Month: November 2023

When hiring someone the first impression you get is their resume. Applicants can use professional resume writers and even GPTs to assist them, but it still represents them. Immediately you make some judgement on whether you want to interview them or not. Many companies now have prescreening applications that will make some first judgements for you, as the selector you make that decision. What on the resume are you looking for? Did they go to the right college? Do they have a title from a respected company? Do they have gaps? There is always something that you are looking for. 

Now compare that to when you are making friends. You do not have a sheet of paper to review. Often you meet people at school, at work, or in other social settings. In all three scenarios without the resume in hand there Is some judgement that is made. Based on where you met them you assume they made it through some selection process. At college or a job, the person must have the same qualifications that you did to get in. In social settings you assume that if your friends know them, that they have the same values as your friends.  

If you are unfortunately single right now and the way many people meet is online your first introduction is their profile page. This is filled with pictures and some usual comments about themselves. But, from this profile page you make judgements about them. Do they look good enough? Do they have a word or two you like? You swipe left or right and move to the next one.  

Why do I compare those three? Why am I connecting three things that may not normally be connected? Why do I use the word judge so many times? 

Before I answer those questions there is something that I am doing and would ask my reader to do the same. Look at the people around you, your partner, your friends, and your coworkers. There is a famous quote “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” (Jim Rohn) but your work mates’ number more than five, as well as your friends and family. Are these the people you want to be around? Are these the people with the same values you have? Look at your resume and are these the companies that fit your values? This self-reflection may not be easy, in fact use the time to be critical. 

You should be able to now understand why I all four are mentioned together. I have stated simply that “you cannot change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.” And this introspection exercise is to do just that. It is not about a new year’s resolution, not about an impulsively rash decision, or telling you to cut off everyone that does not fit. It is about making you think about your values, what you yourself think is important and making a conscious effort to spend time with people who have those values. If someone has a trait that they excel in and you lack, being around them can mentor you.  

Now I am going to add a fourth scenario. Look at your last purchases. Discretionary or non-discretionary. Are you spending money that matches what is important to you? Are you spending money on things, experiences, for family, for yourself?  

I write a lot about things I see and view and what I try to change in myself. The best way is to be around people who are successful in the things you want to change, and even asking them for assistance. But just being around those who share your values allows you to be yourself and you do not need to pretend to have other values. For money, everyone is going to have what they spend their money on. And there is no right answer, but make sure when doing things together, that you are getting the value you want. The value could be friendship, and the activity does not matter, but make it based on your value. 

This exercise is something I may add to my quarterly routine, but the key thing is living with myself and within my values is something I need to make sure I follow.  

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain, I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  I do read all feedback, I mostly wont post any of them.

This Blog is a labor of love, and was originally going to be a book.  With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path.  I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content.  I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip.  I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.   AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information.Images without notes are created using and AI tool that allows me to reuse them.  

Some strong leaders state the words ‘You are with us, or you are against us.” For us Americans in was a rallying cry after 9/11, but the origin of the saying goes well before 2001. There are even references in the bible. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller states “You’re either for us, or against your country.” Even as I type the quote I cringe at the exact wording. 

This saying sets up a simplistic dichotomy of being either “for us” or “against us” which does not allow for any nuance or complexity. It assumes that there are only two sides to every issue, and that people must either be for one side or against the other. This is simply not true. There are often many different perspectives on an issue, and people may hold a variety of different views. The world is not black and white, there are shades of grey and there are colors. Forcing someone to pick a side without understanding the nuances is divisive. 

The saying also puts pressure on people to make an immediate decision. They may not have the facts but demand one to pick a side. The goal of the statement is often to intimidate someone into allegiance. Knowing that people have this ardent desire to belong, they could make the wrong choice in haste.  

Once the choice is made it creates this adversarial situation. This is the “us” versus “them” mentality. The chasm between the two sides continues to grow. This chasm prevents productive conversations from happening and finding resolutions difficult. The divide even creates this unhealthy self-righteousness feeling and allows people to demonize anyone on the other side. 

People use this divide to justify their behavior. Including what could be seen as extreme. When there is a crowd with you it is easier to not only act worse, but to get apparent approval from the crowd. They are with you, thus whatever you do they must agree with. Promoting extreme measures on your side is fully justified but also supported. Social media can amplify both the measures and the backing. 

Once someone picks a side it is not always possible to speak out against something that side does. There is a fear that if you do speak up you will be thrown out of this clan that you selected. In the worst-case scenario, their extreme measure could be directed at you. This fear and intimidation silences many who otherwise would not have joined if they knew.  

Throughout history, leaders of politics and religion have used this divisive phrase to force people to take sides and strengthen their in-group. But most complex issues have more than just two monolithic sides. This saying boxes people into a false choice when truth is often far messier. 

