#Blog

A few years ago, software engineering was a pretty great job market.

Then, in 2022, tech companies laid off 165,269 employees. In 2023, they laid off another 264,220 employees. So far, in 2024, they’ve laid off 124,517 employees.

It used to take very little time to find a new tech job, and now most of us have friends who have been looking for a new job for months, or even more than a year.

“Intelligence is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is the monster.”

“Eat rocks,” said Google’s AI, apparently confusing people with ostriches. Meanwhile, Apple decided the best way to sell iPads was to literally crush musical instruments. Welcome to the wacky world of AI marketing, where billion-dollar companies with genius-level employees somehow keep making decisions that would embarrass a sleep-deprived intern.

These facepalm-inducing moments aren’t just amusing anecdotes; they’re symptoms of a larger problem in the tech industry: a critical lack of wisdom. In this article, we’ll dissect why having the smartest people in the room doesn’t guarantee smart decisions, explore the crucial difference between intelligence and wisdom, and demonstrate how we can harness AI itself to help us make wiser choices. Spoiler alert: it involves dusting off some advice from good old Ben Franklin.

Let’s face it–the internet is a giant distraction engine.

Ever gone online to check the weather and somehow ended up watching a whole documentary about monarch butterfly migration? It’s like going to the store for milk and coming home with a live chicken.

The internet is designed to capture your attention and hold on to it like a puppy with a rope toy. And while that’s great for advertisers, it’s not so great for your own productivity or your precious and limited free time.

Once upon a time, a scorpion needed to cross a river. He couldn’t swim, so he asked a frog he found by the riverbank for a ride on his back. The frog was hesitant at first. “What if you sting me?” he asked. The scorpion reasoned, “If I sting you, we both would drown!” So, the frog agreed, thinking it made sense.

Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog. As they both started sinking, the frog asked, “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown!” The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.”

Yesterday, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was suddenly fired by the board of directors, and Greg Brockman, co-founder and president, quit in solidarity. Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, defended the decision in a company all-hands meeting. The only thing we know is that the company says Mr. Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications” with the board.

Ilya Sutskever has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto, where he studied under Geoffrey Hinton (the so-called “Godfather of AI”) and is one of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence. The new temporary CEO, Mira Murati, was the former CTO of OpenAI.

Community is a lot harder to foster than productivity. It’s also a lot more important, in the long run. Community is hard to build and easy to destroy. It requires patience, emotional intelligence, a willingness to trust, a willingness to be vulnerable, and a sense of humor.

Detour: Team vs Community

In the context of business we often borrow a sports metaphor and call the people we work with our “team”. Most of us are so used to it we don’t even notice its connection to sports anymore.

Years ago, my friend Doug – one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever worked with – was sitting at his desk at work, leaning back in his chair and thinking hard about the problem he was trying to solve. The CEO of the startup he worked for sauntered past Doug’s office, then stepped back a few steps and looked in at Doug, who appeared to be staring blankly off into the distance. He asked Doug “Why aren’t you typing?”

What is servant leadership anyway? What does it have to do with motivation, alignment, and purpose? I’ve been reading and thinking about that lately.

When I first heard the term “servant leader” I immediately thought I understood where it came from. Many of the worst managers I’ve seen seem to gravitate towards the role because of ego and a desire to be seen as better or more successful than others.