Victor Rozek
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As I See It: When Gates Was Young
December 9, 2019 Victor Rozek
You would have to be of a certain age to remember how excited and optimistic users once were about computer technology. It all seems Paleolithic by today’s standards, but those heavy boxes and bulky monitors were wondrous tools and novel toys in their day. Technology transformed us into Harry Potter and a personal computer became our magic stick.
My first computer was a PS/2. No, not a PlayStation, an IBM Personal System/2 that boasted a whopping 2 MB of RAM and 20 MB of disk storage – who could ever need anything more? It also contained a VGA graphic cards. …
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As I See It: Speech On Steroids
November 11, 2019 Victor Rozek
When Guttenberg first started cranking out Bibles, the religious authorities who dominated life and discourse in the 15th century were cautiously optimistic. Not only could it save monks years of lugubrious work copying and illustrating the volume, but they assumed this new technology would be used solely to propagate a Medieval version of approved speech.
But of course that didn’t last long.
Since its Feudal inception, communication technology and free speech have always had a turbulent and tenuous relationship. The easier it became to disseminate information, the more efficient the spread of heretical, seditious, and unpopular ideas. And the more …
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As I See It: Quitting Time
October 28, 2019 Victor Rozek
Unlike relationships based on mutual regard, if you have issues with your job, your job doesn’t care. It’s just there, waiting to get done, by you or someone else. Nothing personal, just business.
It’s more of a one-way relationship, with all of the emotional highs and lows experienced by the employee. And while managers have three options for dealing with undesirable workers: fix, move, or fire; employees have but one option for dealing with undesirable jobs: quit.
But even when the workplace becomes intolerable, people often contrive to get themselves fired because they don’t have the courage to stand up …
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As I See It: De-Meritocracy
September 30, 2019 Victor Rozek
I don’t recall high school being a particularly joyous experience, but it wasn’t debilitating either. It was mostly leaden, with an occasional splash of color, spiced with alternating doses of bravado, awkwardness, and frustration. It wasn’t optimal, but it seems remarkably benign compared to today’s reality. A recent study of kids in an affluent Silicon Valley high school “found that 54 percent of students displayed moderate to severe symptoms of depression and 80 percent displayed moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.”
Beyond the very real anxiety-inducing possibility of getting shot in the classroom, Daniel Markovits has another explanation for the …
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As I See It: Restless
September 23, 2019 Victor Rozek
The more entangled I become with technology the more restless I feel when I’m away from it. The nervous system gets accustomed to the stimulation, the steady drip of dopamine from the little validations, the comforting illusion of wide-ranging intimacy, the ease of attachment without exertion. The Internet is fast food for lazy, twitchy synapses. And I’ve become conditioned to crave it.
Like an alcoholic past due for a drink, I look around for my digital bottle.
It’s on the coffee table. A swipe of a finger and I have access to a distorted world of dramatic headlines, lurid images, …
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As I See It: Paper Or Plastic
July 8, 2019 Victor Rozek
Technology managers often grapple with a thorny employment dilemma: Do they hire for specialization or suppleness; specific or general knowledge; narrow but deep, or broad but shallow. It’s the quandary of expert versus generalist, and it’s like deciding whether you want to buy a hot car with no utility, or a utility vehicle with no hot.
Some of the ambivalence arises from the fact that both are contextually useful and necessary. A handyman by definition must be a generalist; but you probably don’t want a handyman performing your bypass surgery.
Yet according to Jerry Useem, things are shifting noticeably in …
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As I See It: In The Face Of Bad Behavior
June 3, 2019 Victor Rozek
I can’t remember precisely what was worrying my manager that day. But as we walked down a long hallway, she expounded on some issue having to do with one of the employees under my supervision. Whatever the specific problem, she seemed more troubled than was common, and in an attempt to reassure her, I put my arm around her shoulders and said: “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
That was it. The whole incident took no more than three seconds and I thought no more about it. But months later, over a quiet cup of coffee, she shared the …
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As I See It: A Taxing Situation
May 6, 2019 Victor Rozek
A few weeks ago, millions of us took a deep, resentment-laden breath before signing our name to a check and sending it off to the federal government. Taxes, the eternal pebble in the workingperson’s shoe, are as unpopular as they are necessary, and remain the subject of endless debate over who should pay and how much.
In a system rigged to favor those with money-wielding lobbyists, IT professionals are part of that vast pool of middle-class dupes who neither make so little as to be exempt from taxes, nor so much as to be able to avoid paying them altogether. …
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As I See It: Why The Long Face?
April 8, 2019 Victor Rozek
For an increasing number of Americans, the elusive search for happiness starts and ends each day with screen time. Smartphones, symbolic of a larger attachment to, and dependence on technology, have become the fifth appendage, glued to their owners like fake fingernails. They amplify and simplify, offering seemingly endless relationships without the need for relating, and limitless connection without the bother of bonding.
To keep the voracious social media beast fed, most of us have become both content providers and consumers. Everyone, it seems, is flogging their own reality show. Each day we post our next episode and anxiously await …
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As I See It: The Useless Class
March 18, 2019 Victor Rozek
My father-in-law recently had a cancerous lobe removed from his lung. As surgeries go, it was relatively serious, but also relatively common. In an age of organ transplants, a lobe removal is no longer particularly noteworthy. What is notable, however, is that the procedure was performed by a robot.
Robotics is part of the so-called fourth industrial revolution that includes companionable fields such as AI and biotech. In aggregate, they are poised to radically transform the economy. But although the word “transformation” has become a new-age descriptor for optimistic change, its consequences are purely contextual. For every automated medical procedure, …
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