Tag: bigco

  • Do you even need a presentation?

    This meeting could have been an email. 🔗 Do you even need a presentation?

    Read more

  • Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?

    Larry Ellison’s debt-funded scramble to turn Oracle into an AI hyperscaler, from the January 2025 White House announcement of Project Stargate – as much as $500 billion over four years across 500,000-square-foot data centres producing 10 gigawatts – to a credit rating now a notch above junk and steeper interest rates from lenders. Ellison is…

    Read more

  • Big Tech’s PR Playbook for Overcoming Data Center Opponents

    The data center industry has imported tobacco and fossil fuel influence tactics: opaque nonprofit front groups sharing website templates and ad IDs, super PAC-funded influencers and sockpuppet accounts, and community forums engineered to keep residents off the microphone. It works because property tax limits have left municipalities dependent on exactly this kind of capital, and…

    Read more

  • Inside Nadella’s hardest year: Is Microsoft’s North Star also a noose?

    Microsoft’s early AI bet has become a threat to its own foundations: M365 is being bypassed by chat interfaces, GitHub is losing developers to Cursor and Claude Code, and Azure customers are getting the compute left over after Microsoft feeds its own AI products. Meanwhile $190B in capex, a stock down 24%, capacity shopping from…

    Read more

  • Relative to your interests, Tuesday

    Relative to your interests, Tuesday

    I have been on vacation for a little while, in Finland for the third time. Finland feels different than the other parts of Europe I have been to. Perhaps it’s because I spent my time there in rural Finland. But it also feels like most of Finland is rural. In that way, it feels a…

    Read more

  • find your customer

    Compensation theater: Everyone cares about the compensation (base salary, bonus, and stock). That’s the data they care about, but where did this pile of compensation come from? Who decided how big it is? And how is it allocated? It is a long, complicated, and large process that began over a year ago. Every meeting I…

    Read more

  • How AI change your software development organization

    How AI change your software development organization

    A catch-up with Purnima Padmanabhan, GM of the Tanzu Division at Broadcom, on what her team has actually learned shipping enterprise software with AI for the last year and a half: code generation is the small part, beautiful code is the new uncanny valley, and you cannot solve the agent boundary problem from inside the…

    Read more

  • When management is the bottleneck preventing enterprise AI ROI.

    Right now, many companies already have the technology they need to go much faster. The blocker is company systems that are mostly designed to prevent things from happening. The power is centralized and all the team members are treated like a risk vector. Exhausting approval cycles, super tight boundaries on roles, unbreakable title-based hierarchies, and…

    Read more

  • Doing nothing at work

    Argues many engineers should work fewer hours and at a slower pace, aiming for 80% utilisation and spending 20% of the workday away from the computer. The reason given is that performance at tech companies is dominated by outlier events rather than steady output. Summarized by AI. 🔗 Doing nothing at work

    Read more

  • How do AI Layoffs Work? Some Speculation.

    How do AI Layoffs Work? Some Speculation.

    Via geralt on Pixabay When an executives says layoffs were driven by AI, what exactly is the AI doing that removes the need for those humans? Here’s some dog-walk speculation. Decks, Meetings, etc. All the prep work around The Meeting. Things like: the agenda, slides, the pre-read, notes during the meeting, and followup tracking. There’s…

    Read more

  • The Ask

    Figuring out what the point of a meeting is when the Americans won’t just tell you directly. 🔗 The Ask

    Read more

  • Got your deck ready?

    Got your deck ready?

    Image by geralt on Pixabay. The mystery is why everyone is using presentation software for communication that is not a presentation. Predicable, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this post since first reading it. The mystery of this is that everyone complains about slides-driven work cultures, but the revealed preference is that people…

    Read more

  • The end of the meat-mouse

    The agency in agentic AI feels a lot more like giving the users – the humans – agency they didn’t have. That’s what’s making it useful for me, from sorting out dumb-shit home-networking incompatibilities, figuring out taxes, and otherwise sorting my shit out. When you unleash something like Claude code on all the messy and…

    Read more

  • Untitled post 53624

    If you have PowerPoint pillars, your organization probably has strategy BO. From The Octopus Organization.

    Read more

  • This is at big tech companies. Imagine how it is at but normal companies. Better or worse? 🔗 How good engineers write bad code at big companies

    Read more

  • The ultimate bike-shedding story, and, always make your own slides

    The ultimate bike-shedding story, and, always make your own slides

    Steve Jobs had a lot of feedback on the original calculator app. He sent the programmer on a rock-fetching canard, demanding changes each day and then finding new things he didn’t like. Eventually, the developer just added an extra window, below, that allowed Jobs to tinker with all the UI aspects. That ended the back…

    Read more

  • Survive the next meeting

    Survive the next meeting

    This is a mode I catch myself in where all I’m focused on is getting through the next meeting. “Getting through” means running out the clock so that it’s over, getting out of it without any new work, and especially without “getting in trouble” for something. Obviously, this is bad most of the time as…

    Read more

  • Always have a pitch ready

    ”Organizational interest comes in waves. When it’s reliability time, VPs are desperate to be doing something. They want to come up with plausible-sounding reliability projects that they can fund, because they need to go to their bosses and point at what they’re doing for reliability, but they don’t have the skillset to do it on…

    Read more

  • How to avoid working too much

    How to avoid working too much

    Surviving and Thriving in a BigCo If you work in a large organization, you’ll like this new video series I did with O’Reilly. Check out the intro above, and here’s the topics covered: Cultivate your Style and Character. How does a BigCo Work? Mentors are Nice, Champions are Better. Asking Questions Leads to Homework for…

    Read more

  • When you hear the word “input,” run – avoiding unpaid work at work

    When you hear the word “input,” run – avoiding unpaid work at work

    Thriving in a BigCo: Avoiding homework, and assigning homework I’m working on a video series with O’Reilly based on my working and thriving in a BigCo talks. Here’s a little storyboarding I did on one topic to avoid having too much work that’s not part of your job, a concept I call “homework.” The young…

    Read more