I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
All the things that matter still matter, but they matter more
Hype tends to be, well, hyperbolic.
If you read headlines and social media posts about the use of AI in software development, then you would be forgiven for thinking that is the end of everything. No more developers! No more testers! No more SaaS! English is the only coding language! The death of technologies, practices and industries has been declared many times over the last few years - and yet they seem to keep on going.
If we step away from the hype and take a few deep breaths, I believe that we can see that, while AI will have a disruptive impact on software development, it will be one of amplification rather than dislocation.
How I stopped fearing the phrase, ‘I’m not technical.’
My heart used to sink when I heard someone say, ‘I’m not technical’.
Not because I think that everyone in the world should be a technical expert, but because those words were usually said by a digital leader to mean that, although they were in charge, they didn’t actually understand most of what their team did every day.
Sometimes the phrase was used to indicate humility: ‘I don’t have a technical background, so you’re going to have to explain things to me.’ But at other times it indicated a lack of interest: ‘I haven’t got time for all this technical nonsense – just get the job done.’ (You can imagine which I was most pleased to hear.)
Revealing invisible ingenuity
If you are ever in Paris and looking for something to do, then it is worth a visit to the Musée des Arts et Metiers. Don’t be misled by the name: although it translates to ‘Museum of Arts and Crafts’, you won’t find any William Morris wallpaper or Rennie Mackintosh chairs: it is a museum of technology.
What you will find is hall after hall of inventions, models and instruments, from the 18th century to the 21st century, charting the development of technologies that have shaped the world. There are early phonographs and radios, steam engines and looms, suspension bridges and space robots. There is a secret camera built into a hat, the preserved laboratory of Antoine Lavoisier, and Foucault’s pendulum, swinging backwards and forwards from the roof of a church, steadily measuring the rotation of the Earth.
Standing on the edge of uncertainty
The practice of software development is being disrupted.
This might not seem like a new phenomenon. Software development is a practice which seems to be subject to continuous change, in an industry which prizes disruption. Over my own career, I have moved from a world in which code was designed according to heavyweight, structured methods, before being written used bare and basic editors, and tested through intense manual effort, to a world in which code is designed, developed and released in short sprints, written in sophisticated development environments, and tested through an automated pipeline.
However, even though programming is not typing, the activity of writing code has been remarkably stable since the invention of high level languages: assembling logical constructs to make the computer do what you want it to do, and then putting one line after another until you are done. And then debugging it until you are actually done. And then continuously improving it, because you are never really done.
Programming is not typing
What does programming look like?
If you believe films and TV programmes, it looks like typing. In a fraught situation, where the hero’s technical sidekick is attempting to defuse a bomb, or ‘hack into the mainframe’ it looks like typing very fast. If it’s the hero who is doing the programming, it looks like typing very fast while wearing sunglasses. If it’s the villain or one of the villain’s minions, it looks like typing very fast in a room with blacked out windows, possibly surrounded by pizza boxes and other debris.
(In one notorious example from a police procedural programme, it looks like two people typing very fast on the same keyboard at the same time. I have no idea what the actors in this programme thought their characters were doing, and suspect that the scriptwriters didn’t either.)
Reasoning and reflex
I didn’t learn to drive a car until I was in my mid-twenties, and I found it difficult. It took me three attempts to pass my test, and a lot longer before I was a confident driver. But, as well as teaching me how to drive, the experience taught me the difference between reasoning and reflex: the difference between knowing what you should do, and doing it automatically due to muscle memory.
Later, I learnt the management lesson that, when we acquire new skills, especially those with a physical component, we pass through phases of unconscious incompetence (we don’t know what to do), conscious incompetence (we know what to do but we can’t do it), conscious competence (we know what to do, and we can do it when we think about it), and unconscious competence (we know what to do, and we do it automatically).
AI - a catch up guide to early episodes
Have you ever tried to start a major TV series partway through? You hear everybody talking about it at work, and it sounds thrilling. Then you watch the latest episode, and are baffled by names, places and relationships. Why is this woman so angry with that man? Why are those two factions fighting? And why are those people wandering in the wilderness, apparently disconnected from the rest of the plot? You switch to the series guide on your streaming service and realise that, to catch up, you are going to have to watch the three previous seasons. Perhaps you should just watch that cooking show again.
Trying to understand AI can feel like this. To many people, the appearance of generative AI a few years ago was a sudden, magic and unheralded event, followed by a never ending stream of releases, products and announcements. It’s hard to make sense of the present, let alone look to the future.
Your Moonshot doesn’t have to be a Moonshot
In 1962, NASA faced a difficult technology procurement choice.
They needed a guidance computer for the Apollo Moon missions. Did they go for a design based on new technology, working with researchers at MIT, or a design based on proven technology from their existing suppliers?
They chose the new technology: rather than discrete electronic transistors, they would use silicon chips, which combined multiple transistors into a single component. These chips weren’t like the chips of today, though: rather than millions or billions of transistors, they contained just a few transistors, each representing a single logic gate. Thousands of them were needed to build the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
Business sponsor translation service
It’s tough being the business sponsor of a technology initiative. You want to achieve an outcome; you are responsible for achieving that outcome; it’s your budget that is being spent; and you will be judged on the result. But you are dependent on people you don’t know, concepts that you don’t understand, products that you may never even see, and suppliers that you have never met.
Given how tough the job is, it seems like a good idea not to make it any tougher. However, because business sponsors are rarely experts in technology, they often accidentally make their jobs tougher without realising – sometimes just by saying a few words. Because business sponsors are senior leaders, the things they say have consequences: they prompt the people around them to take action. And, if the sponsor says the wrong things, those actions will be counter-productive.
Who leads?
When do you become a leader?
I was recently asked this question while on stage, speaking at an event. Given that I was supposed to be speaking about leadership, I should have an answer ready, but I have to admit that I was flummoxed for a while.
I thought about all the formal thresholds that we cross in our careers: from individual contributor to team leader; from a team leader to a manager; from a manager of people to a manager of managers; up to someone who leads a function or a business unit. Did any of these constitute the boundary of leadership? Sometimes – but formal career progression did not feel like the whole answer.
It’s okay to be overwhelmed by new technology (especially if you’re a technologist)
I’ve been overwhelmed by new technology many times in my life.
When I got my first microcomputer as a teenager, there was very little to help me make sense of it, other than the manual that it came with, some computer magazines, and the efforts of my friends, who were trying to understand their own computers. This new language seemed like a wall of gibberish, with no way to gain purchase.
When I first moved from a corporate environment to a startup environment in the dot com era, I realised that there was a whole new web based technology stack that had sprung up while I wasn’t paying attention, and that I needed to learn in order to lead my team effectively. The skills I had learnt over years of professional work suddenly felt obsolete.
Out of the shadows
Shadow IT is a failure of trust, and it is a failure we must fix.
The origin of the term ‘shadow IT’ is unclear, but you don’t need to know where it came from to understand what it means.
If you work in an IT department, it instantly evokes feelings of dread and horror: of insecure, unmanaged, poorly designed and unstable systems that business teams have come to depend on, and that you’re going to have to figure out how to manage and integrate.