I started thinking about this recently for a few reasons. A few weeks ago, in the US local elections were held. In my town we voted for mayor. I noticed something interesting on the signage of both candidates. Neither one stated their party affiliation. There were also signs stating that federal politics have no place in local elections. Both candidates did not want their voters to think that they were all in with their parties, that you were either pro everything one side or the other. 

Second, the war in the middle east continues. As I listen to some podcasts and relearn the history and what has been going on there for fifty plus years, I see the situation is more nuanced than ‘for us or against us’ statement.  

And third, Kid Rock who slammed Bud Light decided to change his tune. His latest statement “I didn’t want to be in the party of cancel cultures and boycotts that ultimately hurt working-class people.” A few weeks ago, I wrote about not being responsible for your first thought. Here I see Kid Rock got to understand the situation and now is on to his second thought. 

All three started me thinking about how we should approach the chasm that separates too many people. The optimist in me would like to see more nuanced thinking around ideas. People to be more open to perspectives outside of this one side or the other. For people to find the strength to speak up, as often there are more that are willing to agree with you. That strength will be needed to overcome those screaming the loudest, as they are not the ones we should be listening to. Though most sides of an issue have key divisions, there are also common values that should bring them together. In the end people care about freedom, safety, justice, family etc. It is finding those values that we can agree on to find a way forward.  

So now when I hear the following phrase ‘You are either with us, or against us” I will try to dig the strength to say ‘No, I am not, I can agree with you on one point but disagree other times.’ 

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain, I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  I do read all feedback, I mostly wont post any of them.

This Blog is a labor of love, and was originally going to be a book.  With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path.  I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content.  I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip.  I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.   AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information.Images without notes are created using and AI tool that allows me to reuse them.  

My first job as a child was delivering the Daily Journal newspaper. A subscription was a few dollars a week and people got a morning paper and on Sunday an expanded paper with coupons. This was the first subscription I knew about. I remember some other delivery services, Milk, Charles Chips, etc. But I didn’t think about subscriptions that much; well, I was a kid.  

The first subscription shock was cable television. I remember all the talk about who would pay for something you get for free. At that time, most people got television via rabbit ears. But by 1988 52.4% of US households had cable television, the notion of people willing to pay for a subscription was debunked.  

In the mid 80s technology subscriptions started. At any point in time, I had Prodigy, GEnie or CompuServe. These predate the open internet. I think the most popular of these was AOL. Some people I know still have and use their AOL email address. These services gave you access to a walled garden of activities, information, and entertainment. These were all killed due to the open internet and high-speed internet access, which was another subscription service. 

Amazon started it streaming service in 2006 and it grew with its Amazon prime. 2007 Netflix, a video DVD subscription company, decided to move to online streaming. Hulu was also announced in 2007, but was not popular until Disney plus, ESPN plus joined it in 2019, and 2018. Some of this growth was helped by Apple allowing apps to charge subscription fees, so now apps and services were given easy access to potential customers. 

Why all the history? I started writing this a few months ago but two of my favorite podcasts started to mention it. This Week in Google and The Big Technology podcast last week had stories about what I have been thinking, as it appears after covid many of the blogs, YouTube channels and podcasts are starting to create subscription tiers.  It started more during covid where a few musicians I enjoy could not make money touring, so they went to a tipping model, or in some cases a subscription model. WIth the subscription they would give you more access to them, zoom calls, access to private Facebook, Instagram feeds, lessons, etc.  

In 2005 I was commuting to NYC and found podcasts to keep me entertained on the hour or so bus ride there and back. There were free, some had advertising in the mix. Every podcast I listen to now has some kind of paid tier, TWIT (Club TWIT), Hidden Brain, Huberman Labs, No Stupid Question, The Big Technology Podcast, Factually etc. If I paid for all it could add up to two hundred dollars a month. This is more than I pay for cable television and internet! Next add artists, including writers, musicians that I would like to support, it could add to close to three hundred dollars a month. This does not include my cell phone subscription to receive the information also. And what about all the ‘app’ subscriptions and things like Peloton etc.  

My mind is trying to wrap my head around a few things that are conflicting. First, I do need to manage my expenses, second if I stop paying which services may not exist and third is this the end of advertising supported content. The first is easy, I need to make choices, understand what I spend money on (yes there is a subscription app that will even help you with that) and give myself a budget.  

The second two are a bit more problematic. Now I do not think that Netflix, Disney etc. are going to go out of business, but some of the smaller ones may struggle. And lastly, if everything goes behind a paywall, how useful will the internet be? If the better writers and authors want you to pay to see the best content, what is left is going to be ‘lower quality.’ I am going to ignore the fact that search and things like Chat GPT will be useless if everything is behind a paywall. LLM’s like Chat GPT will need a walled garden they have control over to train; this is another post in draft already.  

