew by 9.9 million people between the end of the Great Recession and the start of the pandemic. Nearly 98 percent of that growth — 9.7 million people — came from workers 55 and older.

The current crop of seniors are feeling more optimistic about their long term prospects - atleast for now. Maybe there is a lesson from the times of Octavian if such optimism is warranted or not. 

Crystal Ball

Over the holidays, one of my friends had her college-going son decide that he needed a break from family. He came home for the holidays, spent most of his time alone or with friends and a few days before the new year simply left home to be with his best friend. He stepped out for a walk to "clear his head" and a few hours later was in a different town. My friend D, dealt with the event as stoically as a parent can under the circumstances. Gave him time and space to gather his thoughts, did not push and prod for information or actions - just let him work it out. 

New Year's eve was hard - nothing had been heard from the kid not even a new year's wish. Silence reigned in the days to follow. D steeled her heart as that is probably the best way for her to deal with this. She tells me that she will not expend any further energy on him - there is nothing left for her to give him. She has depleted every resource she ever had to give this child a head-start in his life. Some people cannot be saved and that needs to be accepted - is what D says as she tries to cope. 

This situation brought to mind my own conflicts with parents albeit at a much older age for presumably reasons that go beyond a moody teen tantrum. Notwithstanding, real pain was caused to those who gave birth to me. There is no suffering quite as potent as that caused by a child's actions directed towards their parent. I am close to D's age and I feel her pain as a mother - it is not so hard to empathize. This could have all happened to me. 

That was simply not the case when I was the cause like her son is to her. I remember the feelings of righteous outrage that made me behave the way I did. I also remembered the years it took to make amends and how the pain boomeranged at me. All of that is in store for this clueless kid who will likely endure much worse than me given how young he is and how much hurt he is causing to the parent who loves him more than anything in the world. Sadly, no one can hold up a crystal ball to this child right now and show him what awaits him. He has to learn it all the hard way. For D's sake I hope that is sooner than later. 

Slaying Dragons

 A very dear friend has been living in crisis more for the sixth year now with no end in sight. A is generally an optimistic person and has no trouble buckling down and working hard. But those qualities have not eased up what some would describe as a long run of bad if not terrible luck. Looking back at the years and the decisions leading up to this long and difficult period for A, I have come to believe the quality of a person's judgement and decision-making might be impacted by a series of losses that they are not able to rationalize. 

That is when the crisis goes from being manageable to acquiring a life and momentum of its own - a force of nature that a human cannot control. Once that happens it is increasingly harder to make coherent decisions because most of your energy is spent in fighting outcomes that you did not directly cause or even know to expect. Observing what A has been going through has been sadly informative about how crisis comes to a person's life and can turn into a hydra-headed monster. This year I wish my friend respite from slaying dragons and a path back to the normalcy long craved for.  

Alone Time

Nice essay on the difference between solitude and loneliness. As someone who craves the former and is terrified of the later, I know something about the line between the two and when it starts to blur. I have found it easy to get the solitude I need in the company of a likeminded person who is pursuing their interests that may or may not intersect with mine. For me the company is physical proximity to this person in a quiet environment. 

I have spent many happy hours and days in this mode. There could be occasional conversations but mostly we are each doing our thing. Just removing that companion in solitude can turn it into a lonely experience and I have been through plenty of that as well. For me the presence of the companion is like air and water required to sustain solitude in a healthy way. Once the sustenance is removed, the inner resources I would use to enjoy the solitude get engaged in fighting loneliness. That makes for an incomparably worse situation. The only way I know to improve that is by staying so busy that it is impossible to experience the quiet alone time. 

While solitude might sometimes be necessary for creativity, loneliness can often be the dark and fertile ground to depression. Samuel Johnson, the literary giant and depressive, found much to fear in the quiet absence of loneliness. His best advice for those of a similarly melancholy disposition was, “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.” 

