AI Is Just A Majordomo

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The IT world is on fire right now with solutions to every major problem we’ve ever had. Wouldn’t you know it that the solution appears to be something that people are very intent on selling to you? Where have I heard that before? You wouldn’t know it looking at the landscape of IT right now but AI has iterated more times than you can think over the last couple of years. While people are still carrying on about LLMs and writing homework essays the market has moved on to agentic solutions that act like employees doing things all over the place.

The result is people are more excited about the potential for AI than ever. Well, that is if you’re someone that has problems that need to be solved. If you’re someone doing something creative, like making art or music or poetry you’re worried about what AI is going to do to your profession. That divide is what I’ve been thinking about for a while. I don’t think it should come as a shock to anyone but I’ve figured out why AI is hot for every executive out there.

AI appeals to people that have someone doing work for them.

The Creative Process

I like writing. I enjoy coming up with fun synonyms and turns of phrase and understanding a topic while I create something around it. Sure, the process of typing the words out gets tedious. Finding the time to do it even more so, especially this year. I wouldn’t trade writing for anything because it helps me express thoughts in a way that I couldn’t before.

I know that I love writing because whenever I try to teach an AI agent to write like me I find the process painful. The instruction list is three pages long. You feed the algorithm a bunch of your posts and tell it to come up with an outline of how you write. What comes out the other side sounds approximately like you but misses a lot of the points. I think my favorite one was when I had an AI analyze one of my posts and it said I did a good job but needed to leave off my Tom’s Take at the end. When I went back to create an outline for training an AI to write like me the outline included leaving a summary at the end. Who knew?

People love the creative process. Whether it’s painting or woodworking or making music creative people want to feel like they’ve accomplished something. They want to see the process unfold. The magic happens on the journey from beginning to end. Feel free to insert your favorite cliche about the journey here. A thing worth doing is worth taking your time to do it.

Domo Arigato, Majordomo

You know who doesn’t love that process? Results-oriented people. You know the ones. The people that care more about the report being on time than the content. The people that need an executive summary at the beginning because they can’t be bothered to read the whole thing. The kind of people that flew the Concorde back in the day because they needed to be in New York with a minimum of delay. You’re probably already picturing these people in your head with suits and wide tie knots and a need to ensure the board sees things their way.

Executives, managers, and the like love AI. Because it replicates their workflow perfectly. They don’t create. They have others create. They don’t want to type or write or draw. They want to see the results and leverage them for other things. The report is there if you want to read it but they just need the summary so they can figure out what to do with it. Does it matter whether they’re asking a knowledge worker or an AI agent to create something?

The other characteristic of those people, especially as you go up the organizational chart, is their inability to discern bad information. They work from the assumption that everything presented in the report is accurate. The people that were doing it for them before were almost always accurate. Why wouldn’t the fancy new software be just as accurate? Of course, if the knowledge worker gave bad data to the executive they could be fired or disciplined for it. If the AI lies to the CEO what are they going to do? Put it in time out? The LLM or agent doesn’t even know what time out is.

People that have other people do things for them love AI. They want the rest of us to embrace it too because then we all have things doing work for us and that means they can realign their companies for maximum profit and productivity. The reliance on these systems creates opportunities for problems. I used the term majordomo in the title for a good reason. The kinds of people that have a majordomo (or butler) are exactly the kinds of people that salivate about AI. It’s always available, never wants to be complimented or paid, and probably gives the right information most of the time. Even if it doesn’t, who is going to know? Just ask another AI if it’s true.

Tom’s Take

The dependence on these systems means that we’re forgetting how to be creative. We don’t know how to build because something is building for us. Who is going to come up with the next novel file open command in Python or creative metaphor if we just rely on LLMs to do it for us now? We need to break away from the idea that someone needs to do things for us and embrace the idea of doing them. We learn the process better. We have better knowledge. And the more of them we do the more we realize what actually needs to be done. The background noise of AI agents doing meaningless tasks doesn’t make them go away. They just get taken care of by the artificial majordomos.

Don’t Let AI Make You Circuit City

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I have a little confession. Sometimes I like to go into Best Buy and just listen. I pretend to be shopping or modem bearings or a left handed torque wrench. What I’m really doing is hearing how people sell computers. I remember when 8x CD burners were all the rage. I recall picking one particular machine because it had an integrated Sound Blaster card. Today, I just marvel at how the associates rattle off a long string of impressive sounding nonsense that consumers will either buy hook, line, and sinker or refute based on some Youtube reviewer recommendation. Every once in a while, though, I hear someone that actually does understand the lingo and it is wonderful. They listen and understand the challenges and don’t sell a $3,000 gaming computer to a grandmother just to play Candy Crush and look up grandkid photos on Facebook.

The Experience Matters

What does that story have to do with the title of this post? Well, dear young readers, you may not remember the time when Best Buy Blue was locked in mortal competition with Circuit City Red. In a time before Amazon was ascendant you had to pick between the two giants of big box tech retail. You may remember that Circuit City went out of business in 2009 thanks to the economic conditions of the time, but the real downfall of the company happened years earlier.

