Posted on by Nick Korte

AI and Automation: Repeatable Patterns for Learning, Consulting, and Growth with Erik Gross (2/2)

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How many questions should you ask before offering your opinion? If you’re working as a consultant in tech, Erik Gross would advise not offering your opinion until you have the full context of the problem to be solved and the organization you’re trying to help. Erik’s recommendations for being successful as a consultant follow a repeatable pattern. And just as the consultant needs context to be effective, the learner needs context like an understanding of terminology when learning a new technology.

In episode 295, guest Erik Gross shares his latest entrepreneurial endeavor and why he’s considering moving to full-time entrepreneurship. Erik will explain the AI and automation space, share some of the interesting tools in that space and their value in the business world, and make some recommendations for further education.

Original Recording Date: 09-07-2024

Erik Gross is a developer, an architect, and an entrepreneur who has been very active in the tech space over the last 10-15 years. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Erik this time, check out Episode 294.

Topics – Identity Crisis, A Pattern for Learning and The Expert’s Curse, Success as a Consultant, Entrepreneurial Growth and Pressure, Landing in the AI and Automation Space

2:49 – Identity Crisis

  • If someone builds a business around something (creating training content, for example) and that is no longer their main focus as a business owner, do they start to wonder what the job really is now (almost like a small identity crisis)?
    • Erik says this absolutely happens and shares some examples from his experience with The Tech Academy.
      • Erik says he wasn’t the one who really knew how grow and run a team, feeling for a while it was a failure of his. Jack was the one who knew how to do these things. But, Erik accepted this was a skill that needed work and started thinking about ways to improve. Even if we achieve success in one or multiple areas, there will be other areas in which we can improve.
      • Nothing is going to be perfect. Erik shares how proud he is of the curriculum The Tech Academy has to offer, but he also knows it could be even better. Right now Erik is working a project to review all courses one step at a time and capture what needs to be improved (over 1300 hours of content to review).
      • “How much more could it serve our students? How much better could the product be? It’s already really good. That kind of iterative improvement thing…that gets me excited.” – Erik Gross

5:22 – A Pattern for Learning and The Expert’s Curse

  • Erik had to build expertise in a new area to get his newest entrepreneurial endeavor started. How can people build expertise in the emerging AI (artificial intelligence)? Or is changing your focus to this area merely chasing something new and shiny?
    • Erik has developed a workable pattern for learning new things that he’s refined over time. But it first took making mistakes and then making adjustments to his approach.
    • Erik used to learn things the way we’re about to describe and no longer recommends it.
      • Erik gives the example of learning React.
      • He used to approach this by finding a current real-world project to build with React. This would only make him frustrated.
    • Here’s the pattern of learning Erik recommends for himself, his students, and his coaching clients.
      • When learning about a new area, Erik identifies the terms in that area he does not know, and before building anything, Erik will define those terms to ensure he understands what they mean.
      • The term “state” is used frequently when working with React, for example. It was important to clear up the meaning of this term in the context of React due to its overuse in other areas. Do this for all other terms unknown to you.
      • Find a simple tutorial that ONLY teaches that subject. If we continue the React example, Erik points out most tutorials he found to learn React included other technologies such as JSX, Babel, and TypeScript at a minimum.
      • “At a minimum, they were teaching all 4 of those subjects in one tutorial, but they rarely clarified that they were teaching you 4 things. I finally found one that taught the simplicity. You know what React is? It’s 2 JavaScript libraries…. So, all this React library is really doing as one of its core functions is that I can use some text to create HTML, and it makes parts of that easier. And I have a reusable chunk of element on my page. Cool.” – Erik Gross, on the shortcoming of tutorials to learn React
      • Listen to Erik describe what happens and what the learner misses when trying to understand how React works and other tools like JSX are added into the mix.
    • To re-state this learning process in general:
      • Find and clear up your understanding of specific unique terms.
      • Find a simple tutorial focused on only the technology you want to learn about.
      • Then, try to build something of your own devising, but keep it simple!
    • Erik says if you can do the above 3 things, you will usually be able to approach a production problem with that specific technology.
    • Nick likes the foundational, focused approach because it allows you to add more components and other technologies.
    • “I’ve done this more times that I can count, and it’s the curse of the technology educator. We assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the student…. It’s really hard as an expert to genuinely remember what it was like to be a beginner. It’s really difficult. You have to consciously try to do that. But when you do, you produce curriculum that is accessible to anybody….” – Erik Gross
      • Listen to Erik describe this happening with some of the curriculum he built for a JavaScript course.
      • Erik has a passion for the STEM fields and reminds us that too many educators often make this mistake without knowing we’ve made it.