Big Rock

When a male exec makes a bold, unabashed claim that he values marriage over every other measure of success in life, it gets talked about. Notwithstanding, the co-founder of Netflix making Tuesday date nights with his wife sacrosanct is something everyone could stand to learn from. Work-life disbalance can start way earlier for folks and not every sufferer of the malaise is a co-founder of anything nevermind Netflix. If left unattended, it grows worse over time. The idea is that it is up to the individual to draw the line in the sand, set boundaries that they will not have violated. For this man it was the 5pm cut-off on Tuesdays for date-night - each person can have their one thing that they fight for to keep balance and sanity. It is easy to see the power of one such inviolable thing that the person can hold on to even in the most difficult times. 

It is a huge blessing if that thing can be part of making and keeping a strong marriage - but even if not there is a great value to such carve out, a hard stop and transition to personal time. I had a manager once who often reminded us to be kind to ourselves and our families by taking time for nurture. He often shared how he did what he was advocating for us to do. C was married to his high-school sweetheart for close to thirty years at the time and like the co-founder of Netflix considered the health of that marriage the most important thing in his life. He was only sharing with his team ideas that had served him well personally and professionally. 

Changing Lens

Besides altering the camera market, the smart-phone has effectively killed the joy and pride a person could experience taking a really nice picture. When J was a child, I gave her my entry level SLR camera which was already an old model by then. She learned to take good pictures using that camera. Sometimes on weekends we went to parks and wooded areas around town for her to take pictures. 

We had our favorite streets downtown where she enjoyed taking the scenery. Once she got her first smart-phone, things started to change. There were some very artistic selfies but pictures of the world around her that she had a good eye for, started to become few and far between. J has lived in some interesting places over the last few years but that did not promote any picture taking. 

Her logic was that any place that well touristed has been photographed to death down to the last street intersection and building. There is no new story to tell there, no new way to see what millions of others have seen and documented. She is not interested in adding to this infinite repository. Back in her childhood, there was something novel to see even in the park nearest to our house. The way she looked at the ducks in the pond was unique because a simple Google search would not yield hundreds of images people have taken using their smart-phones. 

I stopped being interested in trying to take memorable and artistic pictures for very similar reasons and find the sparse collection of black and white images from my parents' childhood and youth way for valuable to spend time looking over than the endless stream of images on my phone.

Risky Touch

I can't imagine while the safety of buttons over smart screens in cars called for a study. Every time, I have driven a rental and smart screen was involved, I was in a near-miss accident situation. In a rental the risks are higher because the person is dealing with unfamiliar car, exiting an airport they don't know into a city they know even less. Add to that unfamiliar street signs and it is a miracle the driver does not get into trouble trying to control a smart screen. The findings of the study are so obvious, that it boggles the mind

Traditional buttons, knobs, and switches have a tactility that allow drivers to intuitively find and adjust them while keeping their eyes on the road. A slippery touchscreen does not. Analog controls are also permanently positioned, whereas a touchscreen may require additional navigation to reach a feature.

I am driving the last model of my car that came without touch-screen technology. It is going to be ten years old soon but I can't see myself driving a car that requires me to muti-talk driving with finding things on a big touch-screen. I wish there were more clamor over the challenges faced by people like me so automakers would change the way they  do things

Dreaming Work

Interesting set of perspectives on this story about fading worker ambition. I agree with the idea that the said workers have just become smarter thanks to the easier access and flow of information about what it is to be a worker across the full spectrum of employers. It used to be you had a dream company and you were lucky enough to get an offer. Chances are you took it without much awareness of what you were stepping into. 

Then you worked as long and as hard as it took to bring parity between your dream about what this job and company was about and the reality that you faced. That created for long-term commitment to the cause and a strong desire to move up because that was the only reasonable thing to do if you were doing to tough it out and give it your best shot. Today, none of that holds true. There are any number of sources to get insight into the company, culture and the reality of working the job that you are being offered. 

My experience with recruiters has been that they are happy to set you up for success in negotiation by hinting at the maximum budget for the role. This is driven by the the incentives for that recruiter - if you win they win, even if they did not play entirely fair. With all of that people are coming to understand that no job is a dream come true, they could be worth more than they are making right now and loyalty can't be a one way street. This is even more the epiphanies people had when they first got a chance to work fully remote. 