One of the things that set Circuit City apart from everyone else was their sales staff. They earn commissions based on helping customers. That meant they had to know their stuff to keep making money. And the very best of them could make a LOT of money. It also contributed a lot to the performance of the stores. The very best of the best were making a dent in the profit margins of the stores. What should management do about that?

If you guessed something sane and positive, you’d be wrong. In 2003, they eliminated their commissioned sales staff and fired nearly 4,000 of the best. You can just imagine what happened next. Sales plummeted. The associates left behind weren’t the top performers. They struggled to hit the revenue targets. Management panicked. They tried to rehire the furloughed overachievers at entry-level hourly rates. There was raucous laughter and lots of middle fingers. And five years later Circuit City collapsed into fodder for Youtube historians to analyze.

What doomed Circuit City was not an economy bubble popping. It wasn’t Amazon or the rise of independent influencers. It wasn’t cheap parts or dupes of the best camcorders and tape recorders. It was the hubris to think that the people that had spent their careers learning the ins-and-outs of technology were replaceable but less skill and less cost to the business. Inexperience may sound impressive to those that don’t understand but the knowledgable customer knows the difference. The Circuit City execs learned that lesson the hard way. But our old friend George Santayana has a new generation to teach.

Repeating The Past

How could you possibly decide to fire your best performers and replace them with something cheap that spouts out approximate answers that look correct but are ultimately useless when applied in reality? What kind of CEO would think about that just to shave some numbers off the bottom line in the name of Shareholder Value?

Oh. Yeah.

AI.

LLMs are making advances by leaps and bounds compared to just eighteen months ago. But they are not a replacement for people that understand the actual technology. LLMs don’t learn the way that people learn. They are trained and refined to find better solutions to problems but they don’t “learn”. They just get slightly better over time about not putting adverbs in every sentence they write. People make math mistakes that blow up switches and routers. LLMs eventually learn that the word “double” doesn’t always mean double.

To an executive, LLMs sound impressive. They’re filled with impressive words that mean a lot of nothing. To knowledge workers, LLMs create approximations of words that have no meaning. Nowhere is this more apparent in the fact that we’ve created entire acronyms of things like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to reduce the likelihood that an LLM will just make something up because it sounds good. If you need someone other than just make something up because it’s what an executive wants to hear I’m way cheaper than any GPU cluster that NVIDIA is shipping today, including power consumption costs.

Shaving Dollars and Sense

Circuit City thought that customers wouldn’t know the difference between Bob the Sales Juggernaut’s expansive knowledge of DVD players and Billy the New Guy’s attempts to sound as impressive as Bob. The kinds of people that will pay top dollar for a plasma TV know the difference. The kinds of people that rely on Bob to tell them what to buy because they’re too busy to shop don’t. Circuit City thought they could save on the bottom line by removing experience and they removed the entire bottom line, along with everything above it too.

The rumblings are already there in the market. Entry level tasks will be handled by AI so we can focus on higher-order thinking. The real value is going to be in the way that experts solve problems. At least until we figure out the next thing after LLMs which can try to approximate the thinking of those experts. Then we start the cycle all over again. And those experts? Do you know where they got the knowledge? But doing the meaningless entry-level tasks until they mastered them. They learned as they worked. They tweaked their own algorithms without the need for fifty new GPUs.

Tom’s Take

Thinking you can replace experience with cheap substitutes leads to disaster every single time. “Good enough” isn’t good enough when people know enough about the subject to understand they’re hearing garbage. In fact, I’d argue that AI might be good enough to do the one thing that Circuit City didn’t figure out for years. If your executive team is so great at making poor decisions that they could be replaced by a soulless software program, maybe they should be replaced instead. You might still go out of business eventually but the reduced salaries at the top might keep the lights on a little longer. Who knows? Maybe AI could learn a thing or two that way.

Is Cisco Live Still The Place To Be

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You may recall from my post about Cisco Live last year that I talked about legacy and passing the torch to a new generation of people being active at the event. It was a moment where I was happy for what was occurring and thrilled to see the continuation of the community. It’s now a year later and I have a very different outlook on Cisco Live that isn’t nearly as rosy. Which is why I asked the question in the post title.

Destination Unknown

If you are a Cisco customer or partner that wants the latest news about Cisco products and services then Cisco Live is the place you need to be to get them. Sure, you can watch the keynotes virtually and read all the press releases online. However, if you really want to get up close and personal with the technology you have to be there. After all, it was this need to be in-person that inspired our community in the first place. We showed up. We met up. And we made the event even better because we were there.

That was then. 2025 is a different story. The first hints about the situation came when I was walking around on Sunday trying to find the Social Media hub. After all, that’s where the opening meetup usually happens. I went to the area where it was in 2019 only to be greeted by the Social Lounge:

Not very…hubby…is it? As my friend Jordan Martin pointed it, it’s hard to be social with each other when all of the furniture is arranged facing outwards. I found out later that opening meetup was being held in the Cisco NetVet Lounge and not the hub. That’s because the Social Media Hub no longer existed. I should have known that was likely to happen when my friend Kathleen Mudge was let go from her position last year. She had done more than anyone to bring together the social aspects of Cisco Live. She fought for the space and the things that went along with it. The Social Media Hub was present at Cisco Live Europe in February but gone in the US.

