I was in an AMA at work, and someone asked me what makes a good software engineer. I said: Someone who is curious and wants to understand why from many points of view (tech, product, customer, etc.), and someone who cares about the outcome, not that they were the ones to “get it” or “make the decision.”

The more I think about it, the more I realize that curiosity is the foundation. You need curiosity about the system you’re building, the organization’s actual goals, and especially about the people you’re working with. But curiosity alone isn’t enough, you also need to be intellectually honest about what you find.

The principle I try to live by is: I would rather be correct than right.

We’ve always had to figure out who to trust for expertise, but until now, that access wasn’t universal. Used to be the bloke at the pub who ‘knew things,’ or that friend of a friend who could fix computers (me as a kid), or books if you had the patience. Rich people had their ‘real’ experts on call, though Bernie Madoff shows how well that could work out.

The internet changed things, sure. Suddenly you could reach out to actual experts, find communities, and learn from people across the world. But you still needed judgment, because you could also find a community that agreed the earth was flat, so, you know, mixed bag.

What hasn’t changed is we’ve always had to figure out who to trust. What’s changing is how we get our answers, and who gets to sound like an expert.

A colleague recently said something that’s been rattling around in my head: “AI gives you speed, but it doesn’t give you direction.” And the more I use these tools, the more I think that undersells the danger.

I have been wondering how to think about AIs (or genies) and how computers are like bicycles for the mind, as Steve Jobs put it, and I think these tools take it further. They are more like motorcycles for the mind. They go really fast, and you better not treat them like a bike, because you need to know what you’re doing. How to handle that thing. You need to make sure you don’t try to go too fast too soon, or for too long, because you’ll get speed blind and… things will happen.

I was in an incident review recently where one of the problems was a human going too fast. This process is very manual, repetitive, and boring, and it rarely fails, so we skip some steps. That mostly works (see Why Do Things Go right?), except when it doesn’t. Ripe for occasional issues and likely in need of automation.

I believe we often skip steps because we don’t know why we do them. It’s not tedious for tediousness sake, it’s often there because it’s important. And until we have the automation, or maybe we’ve intentionally chosen not to automate it, we need to find some way of helping the human ’live the situation.'

You’ve probably sat through your fair share of meetings where time slips away as conversations wander aimlessly, not unlike being dropped into an unfamiliar codebase, with twisting branches all alike.

A colleague asked for feedback on a meeting they ran, and after sharing my thoughts, I realized my advice about meetings sounded exactly like how I talk about planning projects. This got me thinking: the skills for running good meetings and successful projects are nearly identical.