Something about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
Look up the organizational chart meme. Look at Amazon's chart. You'll know what's off.
The Ask
31–40 of 122 posts
Re: The Ask
#32The atrocious writing style makes it at least obvious this wasn’t written by AI. Silver linings.
Re: The Ask
#33Something about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
It's the writing of someone who has been writing articles like this for decades now, instead of your average blogger or journalist. Just enjoy the difference.
Re: The Ask
#34Something about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
To me, as a non-native speaker it feels like a series of interruptions and focus changes with no natural flow. Hard to follow.
Re: The Ask
#35Something about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
Very. Short. Sentences. That’s AI
Re: The Ask
#36For a senior manager, the main problem is organizational blinders: people not seeing the direct route (through fear, ambition, loyalty, etc.) Senior people get to ask the cross-cutting questions that others can't (and let the chips fall).
For line managers, they are deluged with impossible, specific asks and they have no real way of knowing if the team will be able to perform, or be happy to. They survive by maintaining fictions and blinders, and staying just ahead in chips.
I think he's underselling to say it's instinct; in law it's called ripeness, waiting for when something really needs to be addressed, and then ideally just reflect that in a way people can take on instead of taking control. The senior's job is not to intervene unless necessary, and even then to prefer activating others.
So I feel it's a project manager mindset to always be tallying asks; while a senior manager is really tracking issues and capabilities on a different timescale, doing the prep to build the capability to address the issue when it's ripe.
Re: The Ask
#37Something about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
Terminal LinkedIn brain
Re: The Ask
#38Harsh take: AI should replace most middle management. It is the easiest part of an organization to replace. The people making things should mostly communicate about company strategy, cross-team issues, and job requirements with an AI. There should be a handful of high-level strategy on top of the AI. The AI should have access to all the documents for the company. The middle management should be put in a spaceship alo…
A key job of management is to figure out what's actually going on, as opposed to just what people tell you is going on. LLMs are inherently gullible.
Human managers are inherently gullible; we've got no plausible path to unbias them. LLMs have at least one plausible path which is to train them to be a little bit cynical.
We're not going to call it "management" necessarily, but there is no question that LLMs are going to take over decision making from managers eventually. Why choose a monkey guessing what the evidence says you should do when you could have an optimised evidence-weighted statistical model making the bets? The only reason to use humans is there are still technical limits on how general the models are, limits that seem to be falling away at a pleasing rate.
Re: The Ask
#39This is extremely difficult to read. Can someone summarize the point?
Re: The Ask
#40Something about this writing feels off, but for the life of me I can't say exactly what.
It's the writing of someone who has been writing articles like this for decades now, instead of your average blogger or journalist. Just enjoy the difference.
Can confirm! I've been reading Rands for 20 years now