The result? A muted meetup. People arrived at 5:00. They waited around for half an hour to take the opening meetup picture. And most of them were gone by 5:45. The schedule said the meetup was supposed to last until 6:30. A few of us looked around and realized that not only was the meetup short this year but that we wouldn’t be able to get back into the NetVet Lounge again because of our Explorer passes and lack of standing. Oh well, time to do something different.

The Monday Banter and Beers party with the Cisco Champions and Tech Field Day delegates was much more what I would have expected an opening meetup to be. Lots of friends chatting and enjoying themselves. Meeting new people. We even closed down the party and kept going. I was able to talk to the people that ran the Cisco Insiders program and told them my feelings on that meetup versus this one. I knew that something felt off but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

The End of the Road?

Fast forward to Thursday afternoon. We had a tradition by now. We go to the closing celebrity keynote. We laugh at the jokes. Then we retire to the social media hub for the closing tweetup until it’s time to take the big sign picture. Then we stay in the hub until they start carrying off the furniture. It’s simple but it works.

This year? No closing keynote. No hub. No sign picture either. We camped out on some couches by the top of the escalators until we got bored and left. No camaraderie as in years past. Aside from the few of us there it really felt like we’d missed closing time somehow. In fact, this was the best picture of the sign I saw. Completely empty.

Part of me is disappointed. I understand that social media has changed for the worse in the past couple of years. It feels like the community that we built on Twitter died when the platform changed radically from what it was into whatever it is now. I’m almost never on it. I spend more of my time on BlueSky now. But the wholesale retreat from all things social felt jarring this year. In twelve months we went from optimistic about the future of the social community to being shocked at the virtual disappearance of it for anyone not directly tied into the success over the years. Honestly, if it wasn’t for us keeping things alive this year I doubt anyone would have realized it at all.

Some of my best friends have come from the social media community at Cisco Live. We talk daily. We reminisce about The Great Beanbag Heist and the Red Bull Incident. We try to figure out how many times Weezer has played and which stadium sounded the best. We groan about going back to Las Vegas for the next few years because we have to balance the ease of logistics with the neon and the heat. But we do it together. We hang out together. We plan together. Those who make it have the fun for those that can’t and the ones that aren’t there swear they’ll be there again next year. We will endure.

What worries me the most is the subtle shift in what this represents. Our social community helped grow into the Insider programs Cisco has today. Our group helped convince people to support Cisco and adopt their solutions. Cisco worked with us to get more people engaged. And now? It feels like we were an afterthought in 2025. Worse still, the focus has shifted. Customers aren’t necessarily driving product direction. Who is Cisco listening to? The people with the money? Or the people wanting to make the money? I can’t honestly answer right now. I’m sure an LLM could help me figure it out but that’s an entirely different story.

Tom’s Take

Cisco Live felt different this year for all the wrong reasons. Things have shifted. It’s not that social isn’t a component of things. It’s that social was practically absent and no one noticed. Many of us are going to continue to do the things we do because we’ve been doing them too long now not to. Maybe that means commandeering couches and holding our own parties. It could mean our group is going to be less visible. But what matters is that we are going to continue to enjoy the event the way we do. Imploding platforms don’t matter. Designated spaces don’t matter. People matter. They always will. And the people are greater than everything.

Do You Need To Answer That Question?

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

We’ve all been in a situation where we’re listening to a presentation or in a class where someone is sharing knowledge. The presenter or expert finishes a point and stops to take a breath or move on to the next point when you hear a voice.

“What they meant to say was…”

You can already picture the person doing it. I don’t need to describe the kind of person that does this. We all know who it is and, if you’re like me, it drives you crazy. I know it because I’ve found myself being that person several times and it’s something I’m working hard to fix.

Info to Share

People that want to chime in feel like they have important things to share. Maybe they know something deeper about the subject. Perhaps they’ve worked on a technology and have additional information to add to the discussion. They mean well. They’re eager to add to the discussion. They mean well. Most of the time.

What about the other times? Maybe it’s someone that thinks they’re smarter than the presenter. I know I’ve had to deal with that plenty of times. It could be an executive that needs to clarify the message or add in the important talking points that marketing has decided on so that everything sounds right.

In the latter cases, the reason why someone needs to jump in and answer the question is less egalitarian. They’re not trying to raise the body of knowledge or educate the people in the room for a noble reason. They’re looking to be the center of attention. They want to take all the agency of the presenter and show how smart they are or make sure everyone knows how important they are.

I’ve been at the point where I’ve almost asked out loud, “If you’re paying this person to talk why do you feel the need to talk over them?” For a CEO of a company that should be the end of the discussion. For the smart person in the audience they’ll probably have a more pointed response. The result is hopefully the same. Why are you the one talking when everyone came to hear the person you interrupted?

Ask Your Own Questions

I’ve struggled with this myself many times. I’ve wanted to add to the conversation. I’ve felt like if I could just clarify this point things would be way more clear. While I may feel like my info is the most important to impart what I’m trading away by doing that is robbing the person presenting of all their agency.

