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When web 2.0 became the norm, the about of misinformation grew a lot. The more the people were able to write anything without getting embarrassed of being proven wrong, the more the misinformation started coming out. Over time I started learning on how to assign weightage to what I read and have a small set of trusted sources, then I was able to navigate misinformation well. The flood of forwards in then email and now whatsapp which often looked true often have failed even reputed news agencies.

An example of such a forward was the ‘O-Yes’ operating system that circulated in the late 90s. Every college internal magazine’s editors fell for this forward and featured it in their magazines. Even now, Google search’s AI overview lists part of the email as the OS features without debunking it is as a myth. I fought really hard to disprove it during my college days and ended up with a lot of wasted effort as it still got published.

This is called Brandolini’s law, the amount of energy that is required to refute misinformation is orders of magnitude larger than the effort needed to create it. There are another class of problems where if you fight misinformation then you are at the risk of losing your membership/status in the community. For a very long time in India, you cannot tender 10 rupee coins as people formed an opinion that they are fake.

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The more you are engaged in rapidly evolving landscapes, the more you stumble on this problem. With Gen AI, we are even more hit with misinformation that seems very close being treated as real information. The tool is available to the masses, yet there are fewer individuals who can prove/disprove. False experts, an offshoot of advanced beginners are on the rise due to these tools.

Before Gen AI, whenever I used to interact with the executives, I could sense that the tone of conversation is to understand about problems and solutions deeper. Nowadays I observe a marked shift in the tone towards “oh, I know this stuff, tell me something I do not know yet”.

One solution that often works for me, is to ask for the source of the claim or statement. People struggle a lot to admit what they gained without understanding the source. Questioning the source often works in a live setting where you are either in a meeting, 1-on-1 conversations or talk event like round table. In high stakes conversation, I go with ‘I agree’ and say where it may work and then follow up with why it does not work everywhere else. Due to the effort asymmetry, it is necessary to reserve the strength to confront only the ones that are absolutely necessary.

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At my workplace, I could sense very readily who has travelled a lot and who has not. Even in those who have travelled, I am able to observe the differences between those who travelled a lot within urban spaces and those who have experienced significantly different cultures.

The one trait that stands out is they often turn up to learning situations with an empty cup. Well travelled people accept that there are multiple normals and multiple ways of living and doing things, this primes them to question status quo, accept new ideas and also handle new situations with a calmness that is infectious. They are also very comfortable about who they are and often found not wanting to impress others.

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These are the common top traits that I have seen that makes them stand out

  • Learning mindset
  • Ability to read the room even when people are not speaking
  • Ready to experience a wide range of cuisines, they are not picky.
    • In general they become less polarised in almost all subjects
  • Conversation starters, often able to connect with anyone on any topic and build stories
  • Sense of calmness and composure even in very new situations

A bonus that amplifies the above traits are having worked in offices across different locations both within the country and outside. When working in a new location, you have to very quickly blend in to be part of the team by adapting to local culture of that place. Our work is a team sport, the more people you meet in individual or team setting the more you become a good team player who stands out at work.

Always look for the experience that is going to frequently put you into new people situations either as a form of leisure travel or official travel. See the magic of how fast are you able to grow as a person.

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Demoes are always concepts, they are not a showcase of capability instead it is an artistic impression of what is possible in the end state. A frequent repeated pattern in the enterprise software I see is that – someone builds a something eye catching in a short turnaround time, it gets coverage and people are assigned to take it production and then it stalls like how the loading icon appears when you try to watch a hd movie with a poor connection.

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I had been an advocate of rapid prototyping & development and XP practices all along my career. It is in my best interest to find increasingly faster and sound ways of developing software. The first problem to solve in software development is never programming, it is to figure out ‘are we building something that people would want it very badly?’ Building something was expensive so people had to be extra careful to understand if they are going down the right path. With advent of more and more easier programming tools, the building part became easier and easier to the point right now that we can do lots of work in an extremely short window.

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This paved way for ‘Let us build first and check if it works’. This is where several people stumble and I am reminded of the infamous developer quote ‘It works on my machine’. ‘Works’ means different to different people. Productionising an application is far from development completion. It involves architecting, designing, testing, certifying, securing, scaling, monitoring and on and on. The UX has to be top notch, architecture should be easy to scale, design should be able to add more components with less effort, when scaled and distributed it should take advantage of economies of scale and bring more returns.

Another bigger problem I see with the current state of development is that zero to one has become an easy to solve problem but people are stuck at level one and very few have the capability and grit to move beyond the starting point. What has in fact happened is that the starting line has moved from zero to one, the difficulty of getting to the finish line still stays the same. I feel it is momentary that people are getting carried away and impressed by the quick turnaround time.

Only when all the parts of the cycle from start to finish are transformed to a rapid development pace, then demos will be an engineer’s showcase not like an artist’s impression of how the finished product will look like; which is easy to demo and hard to ship