Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

At my sales training seminar the past few days I had a number of conversations with colleagues about AI. These convos spanned topics from "What are we doing [in our product] to align with industry demand for AI powered features?" to "How can we use AI in our jobs in sales to sell more effectively?"to "Is our job [in sales] even going to exist in 5 years?" There's so much I could write about AI even within these topics, let alone the broader discussions about AI. For this, my first journal entry about AI, I'll start with the latter question— which, to state it in more dire terms, is,  Is AI coming for my job?

I use this alarmist language to make a point: This is what people are worry about more and more. And this is the type of lanaguage that's becoming increasingly common as people express their thoughts/concerns.

I don't think the future is as bad as all that. I think we're at a point in the technology hype curve where there's a lot of uncertainty. And I want to be careful to say that I really can't predict the future of AI, even 5 years out.

Why 5 years? Consider how far AI has come in 5 years. 5 years ago AI was more science fiction than science fact.

Three years ago AI was full of hype but still short of reality. While many people in software development, my field, were buzzing about how AI would give us "10x" improvements and pouring money into it, a few of us were pointing out that there was currently no there there and such investment was like the proverbial lemmings chasing each other over the cliff.

Two years ago in software development we started to see the actual value of AI appear. AI could write code— but generally simple code, and it needed more testing and definitely review by a skilled person. The new wisdom became, "AI makes programmers 30% more efficient." That's a far cry from the 1000% gain people were still frothing about 12 months earlier!

Today, in software, we're seeing that 30% level of gain take hold more broadly. Some people react to that figure by asking "Does that mean layoffs of 30% among software developers?" I think that viewpoint fails to appreciate what's happened across the history of technological progress.

Yes, new technology has always reduced the number of old jobs that were doing things the old way. In the industrial revolution factory automation reduced the number of jobs for everything from sawing wood to stitching clothes to digging for coal. A simplistic view of it is, "Machines replaced people." But while machines replaced jobs where people were doing rote, manual work, the economy was not a zero-sum game. Overall the economy grew because of efficiency, and new, higher value jobs were created elsewhere.

The same lesson applies with the AI transformation. AI will replace people who are doing lower level, more rote jobs. But economic gains will mean more higher level jobs can be created elsewhere. For those who are looking at it as zero-sum, though, and wondering, "Will AI take my job?" the answer is really, "People who know how to use AI to be more productive will replace those who don't."

I was busy this past week at work. It was QBR week, where QBR is Quarterly Business Review. It's an every-3-months process for people in sales where we get the extended team together— extended meaning not just the people in sales but also representatives of teams who support us— to review what happened in the past quarter, discuss and defend our plans for how we'll meet targets this next quarter, and receive a bit of training. Sometimes QBRs mean the stresses of travel in addition to long days of being crammed in a conference room subjected to Death By PowerPoint, but this one was local for me in San Jose. That's one of the benefits of living in Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the world.

Monday and Tuesday were normal days (mostly) as the QBR didn't start in earnest until Wednesday afternoon. Meetings were a bit light as many people on the team had travel booked. I used the unstructured time in my schedule to knock off some research and prep work for later.

Tuesday evening I met a few colleagues for dinner. They'd flown in to San Jose a day ahead of time as they were coming from Texas and the east coast. Plus, the three of us were going to visit a major new client onsite the next morning to improve how well we understand their objectives, build our relationship face-to-face, and start planning how best we can help them. The two of them are leaders in post-sales functions, so the conversation over dinner was me helping them understand what I know from working with this customer for almost a year now in a pre-sales capacity. It was a good dinner as we kept the work conversation balanced reasonably with enjoying ourselves over dinner.

Wednesday morning I had multiple meetings before the QBR. The day started at 7:30 with a CEO all-hands, then I had an hour-long meeting where I led a technical workshop introducing a new stakeholder at one of our prospects to our flagship product so that he can help run an evaluation with us, then I hit the road for that in-person meeting I talked about above. The f2f meeting went really well. We accomplished everything we set out to do and the customer seemed to value the experience. Oh, and when my sales leader started talking up one of our new products I boldly offered to take over the white board and give and impromptu walkthrough of how it works. Everyone on both sides of the table was impressed.



People took pictures. So did I. (That's a selfie above.)