It really hit me last year when I was a Wood Badge course director. I was intimately familiar with the curriculum and knew every lesson we were trying to impart to the participants. We had also chosen our staff members to present on specific lessons. Each of them had time to prep and understand the material and knew what they were supposed to accomplish. Someone without awareness might have thought they knew the material better than anyone.

I found myself wanting to add to the conversation after every presentation but I also knew it was my place to watch and make notes, not jump in. How would it look to the participants if I kept interrupting the presenter to add my points? They would have stopped listening to the real presenter and just waited for me to speak. That’s not the preferred outcome for someone to present material.

The other thing you have to ask yourself in that situation is “what does this do to the presenter”? How would you feel if someone kept interrupting you if you tried to make a point or teach a lesson? I’m all for deferring to people with more knowledge or experience but if someone is constantly interrupting me for pointless reasons or to restate something I’ve said I would be furious. I’d never want that person to be in the same room as me when I’m trying to present. Minimizing your presenters is a great way to ensure they never want to work for you again.

To me, the best way to support your presenter and the lesson they are teaching is to stay quiet. If you feel like you need to add something wait until the very end so they don’t feel like you’re stepping on them. Even if they say something incorrect and you feel the need to call it out, do it quietly with the presenter instead of making a scene. If the presenter corrects themselves it looks way better than having someone else do it. And above all, remember that everyone’s skills and viewpoints are valid and you aren’t an authority. You’re a voice in the conversation.

Tom’s Take

I really love sharing info and answering questions. I like teaching. But I have learned over the years that there is a time and place for things. And if I’m not the one that is designated to be teaching or talking I really need to keep things to myself. Stealing someone’s agency makes me look bad and makes the presenter look weak. I would rather help where I can and build up a future rock star presenter than steal their thunder and make them look silly. I still have moment where I need to work on it but I hope that I’m better than I have been in years past.

A Year of Consistency, Again

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2024 was a year of being busy. You probably noticed as a loyal reader because my output on this blog fell off quite a bit. I wanted to get back on track per my New Year’s Day post. How did I do? Sixteen posts for the whole year. Barely more than one a month.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy. I have been working hard to bring great Tech Field Day events to the community. I’ve become more active on BlueSky as the community shifts there due to the craziness happening on Twitter/X. I have been getting more and more briefings on technology, which I’ve been writing up on LinkedIn. And of course I’ve been active on the Gestalt IT Rundown and the Tech Field Day Podcast

I also ran almost every day in 2024. I mentioned on Facebook that “consistency beats quantity”, which was a phrase that encouraged me to try and run at least one mile a day in 2024. That ended up being 901 miles of running for the year, with November and December having a LOT or running. I plan on keeping that going in 2025, where I’m aiming for 1,000 miles. It will be a challenge but I’ve never been one to shy away from that.

Coming Up

Where does that leave writing here? I still try to get that done when I can. Usually when I have something interesting to say. In years past I’ve tried to post every week or even two weeks. I’ve written about tech and leadership and even writing itself. I’ve tried to cover the gamut of things that are important to me.

2025 is the fifteenth anniversary year of me starting to write. The industry has changed quite a bit. Networking is focused more on moving data to the cloud or getting inputs to AI algorithms. Wi-Fi is getting faster and opening new spectrums. Security is crazy and provides the kinds of headlines that could keep one busy with breach analysis every week for the rest of my career.

However, I don’t want to just hit the highlights. I want to bring you analysis and insightful things to make you wonder about where the tech is going. I want to highlight important things that you need to be aware of. In short, I want to bring thought behind the words. Ironically it has become extremely easy to write in 2025 with the advent of AI text generation. Every writing tool integrates some form of text creation, whether it’s generating paragraphs from prompts or just analyzing your writing to figure out how to better say something. That means that there are more words out there saying a lot less than they ever have before.

I want to make sure I’m bringing you the kind of content that you want to read instead of just posting because I need to create something. That’s how I felt for a very long time. This year caused me to post less but it made me think more about what I wanted to say. I don’t think I’m going to get back to posting weekly but I do promise to get more out there for you as long as you keep reading it.

Cutting to the Quick

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No doubt you’ve seen the news that Intel has parted ways with Pat Gelsinger. There is a lot of info to unpack on that particular story but we did a good job of covering it on the Rundown this week. What I really wanted to talk about was a quote that I brought up in the episode that I heard from my friend Michael Bushong a couple of months ago:

No one cuts their way back into relevance.

It’s been rattling around in my head for a while and I wanted to talk about why he’s absolutely right.

Outcomes Need Incomes

Do you remember the coupon clipping craze of ten years ago? I think it started from some show on TLC about people that were ultra crazy couponers. They would do the math and they could buy like 100 lbs of rice for $2. They would stock up on a year’s worth of toothpaste at a time because you could pay next to nothing for it. However, the trend died out after a year or so. In part, that was because the show wasn’t very exciting after the shock of buying two years of hand soap wore off. The other reason is because people realized that a lot of those deals required you to make some investments first. Sure, you could buy all the dental floss you wanted for $3. But you had to buy it at full price and send away for a rebate. Or you had to hope that someone at the register would triple your coupon first.

