Work

With a toot¹ on Mastodon in which he appreciated this post, dear Nicola made me think about how little I put into promoting my professional blog on these shores.

I’ve been working a lot with AI lately. Wait, don’t run away. I know it’s a boring and unpleasant topic, about which everything and its opposite has been said, but it’s a topic that can’t be ignored. And anyway, I’m only telling you a side story. So, listen, go ahead.

One of the guys I met at my new job, when I pointed out that the software he’d developed lacked a shred of documentation and was impossible for new developers to manage, complained that requests always came to him as urgent, and so he quickly produced code—patching things up, not documenting or commenting, and neglecting privacy and security aspects—for the good of the company. Damn, for the good of the company!

If you apply a certain force to someone, expect a force of at least equal magnitude to be exerted on you. To paraphrase Newton’s third law, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Bringing the whole thing back to a less philosophical and low-level level, I could say that it’s absolutely foolish not to imagine that an action will always have consequences of equal or greater intensity.

Have you ever had to fire someone? I mean, have you ever been forced to tell a colleague that from that day he or she will be able to stay home because it is no longer sustainable? And have you ever put yourself in that colleague’s shoes, slipped into his or her life? Have you ever identified yourself with a bedridden mother, or without a partner and a child to take care of, or with a wife without a job and multiple children to support, or with a mortgage just signed, or with a newborn child, or a wish just wished for?

For so many days I have written nothing. Nothing on the blog, nothing in my journal, nothing but emails and reports and analysis and bullshit to keep alive a professional social media account that I am already thinking of closing. Nothing.

There are daily occasions that suggest parallels to my work and team management. Simple things like, for example, choosing which gadget to give to your son or daughter: is a walkie-talkie or a watch better?

I’ve done something in the last few days that I’m not very proud of. But it was something I had to do, that several people suggested I do, that I didn’t even need that they suggested I do, but so I did. I activated an account on Instagram.