AI tools like ChatGPT are absolutely fundamental to technology work, especially anything to do with software and ops work.

If you are not enabling and encouraging usage of these advances in productivity in your workforce you are putting your competitive edge at risk

Last week I created a multithreaded Python script that creates CSV output scanning accounts and regions with even some nice emojis and status bars as it runs using my AWS/config file as input.

I did that in 10 minutes with ChatGPT, and it worked flawlessly.

Recently, I helped lead tracking down IAM keys and secrets, across multiple AWS Accounts and Regions.

Several years ago, this task would have taken me some solid hours of Googling and Testing to script this with Boto3 in Python. Mainly because I never remember all the AWS CLI and Boto3 nuances

Good for you mate ❤️ The emotional side is just as important

I actually pivoted and put it all into RoamResearch not long after that! It’s much better now and by using Readwise with my Kindle it pushes new highlights into Roam as notes

The danger of this term, indeed any such term, is when it is used by organizations already lacking awareness of the levels of pre-existing dysfunction. Buzzwords and clever presentations never fix systemic issues, once the rot has set in a more direct and forcible approach may be essential:

Where the idea of "scrappy" came from was never openly stated by the decree - its origins come from tech industry buzzwords relating to a company's ability to be resourceful, agile, and efficient, primarily when operating with limited resources.

Such an example highlights the danger of a lack of organization awareness in senior leadership being disconnected to the "work-as-done", and why more layers of middle management will not, (if you'll pardon the pun!), manage themselves Out of the Crisis:

The result was sadly predictable. More chaos, misdirection, missed deadlines, and a further decline in intrinsic motivation. While the employees may have believed the "scrappy" intent was honorable, it would not help them win playing the already well-entrenched extrinsic motivation game.

I once worked at a company where a senior leader, under pressure for new ideas and needing to improve employee motivation numbers, in addition to fixing flat growth numbers after years of prosperity, decreed to an engineering organization that people needed to be more "scrappy".

The results are sadly predictable, organizational technical and system debt proliferates, urgency and critical efforts are mis-directed to whoever yells loudest usually the most entitled aka the HiPPO), objectives are often missed leading to reforecasting and endless re-organizations

The situation stems from many factors: poor organizational goal alignment, over-indexing on extrinsic motivation for pet-projects, not enough respect paid to continuous improvement objectives a.k.a technical glue work

This quote from Andrew Stotz, Transform Your Business With Dr.Deming's 14 Points, sums up perfectly a classic organization anti-pattern I've seen in many workplaces.