I bring this up because it illustrates an issue with company finances too. There are two ways to increase profit. You can sell more things or you can cut costs. Most companies do the former because it’s the fastest way to make money. You sell more goods and you take in more money. Sounds easy, right? Once you make those sales you have to take away your expenses, like labor and overhead before you arrive at net profit. While you do need to keep an eye on those costs some people take it to the extreme, much like the ultra couponers above.

I usually see this expressed when a CEO is let go and their immediate successor is the Chief Financial Officer, or CFO. On the org chart the CFO is almost always considered to be the second in command after the CEO. Why? Because they deal with the money. They figure out how to make the most money and reduce costs as much as possible to make the most net profit possible. On paper that sounds like a wonderful idea. If this person is in charge of the money why not put them in the charge of the business?

My issue comes when the newly-minted CEO is only concerned about costs. You see this with decisions like cutting workers or selling off pieces of the company to reduce overhead. It is often expressed by seeing a company “tightening the belt” so to speak in order to make more money. Again, a great theory on paper. Companies do need to control expenses and it can be a great way to reverse your fortunes if you’re struggling. But what happens when you run out of expenses to cut?

Ninety-Day Executives

The real reason why you can’t cut your way back into relevance is because cost cutting puts your company on the back foot from the start. If you’re only worried about how much something costs you’re not going to want to invest in anything that could bring long term gain. You’re only looking at the immediate horizon. Why spend money to make money?

Of course, we all know the companies must invest if they want long-term success. Intel is a great example. The current plan of investment into chip foundries is going to pay off in the future for sure. But that future is years away. Intel has to forgo immediate profits in favor of future success. That’s literally how investment works. If I want to make money in a savings account I have to put my money in there and not touch it until it makes money. That’s how opportunity costs works and it spares no one.

However, opportunity cost has a darker counterpart, namely the quarterly cycle. See, companies don’t operate on a five-year timeline. Or a fiscal year. They really operate on a three-month rolling timeline. Everything that happens needs to impact the current quarter. Every decision must make money by the end of the quarter. Why? Because every quarter a publicly traded company must release a report to investors detailing how much money they made. If the investors don’t like the report they lose confidence and the value of your company could drop if they choose to sell off stock in your company.

So CEOs, especially the cost-conscious ones, are driven more by the need to succeed and be profitable every quarter rather than run into the issues of not making enough money for the past three months. They would rather recognize immediate gains rather than invest for the future. And how do they accomplish that if there isn’t more profit to gain from selling things? By cutting costs even more. Hence the Bushong quote above. CEOs that have no vision will make things look great for investors for a quarter or maybe two until the easy costs are cut. Then it’s time to produce. However, you’ve stifled your workforce and your research teams because they weren’t making immediate profit. So your company is now in trouble because there isn’t a way to produce more income and costs are at a minimum.

And the investors? They only care about how much money you’re going to make the end of the quarter. They don’t care about last quarter or next quarter. Just now. They want their $2, as in the paperboy from Better Off Dead. Which leads to a feedback loop that can destroy a company. Pat Gelsinger was facing that feedback loop at Intel. Investors wanted their profits at the end of this quarter and Pat and the rest of the industry could see it was going to take longer than that to succeed. Who won? Well, the board didn’t retire.

Tom’s Take

I know it sounds a little harsh, but I’m tired of investors driving companies into untenable positions because they can’t imagine investing for the future of a quarter from now. As much as we make fun of day traders for not having vision some quarterly investors are no better. They just have a little more patience. If we started building companies that are in it for the long haul and make investment decision based on calendar years and not quarterly cycles I think we would have more robust companies overall and less reliance on cost cutting as an emergency profit making button. And we wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not we were cutting our way to a profit or cutting off our nose to spite our faceless investors.

AI Should Be Concise

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One of the things that I’ve noticed about the rise of AI is that everything feels so wordy now. I’m sure it’s a byproduct of the popularity of ChatGPT and other LLMs that are designed for language. You’ve likely seen it too on websites that have paragraphs of text that feel unnecessary. Maybe you’re looking for an answer to a specific question. You could be trying to find a recipe or even a code block for a problem. What you find is a wall of text that feels pieced together by someone that doesn’t know how to write.

The Soul of Wit

I feel like the biggest issue with those overly word-filled answers comes down to the way that people feel about unnecessary exposition. AI is built to write things on a topic and fill out word count. Much like a student trying to pad out the page length for a required report, AI doesn’t know when to shut up. It specifically adds words that aren’t really required. I realize that there are modes of AI content creation that value being concise but those are the default.

I use AI quite a bit to summarize long articles, many of which I’m sure were created with AI-assistance in the first place. AI is quite adept at removing the unneeded pieces, likely because it knows where there are inserted in the first place. It took me a while to understand why this bothered me so much. What is it about having a computer spend way too much time explaining answers to you that feels wrong?

