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Car usage happens in different ways. (1) You can buy your own car, drive around and do routine maintenance and repair. (2) You can lease/rent a car where the lessor takes care of maintenance and repairs and charges you a fixed fee + fuel (3) You can hire a taxi short or long term and pay a negotiated rate which also comes along with a chauffeur.

You don’t have a fixed mindset of outright ownership of option 1 whenever you want to use a car. Outright ownership is a liability which is offset with overall running costs over years compared to leasing/renting and hiring a taxi. Code is similar. Every line of code written by you or your organisation is a liability that will be offset only by long term returns on the deployment.

Code maintenance has always been difficult. Code once written never stays in the original environment it was written. There are ecosystem updates, security requirements, business needs, operating system changes that needs constant update to the code. This constant adaptation is required to keep it alive. This constant adaptation over time leads to poor documentation resulting in loss of institutional knowledge, poor hacks to meet the deadlines compromising security and increasing architectural debt, insufficient testing leading to bugs over time accepted as undocumented features which will survive future reverse engineering efforts.

I have often observed that when I hand a over a well architected, documented and tested code after an engagement; then come back a year or two later, the code is spaghettified. So any code how well written it is, it stares down the path of poor maintenance. The more the volume, the poorer is the maintenance.

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When I interact with my clients, one thing they say is that “I can build any software I want from scratch with Gen AI”. It has become so cheap that I do not want to buy software any more. While creation is cheap, it is not easy to inherit volumes of code and keep it running as per our needs. Every line of code you own is a liability, it is not an asset. Only your own USP should be your code, the rest should be someone else’s code.

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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.