In life as in film, you won’t get it perfect the first time. (Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash)

Good words: Take two

Alright! New week, World Cup is well under way (Cape Verde wow!!), and I’ve done a bit of reflection and reorganizing to clarify this series’ big picture. The topics that I kept wanting to write about each week were not necessarily aligning to what I said would be the purpose of this series (“…to explore how you navigate getting good words when it’s seductively easy to get words. And how that relates to keeping your engineering job and evolving with it”).

I also want this writing to dovetail with the PhD in Education I’ll be resuming in the autumn, so bear with me as we reset.

First: I need to remove any claims to show any connection between my topics and how you keep your engineering job. We can all see now (I hope) what a poopy clown show (or maybe sheep show?) working in tech can be. To claim I can provide any sort of insight that helps you beat layoffs is irresponsible and I’m sorry. It’s also not something you individually could control for several reasons, but ultimately protecting your working rights requires collective action. (Start or join a tech union. ✌️)

Second: It doesn’t really matter what your role or title is in terms of who I imagine the ideal reader is. If you’re going through a step change right now where your job changed pretty quickly and drastically from making to endless reading and writing in service to oversight of multiple, tireless AI tools, you’re who I’m thinking about.

So: we’re exploring how you navigate getting good words when it’s seductively easy to get words, and how this endeavour relates to evolving in your job.

I do know that all the previous thinking and writing was still important because ultimately, it’s all about how I keep tripping over lame and shitty workplace learning and knowledge sharing, and now there’s the adopt or die imposition of AI on every nook and cranny of your job when executives don’t even know what they’re talking about half as well as you.

As Cory Doctorow yet again validated what I was thinking and then said it with a bow and arrow into the heart: “Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge — the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working…” (this is from a Medium post, The world has moved on, but he talks more about process knowledge in Process knowledge).

I’ll leave you with this bouquet of links out to other sources for today (call it homework), and remember to reflect on what you read, see, and hear!

What surprised you?

What resonated with you?

What confused you?