12:25 – Success as a Consultant

  • Nick references the discussion with Erik from Episode 267 focused on what is happening in the learner’s mind and meeting the person where they are. The technology instructor has to do this, but Erik has also been a consultant. Nick feels the consultant can use their role to educate as well. How are the roles of the educator and the consultant both similar and different from each other?
    • We spoke to Dale McKay about being a consultant in Episode 288 and Episode 289. Erik would highly encourage listeners to go back and listen to these!
    • Erik says there is a difference in approach to consulting vs. teaching something as an instructor, but it starts with your audience and what is happening with them.
      • Erik was a contract technologist for many years, including work as a cloud transformation consultant. He tells us people may resent consultants brought in to help a company. In Erik’s experience, sometimes he was welcomed, and other times was not.
      • A consultant can run into challenges when dealing with SMEs (subject matter experts).
    • Erik would sum up the successful pattern for being a consultant as “listen more than you talk.”
      • “Most engineers…in fact, probably all of us, are hard wired to solve problems. When you’re early in your consultant career, the moment a problem comes out of a client’s mouth you instantly mentally start solving it. And sometimes you even start solving it out loud, which is a big mistake. For me it has everything to do with the fact that you actually don’t have all the context yet. You’re making a fundamental engineering mistake, which we all do from time to time….” – Erik Gross
      • Context can be things like the ramification of making a specific change to a system, other systems a specific system may be integrated with, etc.
      • A consultant has expertise and usually knowledge of a business domain, but they don’t know the context of the company they are working with in full when they begin. The job at first is to be quiet and listen.
      • Most people want to talk about themselves and the problems they have. Erik says the consultant needs to ask enough questions so that once they give advice, it is valuable to the audience you are trying to help (an engineering leader, a subject matter expert, etc.).
      • The consultant is not stuck in the problem a team of engineers at a company is trying to solve. Hopefully the consultant has gathered information from a number of perspectives within an organization before deciding to give an opinion.
      • Avoid giving advice and opinions early on in an engagement. You do not know enough yet to fully understand what the problem is.
      • “If you take that approach as a consultant, there will be a moment where they trust you. And when they trust you, now when you go to teach them something, they will listen. If you do it a moment before that shift, they are going to be resistant to you trying to teach them anything. That’s been my expeirence at least. …A lot of fundamental differences between that training and consulting thing, but make no mistake about it – there is a point as a consultant where you genuinely do have to teach them things. Just don’t make the mistake of doing it before you have their trust that you’re genuinely an authority. The fact that they hired you or your company for a whole bunch of money does not make you an authority at all. That’s got to be earned. And you earn it by asking questions and understanding.” – Erik Gross, on a consultant’s role
      • As we ask more questions, our questions get better. The continued questions also indicate a genuine interest in what the customer is struggling with. Erik has given opinions in the past before asking enough questions, and it was a mistake.
    • Do people ever get tired of answering that next question?
      • Erik says if the person asking is genuinely interested / finds something fascinating, people do not mind answering more questions.
      • “You can’t fake genuine interest with someone. They’ll know immediately. But you can create your own interest. You’re in control of that…. I’ve never experienced it that people get tired of answering the next question when they know you genuinely want to know or you’re genuinely acknowledging something that you actually really find admirable or cool about what they’re doing or that you’re fascinated by.” – Erik Gross
      • Erik demonstrates this by asking about an Albert Einstein picture in Nick’s background.
      • Finding interesting things about other people or the situation they are in is a skill we can develop.
      • Erik says you can ask some personal or private questions if the person knows you really care.
    • Nick thinks this is a great approach to take if you’re the newest member of any team.
      • One of Erik’s favorite places to visit on the internet is Not Always Right. It shows you all the wrong ways to interact with people. Many of us have met someone new to a team or organization who tries to tell us how awesome they are. Erik would encourage us to not be that person and to ask questions of others based on a genuine interest in learning about them and what they do.