Marriages and relationships were mended, parents bonded with their teenaged kids, some decided to have babies at a time when both parents could be home and helping raise them. All of those gains helped put the value of ambition at work in perspective. Would a person who had just achieved the degree of closeness and communication with her college-bound son that she had always longed for, trade that for yet another promotion? Maybe she would wait until he left to college and it did not matter if that promotion was no longer on the table by then. She would still be better off forming that connection with her kid - that is a lifetime value. 

Last Try

Just about every New Year's eve, I find myself thinking about people who had impact on my life at some point and if I have been in touch with them enough. Some of them are now deceased and the answer is I did what I could but it fell short. Teachers come to mind most often - people who touched the lives of thousands like me over their career, making contributions that were transformative or incremental. Either way, without that impetus, the person would not be who they are today. This year, I reached out to a perfect stranger whose email was listed on a web-site that maintained a database of seniors in Ms. P's community. 

Finding this organization was extremely random and driven by the whims of Google SEO and the set of search terms I chose. Ms. P has had disproportionate influence on my life and there is not a year that goes by when I don't think of her and feel grateful for everything she did for me. She was never on social media and the last time I was in touch with her, she had no email or cell-phone. I had heard from a common acquaintance that she was unwell for a period of time and nothing more was heard since that time. She would be in her mid 80's if she is still alive. It would be a dream come true if I can communicate with her even if just once more. 

Stupidly Stubborn

The past year, I have run into more than my fair share of stubborn people - in personal and professional life. Part of me thinks it might have to do with growing older and not caring quite as much as I once did about my own opinions and beliefs as I once did. Making mistakes over the years can be a humbling experience - atleast has been for me. I have found a little flexibility goes a long away - a couple of decades nothing would convince me to waver from what I held to be true. Reading this article about stubbornness written a b-school professor amused me because he is so right

Stubborn people may seem invincible, but there is a huge difference between a strong person and a stubborn person. Although stubborn people project strength and power, it is only a façade. Stubbornness is often a sign of insecurity and a way to hold on to a very fragile mental equilibrium. Truly strong people know how to compromise when necessary.

Stubborn people are often fearful of change, which explains the rigidity that characterises much of their behaviour. At an unconscious level, they perceive attempts to change their mind as personal attacks. Thus, they are always on their guard, lashing out at anyone who tries to question their ideas. Instead of accepting new information or entertain the possibility that someone else could be right, they prefer to argue their original point of view. Their insecurities make them ideal candidates for confirmation bias, i.e. the tendency to process information in ways that prop up one’s belief system.

A lot of what he describes here is true of my younger self. It seems that I have been able to overcome some of that stupidity over the years. The stubborn around me are still on their journey and given enough time and setbacks may come to see things differently - just as I did.

Left Blue

 I have shopped at the local Asian grocery store sporadically for two decades now. On my recent trip which came about for the first time since the pandemic started, I noticed a lot of change and not in the ways I might have imagined. The owner is a woman maybe in her early 60s. The whole family works in the store. She is still a fixture running one of the registers as she always did. 

The surrounding cast of characters is completely different. There used to be a couple of kids a bit older than J that came around to work at the store after school. Looks like they have moved on to other things now they are in their mid-20s. The owner always had perfect hair, pretty jewelry and fashionable clothes. She rarely talked to any of her customers and I can't recall ever seeing her smile. But if you struck up a conversation with her, she would be pleasant enough. 

It is no surprise that everything is a lot more expensive than it used to be. The fish stand was not well-stocked and what little they had did not look appetizing. The mix of customers at the store felt quite different from what I had been used to seeing on my trips here. A lot of folks shuffling around the aisles cluelessly much like me. A certain sadness permeated the air even as everyone carried on as before. The social distancing signage remains but no one cares to follow them anymore. But it serves as a reminder to the last couple of years we've been through. Maybe that blue feeling has lingered on in this store more than the others - the owner is a pale shadow of her former self. Her hair is a short, choppy bob - not quite the perfect coif she used to have, she wears dark sweatpants and an oversize sweater, the jewelry is largely gone.