Wednesday afternoon I joined the QBR already in progress. I was 15-20 minutes late because the customer visit ran so long. I texted my boss so he'd know. Absolutely nobody at the meeting minded that I came in late. We're in sales; making customers excited and successful with our products is what we do. Plus, I got to brag about rocking that chalk talk. I mean, there was no chalk involved. I haven't used a chalkboard since... er... sometime in high school. But I still call it chalk talk since WTF rhymes with "dry erase marker"? 😂

The QBR training on Wednesday wasn't bad. It wasn't bad because it wasn't too long and wasn't Death by PowerPoint. But it also wasn't good because the sales leader who delivered it was too familiar with the material and didn't really believe in it anyway. I was sitting there so much of the time thinking to myself, "Okay, Ace"— 'Ace' was the person delivering the training— "The person who most needs to change to incorporate this lesson is you." 🙄

Wednesday evening we had a team dinner. The food was decent and the drinks were... free. 😂 I started early as the first person at the bar. The maître d' asked if I was the organizer... partly because I was first there and partly because I was dressed in a jacket with a snazzy folded pocket square. I was almost done with margarita number 2 by the time our actual leader arrived. 😂 By the end of the dinner I'd had probably 2 more drinks than I should have had. Good thing I was taking Uber home.

Thursday was another early morning. I woke up at 6:15am. And I woke up still drunk from the night before. 🤣 Well, partly drunk. A shower, a bit of breakfast, and caffeine helped wash some of it off. But I was glad I was taking Uber to the office again. 😂

Thursday was a long day. We were supposed to finish before 4 but ran 'til just after 5. We might've gone til 6 but most of the execs had started filtering out after 1pm so there were fewer people grilling the last few account managers with questions. It's always amusing when execs pound the table about how we've got to be "all in" and "110% committed" then leave early because they don't want to take flights at inconvenient times. 🙄

Thursday evening I enjoyed a casual dinner with those who were left. Instead of going to a fancy-ish restaurant we walked a few blocks over to San Pedro Square, a food hall in San Jose. We sat at a big table outside and enjoyed live music from a rock/jazz cover band while eating.

Edited to add: It was at Thursday's dinner I got an email from the colleague I'd been siting next to for 2 days that he just tested positive for Covid-19. 😨😡😞 That put a damper on the rest of the evening.

Friday was my catch-up day. I had been hoping it'd be an easy half-day to recuperate from the busy-ness of the week, but alas it ended up fairly packed. Still, it was just gentle enough to finish off a busy week.

Vegas Travelog #2
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Mon, 27 Nov 2023. 8:45pm.

Day 1 of the trade show is done. Well, it's almost done. I'm back at my hotel, dressed down, grabbing a casual dinner. Yes, it's almost 9pm and I'm just now eating dinner. That's how things often roll at trade shows.

I'm in town for the mammoth AWS re:Invent show. It's drawing some 65,000 attendees this year, I've heard. Everything was a madhouse with crowds this afternoon. Getting a car from the airport was slow. Traffic was slow. The trade show floor was packed shoulder to shoulder.

Shows like this are always tiring. And no, it's not because Las Vegas is the epicenter of 24/7 entertainment. I find very little of Vegas entertaining anymore. It's tiring because it's many hours per day on my feet answering the same question over and over— "So, what does CompanyName do?"— for people who don't really care about my company's products but only want a free t-shirt or other giveaway. In other words, a typical big trade show.

That said, while 90%+ of the visitors to our booth will be freebie seekers, it's the other 10% we live for. Those are the folks who work in software and struggle with challenges of the kind we can fix. They'll see value in what we offer, and we're there to help them understand it.

My two Macs, work and personal, were pestering me for upgrades yesterday. MacOS "Sonoma" is up to version 14.1. I was running the latest version of "Venture", 13.6.1. On my work machine there's company software that forces me to take upgrades after a certain period of time, so I figured I'd get ahead of that nagging by upgrading the OS now. What a mistake!

For some reason I decided to upgrade my personal computer first, even though there's no requirement on taking upgrades for it. I think I was thinking it'd be lower risk. At least I had the presence of mind to make a Time Machine backup before applying the OS upgrade. That turned out to be critical when I chose to downgrade away from Sonoma and had to wipe my disk and restore from backup!

