Jeremy Osterhouse

I first read this in 2006, but have been thinking about it again recently. I share this experience.

From his wife’s perspective, Phil said, it looks like he knows how to do everything. But his own, subjective experience is very different. He doesn’t really have detailed procedural knowledge of most tasks. He’s just very good at discovering that knowledge.

“What I’m actually doing is figuring things out on the fly,” Phil said. That’s what all IT adepts do, all the time. We do it in such a rapid, fluid, and automatic way that we don’t seem to be constantly learning or relearning. But we are, and Phil’s insight prompted me to recalibrate my thinking on this matter.

The clash of these cognitive styles — knowing how to do things versus knowing how to find out how to do things — is a source of friction between IT folk and our clientele. From our perspective, it’s annoying to be asked constantly to write down detailed step-by-step procedures. If we don’t rely on them, why should anyone else need to?

— Jon Udell, The tacit dimension of tech support

See also: Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi. My quotes don’t include it, but Udell references Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge” concept.

Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, and you can’t measure work like that anyway.

The simplest way to see the problem is to back-test this against other big technology shifts in the past. Some of the industries that should have suffered most ended up much bigger, and some of the industries that did suffer most should have been immune.

50 years of financial automation doesn’t seem to have hurt the market for CPAs.

— Benedict Evans, Predicting AI job exposure

On a walk recently, my kids found an LED display sign and discovered on close inspection that they could see individual colored lights up close, while it looked like colors from a distance. They asked me how this worked and I explained that different combinations of red, green, and blue lights could make any color. It was an abstract idea to explain to them, so it occurred to me that I could make a little web page to demonstrate how it works. I prompted Claude:

My kids have discovered that screen combine red, green, and blue to make all other colors. Could you make an html page that demonstrates mixing those three colors? Have a slider for each color that shows the color that’s being added as well as the output color.

And the result is RGB Color mixer.

[CEO] — synthesized: “A good assessment, but I don’t see the problems you describe. I see the problems I can see. You should focus on the problems I can see.”

A front-line manager’s job is to take the time to understand and adapt to the current situation. For a new senior leader, you are the situation. Chances are, your boss and your senior peers are in the middle of it. They are smack dab in the center of the chaos, and while their perspective is relevant, it’s blurred by history and chaos. One of your immense fading advantages as the new senior leader at the table is that you have no history in this current chaos, yet. You have fresh perspective that has not been beaten into submission by the chaos.

— Rands in Repose, Here’s The Rub: We Don’t Believe You