Enterprise D Bridge

Then it hit me. It felt wrong because we already have a perfect example of what an intelligence should feel like when it answers you. It comes courtesy of Gene Roddenberry and sounds just like his wife Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. You’ve probably guessed that it’s the Starfleet computer system found on board every Federation starship. If you’ve watched any series since Next Generation you’ve heard the voice of the ship computer executing commands and providing information to the crew members, guests, and even holographic projections.

Why is the Star Trek computer a better example of AI behavior to me? In part because it provides information in the most concise manner possible. When the captain asks a question the answer is produced. No paragraphs necessary. No use of delve or convolutional needed. It produces the requested info promptly. Could you imagine a ship’s computer that drones on for three paragraphs before telling the first officer that the energy pulse is deadly and the shields need to be raised?

Quality Over Quantity

I’m sure you already know someone that thinks they know a lot about a subject and are more than happy to tell you about what they know. Do they tend to answer questions or explain concepts tersely? Or do they add in filler words and try to talk around tricky pieces in order to seem like they have more knowledge than they actually do? Can you tell the difference? I’m willing to be that you can.

That’s why GPT-style LLM content creation feels so soulless. We’re conditioned to appreciate precision. The longer someone goes on about something the more likely we are to either tune out or suspect it’s not an accurate answer. That’s actually a way that interrogators are trained to uncover falsehoods and lies. People stretching the truth are more likely to use more words in their statements.

There’s also more reasoning behind the padding. Think about how many ads are usually running on sites that have this kind of AI-generated content. Is it just a few? Or as many as possible inserted between every possible paragraph. It’s not unlike video sites like Youtube having ads inserted at certain points in the video. If you insert an additional ad in a video that is a minimum of twenty minutes how long do you think the average video is going to be for channels that rely on ad revenue? The actual substance of the content isn’t as important as getting those extra ad clicks.

Tom’s Take

It’s unlikely that my ramblings about ChatGPT is going to change things any time soon. I’d rather have the precision of Star Trek over the hollow content that creates yarns about family life before getting to the actual recipe. Maybe I’m in the minority. But I feel like my audience would prefer getting the results they want and doing away with the unnecessary pieces. Could this blog post have been a lot shorter and just said “Stop being so wordy”? Sure. But it’s long because it was written by a human.

Semper Gumby

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By now I’m sure you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” If you work in IT or events or even in a trade you’ve seen things go upside down on many occasions. Did you ever ask yourself why this happens? Or even what you can do to fix it? What about avoiding it completely?

I have done a lot in IT over the years. I’ve also been working hard as an event planner and coordinator with Tech Field Day. The best lessons that I’ve learned about anticipating disaster have come from my time in Scouting. I’m often asked by companies “how did you know that would happen?” I almost always answer the same way: “I didn’t know THAT would go wrong, but I knew something would. I just kept my eye out for it.” It almost sounds too simple, right? But if you are familiar with event planning you know it’s almost a law, just like Mr. Murphy’s famous version.

How can you anticipate problems and still manage to make things happen? You can’t always fix everything. However, you can make sure that people don’t notice the issues. You just have to be willing to bend a little with the new situation. Rolling with the punches, as it were. There’s no better mascot than Gumby, the beloved childhood clay toy. Borrowing “semper” to be translated as “always” as in the Marine motto of “Semper Fidelis” (always faithful) and you arrive at the unofficial motto for most scouting events. It’s something we’ve always repeated during our Scouting events as a reminder to stay flexible. I even have a little Gumby with me to serve as a reminder courtesy of my friend Rebecca Koss after a particularly fun bout of necessary flexibility when delivering a course during COVID.

Always Flexible

Things go wrong more than we’d like to admit. We’re late for an appointment. We’re missing a page out of our workbook. A butterfly flapped its wings in the Sahara and now your hard drive is blank. Whatever the reason for the troubles you still have something you need to do. It’s way too easy to just admit defeat and hope that you can make a better attempt the next time. Or, you can bend a little and try to make the most of it.

“Semper Gumby” doesn’t mean you quit. It doesn’t mean you scream and yell and cry because things aren’t fair. It means you assess the situation, apply some flexible thinking, and you make it work. Nothing is perfect, but our response to that can be pretty close. You just have to accept that the more set-in-stone something might be the more likely it is that you can do a reasonable job of it when things go wrong and still do well.

Here’s an example. You’re teaching a day-long seminar course and you’re running behind. Specifically, you’re running behind because a fire alarm went off and you wasted half an hour on something that’s outside your control. Does it suck? Yes. Does it mean that things aren’t going to be perfect? Absolutely. But will it be the end of your class? No. Because you can be flexible and claw back some of that time to make it work.

You’re probably already formulating in your head how you could get that time back. Shortening sections by five minutes is a great way to reclaim time. You can also rearrange the schedule on the fly to focus on the important lessons so people get the critical information. Not everything lends itself well to this kind of remix. If lessons are dependent on other information you can’t rearrange them. But if you can move things or even change their content you can work some magic. Group discussions can become more focused lessons. Ten minutes of note taking can be four minutes of notes being shared on a projector and copied.

Go With The Flow

What if the hassle is because someone is terminally late? If you’ve ever worked with an important vice president in a company you know they’re constantly running behind. Sometimes that’s on them. Their calendars are always super packed and their appointments always run long. It’s because their people book their appointments short to keep them moving. But that extra five minutes they want to take to finish something up makes their last appointment an hour late. Sound like the doctor’s office to you?