Why I Didn't Like Sonoma

What was wrong with Sonoma? Two or three things, some little and one bigger. The little things are UX nits I don't like. The highlighting of title bars is different. And the lock screen includes a digital clock in a ridiculously large font. If you've updated an iPhone anytime recently, you know what I'm talking about. Even stupider that clock's font can't be reduced (on the desktop) though it can at least be removed. Though then the login prompt stays down at the bottom of the screen for no good reason.

The big thing I didn't like is that MacOS Sonoma screws up Adobe Photoshop Elements. My 2022 Elements at least doesn't crash, like I read some accounts of online, but there are problems with none of the color pickers displaying properly. That's a small thing but also kind of a big thing... as one of the main things an image editor is used for is to modify colors!

Support channels on this problem were useless. Both companies just finger-point at the other. Adobe fanbois state, "Why should Adobe fix something Apple broke?" while Apple says Adobe was provided advanced access to the new OS months ago to qualify its apps and prepare updates if necessary. Adobe's only update right now is, "We've just released Elements 2024 >> CLICK HERE TO BUY! "

Downgrading: Wipe, Reinstall, Restore

The process to roll back to the older OS turned out to be harder than many support sites but not crazy overall. That backup I made immediately before upgrading turned out to be my salvation!

First, I tried simply restoring the backup. That's what most sites say works. It does not work. It does not support rolling back the OS, at least not between major versions. Apple says you have to reinstall the older OS— which requires erasing your disk.

I considered the risks of wiping my disk. I do have that Time Machine backup (actually I have several)... but would it work? I reassured myself that this is a normal process. Copying via a TIme Machine backup is one of the standard ways of migrating to a new computer.

I held my breath as I pressed the button to erase the disk. It asked me if I'm sure. Then if I'm sure I'm sure. Then if I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure. There were so many confirmation prompts I had to take at least one breath in there somewhere. 🤣

The reinstall took a few hours. I left my computer sitting overnight to finish. This morning the new— I mean, old— OS was installed and the computer was at it's, "Hi, I'm your new computer, let's get your stuff copied over!" state. I chose my Time Machine backup and left it to chug along for about 20 minutes. Success!

This past weekend the comic strip "Dilbert" was canceled, and its author, Scott Adams, effectively was, too. As I mentioned in a brief blog yesterday, these were consequences of Adams publishing video of himself going on a racist tirade.

Do I care that "Dilbert" got canceled? No. I stopped reading the comic strip over 10 years ago. It had ceased being funny years before that. That's a harsh thing to say because for years it was funny, enormously funny, especially to me as a software engineer and person in IT. You see, the main character in Dilbert is/was a software engineer, and the comic was about the foolishness that goes on particularly in the corporate world of software and IT. ...At least it used to be. Adams started rehashing old material and gradually folded in too much right wing politics.

Even after the comic strip became tedious and stupidly political I continued reading Adams' blog for a while. Back in 2015-2016 he shared a number of trenchant observations about Donald Trump's rising political campaign. Adams has studied techniques of persuasion and recognized Trump as being a master of these techniques. His blog was, for a while, an excellent "inside baseball" type explanation of what Trump was doing and why it was working.

I specify for a while because after a few months of sharing insight on Trump's techniques, Adams shifted to actively using those techniques to argue Trump's White nationalism cause. For the first week or so I wondered if it was a test for his readers; could we spot the techniques? But it wasn't a test. Adams had gone full MAGA. I stopped following him.

One of the many problems with going full MAGA is that it rots your brain. MAGA-heads wall themselves off in echo chambers of the like minded. Gradually they believe that everything they believe is normal. Thus Adams shameless posted an overtly racist screed, figuring since he was such a master of persuasive arts he'd show us all how smart he is. Well, I'm sure the 30% or so who are MAGA see his brilliance. The rest of us say Good riddance.

The past day-ish of work has been tough. I worked until about 9:30pm last night, taking an hour off for dinner, then was back online this morning before 7am. But worse than the long hours has been the frustration. "I'm not even at Square One," I bemoaned. "It's like I'm at Square Negative 6!"