Feedback Loop

Over the years, I  have had an on and off relationship with this blog as far as using it as a medium to connect to the world. In the alone years, it was a one of the ways to feel I existed in the world through the online conversations that started here and sometimes resulted in ongoing friendships. In the less alone or busy years, I felt the need to write whatever came to mind without desiring any communication at all. It was a keeping up the schedule and the practice so as to not lose this habit that took a while to gel. No different that keeping up the exercise and reading habits. If anything served well over time, it is worth keeping. Reading this Wired story helps me understand what drove me to taper off the social and communication elements online

Without the ability to find out how their identity is ricocheting around the virtual world, people often feel a fight-or-flight response when they’ve been online for many hours—and even after they’ve logged off.

It takes a lot of time online to grow and maintain that level of feedback loop and it comes at a certain cost. When a person is largely alone and needs to feel seen and counted, the investment may offer value. When that is not the case, it calls for carving out from the scarce resource of alone time to feed this habit. Comes a time when the value ceases to exist - that was my experience at least. 

Telling Tales

Telling the story is the most important sometimes than the event that requires it. An exec I have known for a while resigned from his job abruptly right around Thanksgiving last year. All signs pointed to him being a lifer at the company - his growth had been steady and predictable over the years. And then one day he was gone. Those who were close to him were not surprised, the rest did not care. R had to tell his story and make the event count - and so he did. It was steeped in the usual cliches about taking time for self-discovery and spending time with family - a bit late being an empty nester with married kids some might say. But that was his story anyway. 

He posted pictures of said family enjoying the holidays together to lend credence to the story. He had a call to action at the end of it - I am open to work so please introduce me to people. Those of us who have known R for a while have seen him make some spectacularly bad decisions though he is generally pretty competent. It was one of those traits he had. It made me wonder if that had not been his undoing in the end. I am not sure R had read the general guidelines of how not to tell such stories because it sounded a lot like the gaffes he made during his tenure at the company. 

Tired Brain

I enjoy that state when my brain gets tired from thinking hard when there is a way for me to take a break and do something that involves no thinking at all. It is almost as satisfying as binging on food that is delicious and bad for me. That is obviously not an option for people whose jobs require that their brains continue to think hard past that point of fatigue and the costs of making poor decision could mean the difference between life and death for someone else

The researchers found that participants who laboured on the more difficult task had accumulated more glutamate in this region of the brain by the end of the day than had those who worked on the easier task. And, given a choice between an immediate cash reward and a larger reward that would come months later, they were more likely to choose the smaller, short-term reward than they were at the start of the day.

It seems like humans should work upto the point when the break feels like an awesome reward and be given enough time to enjoy that treat so they are re-invigorated for the thinking again.

Feeling Prosperity

Over the holidays, we got together with extended family after a while. A few of the adult kids in the group (including J) had recently joined the workforce. No one is making big bucks yet and everyone is experiencing the struggles of starting out alone. 

But the way each of these kids perceives their financial status and therefore what they imagine in or out of their reach is vastly different. Some feel richer than they actually are and conversely other feel poorer than the really are. And that perception leads to actions and therefore outcomes. There is a fine balance of feeling just solvent enough but fretting about money, being realistic about their earning and spending abilities without being reckless. It seems like a hard problem to solve. 

Everyone carries baggage from their parents' relationship with money - things that they observed and decide to emulate or reject. Building on that foundation leads to less than optimal outcomes. Talking to these young people took me back to the time I was in their stage of life and how the habits formed then set the tone for the rest of my life. As a parent I found myself itching to course correct J so she would break free from the cycle that was created over two generations by a new immigrant mother born to refugee parents.

Behind Times

Loved reading this interview with the the only guy who is still in the floppy-drive business. He speaks for many in niche and supposedly dying businesses when he says: 

..I’m not exactly a person with great vision. I just follow what our customers want us to do. When people ask me: “Why are you into floppy disks today?” the answer is: “Because I forgot to get out of the business.” Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I’d already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I’d just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn’t try to expand.

This interview reminded me of a water-cooler conversation I had been part of in my second job out of college. Being as green as I was then, I listened to the my older and wiser colleagues as if their word were the gospel. Specially, the ones who delivered only occasional wisdom and with great conviction. That morning the conversation was around how a developer stays sharp for all time to come so that they be employed as a developer. The consensus opinion was you move on the management and leadership roles over time and allow young people to be be developers. 

