Professional Development – 2023 – Week 17

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/54585499@N04/

.NET

Move Cross-Cutting Concerns Where They Should Be in .NET (via Nick Chapsas)

Note: This is specific to MediatR. You create a pipeline behavior that handles a given request with a given response. You have to add the behavior at app startup. This is good for logging before an API call is actually invoked.

Career

5 Ways to Future-Proof Your Career in the Age of AI (via HBR)

  1. Avoid predictability. These models are trained on what’s already available; they are prediction engines. Find ways to include novelty in your work.
  2. Work on improving soft/professional skills.
  3. Build relationships with people and use those experiences to create novelty.
  4. Develop your personal brand. (I would have worded this to say be known for your human skills.)
  5. Cultivate expertise. The current technology is good at getting work started (e.g., draft emails), but your expertise in a field is the ultimate judge.

A Career Cold Start Algorithm (via SWLW)

Although the title is misleading, the algorithm the article presents for joining a new company is pretty solid. Step 1: Ask someone on the team for 30 minutes of their time. Step 2: Spend 25 minutes having them tell you what you should know. Step 3: Spend 3 minutes asking what the biggest challenges are for the team. Step 4: Spend 2 minutes asking who you should talk to next. Step 5: Repeat process until no new names appear.

Change Management

The Most Successful Approaches to Leading Organizational Change (via HBR)

  • Masterful — build capacity and frameworks; “I trust my people to solve things with us.”
  • Emergent — self-organized, few hard rules; “I can only create the conditions for change to happen.”
  • Directive — tell/sell, rollouts; “I can manage change.”
  • Self-assembly — initiatives, toolkits; “Launch enough and something will stick.”

Driving Organizational Change — Without Abandoning Tradition (via HBR)

Bringing in external change agents is often a lose-lose: The existing leaders become defensive of their current (non-working) ideas, and the change agent is rejected for doing the very thing they were hired for. The solution is to demonstrate caring about the intent (e.g., delivering great health care, helping diverse talent thrive) so they can join you in building the future.

Cybersecurity

The New Risks ChatGPT Poses to Cybersecurity (via HBR)

  • AI-generated phishing scams.
  • Duping ChatGPT into writing malicious code.
  • Regulating AI usage and capabilities.

Cyber Thieves Are Getting More Creative (via HBR)

  • Exploiting wire transfers by generating emails that have just enough truth in them to be plausible.
  • Stealing paychecks by gaining access to payroll sites and changing bank account numbers then reverting the changes.
  • Tricking people into helping the “boss.”

Project Management

Rescuing a project in progress (via SWLW)

  1. Stop everything.
  2. Take status of everything. Where does each project broadly stand in terms of size, scope, completion, and unknowns.
  3. Pick a smaller project that’s almost done, and redirect all resources to finishing that one up before working on anything else. Get something finished. Establish “completion discipline”.
  4. Only move on to the next project once the current project is 100% done.
  5. Do not add to the pile. No more new projects.
https://world.hey.com/jason/rescuing-a-project-in-progress-d31883f7