I was struggling to prepare some use cases to show a customer today during a POC. I needed to set up our product in a sandbox environment and pre-test the use cases to ensure they'd go smoothly in front of the customer. Setting up the environment should've been easy.... Should have been. It wasn't. What should have been a 30 minute job took hours. First, AWS commands kept failing for reasons that were no fault of my own. Each time I had to troubleshoot the error, fix whatever I could, and start the process again. Next, once I got the environment created, the install of our product wouldn't come up correctly in it. At that point I hoped I'd gotten from Square Negative Six up to Square Zero... but no, I had to burn it down and try again. Starting at Square Negative Six.

This morning a few people answered the help request I posted in an internal Slack channel. "DiD YoU FoLlOw ThE DoCuMeNtAtIoN?" the developers basically said. Despite the fact that I posted a link to the docs in my help request with an explanation, "I'm following the docs at [link] and it's not working." 🙄

After a few more hours of trying to bring up a working sandbox environment in AWS I threw in the towel on it. A teammate suggested an alternative in GCP. It came up quickly but had an outdated version. I asked another colleague if he could help with that, and he updated the version. But then there were a few glitches. All in, I didn't have a working sandbox environment until less than 2 hours before my meeting with the customer. At that point I was was Square One!

I coordinated with my boss and the account manager to postpone today's working session with the customer. From the point I finally reached Square One late this morning I knew I still had hours more work to do before I'd be ready. Indeed, I've been working on it the whole rest of the day since then and I'm only about half done right now. 😨 I hope I can get through the rest in time for my 11am meeting tomorrow.

Sunday night I decided to upgrade iOS on my iPhone. I was on version 12.something, 12.2 I think. It was old enough that apps were starting to break and updates required a newer iOS. Hawk assured me that she's on 13.something and nothing's wrong with it.

"Nothing's wrong with it" is an important recommendation because often there is something wrong with an upgrade. Compelling new features are rare anymore— and "New: 25 animated emojis!!!" is not a compelling feature to me— so most of what you get with upgrades is risk of something you relied on breaking. I'll stick with a rock-solid OS as long as I can. For example, I'm still running Windows XP (launched in 2003, last updated in 2008) in a VM for two Windows-only apps I own.

I backed up my phone and checked iTunes for upgrades. 12.4 was the newest version it offered. "That's weird," I thought to myself. Hawk's already on 13.x. I check my iPhone's upgrade settings and found it was ready to leap to 14.3. "I wonder why iTunes only shows 12.4?" I started the 14.3 upgrade on my phone and soon the answer became apparent. "You must update your software to connect to this iPhone," my computer informed me.

How Much to Fix this Upgrade?

iTunes and Photos were not showing any updates available to help, so it looked like I'd have to upgrade my computer OS to be able to manage my phone anymore. And that would mean buying new copies of a few key applications I use daily. You see, I stick on old versions of software, too. I have a few 32-bit apps that aren't supported on Apple's newer, 64-bit-only MacOS versions. I'm on the newest MacOS that still has 32-bit support. Updating to any newer version means replacing those apps, at a cost of $150-200.

"I wonder if I can roll back to an older iOS that works with my MacOS version," I asked aloud. "But probably not, because Apple doesn't doesn't make going backwards easy at all."

"I had a similar problem when I updated my iPhone, and just decided I should buy a whole new computer," Hawk replied. A new computer and the new software would up my cost for this fix to $1,500! I'll tell you the truth, though. That thought had already crossed my mind at that point.

Be Steadfast. The Way Back Will Come.

Before giving in to spending anywhere from $200 to $1,500 to fix the problems caused by the update I decided to look for a free solution. Free should be in quotes, though, because while the purchase price might be zero, if it requires a lot of time it's expensive. As a well paid professional I know that the time-money tradeoff is a real thing. Compared to a few hours of exasperating effort to get it working, spending $200 could well be the less annoying solution. So I set a short time limit on my exploration.

Thankfully a solution did appear. Though not in the place I expected.

I searched first for a method to downgrade my phone OS. I found a blog from not too long ago that described how to down-rev from version 14 beta to version 13.x. I wasn't sure it would work with 14.3 but I was willing to give it a try.

Good news/bad news. The down-rev didn't work (bad news). But it failed in a very interesting way (good news). It prodded iTunes and Photos into pulling unadvertised updates. Once each updated it recognized my iPhone and restored the functionality I enjoyed previously. Now I'm good to continue not upgrading my MacOS, my desktop applications, or my computer for probably another year!