The Modern Manager Confronts Old Realities in an AI World
December 18, 2024
This blog post is the work of an authentic dinobaby. No smart software was used.
Beleaguered
I read and got a kick out of “Parkinson’s Law: It’s Real, So Use It.” The subtitle: “Yes, Just Set That Deadline.” The main idea is that deadlines are necessary. Loosely translated to modern technology lingo: “Ship it. We will fix it with an update.”
The write up says:
Projects that don’t have deadlines imposed on them, even if they are self-imposed, will take a lot longer than they need to, and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat. By setting challenging deadlines you will actually get better results.
Yesterday evening I received an email asking for some information related to a lecture we delivered earlier in the day. My first question was, “What’s the deadline?” No answer came back. I worked on a project earlier this year and deadlines were dots on a timeline. No dates, just blobs in months. We did a small project for an AI outfit. Nothing actually worked but I was asked, “How’s your part coming?” It wasn’t.
I concluded from these 2024 interactions that planning was not a finely tuned skill in four different, big time, high aspiration companies. Yet, here is a current article advocating for deadlines. I think the author has been caught in the same weird time talk my team and I have.
The author says:
Deadlines force a clear tempo and cadence and, fundamentally, they make things happen.
I agree. Deadlines make things happen. In my experience, that means, “Ship it. We will fix it with updates.” (Does that sound familiar?)
This essay makes clear to me that today’s crop of “managers” understand that some basics work really well. However, are today’s managers sufficiently informed to think through the time and resources required to deliver a high value, functional product or service. I would respectfully submit that there are some examples of today’s managers confusing marketing jabber and the need to make sales with getting work done so a product actually works. Consider these examples:
- Google’s announcements about quantum breakthroughs. Do they work? Sure, well, sort of.
- Microsoft’s broken image generation function in Copilot. Well, it worked and then it didn’t.
- Amazon’s quest to get Alexa to be more than a kitchen timer using other firms’ technology. Yeah, that is costing how much?
Knowing what to do — that is, setting a deadline— and creating something that really works — that is, an operating system which allows a user to send a facsimile or print a document — are interdependent capabilities. Managers who don’t know what is required cannot set a meaningful deadline. That’s what’s so darned interesting about Apple’s AI. Exactly when was that going to be available? Yeah. Soon, real soon. And that quantum computing stuff? Soon, real soon. And artificial general intelligence? It’s here now, pal.
Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2024
Comments
Got something to say?
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
