Articles for category: Growth

9 hours ago

Greg Thomas

The Era of “I think this is the problem.”

We are exiting the era of someone knowing the answer and entering the era where everyone around the room can say – “I think it’s this”. During a call, everyone can bring up their AI tool du jour, copy and paste an error message in, and come back with a “I think it is this”. It’s not the answer; there is no analysis, there is no surety in what we are trying to solve. Having more information is great, but if it’s not directed to the solution at hand, it’s just more noise. Whereas we used to have people who

Counting Token Shock

Counting Lines of Code became… Counting Number of Unit Tests Generated became… Generating the number of class files became… Ensuring we had everything commented, which became… An unlimited number of TODOs in our code. And now we are counting Tokens of usage and surprise, surprise – we are gamifying and overusing them so that our metrics look inflated. I AM SHOCKED!!!! Yes, your team should be using AI. But if you’re measuring your team by their token consumption, it’s a lazy, easy metric. Instead, why not look at; As with development metrics of the past, the first metric identified is

2 days ago

Greg Thomas

Up at 5 am for Saturday Morning Cartoons

If you can recreate that magic, where kids would wake up in the morning, with or without cereal, and watch your show for 2 – 3 hours, to catch the best cartoons, the ones they loved the most, then you have something. If you can recreate the need for someone to show up, you’ve built something. If they rush into the kitchen to make something while trying not to miss the previews, then you have something. Take it, build up on it, don’t stop making it better. But that’s the level of magic you’re trying to create – that’s the

5 days ago

Greg Thomas

No One Person is the Meeting

If one person cannot attend the meeting, you need to cancel the meeting. The meeting should then be about why that one person is so critical to the meeting and what we need to do to remove that dependency. A meeting of one is only good for the one.

Worth the Travel?

Is your work worth the travel? Is what you are getting out of it – paycheck, experience, knowledge, teaching, training worth the travel? Does it get you all of those things or just some? Is it worth more in the long run vs the short run? If it takes 2 hours to get there, but you get compensated with meals, does that make up for the travel time? What if you need to stay late on Wednesdays? The only person you can decide whether your job is worth the travel is you; you’re the only one who can make that