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Today is a day at the office which means an iPad-only day to take notes. I love those days. The iPad is such a great device for this use case.
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Hard Times Are Sometimes Needed
When things go wrong at work, when numbers don’t add up to meet high sales expectations, only then people starts to question things. It’s only in these harder days that we can really start to find new ways, reimagine how we do business. Those hard times are sometimes necessary for a company to evolve.
Looking at you Apple1.
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I’m also referring to the company I work for presently. ↩︎
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When Will IT Support Guys Learn?
The CEO of the company I work for (450 employees) called me today over Microsoft Teams because he was seeking for help and explanations for a problem with repeated authentification requests when using Microsoft 365 services on his devices (an iPhone, an iPad). He wasn’t sure why he was getting that many requests. After calling the IT department for support, he was baffled by the responses he got for his problem: reboot your phone, uninstall Apple Mail and re-install, that type of shitty responses. After a few tries, he finally got the “real” reasons: iPhone aren’t supported officially and weakening the security posture of the whole company, he should get an Android. What a shitload of bullshit, which is often typical from IT guys who don’t understand or know Apple devices. I’m so tired of this, after all those decades.
Back to my call with my CEO, after trying to understand the situation and find a sound explanation, I told him that the type of answers he got was unacceptable. We are an IT company for god’s sake! He was shy of admitting the same and surprised by this nonsense. He is the CEO, a smart guy. We should do better.
The iPhone is not weakening the security posture of the company, some IT support guys are1.
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I don’t want to generalize but this type of support from unknowledgeable IT guys is still way too much prevalent these days. ↩︎
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Here's Why I Hate Template In Office Work
Using templates in office work can sometimes be counterproductive, leading to less original thinking, reduced engagement, and fewer creative problem-solving opportunities. Templates can make it easy to fall into a routine of just filling in blanks, resulting in more generic outputs and a checkbox mentality. This reliance on templates can also make it challenging to adapt and innovate when a task doesn’t fit the template. To keep creativity and innovation alive, it’s helpful to use templates as a starting point while encouraging team members to think critically and adapt as needed.
Some of my colleagues are highly dependant on them, I’m not. I’m staying away from them. It’s a creative thinking killer.
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This Microsoft Word bug is really starting to get on my nerves. It’s been going on for weeks now.
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Overrated x 1000
Microsoft 365 or Office 365, if you prefer, is so overrated. Microsoft is the master of selling licenses but when it comes down to doing real serious collaborative work with Teams and the rest of the software suite it falls apart really quickly. For example: trying to collaborated on a Word document, creating comments and assigning a task toi someone… nobody knows really where the task is actually saved! And no one seems to get a notification… or nobody cares to look at the activity tab in Teams because it is so overwhelming! Oh and don’t get me started with Microsoft Loop, a pale copycat of Notion. And should we talk about Visio? I prefer not.
I’m so fed up of working in an IT field where everyone is short sighted with Microsoft. I mean, there are so much more powerful collaborative apps out there.
/rantoff
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Why on earth in 2024 a company like Checkpoint still ships 32-bit software like a MDR client for Windows Server 2019? I mean, come on!! It’s like shipping a parallel port on a MacBook Pro!
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On Presenting
Just completed a one hour customer presentation this morning. It was the culmination of a six-week project that shoud lead to bigger opportunities. I love doing presentations and I’m really comfortable doing so in front of people, especially when it is directly related to my field of expertise.
Each time I prepare such presentations, I always think about Steve Jobs keynotes. Always. He was a model for me. And still is. There is a little bit of his way into my presentation delivery: setting the stage, telling a story, and a « one more thing » whenever possible.
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In my day-to-day work, I’m benefiting so much from many mentors that I had a chance to meet during my career. They don’t know it, but they helped me so much to become what I am today and how I work with my other colleagues. Someone said: we are the sum of people we met in our life. I like this a lot.
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Yesterday at the office, during a web conference, one of my colleagues, probably around 24 years old, called me a boomer! I responded: Hey, young boy, consider take ChatGPT for a ride and ask him what is the “X” generation is? I felt insulted.
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Yesterday, while writing and editing a report for one of our clients, I used ChatGPT for two different use cases. One use case was to ask for a summarization of what “firmware” is and how critical it is. The second use case is to define the pillars of a data management and governance policy in the enterprise. On that one, I asked for more details about managing unstructured data. The ChatGPT results were mind-blowing. I know a lot about this specific IT field, and I could validate the correctness of the answers. I saved a lot of time because of ChatGPT.
But what about my ethics?
Should I write a disclaimer in this report that says GenAI was used to put together some portions of this report? Is the client ready and mature enough to read this disclaimer? Will he understand that ChatGPT is in fact like an assistant to whom I asked to summarize what a data governance policy is? How do I cite my sources?
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Yesterday I did a 20-min presentation on how to take advantage of ChatGPT and GenAI tools at work, for my colleagues. Many of them didn’t learn anything because they already experimented with these tools. For others, they learned quite a bit and I saw their enchantment in their eyes. This reminds of 1993 when I gave a similar presentation about tools like Netscape, Newsgroups, Gopher, and Mail and how to use http requests. Today, we need to learn how to create effective “prompts”.
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When people are nervous and under pressure, their worst tendencies often surface easily. 😌
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I have been tasked to create a short presentation to my colleagues on how to take advantage of ChatGPT in day to day work. That will be a fun one to create. I love those little special projects. 😊👨🏻💻
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I’ve been granted a Microsoft Copilot license at work for testing purposes. I have a love and hate relationship with Microsoft software in general. This will probably extend to cover Copilot as well. I shall not be deceived by this video. I will see.
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I hate it when I get this feeling of losing control of my agenda at work. I’m not used to this. 😩
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☝🏻 Thought of the day: collaborative software or services enabling better collaboration within a team is overrated or overestimated. If you are a loner at work, you’ll stay a loner, with or without a collab suite. 🤷🏻♂️
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I use Notion quite a lot at work to help me manage my workloads and projects. It’s quite a powerful and flexible tool, rarely seen these days. I appreciate every minute I spend in it, to the same level I experience when using Apple Keynote.
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I’m still surprised and baffled when I see coworkers with so limited knowledge of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. I mean, beyond typing words and writing simple calculations. 🤔
