Category: Uncategorized

• An oft-rescheduled and contentious meeting resulted in a resolution to work together more often and more closely, which is the right answer.
• I made progress on (many of) the things this week!
• By speaking freely about what I’m working on (for a change) I’ve found folks who are interested in the results, interested in the process, interested in helping, or who might combine their work and mine to make something even more interesting. Of course! Yet I quickly forget that this is usually the case, especially when I’m feeling sheepish about my progress.
• My hygiene and nutrition has been adequate for another trip around the sun. Many happy returns!

• Every Thursday I do a ladder of deadlifts – a couple light warmup sets, a handful of medium-heavy work sets, a heavyish couple/few reps, and a couple of legitimately heavy (for me) ones. I go double-overhand as long as I can, switching to a mixed grip once the bar starts to slip out of my hands. That used to happen around the end of the work sets; this week I got all the way to the final “legitimately heavy” set before having to switch grips. Getting better!
• I finally managed to schedule some unpleasant diagnostic things I had been avoiding, a volunteer stint at the school district, shoulder PT, and close a lingering needless account by riding the momentum of just getting started. Just chipping off a chunk of a big problem and getting started is an underappreciated skill. (And it’s astonishing how deeply broken the US healthcare system is even for someone as healthy as I seem to be.)
• The people I support are visibly responding to my coaching. That’s a win every time!

I’ need’ll start to keep track of wins as they happen; trying to remember all that happened last week is not easy.

• My “plan” has been reviewed by my team and my boss without much objection – time to double-check it for intelligibility and broaden the audience.
• One conclusion of discussion last week is that there’s widespread disagreement about how well we understand our users. This leads me to believe that the real answer is “not very well.” This is a win in that it makes they way forward much clearer. (There might also be some confusion around users versus customers here.)
• My boss’ team meeting is about to get a lot spicier – he’ll have some news as usual, but we’re all expected to bring statuses (though not statusing (future article)!) and discussion topics. I’m full of that stuff, and it’ll be good to have the opportunity to display accountability (future article).

• Good Friday Spring Holiday – this day off caught many at work by pleasant surprise.
• A chat with the SVP of Engineering reminded me that I’m overdue on publicizing and gathering support for the high-level version of my plan for the department. My goal for the week is set!
• While Swift syntax is distinctly weird to my “C-like” early Javascrip-trained eyes, plowing through the Apple-provided tutorials is helpful. Somewhat. Even so, the use/placement of dots in something like the following is distinctly odd to me:

VStack() {
	Image(systemName: "pin")
		.imageScale(.large)
		.foregroundColor(.accentColor)
	Text("Placeholder text for now")
}
.padding()

Yeah, I’m team tabs.

• It wasn’t COVID-19, just a sinus infection that dripped into crevices and alarmed passers-by. I’m nearly 100% now.
• Nothing caught on fire while I was out.
• The hackathon a few weeks ago was inspiring enough that I’ve started to learn a little but about iOS app development to fulfill a personal project. Since my last real coding experience was a bunch of kooky javascript stuff around the turn of the century I’m well out of my depth, but it’s both fun and frustrating; there’s a point at which I’m familiar, I’m familiar, I’m familiar with the concepts in a tutorial and then whap I’m met with something totally baffling. As the ultramarathoners say, RFM.

It’s spring break, that awkward nearly month-long period when employees with kids start disappearing for a week at a time. Every year the challenge is to make sure that people have prepared their teams for their absence; that enough is done and questions answered (and backup help secured) that whoever remains can proceed without much trouble, and especially that the person’s absence doesn’t come as a surprise.

When I asked each person this week “what do we need to do to prepare your team for your absence” each person’s answer started with what they’ve already done. That’s a big win.

Last week was all about an off-site meeting involving the product and engineering groups.

(What does off-site mean in today’s remote-first environment? Never mind.)

• It was a good set of sessions! in particular, the hackathon presentations were funny and inspiring. Enough so that I’m tempted to get back into coding a little. Maybe I could hack(athon) a bit one day.
• My team really came together working on our “elevator-pitch-style” team charter. I have some homework to do to set us up for the last step, but it’s a pleasure to collect the good thoughts of good people trying hard to improve.
• A coworker made their displeasure with the past UX regime abundantly clear in a group setting, and I decided I would not let it bother me. Even so, it did, for a bit. But later when we talked about it and I told them I had decided not to let it bother me, it actually no longer bothered me. It worked!

