Weeknotes #384 — 23-year break

Lining up at the start of the JPMorganChase Corporate Challenge

A fully-packed week with plenty going on. Multiple days of back-to-back meetings coupled with things happening in the evenings. And when things weren’t happening, the football was on. The football is always on.

This was a week in which I:

Have been really enjoying having an intern in the team. It has got me thinking about how much context someone gathers over many years of working that someone new to the workforce doesn’t have. The nature of the problems we deal with is also different to those in schools, colleges and universities — there, problems get set and the problem statement is unquestionable. Contrast this with work, where someone gives you a spec, you can review it, comment on it, and even change it until you get to something you all agree on. It’s a different mindset.

Met with my boss’s boss for an ad hoc catch-up. Our conversation got me reflecting that of the 27 years I have worked in investment banking, there have only been a couple of periods of significant growth. The first was the dotcom boom around the time I started my career and the second was the insane period just before the global financial crisis less than a decade later. For the rest of the time it has mainly been about doing more with the same (or less) budget.

Discussed our approach to a business growth project that has started to spawn sub-projects, and how we could make sure that the work is sufficiently joined-up.

Reviewed and circulated a specification document sent to us by the head of a department, with the expectation that we will help to develop their idea.

Reviewed another request from a different team who also want help, this time with dashboards and management information tooling. The requests are coming thick and fast at the moment.

Met with the owner of an internal system to discuss their approach to the collection of specific data, and to review the compatibility of the process demanded by the system with what we need to do in the regions we are responsible for.

Attended the final two training sessions for our document management project. The project team did some things slightly differently at each session. This, coupled with different questions from each audience, kept it interesting.

Met with our chosen training and workshop provider ahead of an upcoming management team offsite, giving them information about who we are and what we are trying to achieve so that they can effectively shape our day with them.

Also met with the venue provider for the other days of our offsite to clarify how things work and the options we have to configure our room.

Met with two of our functional heads to talk about long-term succession planning and any actions we need to take to prepare future leaders on our radar.

Joined a company-wide webinar to hear about our relaunched employee value proposition.

Assisted in putting together some slides for an upcoming governance committee meeting, tackling a difficult issue.

Had a wonderful random surprise gift of a set of AirPods Pro from my wife. I’d been toying with buying some for months but never quite committed. Having used them for a few days, I can report that they are every bit as good as people say they are. The noise cancellation is incredible and the sound is great.

Helped out with taking a family member to and from the hospital for treatment on Saturday and Sunday. It was lovely to spend some time with them on the journey and felt great to be useful, even if it was just a little bit.

Ran the JPMorganChase Corporate Challenge for the first time in 23 years. The last two times I tried to enter, in 2004 and 2005, the event was cancelled due to poor weather and terrorist attacks respectively. Fortunately, this year went off without a hitch. I felt as though I didn’t leave anything on the table, and at 49 years old I can probably say that I’m unlikely to beat this time in the future. David Seaman was on hand with an air horn to start proceedings.

David Seaman being interviewed at the start line, not long before letting us loose via the sound of his air horn.

Had a longer-than-planned Saturday club ride due to two punctures that our group suffered in quick succession. By the time we made it back, I was pretty sure that the other cyclists would have had their coffee and be on their way home, so I skipped it and headed straight home too. It was lovely to ride with some new faces, people who had recently joined the club or didn’t get out with us that much.

Met up with my oldest and closest friends for a weekend consisting of a barbecue, football and Formula 1. We had meant to go to the race at Silverstone, but the company we had bought tickets from went into administration the day before, giving us a clue as to why we hadn’t received our tickets. We made the most of it, though, and it was lovely to hang out together.

Enjoyed our latest Album Club evening, hearing Pavement’s first album, Slanted and Enchanted. I’ve now heard three of the five Pavement albums at Album Clubs.

Media

Podcasts

I loved Paul Ford’s description, on the Aboard podcast, of bespoke AI-engineered software being “like a weird shoe for a weird foot”, and that it doesn’t make sense to put software for one person into GitHub for everyone to see and use. It got me thinking about how faster and more efficient hardware has masked inefficient software implementations over the decades; shifting to vibe-coded applications for one user is taking this to extremes. In the episode, Ford also makes the point that people typically learn things like software architecture through implementations using known languages and frameworks. What happens when they are no longer doing this?

This passage in Ben Thompson’s Stratechery update about ‘The AI Stack’ reminded me of strategic thinking with a Wardley Map (“do we open source a component to undermine a competitor or do we slow down evolution through a dark art[…]?”), albeit one for an industry and not the insides of a single company:

The AI Stack looks something like this, starting from the bottom:

Semiconductor equipment makers

Logic fabs

Packaging

Memory fabs

Chip makers

Networking

Data centers

Model makers

Applications

Users

In the short run, as long as there are shortages, there is money to be made at every level of the stack; in the long run, once supply and demand come into balance, the most value accrues to whoever in the stack is able to integrate around a bottleneck in the stack and commoditize everyone else.

I learned from The Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast that “well over a third of the teachers in America’s History (high school) classrooms are coaches, and very few of them have any substantive education in history.”

Video

When we weren’t watching football, we carried on with season two of The Four Seasons. It doesn’t require a lot of effort, and is still making me laugh out loud.

Sitting in a hospital waiting room on Sunday morning, my attention was drawn to the TV in the corner, which was playing an old black-and-white movie. It turned out to be Jane Eyre (1943). I caught the last 20 minutes, and it completely sucked me in, so I’ve added it to my ‘to watch’ list.

Books

Nearly done with Tsunami Kids by Paul Forkan and Rob Forkan. It’s strange reading the end of the book, which is in part a celebration of what they achieved with the Gandys flip-flop brand, with the knowledge that the company recently went into administration.

Next week: Another two Album Clubs, and a long-anticipated family get-together.