“No, you don’t want to have to compare yourself to that”
Keep more of the value you create, or stop striving if the gap can't be closed. Maybe you can use The AI to bridge that gap.
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2023 Resolution
In 2023 I’d like to upgrade my game to: “you’re sure as cuss not gettin’ any worse.”
Everything is a tool, one that keeps you employed at current compensation levels, hopefully
GPT and my own career trajectory
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Tyler continues his embrace for The AI. it opens up new ways of working for writers (and “creators”) across the creation lifecycle: inspiration, structuring, writing, and re-harvesting additional content (talks, articles, etc.). This positioning is something like embracing the automation and productivity that The AI brings and using the freed up time and resources to do something “more valuable.” The hard part is finding what they “more valuable” is and making sure it doesn’t lower your revenue and overall power. I mean, I don’t think automation or globalism helped factory workers that much.
Still, I agree with him if only for my own survival. That position is overly dramatic - most of us will “be fine,” as people like to say. Like so many of my peers, I like technology for itself, and I like tools for figuring out new and interesting things to do and ways to do them.
The selfish question here is “how can I use The AI to make my work better, to make me more valuable.” The troubling question is “what types of work will The AI make obsolete or totally valueless/cheap.”
For example, it looks like voice over work for audio books is under attack. Rather, the humans who do now are under attack. I suspect writing copy for websites and glossy PDFs are under attack (again, what I actually mean are the people who do that work). A lot of journalism too.
As a nerd, I get excited about what technology can do, but as a human, I’m often tired of trying to find “more value.” I’m a big believer in reaping the value of work already done, stopping the capitalist quest to constantly grow and improve.
Related: The web will be full of (good enough) text from the AIs. To maintain your human edge, be more weird (or “unique”) and talk with other people IRL more.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year helping out with our annual conference, SpringOne. It’s January 24th to 26th. If you’re a developer, doing operations, DevOps tooling and platform engineering stuff, or an executive in charge of getting better at software, you’ll get a lot of useful info.
My Content
ENGAGE WITH MY BRAND.
Five Strategies to Control Cloud Costs - I go over exactly what the title says giving a nudge on how to start putting together a strategy. The most helpful insight from the Thought Leaders last year was that your application architectures drive a lot (most of?) your cloud costs. Developers may not have really (had to) think too much about what their decisions cost.
Should I Start a Podcast?, Software Defined Talk #395 - great episode from two incredibly experienced podcasters on doing podcasts. If you have any notion of starting a podcast, you’ll get everything you need to start here. There’s a lot, but as the title says, the answer is that you should do one. I’m not on this one.
Wastebook
“Sloppy dead.”- “He’s completely lost his mind.”
“I know a better hiding place. Come.”
“liminal incivility” here.
This 1899 TV show is a sort of triumph of what we used to call “foreign movies.” There’s a lot of languages way beyond English, and you need to subtitles. Spanish, French, German, English, Danish (but then the subtitles label shifts to Norwegian), Cantonese, Japanese.
“nesting and vesting” here.
“I’m just not in the know, so I wouldn’t know.” Overheard somewhere in Austin.
American wine is so syrup-y.
“It irked him to think that art - he did believe in art - could turn into just another thing to make people feel stupid.” -Mouth to Mouth, Antoine Wilson
And: “There are two kinds of idiot in this world, Jeff. Those who hope for the best, and those who prepare for the worst. I am neither.”
Improvement is a young person’s game.
Americans are bonkers for any beer that’s not a lager. They love IPAs. I don’t really want to drink a log, I prefer a lager.
“We tend to survive whether we want to or not.” Merlin.
Act your take, not the value you create for others
Your Coworkers Are Less Ambitious; Bosses Adjust to the New Order, Apple News link.
A long piece on “acting your wage,” full of interviews and surveys.
In a November survey of more than 3,000 workers and managers by software firm Qualtrics, 36% said their overall career ambitions had waned over the past three years, compared with 22% who said their ambition had increased. Nearly 40% said work had become less important to them in the past three years, while 25% said it had grown more important, according to researchers at Qualtrics, which provides software to businesses to evaluate customer and employee experiences.