21:50 – Entrepreneurial Growth and Pressure

  • Let’s go back to Erik’s desire to possibly pursue entrepreneurship full time. It’s an interesting take in a job market where we are seeing a lot of layoffs. Is that pattern part of the reasoning behind Erik’s thinking?
    • Erik says he feels a little insecure when there’s only one source of income. If there is an expense to be paid, he finds it helpful to ensure that exact amount comes from 3 different sources.
    • Erik gives the example of bringing on a new team member as an entrepreneur / startup founder.
      • It’s a critical decision to bring on another person, and Erik tells us he makes the decision right before he really needs the person but doesn’t wait until things are super urgent. Waiting too long to hire a new team member can result in a poor onboarding experience and cause other problems.
      • To hire someone new, Erik needs to secure in advance at least 3 times the amount he will need to pay an employee.
      • Erik describes meeting a candidate who had valuable skills but who he could not yet hire full-time. This person had valuable skills building custom software in the AI and automation space. Erik was honest about his situation with the candidate, and the candidate expressed her desire for full-time work. Erik shares that he later closed another client engagement that allowed him to hire this specific candidate.
      • Erik feels it was the pressure he put on himself to close more business based that made things happen. He was pursuing something he wanted (to scale the business and hire the right talent).
      • “I’ve had a lot of failures in life and a lot of successes, and I’ve learned the successes usually come from throwing myself into a situation where I have to perform…. The fact is…you can always choose to give up. But when I put myself in a situation where I’m like, ‘you have to do this,’ you grow. And you start to demonstrate to yourself…we are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for, but sometimes you can’t learn that until you just literally jump in the ring.” – Erik Gross
      • In our society we might hear messages about pressure being bad or putting us under stress. But we grow when we’re under pressure. Big business targets require us to exert pressure to achieve them. The pressure begins internally, so we have to determine how much of it we can tolerate.
      • “If you can put a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself and perform, you start to build a culture of people around you that thrive on that. And the kind of people that really don’t like it leave. Now, I am not advocating in that being a jerk. That’s got nothing to do with pressure at all. But yeah, that’s what I’ve found to be real for me at least.” – Erik Gross
    • How do we increase the pressure on ourselves without crippling our performance? How can we find the right amount?
      • For Erik, if something is a big jump but doesn’t seem completely silly, he will do it. If the risk is too great to the people around him, Erik won’t pursue something / he will say no.
      • “It isn’t just about you. For any one of us, especially entrepreneurs…every moment you have during a day when you apply your energy and creativity to something is precious, and no matter what kind of a life situation you have, those moments that you’re putting into that entrepreneurial journey are moments you’re not spending somewhere else. It has to be worth it. And if you take that entrepreneurial journey or whatever activity it is you’re putting all that energy into and put that other unbelievably aspect of your life (your friends, your loved ones) at too much risk, that’s not ok.” – Erik Gross
      • Erik will do some risk but not too much. When we last spoke, Erik mentioned he knew he was not going to be the executive who could build The Tech Academy. He was the educator and trainer and put the pressure on himself to allow the business to scale, bringing Jack on as co-founder.
      • We can find out our own tolerances for risk by experimenting in lower stakes situations, for example.
      • Erik mentions The Power Offer as a way to de-risk decisions. Building something only to watch it fail months later in the market can be risky.
      • “If you can find a way to corral that risk, then do so. But you can’t let fear hold you back…. Have a positive enough opinion of yourself…to know that you’ll never truly stay down. I think that your confidence and certainty in your own abilities is the most valuable asset you have. I’ve got a lot of really cool assets in terms of technology skill and writing and teaching. Great. They are not the most valuable thing I have. The most valuable thing I have is an unkillable certainty in myself. I didn’t always have it. Went through fire to achieve it. But you have to be willing to jump into the fire sometimes.” – Erik Gross

