I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
I dreamt I was in a business meeting. I was paging through a magazine while someone else was talking. I was listening, but only with half my brain. A man (my manager perhaps?) said, “Anne, let’s step outside.”
He told me I needed to put the magazine away and pay attention.
I felt at once ashamed and aggrieved. The meeting was moving so slowly. There was no reason I needed to stop reading the magazine to understand what was going on.
Here I am 58 years old, retired for over two years, and I’m still dreaming about men telling me what to do.
I’m glad I’m not in tech anymore
I’ve been “vibe coding” an investment management system and it’s at once exhilarating and discomfiting. I can’t believe how fast I can develop new features. I couldn’t even contemplate implementing my options wheeling and flow asset allocation model without it.
It’s disturbing because I really don’t understand the system I’ve built, even though I can validate what it’s doing. I haven’t equipped it with trading access for my Schwab account. It can only read transactions and positions. And I have security guardrails built-in. But have I gone far enough? Could a rogue AI decide it wanted to do trades for me? Doubtful, the way I’m building it. But impossible? Maybe not.
Some professional software engineers aren’t pleased with the new all-AI all-the-time reality:
In the best of times, working in tech and especially in data science was challenging. Executives literally asked my team to “do magic” on more than one occasion, ignoring that data science isn’t magic but a tool to be used where appropriate in supporting and automating end-user workflows. I often worked on legacy software that didn’t even have the basic deterministic functionality it needed which should be the basis for any probabilistic capabilities built with data science and machine learning. And, there were the men. Wherever I went, I was assumed incompetent while men were assumed competent.
I don’t miss it.
I thought I would, because I really did enjoy some aspects of building software and machine learning systems: the smart people, the chance to use my brain on a daily basis, fun meetings sparring about which approach to take or even which objectives to pursue.
Add to all the other unpleasantness in tech the incredible push to build more more more faster faster faster with AI and I’m glad I’m no longer in that field.
And then I was up at the ski resort
In my dream, the setting switched to a ski resort. I was looking for my car which someone else — a man, I thought — had driven up there for me. Why? Why didn’t I drive there myself? Why didn’t I know where my car was?
I think this dream was asking: Anne, who are you right now? Have you fully left corporate tech work behind? Have you left behind relying on men to facilitate your participation in the activities you love (like skiing)?
I recall only snippets of the dream, but those landed hard with me this morning.