Oh, wow. #Stanford?! IT? As in… the #STEM part of Stanford? 😮
“The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multiphase, multi-year project to address harmful language in #IT at Stanford. pic.twitter.com/cffMUKdy3J
EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action.
The goal of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative is to eliminate many forms of harmful language
(disability bias, ethnic bias, ethnic slurs, gender #bias, implicit bias, sexual bias…) in Stanford websites and code.”
Good night, and good luck.
– This is @DPD_Fr courier services, how can I help you?
– I’ve just received a notification about a parcel delivery planned for tomorrow… and your #IT systems have deleted half of our address. Let me spell it out for you, so your last-mile delivery person can do their job.
– Oh, I can’t, because it’s not yet at the #DPD Paris Agency.
– Sorry, what?
– The parcel is at a DPD Regional Center. Only when the parcel will be marked as “DPD Paris Agency — out to delivery”, will we have access to the data about your #parcel.
– But that will be tomorrow. And your drivers don’t carry digital terminals. Only printouts on A4 paper. So you won’t update the info over #3G.
– Yes, that is correct.
– So if we don’t change the A4 paper printout Thursday evening, the driver will not be able to deliver the parcel tomorrow Friday?
– Yes, that is correct. Call us tomorrow, so we can add the missing address information.
– [ silence ]
And now, the question. What do you do in such cases?
You’re, among other things, a #programmer with 22+ years of writing #code. You’ve studied #logistics in business school. You’ve built companies, managed film crews… Computers don’t seem like some obscure black boxes.
Do you scream at the call-center person who’s somewhere in Tunisia and barely knows the #Louvre is a museum in #Paris?
What do you do? Do you just watch tracking information update to “missing address, second attempt scheduled for Monday”.
How do you live with daily, hourly #fails by #apathy-striken people?
What kind of processes do you have in your life to try to convince someone that 197 cm is not the same as 199 cm?
Yes, that’s a conversation I’m having with a customer relations #employee… 🤯
“Creativity, the biggest determiner of #successful #executives, is killed in the #junior ranks. Maintenance of predetermined procedures is emphasized. This is how you end up with managers and not leaders.
You have a senior leadership that knows all the paperwork but cannot understand a problem and how to solve it.”
#Risk and #creativity. Again
I’m seeing how the mediocre teachers all over the planet install fear and disbelief in our kids’ capacity to create, very early in school
And so, we get excellent line #producers in #cinema (instead of executive risk-takers), excellent mid-level programmers in #IT (instead of non-conforming inventors), great shop-floor managers in #Amazon warehouses (instead of big-picture leaders)…
All gradually replaced by instructions-following #automation. 😕
Now, if you think even larger and recall that the #scientific method requires an ability to invent a good explanation of a phenomenon (versus the “read from Mother #Nature’s Book” for an induction from experience),
you get… people who make robots vs anti-vaxxers and flat-Earthers.
Same patterns on all levels.
O ye smart and all-knowing people of Twitter… please impart a bit of yer well-#cache’d #IT knowledge on me!
Was Amazon.com really using @fastly #CDN instead of its on CloudFront? Why? 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve been sent a link about it in… gasp… The @guardian — can’t believe it.
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