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts on LinkedIn and elsewhere crowing about how ChatGPT could be used to perform UX tasks. Examples:

• How do I use ChatGPT for UX Design
• How to use chatGPT for UI/UX design: 25 examples
• 138 ChatGPT Prompts: UX Research

The enthusiasm is great but this level of shortcutting worries me. It’s okay to ask ChatGPT to find things to read about a topic if you’re fine with some of the results not being appropriate or even not existing. But I don’t think it is fine to ask it how to do something or to perform research on your behalf. ChatGPT’s emphasis is on delivering something that looks sensible, nothing more.

ChatGPT is not a knowledge model, it’s a language model. If you’d like to dive into just how ChatGPT works, Steven Wolfram has a great explanation in his article What is ChatGPT Doing…and Why Does It Work?

The core idea is that ChatGPT is very good at figuring out what a very likely next word might be based on the prior words it has chosen, the prompt that it was given, and word frequency and proximity data derived from a huge amount of copy scraped from the internet. Since it doesn’t actually know anything it does a great job of making plausible-sounding English¹ of the sort you might find anywhere on the net. Since the internet is the training data, the quality of the output is only about as good as the average quality of internet writing, which is not fabulous.

It’s important to remember that there’s no attempt to make sure that what ChatGPT returns is factually accurate. Bloggers and reporters experimenting with ChatGPT have accused it of making things up or “hallucinating,” but this complaint assumes that accuracy should be expected. It should not. ChatGPT is just trying to be plausible.

I’m not saying not to use ChatGPT. It’s great as a memory jogger, or to avoid the tyranny of the blank page. It makes a perfectly shitty first draft that you can then do real work on. But if you just accept what it has to say you are choosing a below-average and likely nonsensical result. And if you use it as a substitute for doing the work that ChatGPT is simulating the output of, you are lying to yourself and others.

Since ChatGPT produces superficially plausible output, hiring managers are going to need to scrutinize a candidate’s work more closely, and quiz a candidate more carefully. (Yes, we should already be doing this.)

On a Slack team I’m on there was a recent debate as to whether or not an engineering manager should accept ChatGPT output as the answer to a coding test, if during their regular duties a new hire would be allowed to use resources like StackOverflow, which often provides code snippets, Google Search, or even ChatGPT. What do you think, given the above?

1. ChatGPT can produce reasonable looking Python and other languages; a co-worker successfully asked it to return JSON in response to a bit of copy where someone asked for an appointment on a specific date and time. [↩]

I’m light on wins this week. The most challenging part of posting wins each week is being conscious of them!

• I wrote two blog posts this week, and without waiting for the weekend. I find that I’ll write a little explainer for someone in the normal course of business, mentoring, etc. and realize that it would make a pretty good short post. (This might be my main source of content.)
• I’ve an idea for another quick post re the favorite topic these days: ChatGPT. People’s un-ironic embrace of ChatGPT as a substitute for actually doing the work yourself is understandable but alarming. It’s going to cause us to look at people’s work a bit differently for a while. (Actually, an idea is only a win of you execute on it, because ideas are cheap.)

Don’t interrupt the user’s natural behavior. Enhance or extend the natural behavior, but remain compatible with it.

While I worked for Belkin we made a remote-controllable plug-in switch module. You would plug this thing in to the wall and then plug a lamp or something into it, and it allowed you to control the lamp with your phone, turn it on or off, set a timer, etc. It was great, it sold pretty well, it was totally DIY-able, and pretty understandable. But folks who used it were ultimately lukewarm about it – they didn’t love it. It interrupted the natural behavior of turning on and off the lamp. Instead of going to the stem of the lamp you had to either use your phone or push a button on the unit, which was at outlet-level on the wall. If someone turned the lamp off the old-fashioned way you could not use the unit to turn it back on without ALSO turning the lamp on the old way, blunting its usefulness.

A person has thousands of hours of practice turning on and off your lamp in the way it affords. And suddenly they and everyone else in their household needs to stop doing that and do some new, unfamiliar, and potentially awkward thing to just turn the lamp on or off.

Later we sold the same guts in a device that replaced a wall switch. People were much happier with this because there was nothing to get “wrong” – if someone pressed the wall switch to turn the light off, you could still operate it with the phone or as a normal wall switch. It fit naturally into people’s existing behavior and enhanced it.