A Little Rant about LinkedIn

Rant of the day: Why is Microsoft not caring about making the LinkedIn app a better app, a better mobile experience? Aren’t they using designers? UX specialists? Even AI? Aren’t they taking care of their brand and image? I mean, using this app on the iPad is such a displeasure.

If someone from Microsoft and / or LinkedIn responsible for this app: have tried it once for real on the iPad? Are you ok with this? Really? If you aren’t, and obviously cannot do anything about it, why are you still working there?

Rant off.

The iPad Pro on The Road for Office Work

Finally, I configured my personal iPad Pro with all my office tools. I certainly wish my job would allow me to use a Mac, but no.

The iPad is very good in this scenario with all the M365 apps (bleh). Battery life is 20 times better than my HP laptop, without the always-on noisy fans. I understand this device is way more powerful than the MacBook Neo, much more compact, three times more expensive for an inferior software experience. That is quite a paradox.

Today, I’m going to the administrative head office, a three-hour drive, using the office’s business bus, specially designed for workers on the road (sure, the Corporation wants always-productive employees!).

Life of an IT worker.

I’ve been working hard on a few presentations lately at work and one of the most satisfying thing is when I remove words or phrases without changing the message.

It’s funny how my interactions with my colleages is evolving since I’ve been using AI. My requests to them are looking more and more like prompts: I give them a context, state my needs and expectations and provide the expected end results, in that order. All the time. 🫣

Blogging in the enterprise is not a thing apparently, even with a headcount of 58K people. I spent some time today in Viva Engage communities to see if some people were there for blogging, even with a corporate mindset, but nothing. It seems that only corporate-related communities are allowed. Too bad.

The Future of Technical Training According to Microsoft

Today, I’m completing a four-day course from Microsoft (AS-104 if you are curious). It’s all virtual, of course, through Microsoft Teams, and instructor-led. We’re a group of 50 people from all around the world, primarily from the US, from what I can see. The one fascinating thing is how pushy the instructors are for us to use… Copilot. They use it all the time to answer questions and paste the answers in the group chat. They offer ways to utilize Copilot to prepare for the certification exam. Etc. Copilot is really their assistant, the undergraduate who’s doing the dirty job, the gopher, if you will. The course is so strictly structured and formatted that I’m seeing a future where there won’t be any instructors. Only Copilot. 😳

To everyone who is afraid of losing their job because of generative artificial intelligence (or one of its variations), now is the right time to ask yourself: am I giving my best at work? Don’t give your employer any reasons or desire to replace you with AI.

Fun fact: I keep a log (or a journal) of everything I do in a day at work. I’ve been doing this for decades. I always used digital tools for that but the guy who gave me the inspiration for doing this when I started my career was doing the same but on paper. I thought Incould improve his process. I did.

I often repeat this thought in my head when I’m in challenging times: “everything around me has been done by people not smarter than me.”. It’s inspired by Steve Jobs’ words from an interview he did in the early 1990s, where he was reflecting on how empowering it is to realize that the world is built by people just like us — and that we can reshape it too.

For the first time in twenty years, I don’t have any business-related apps on my mobile phone, except one for 2FA. No email, no instant messaging, no documents, nothing! I feel some sort of hard-to-describe relief.