My take, “ambition for what?”:
It seems like half of the people are still interested in being “go-getters.”
I mean, if you’re not getting paid for work, you’re getting ripped off.
With the huge wealth inequality gap (and gender/class/etc. gaps), management has obviously been taking money from all these “go-getters” who’ve been working for free and handing their cash (or “value” in the form of share price) over to the wealthy…so…yeah?
Relevant to your interests
omg.lol - A lovable web page and email address, just for you - This is giving me strong #defaultslifestyle vibes. (The DNS stuff still looks like shit though. I still want a format that says “when someone types in this URL, make it go here,” and not whatever the fuck A names, cnames, and that shit is. The RFC wizards need to fix the internet.)
As ever, if you can just lose so much “money” so quickly, I don’t think that money actually existed in the first place.
What explains recent tech layoffs, and why should we be worried? - He’s not a fan: “Layoffs often do not cut costs, as there are many instances of laid-off employees being hired back as contractors, with companies paying the contracting firm. Layoffs often do not increase stock prices, in part because layoffs can signal that a company is having difficulty. Layoffs do not increase productivity. Layoffs do not solve what is often the underlying problem, which is often an ineffective strategy, a loss of market share, or too little revenue. Layoffs are basically a bad decision.”
Dell reportedly planning Chinese chip purge by 2024 - “The PC and tech infrastructure maker has told suppliers to significantly reduce the volume of components sourced from China in its products”
The Startup M&A Market Fell 94% Year over Year - But One Segment is Thriving - “A $22m median M&A price implies most of these transactions were acquihires - acquisitions that value a company for its team.”
Things I learned while looking up other things, 2022.12.11 - Words!
We Asked 850 Cut Readers What’s Tasteful and What’s Tacky - Who knows if these are all still accurate, but they’re fun reading nonetheless.
Be Wary of Imitating High-Status People Who Can Afford to Countersignal - If you’re new, you need to boast and self-promote to get attention. After that, you can be all humble and wear dirty shirts to your TED talk. Also: new, fun word. “Countersignaling a poor strategy for new writers (or podcasters, or musicians, or others in creative domains). People just starting out should look at those who are a little ahead of where they want to be. They’ll usually find that novice writers who are accruing some success regularly post their stuff online and ask others to share it.”
Neubrutalism is taking over the web | Hype4Academy - “I believe those designs are straining our brains a bit more”
Meet the Designer of the Fanciful Subway Entrances to the Paris Métro - Looks good, as always.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke Tells Employees To Just Say No to Meetings - “It’s much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time. As people add things, the set of things that can be done becomes smaller. Then, you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo.” // hopefully, we’ll hear how this went in a year.
Enterprise tech’s great reset - “Cloud-based enterprise tech thrived over the last decade because outside Silicon Valley, buying tech was so, so much easier than building it. It could take years to play out, but if enterprises are now able to hire the tech talent they need to reduce their reliance on cloud infrastructure and SaaS vendors, it might be time to reset expectations for this market.”
Changing moods on IT investment - a gift to ERP leaders, or coal in the stocking? - People are still not sure if IT spending will shrink.
Weekend Reading — Garlic expressions - Has a good round-up or positive uses for ChatGPT, plus some funny pictures. This weekly newsletter is always fun, and I don’t even read the programming stuff.
Keeping your day job - Considerations for keeping your day job: steady income, being with people, and a source of content.
You Can Use Both Features and Benefits in Your Developer Marketing - Even though they may not ask for examples, you should put lots of examples in your developer marketing stuff.
What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround? - First: you should like the product you sell. Second: let the people closest to the customer make more strategic decisions, they have the most input and the most feedback loops to validate new ideas.
Most organizations have to slow down their software releases - or stall out entirely! - because of the shackles of success: that older software that runs their business but that's gotten a bit...mature. Marc Zottner and I recently wrote up the methodology many large enterprises have used to escape the legacy trap, showing results in weeks instead of years. You can read our free ebook here.
