andyst

Possibly the website has been hugged to death, but the principle resonates with me from the headline. In the large and old enterprises I've worked with, there is such a stark shift from I suppose, lifetime service to the consultant economy as the workforce transition follows the boomer generation out, and forecasting where that might leave us.

Short term drivers like a bad quarter or to be seen "disrupting" as a measure of progress, rather then genuine demonstrations of skills, turf out tenured employees often mid-career.

Or perhaps being in the engine room of many companies, doesn't often give you the lifestyle you want anymore, so the race to the top is the optimal spot to go for. Even if it means going up and falling down a few times on the heirarchy, its worth it.

The value of the nature of not having custodians of certain crafts, like aviation or really at the guts of any industry, seems to me its really going to set us back towards really transactional style of operating businesses that are only financially engineered and not really innovating the product in a way they should.

just random thoughts around how to have a fulfilling career, when most of the effort is in sales & marketing, and not much in operations when the funding pot gets allocated across a business.

valve would have the money......

and programming is just typing!

well the good news is, you are exactly who they are looking for! you could just buy some merch though, which has the same effect

otherwise using ROIC or CAGR might be more optimal way to evaluate your investments

nation state owned airlines dumping prices into unprotected domestic markets

rising cost bases in legacy fleet costs, engineering costs. a lot of airlines fail near their capital renewal programs as fleet age > 25yrs

pure domestic competition beomes a race to the bottom between full service and low cost carriers removing any premium

in the australian market theres often comparison between how BYD/(chinese brands) may unseat Tesla (as the scale EV first mover), but I haven't seen what I think is the prize, which is BYD want to take on Toyota as the de facto king of global car making. They want the whole car market, not just EV and are already setup to take that on.

the AI umbrella has been helpful to my BigCorp to justify more machine learning work, or discrete optimisation and scheduling problems

agentic ai which is a huge buzz in enterprise feels more like workflow and rpa (again) and people misunderstanding that getting the happy flow working is only 20% of the job.

I (still!) have an uncle who had a similar mindset, broke his leg half way through a race and only realised when he stopped at the end, that he couldnt walk any further

finally when they had to (successfully) defib him during a race, that shook him into assessing his health not running for the sake of running

There's a mindset with distance runners that I have seen over and over, just sometimes way too much of a generally good thing

especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.

In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.

I somewhat resonate with this. Working in mature industries where competition has condensed down to larger players with enormous scale and embedded product distribution, don't need to compete _much_ on innovation or product, just on price.

I don't think specifically AI has done this compared to a broader view of constant stream of digitilisation of every departments function.

Orgs don't need grads to learn the ropes from the bottom and make their way up the career ladder, when the ladders might only be 3-4 rungs high now.

When seeing the approach to how Elon/DOGE applied themselves to air traffic control after the incidents, I'm not falling into the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This group is just incompetent and going to re-learn all the mistakes within each domain that led to industry getting to where it has through a series of hard won lessons.

the existing systems deliver the international standards for air traffic management that needs to move in sync for all parties, ATC, Airports, Airlines, Manufacturers and Regulators. Technology suppliers to each of those parties where they differ will need to be involved in anything material.

there are many systems involved to manage different parts of flight, are built to spec and integrated deeply across all the parties

even if the systems are old in some cases, they deliver the agreed standards, so updates need to be agreed via organisations like ICAO or IATA and rolled out via a predictable timeline through a managed change process

this is all integrated with human processes, such as for the flight deck

Having been through similar processes with family, scouring medical journals and trials for the answer as if its stack overflow, you're in a period of high stress I think I can understand that may have led to the authors perspective and expectations shaping the narrative here.

the australian economy digs up dirt from the ground and sells it for a lot, it covers all our issues. theres a lot more that could be said, but it fundamentally comes down to that

Having played counter-strike on dial-up '99 and not having unlimited internet time, the bots - Botman, PODbot, NNBot and many others using neural nets was ground breaking then.

The goals of those niche bots were certainly different but in some ways the recent hype doesn't surprise me as much having experienced that period too.

I reflect that the limited internet then drove innovation in offline play that had really stagnanted till recently, I'm looking forward to the first game that really pushes the limit with their NPCs using some of this new tech