Talking to a C-Something-Something
Talking to people outside your bubble is fun. And you don't even need to look left and right, your bubble has horizontal borders too.
It's a Scaling Issue
In 2022, I attended a conference called hub.berlin1. Once everybody got into networking mode after the show, I found myself talking to some C-Level Executive of Siemens Something (I believe). After we casually chatted about his amazing smart home setup that adjusted his boiler temperature according to his shower schedule, he showed me his newest project which was about selling CO2-Emission certificates by growing trees. He told me he would compensate local farmers growing the tree according to the tree's size and all they had to do was to upload a picture of the tree.
When he showed me said pictures, I was asking:
How do you handle the scaling?
I was talking about the picture; normalizing/scaling the actual size of the tree without having to introduce a normalized object as reference.
His answer:
Well, the farmers down there are all about mouth-to-mouth marketing, so I expect getting some 100 on board and the rest will follow.
HE understood scaling his enterprise.
Since his take on the question sounded smarter, I let the conversation go his direction.
Diminishing Returns
More recently, because of REDACTED, I had the chance to talk to the managing director and the enterprise architect of some bigger company. While talking -- you guessed it -- AI, they opened up about their concerns about hiring juniors. They claimed that most of their job interviews showed that juniors can't program without AI assistance anymore.
I thought: Great, their interview process works and they can filter according to their criteria. Good for them!
THEY meant (probably): The current pool of available juniors does not meet our requirements for long-term investment in personnel, and we are pessimistic how this will affect us in 5 years.
Which tells a lot about the company and its proclaimed role in training juniors2.
So What?
I really like these kinds of encounters. They show that there is so much more to learn about what you are currently doing. You don't have to explore new areas or domains for new input, just within your own domain is so much more you know, but don't really know. Or can be interpreted in vastly different ways. Which I find amazing.
Footnotes
I was able to recover the name of this one, because I knew that the closing keynote speaker was supposed to be Robert Habeck which bailed last minute. Later that day, the government announced the Alarmstufe des Notfallplan Gas, the second of three stages of the german gas emergency plan. Luckily, I didn't make the talk anyway, as I was completely wasted after partying the night in Berlin. So I didn't really miss anything anyways.
Which is a rather problematic one in my opinion. But this is another blog post (already in the making).