I am honored to have been asked, and I had a lot of fun chatting with Doug Austin and Tom O’Connor from the eDiscovery Channel about Teams, M365, and eDiscovery and trying to make sense of it all. Check it out below, and if you want to stay in touch on the topic, consider subscribing…
I’ve mentioned before that in some of the worst of my mental health struggles, I had a manager who helped me manage the process and was incredibly supportive of me doing what I needed to do, and I later had a manager who made the entire thing awkward and unbearable for me. This was at the same company. Nothing about the rules or the program changed, but my manager did. That made all the difference between me staying and being productive and walking out the door.
Most managers and even former peers are under strict orders never to say anything, positive or negative, when contacted as a reference for a former coworker.
To paraphrase, HR and legal folks know that if the former employee doesn’t get that position, everything they say will be used against them in a future legal claim that they harmed the job prospects of a former employee unfairly.
So it was somewhat shocking to see the CEO of Intuit not only say this but put it in writing:
The job market for people who can write code has fallen apart. Partly because of AI and partly because companies over-invested in engineers and tools that never could be as successful as they thought. (Remember when we were all going to be hanging out in the metaverse?) Of course, the people running these companies weren’t held accountable for those choices, but I’m past hoping that will ever happen.
So, now the mantra will be “learn AI,” at least until that market isn’t everything companies are currently promising and we go through this whole thing again.
It’s best not to get comfortable with anything in the current tech marketplace. The skills in high demand today won’t be those in high demand five years from now. If you’re entering college and embarking on a technology major, the tech will be changed by the time you graduate.
If the number they quote in the article about gaining four hours per week is accurate, that’s a massive change. In the last few months, many people in the industry have mentioned fixed-rate billing. It’s been an option for law firms for a long time, but it’s only gotten slight traction so far.
That might be about to change. Justifying the current economic model and investing in AI tools that save this much time will be quite challenging. The risks involved with “finding” more billable time are too high. I know; I’ve worked as a consultant before, and while it sounds great that finishing projects ahead of time frees you up to work on other projects, when those other projects don’t come in, you wind up short on your billable hour requirements and those tools that were supposed to make your work-life better, suddenly make it a lot worse.
As I read the post, I found it most interesting that so many customers have made it clear to Cloudflare that they have no interest in letting AI tools use their website content to train large language models. I hadn’t given it much thought, but I also don’t run ads or use my blogs as a side hustle like many others do. It’s easy for me to be uncaring about whether some information I share is being used to respond to someone’s AI prompts without linking to the site. I might feel differently if I depended on traffic to make this endeavor profitable.