Jan Bosch
During the summer, I spent a week at a summer school on deep learning (DL). There were several reasons to attend, but one was to simply learn more about this trending topic. In many ways, it was a wonderful, though humbling, experience as the field is progressing at a rate that’s simply phenomenal. There are … Read more
As we’re entering the vacation season, many of us are going to take a step back and reflect on where we are in our professional lives. To what extent is our work aligned with our personal goals, norms and values? Does it help us grow and develop as professionals and as individuals? Is the direction … Read more
On a regular basis, I run into engineers who refuse to talk about business, monetization, customer value and related topics. All they want is to get a requirement specification, put on their headphones and start building. Their perspective is that business is the responsibility of others and that their job is to build what they’re … Read more
Over the years (decades by now) that I’ve worked in industry and academia, I noticed a common pattern in organizations that don’t perform well or that have great difficulty delivering on expectations: a culture has taken hold that explains phenomena in and around the organization in terms of factors that are not under the control … Read more
As I work with teams in dozens of companies, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern over the years. When I start to work with the team and we go through introductions and the preliminaries, everything looks peachy and wonderful. As we get into the work at hand and I (innocently) start to ask questions, a certain … Read more
With the constantly increasing connectivity and data collection in everything from websites to the Internet of Things, collecting accurate measurements about user and system behavior in the field is becoming increasingly feasible and easy. This is causing a shift in the way we develop and evolve systems, away from requirements and instead focusing on the … Read more
One of the human traits that I tend to forget about (and I believe many with me) is that we ignore well over 99 percent of all the information that our senses receive. If you don’t believe me, take the selective attention test as a case in point. In many ways, focusing our mental energy … Read more
A friend of mine got fired last week. I will not share any details to protect the innocent, but he had been with the same company for close to 20 years when the company, that has been struggling for years, decided that he wasn’t a good fit anymore. The pattern is a typical one that … Read more
Especially in the embedded systems industry, the approach has traditionally been to build products that get worse over time. We design, manufacture and sell a product to the customer, it slowly deteriorates and then we sell the customer a new product several years later (see figure 1). Even though the next product will be better … Read more
Although everyone talks about digitalization (software, data and AI) and the risk of disruption that this brings to companies, very few talk about how companies get disrupted in practice. Most treat it as an amorphous force that topples companies over like a force of nature that is unavoidable and where we are the victims. Of … Read more
