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:
This Christmas, give yourself the gift of knowing that your work isn’t boring
‘Sorry, this is the boring bit.’
When I hear those words, my heart sinks almost as much as it used to when I heard someone declare that they were not technical. In the field of enterprise technology, they normally mean that the speaker is about to attempt an explanation of technical detail to an audience which includes non-technical people.
Perhaps they are going to explain to a product manager why the system built for a hundred users can’t scale to a million without extra infrastructure. Or why it’s not a good idea to put a system which holds customer’s personal details into production without security testing. Or why, while it might be tempting to make the chat interface available to every user, someone has to pay for all those tokens.
How many placebos do you have in your diary?
In 1955, the researcher Henry K. Beecher published a paper called The Powerful Placebo, which described the placebo effect.
This is the phenomenon that, if you have two groups in a medical trial, and you give one group the drug being tested, and the other group a harmless substitute – a placebo – both groups will show improvement. If you want to know the true effect of the drug, you have to subtract the effect of the placebo.
Learn to fail fast? Technologists fail all the time
From time to time, organisations attempt to learn new ways of working. They attempt to become digital or agile or data-driven or innovative. These attempts come with some familiar ideas: that we should execute through cross-functional teams who are empowered to experiment. One of these ideas is that we should not be scared of failure, and that we should learn to fail fast.
These attempts sometimes elicit eye rolls from the technology teams, especially the idea that we should embrace failure. This is not because these ideas are invalid: in fact, they are welcome to technology teams, and reflect their preferred ways of working. However, technologists have a different relationship with failure than non-technologists.