I try to spend my time finding and listening to (or reading) quality content. In my efforts to get better every day it is one of the things I find helps. Some blog posts have been influenced by them, and this one got pushed out faster due to two other podcasts talking about it. If it all goes behind a paywall the ability to grow will be diminished. TWIT and Huberman both have stated their content will always be free which is wonderful, but that does not mean they will be able to survive as a business. I almost wish there were a service where you could just pay $100 a month, get all the content needed and based on what you read or listened to would get a percentage based on some metric. Someone can start that, but I can see we just end up with 2-3 giant cable companies.  

Just a note for those who do not know economics. First there are very few creators/influences that make the big bucks. The platforms will push them to make it seem that it is possible. The people making money are the platforms, and a few of the creators. Which is why the subscription would allow them to create quality content. Until a few months ago, I did not pay as much attention to how many I subscribed to. Writing this was supposed to help me pick which ones I should. It did not, in fact I am still torn. Does anyone who read this have some way to pick?  

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain, I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  I do read all feedback, I mostly wont post any of them.

This Blog is a labor of love, and was originally going to be a book.  With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path.  I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content.  I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip.  I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.   AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information.Images without notes are created using and AI tool that allows me to reuse them.  

Looking at my notes I thought ‘Part 2 is going to be easy to write.’ Every day this week I spent looking at the ideas, trying to put them in an order that makes sense, and it was not. I was failing and trying to articulate how to limit or eliminate mistakes. Guess what people, you cannot prevent mistakes and or avoid failure. It is going to happen whether you like it or not. The line from Apollo 13 ‘failure is not an option’ is untrue.   There is nothing you can do that will ever be foolproof. In fact, there is a saying that I learned while studying the User Experience that a UX designer’s job is to create a user interface that even a fool can use, and the Universes job is the create better fools. So, what are you to do? 

If you know mistakes are going to happen, failure is an option and there needs to be some process on handling it. Yes, what I am saying is plan your mistakes, mishaps, and failures. To me the plans come in two parts. 

First, if you remember after 9/11 in the US, the government called on movie writers to produce ways that the US could be attacked.  Start with the premise of being creative.  When I worked on cars at Camp Sky Crest, one counselor would ask another ‘what does Murphy say?’ (as in Murphy’s laws) The thought was to think of anything that could go wrong and try to front run it.   Now this is not that easy, how can you get people to be creative in all the mistakes that can happen. Guess what, practice it, eventually you will get better. If you never do it, I guarantee at least of the things you would have thought of will happen.  

Second part of planning to fail is ‘what to do when something fails.’  In technology there is this notion of setting up when a system goes down, but that is only one part of failure.  Projects fail, code has issues, business users do things wrong, and so on.  A process needs to be in place for any failures on how to recover and change so that it reduces the possibility of it happening again.  

This includes how to do the postmortem correctly.   Most cases people looking for the simple one mistake that caused the outage.  What I started to learn later was the blame never solved the problem. Bringing back my agile methods of development there is a practice called the five whys. This is a practice mostly used in requirements gathering to keep asking why, up to five times to get to the ‘real’ reason something is being done.  It could be a gorilla and bananas problem, a poor process problem, a people problem, a system problem, a management problem, a time to market problem etc. Unless you keep asking why, it is going to be hard to get to all the breakdowns to address.   

In last week’s writing I described one cause could be lack of reading emails. If an email is sent to too many people often multiple people think the other person reviewed it. In processes with say six or seven sign offs everyone thinks the other person read it, so I do not have to. The process is designed to make sure there are checks and balances, but too many checks people take the short cut, and no one checks.   

The other thing to make sure of is that all the small issues are included in the whys.  If part of the problem is reduced staffed so more workload led to the lack of people paying attention, it needs to be there.  There could be lack of documentation of the process, lack of knowing the process, and even lack of practicing the process so it is usable. Time to market often makes people take short cuts, incentives can drive behavior and egos can break things. Communication failures exist, whether it is a language issue, cultural issue, lack of people speaking up (silence is not always agreement) and simple different understandings of the same sentence.   If you do not work and find small breaks, build solid communication frameworks and practices misaktes and failure will still happen. 

If you are already good at postmortems, then doing the first part is the same thing. Look at your processes, look at what you are doing and challenge the premise that it is the right thing to do. But it becomes before versus after.  

Guess what I lied, there are not two parts but three. The third comes from Agile practices. Part one needs to be done often on some regular basis. In Agile Scrum, this is called a retrospective. Where the finished product is not what is being discussed but the process of how we got there. Mistakes are going to happen but understanding the cause of why things went awry and making minor changes reduces the changes of them happening.  

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” (Einstein) – But maybe it is also not thinking things can go wrong and planning on first how to prevent them, and second how to handle them when they do.  

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain, I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  I do read all feedback, I mostly wont post any of them.

This Blog is a labor of love, and was originally going to be a book.  With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path.  I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content.  I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip.  I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.   AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information.Images without notes are created using and AI tool that allows me to reuse them.