There was one contrarian opinion to this. P was a soft-spoken lead developer, well-liked and respected by his team. He said he was confident he could retire being a Powerbuilder developer and make steady and decent money the whole time. That was his lane and he was intent on sticking with it. You could hear a pin drop after those words were said. Had anyone less respectable than outstanding than P would have been greeted with howls of ridicule, we just dispersed mildly confused by what he had said. P would be in mid 60s now and if he is still inclined to find work he would be right - there are jobs of that skill even today. 

Compressing Time

Watching how rapidly ChatGPT summarized an hour long video into text that can be read in minutes made me take a long pause. Imagine needing to review content of 100s of videos for a research project and finding the little nuggets of useful information from it. 

Would be a breeze with this technology. Setup the search to find the videos in question, summarize it as done here and scan the results automatically based on your logic for what is meaningful. Suddenly, the researcher's work that would have taken weeks and months can be accomplished in a hour if that. That could result in truly amazing outcomes. Workflow automation using this kind of technology is definitely the way forward. 

I have a read a new academic rants against ChatGPT and how its ruined homework. But it has also been called good things 

"It's this multiplier of ability, that I think we are not quite getting our heads around, that is absolutely stunning,"

I am thinking of the student who has responsibilities of her younger siblings, fewer access to resources and particularly lacks team because she has to work after school to help save for college. That kid can now get a huge head-start with this technology and that levels the field and makes her way more competitive. I can see a gig-worker being able to cram more into his week with such assist and significantly increase his income. This is the kind of tide that will lift all boats but those that maximize the value will benefit disproportionately. 

Public Domain

There are different things to look forward to in any new year. Watching for music, cinema and books that enter the public domain on Jan 1 2023 is one of them. A long time fan and user of Project Gutenberg and Open Culture, I loved seeing this list. This the zenith of the creative life-cycle. When first a work of art is made, it only belongs to the creator - maybe just a in their imagination. A full battery of midwives bring it to life and into the world - the agent, the producer, the director and so on. Then the work goes on its journey not unlike a human. 

Some attain early fame and fade to mediocrity and the oblivion. Others make steady progress gaining momentum as they go. Some toil in anonymity their whole life to be recognized in their twilight years. At no point does the human or the piece of art belong unequivocally to the whole world. Death and entry into public domain is needed to transition to that phase. This is a crowded space too - each other there are new entrants seeking that moment of acknowledgement and maybe a second chance. Some will win just like some of our loved ones who are recalled fondly decades after their passing.

Like Fish

I took advantage of a no meeting afternoon recently to go to the pool. It was pretty empty at that odd middle of the workday hour. A few elderly people - maybe retirees, a couple of young mothers teaching their preschoolers to swim, a child being instructed one on one by a swim coach and then me. After a while, I found myself thinking how all of  us in the water were not so different from fish in an aquarium. 

The difference is that the fish naturally inhabit water and their world is forcibly constrained into a tank. For us humans its a way to get some exercise in an environment we had to be taught to work with. But the back and forth is much like the fish - there is no end game other than doing the laps and keeping at it for a period of time. Just that, we have the agency to get out of the water on to dry land and on with our lives. Fish stay there pacing the water for as long as they live. 

But whether fish actually feel bored in a way we can relate to is harder to work out. Fish-keepers sometimes see their pets ‘glass surfing’ – swimming repeatedly up and down the glass of the tank. This could be the aquatic equivalent of the pacing of a captive tiger that’s bored from a lack of stimulation. But the fish could also be stressed from an overcrowded or unfamiliar tank.

It would be great if this fleeting moment of empathy for fish could result in more lasting  outcomes. In the least it made me want to understand what it might be like to be a fish stuck in a tank entertaining humans. 

In that study, scientists observed a striped species of fish known as the cleaner wrasse. They placed a colored mark on the fish’s throat, which it would only be able to see in its reflection. They noticed that the fish used the mirror to check out the mark and then tried to remove the mark by scraping its body. It appeared to recognize itself, thus passing the test for self-awareness.