How can you anticipate that? Well, honestly, you can’t. If you’re flexible you can make it work. VP running ten minutes behind? Fine. Have someone else start presenting in their place. Move on to the next part. Unless that VP is holding some kind of crucial information you can probably start the meeting without them. Especially if they’re just “framing the discussion” or some other thing that shows what they’re adding is less than necessary. Plus, if you start the meeting without them they’ll mention to their people that they need to get them in early next time to avoid interrupting next time.

Flexibility doesn’t mean you don’t have rock solid deadlines. Some things have to happen at a certain time or in a certain way that can’t easily be moved. The flexibility part comes when you learn how to adjust so that things flow smoothly around them. Imagine a boulder in a river. The river can’t move the boulder. So it flows around. Soon the river either wears away the boulder or accepts that it won’t move and continues on the path. The boulder is none the wiser and the river accomplishes its goals.

Tom’s Take

The next time you find yourself stressed out because something isn’t going to plan, don’t scream at the heavens. Just breathe and think of a little green cartoon character. As it was phrased in the 1984 Dune movie, “bend like a reed in the wind” and find a way to be flexible in your approach. You might not be able to affect the kind of change you want but being open to the idea means you can find a way to make something happen that will keep your meeting or lesson on track. If you do it with enough flourish people might even believe that was the plan all along. Just be flexible.

Delegation And You

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I once again loved this episode of the Art of Network Engineering featuring Mike Bushong. He is a very astute judge of character as well as how to apply social skills to your tech role. Definitely listen to the above episode if you’re interested in countering cognitive biases.

In the episode, he told a great story of how he had a pivotal career moment with one of his managers that led to some important introspection. I won’t tell his story but the summary is that he had taken on way too much work and way too many roles and he blew up at his manager because of the stress. She leveled him with a quote that rang true for me:

“No one knows everything you’re working on. They just see that the thing that’s important to them is late.”

That’s not the verbatim quote but that’s how I remember it. It’s definitely something that I’ve been thinking about since the previous episode when he mentioned it the first time.

Load Bearing and Busting

The odds are good that we’re all doing way too many things right now. Whether it’s doing more work in our role or taking on way too many projects in our free time. The human mind seems to crave stimulation and we provide it by keeping our brain so busy that it never has a moment to rest. Sometimes that happens because we’re too focused on saying “yes” to everything and pleasing people. For others it comes because we want to be the focal point for everything that happens in our team or organization.

Taking on too much work is manageable in the short term. We can rearrange deadlines and burn the candle at both ends to make it all work for a few weeks or months. However, when the amount of work that we have to do or the number of projects we have started eventually collapse under their own weight we feel exposed and angry. We’re mad because we’re overworked, yet we are the ones that caused the situation. We’re frustrated that so much relies on us without realizing that we could have said “no” at any time and had less to do. We’re upset that we have too much to do AND that we are the architect of our own struggle.

I feel this in so many different ways because I’ve lived it. I have a hard time saying no. I don’t even take my own advice. I delude myself into believing this time will be different and that I won’t get overwhelmed. Somehow I’m always proven wrong when too many things are going on all at once that require me to do them because I’m the one that made it that way.

No matter how talented we are at project management or learning or any skill you can think of there is only so much we can dedicate ourself to doing. Once we hit our limit everything suffers. If you’re familiar with Quality of Service policies it’s why adding one more packet to a congested link doesn’t just hurt the performance of that single packet but of the entire link overall. Going past your limits makes everything worse.

Finding Your Focus

Just today I heard a wonderful quote from Krazy Ken of Computer Clan fame:

“Focus is about saying ‘no’.”

Declining to do something because you know you’re hit your limit isn’t negative. In fact, it’s the smartest thing you can do to help those around you. If you’re always agreeing to do something when it is brought to you then what exactly are you focused on? If anyone can give you a task and you just preempt everything else are you even focused at all?

I’ve felt this over the past year in a very specific area. I’m the course director for my local Scouting America’s Wood Badge course. If you think I’m busy in my work life I can promise you that my volunteer work in Scouting is even busier. I do way too many things. That was brought into sharp focus for me last year when my time to step forward as the course director was apparent. I had to assemble my team and get everyone working toward the goal of putting on this wonderful course. But I couldn’t do it entirely by myself. I had to rely on my team to get it done. The amount of focus that it takes to make this happen meant that I also needed to step back from some of my other roles.

It was hard to do this! I’d spent years leading a pack and volunteering to be on every training course that I could think of. There were even other opportunities that I wanted to explore that I knew would take just as much time as the thing that I had committed to doing. I had to decide what was most important for me. And I had to realize that while I was delegating things to my team I was also responsible for something even more important. My job was to not take on any new responsibilities until we finished this course. Letting go is hard. Not picking up things to replace them is even harder. My brain craved the stimulation of having something to think about. I didn’t want to just go over the same list again and again to make sure things were headed in the right direction.

