HH- 007 Teaching my 80-year-old dad ChatGPT and my new book on Being a Sr. Engineering Leader

I Taught my 80-year old Dad to use ChatGPT so he can Sell Functional Mushrooms

My dad’s a sales guy and always has multiple businesses going on at the same time. He sold trucking insurance for years and also has a company where he puts vending machines into stores etc that for years prior were selling CBD. Now he also outfits vending machines with computerized screens to show ads on them. It’s hard to keep up with what he’s doing to be honest but I really admire his drive.  We geek out on all of the projects we each have going on at one time and talk often on the phone since we’re about 4 hours away from each other. 

So anyway I saw him down in San Diego a couple of weeks ago and he told me about how he and my brother have partnered with this company to sell functional mushrooms. So when we were out to lunch, he told me about the emails and web site copy he needs to write, and then I showed him ChatGPT. He signed up, and started using it for his business. He’s so happy that he can do this himself and not have to rely on a side writer to do it for him.  He even generated a press release. Yeah, that spells trouble for writers ahead. But I’m happy for my dad. He can do all this himself with this AI helper, and he’s loving it. Goes to show how everything is changing and at a faster rate than we’ve ever seen.  And this is just one example - even senior citizens are getting into it.

Now thinking back to the birth of the web and what followed on from that it took a while for my dad to get involved and I think that happened when he one day got an email account via America Online. And later he used the web to find info and read like many people did. But today with chat gpt etc. he’s in there a lot more actively working with it to create stuff to power his business, a lot faster than the last wave of technology. It’s certainly quite a different thing going on these days and a sea change from a technology perspective. This stuff is powerful. Even 80 year olds are using it, from what seems to be an early mass market time.

Authenticity and Creativity in the Time of AI

I have been writing furiously with my own brain on my next book which is for now called Being a Senior Engineering Leader: The Hourglass Approach to Relationship Building and Communication. I’ve been using a googledoc this time to do the writing and I am in love with that because I can write this book anywhere on my phone, like last week when I was waiting for hours to watch my daughter perform at a dance convention in LA or while we were at Knott’s Berry Farm when she and a friend went on the GhostRider roller coaster 7 times in a row.  

For this book, I share personal stories and some stories from interviews of others. I’ve interviewed 50 engineering VPs and CTOs as part of the research for the book, and from that research I derived themes that I wrote about. The themes that I am writing about are mainly about relationship building and communication as a senior engineering leader, and how to cultivate first teams. It’s been a fun project, and I’ve met so many great leaders during the interviews. I’ve learned a ton. I’ve been writing about the process of writing this book on Mastodon so if this interests you, follow me there. 

I have been using ChatGPT to give me ideas to refine the title of the book. I have not put my book text through ChatGPT as the thought of that frankly scares me. The text as it is now, is what I have created. There is something about the struggle of writing and the creative process which I hold to be important for works of creativity. I care about this text. I care about the authenticity of the text.  I can’t see coauthoring it with an AI. I could feed it through as a proofreader however I don’t like that idea either. Guess I’m feeling oldschool about that. Feels risky.

I do think though that I could plug parts of the book into ChatGPT and have it generate discussion questions for each section of the book. That is something I’m considering. For now though, this book is flowing textually from my mind and I like it. I don’t want to relinquish or water down the creative process of this work. Imagine a world where everyone did that. There is something unsettling about this. The struggle of creativity can be quite troubling and uncomfortable but when you get past the problems you face and solve them in your creative work, it’s a sweet feeling. I think that’s a special part of writing. Do you know what I mean? 

My next step is to follow through on the permissions I need to acquire for the participants that I’m quoting in the book anonymously for now. Once I get that done, I’ll put this on leanpub and then I’m going to send this to publishers. It’s the process of “write the book you want to write and then send it to publishers.”  And the nice thing about this book is that it is a SHORT BOOK. And I suppose that fits the content since it’s a book about being and becoming a senior engineering leader.  Who has time to read a long book? Not me. I’m also deliberately trying not to overengineer this book. It will be finished soon as I am taking a pragmatic approach with it, which is something I learned from being a senior engineering leader myself.  And I do have somewhat of a forcing function since, spoiler alert, I’m starting my second VP role soon, so when the time is right, I’ll share more about that. I’m super excited.

Dynamic Reteaming Cohort Course was Last Week

Since I last shared a newsletter I had been quite busy working on my online cohort course on Dynamic Reteaming. It ran this past week using the Maven platform. I had a nice group of students who actively participated and I’ve learned so much. In the process of preparing for the course, I went over years and years of materials I’d developed having given talks and keynotes around the world on Dynamic Reteaming.  I have done former in-person workshops with Yow and with qCon in the past. It was fun looking back on that material to see what I was thinking back then and how I wanted to adapt material for this week’s course.

It was an online course and I tried to make it interactive with a combination of slides, breakout room activities and a smattering of liberating structures-inspired activities.  I have no idea whether I will teach another course like this again. That’s the fun of experimentation. You do the thing, and then see where it leads you. What will be next after that? I don’t know and to be honest I really like the freedom in that.

The Second Edition of Dynamic Reteaming is Now on Audible

Another thing that just happened is that Dynamic Reteaming, Second Edition is now on audible. I’ve been a squeaky wheel with my publisher on this for like 3 years and it finally happened. It’s different than version 1 especially in the second half of the book with the chapter on team calibrations and planning your reteaming. Overall I think the second version is more complete and polished.

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading.  Here’s how I can help you:

Reach out to me via email if I can help your teams as they go through change or if you need help building software. I’m taking on new consulting clients.