May 9, 2023

Control.

Today I learned that 50% of the 10,500 employees at work are full time, remote workers. I’m happy to work for a company with such a strong Work From Home infrastructure. During the pandemic lockdowns, senior leadership discovered the company didn’t miss a beat; productivity actually improved a bit when folks were working from home.

There are plenty of roles in any company that must be accomplished in an office, but there are also many roles that can be worked from home. I have worked from home for over a decade and my career has grown in ways I didn’t think was possible. All of the people that report to me work from home. Our team earns accolades for our results.

Work From Home fears aren’t productivity based, they’re people and management based.

Automation.

Fast food chain Wendy’s is working with Google to develop an AI chat bot that will replace a human taking your order at a drive-thru window. They plan on beginning their testing in Ohio this coming June. Here’s the article on The Verge with the details.

This is intriguing to me, though a fair sized part of me doesn’t like seeing humans lose their employment to computerized automation.

In the automation arena, I expect my job of writing code will be replaced by AI in my lifetime. One of my greatest skills as a developer is being able to use search engines like DuckDuckGo and Google to my advantage. Now that chatbots are able to write entire applications (mostly by stealing from work shared on the Internet by real developers), it’s only a matter of time before those of us that don’t write the chatbots are going to be replaced by the chatbots.

Smile to the human handing you your biggie meal. They might not be there much longer.

Graphic from The Verge.