When you take on too much you do your entire team a disservice. If you’re not available to help because you’ve agreed to do something that someone else could or should be handling you’re holding everyone back. The modern interpretation of this comes from the excellent Phoenix Project book by Gene Kim. Everyone knows about Brent by this point. The single point of failure in the organization. But how many of us recognize that Brent is a problem because of his necessity to the organization and still do what we do either out of a desire to be more helpful or out of a need to control everything?

Delegation is about focus. It’s about saying “no” to things that you know someone else not only can do but should do. It’s about eliminating distractions and poring your energy into something that needs it. It’s easy to say that someone who has too much to do is unfocused. But when you frame it as a problem of choice it becomes easier to see where the changes need to be made. Some things are absolutely going to require your attention. You’ll know what those are because they are so intrinsically linked to you that they’ll fail without you. But don’t think that everything needs your attention. That’s how you find yourself in the trap and lose focus.

Tom’s Take

As of this writing, I’m two weeks away from the start of my Wood Badge course. I have a great team that has done so much over the past year to be ready to put on a wonderful leadership seminar. But they could only do that because I trusted them to make it happen. I’ve done this a number of times already and it would have been easy for me to jump in and offer way too much advice or even take on the tasks myself. For the first time in a very long time I knew the answer was to sit back and do the least amount possible. Not because I was lazy or malicious. Because I knew they needed to feel like they had an impact. I needed to focus on the important things. I needed to be available to those that needed my help, not doing their job for them. If you find yourself in a similar situation ask one very important question: “What would Mike Bushong do?”

Experience Expansion

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Recently at Networking Field Day, one of the presenters for cPacket had a wonderful line that stuck with me:

There’s no compression algorithm for experience.

Like, floored. Because it hits at the heart of a couple of different things that are going on in the IT industry right now that showcase why it feels like everything is on the verge of falling apart and what we can do to help that.

Misteaks Hapin

Let’s just get this out of the way: you are going to screw up. Anyone doing any job ever for any amount of time has made a mistake. I know I’ve made my fair share of them over the years. When I finished chastising myself I looked back at what happened, figured out what went wrong, and made sure that it didn’t happen that exact same way again. That’s experience.

Experience is key to understanding why we do things the way we do them or why we don’t do something a certain way. You know how you get experience? By doing it. It’s rare that someone can read a book or a blog post about some topic and instantly know everything there is to know about it. Experience is the process of taking all that knowledge and applying it in a successful way. As the quote above states, you can’t rush that.

Can you accelerate some of the process? You absolutely can. You can tell your coworkers not to use a server or that they need to configure a function call in a certain way. However, a lot of figuring things out is learning what didn’t work and not doing it again. Trying to rush that process either leaves gaps in knowledge or creates situations where people are pushed way above their skillset into roles that demand more applied knowledge.

Fast Track

Here’s where I think the disconnect is coming from. People are trying to get into roles that have experience requirements that are beyond them. That means they’re trying to bluff their way into a place they shouldn’t be. It’s a two-part problem that is going to require some introspection on sides of the discussion.

For the workers: You are going to get experience. You’re going to get it doing the job. There’s no VR training for routing loops or cloud outages. There’s no way to compress the lessons you learn on a conference bridge at 3am trying to figure out why CrowdStrike is acting screwy. No one could have predicted the way that particular bug could have affected so many systems. No amount of reading up on null memory pointers or dirty initial environments is going to show you the results of that. You’re going to have to see it. You need to work on it. Then you need to commit the results to memory.

Yes, that means you’re going to have some long hours in the office or the lab trying to figure out race conditions or learn why a certain setting should never be enabled. The more you try to take shortcuts the more likely it is that you’re going to find those skipped lessons coming back to haunt you.

For the employers: Let’s stop lying to ourselves. You don’t need 10 years of experience in a 4-year old programming language and a masters degree in quantum mechanics to program VLANs. Everyone in the industry is laughing at your attempts to weed out the most unqualified candidates automatically by claiming you have to be a genius to get an entry-level job in today’s environment. It’s also disingenuous because you’re putting these lofty goals as requirements and then offering a laughable salary. What you’re really saying is “we pay poorly for overqualified people because we don’t want to train anyone for fear they’ll leave to get more money.”

If you want to pay for junior-level salaries then put junior-level qualifications on the job. Hire people that need experience and give it to them. They’re more likely to be happy getting to learn in a role and potentially stay to become senior as you reward them for gaining experience. Lastly, if your operation is so critical that it can never go down or be impacted for any reason by people learning a trade then you should be compensating the employees you do have 5x what they’re making for the stress you’re making them endure.

Tom’s Take

Shortcuts miss out on the journey. Maybe you get there faster but then you’re waiting around for the rest of reality to catch up to you. The culture that puts ridiculous requirements on entry-level roles is the one that encourages entry-level people to spend 100% of their time studying and cramming with zero experience in order to get a role that lets them gain it. Years ago I said that apprenticeships are key to filling these gaps and that message resonants more with me every day. If we can’t convince people to take their time and get experience and if we can’t keep companies from requiring so much of people that have so little, maybe it should be time to expand how we teach and train. Because experience is an uncompressable algorithm.