30:17 – Landing in the AI and Automation Space

  • How can the technologist add value and knowledge as it relates to AI (artificial intelligence) without shifting all focus there?
    • What the media does not do a great job of is defining terms.
    • We should remember that AI is many things – ComputerVision, robotics, etc. There are categories. The popular thing we’re calling AI right now is usually generative AI centered around natural language processing.
    • Many automation tools that are low code or no code type solutions get lumped into the AI category, but they really aren’t AI. When we refer to the AI and automation space, they are separate things.
    • If you’re not building expertise using generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude, you are doing yourself a disservice. You can at least use these to improve your own personal efficiency.
    • Erik shares the genesis moment of the business he’s working on now.
      • In the 2010s, his development work centered around .NET and its MVC framework
      • Erik got exposed to JavaScript and Node.js. Node is a great training tool that can be used to quickly create an API project for someone to learn how to work with APIs. Erik started to want the same kind of thing for C# (a low effort, easy way to create a nice training environment), but he could not find anything.
      • Last May he decided to see what ChatGPT could do to solve this problem. This was a really smart decision because what Erik wanted to solve was very precise, unique, had defined context and constraints…all the things needed for a good prompt.
      • Within 45 seconds, Erik got a perfect answer.
      • “Generative AI changes everything. It changes everything.” – Erik Gross
    • More enterprises are increasing their willingness to let power users leverage low code or no code solutions for buidling in-house automations.
      • “You can deliver value more rapidly in certain contexts, but you need to know how to use these tools first. Thankfully for an engineer the learning curve is really, really small. When we talk about non-engineers, there is a bit more of a hurdle.” – Erik Gross
      • Even if you work in the enterprise space where these tools might not be allowed or used, you can build expertise using these tools and use it as a career leverage point. This will allow you to identify a need (i.e. automating a business process or processes) that can be served by low code or no code applications that others will not see.
      • These tools also integrate with generative AI tools and could allow insertion of natural language processing.
      • Use of these tools can help the engineer and of course also the entrepreneur.
  • If someone wants to become a software developer, can they start with low code tools and make a shift?
    • Erik says this depends on what your end goal is.
      • If you want to be a working technologist (software developer, engineer, architect, quality assurance, etc.) of some kind, likely low code / no code is not your entry point because you need to understand the fundamentals. Fundamentals in this context would be how computers work, web technologies, how software is made, algorithms, etc.
      • Algorithms might be the most transferrable fundamental to / from low code and no code solutions.
      • Erik also says someone may do so well at focusing on low code and no code solutions they may not want to become an engineer.
    • If we look at this through the lens of Most Valuable Knowledge…
      • Any time we are buidling a product or service, we should think about who it will help.
      • Being good at something and very interested in it is a great start, but the third piece of the Most Valuable Knowledge Framework is considering where this will intersect with the marketplace demand.
      • Erik feels like large enterprises haven’t adopted low code / no code solutions very much and sees them leaning more toward customized software development, which has its own specific requirements (scalability, availability, infrastructure, etc.).
      • For the small business, low code and no code can really make an impact. These shops may not be able to pay for highly customized software solutions.
      • “We’ll abstract away as much as we can. We’re going to abstract away all that infrastructure stuff. Can I just write a function and drop it into Azure Functions or AWS Lambda? That’s the fun part. Look at this algorithm I built. Boom – it drops in and it works. So, we’re getting more and more towards that, but we’re still absolutely not accessible to a small to medium size business with what we deliver…. Now, with low code / no code tools and leveraging natural language processing (ChatGPT or another generative AI), you can accomplish things for them internally that we couldn’t even 18 months ago.” – Erik Gross
      • Smaller businesses also don’t generally know how software is made and might not be great at gathering requirements.
      • Erik gives an example of a client that services crawl spaces. Listen to his description of the challenge of understanding which of this client’s customers is eligible for payment collections on any given day. It takes hours to gather the information from different systems, and the data changes quickly over time. People were using Google Sheets and their internal CRM system to generate the data needed.
      • Erik talks about a tool called AirTable (basically a highly performant online database) that allows building a 2-way data synchronization between sources and can show the right view of the data needed to understand and forecast payment collections. All of this can be done without needing to write code! The automation tools have been gaining popularity, but we’ve only made it here because of generative AI according to Erik. These kinds of solutions provide small businesses with something valuable which was previously outside their reach.
    • If you want to learn more about low code / no code tools…
  • If you have other questions or want to follow up with Erik on today’s discussion…
    • E-mail Erik at erikg@madwizardmarketing.com, and feel free to ask him about anything. He is willing to spend 30 minutes talking to almost anyone.
    • Erik loves the technology field and has found it to be filled with some incredible people.

Mentioned in the Outro

  • Nick really liked the pattern of learning Erik mentioned and the singular focus. Finding a tutorial that only includes one specific technology is the hard part but may be a way to guard against that expert’s curse.
  • We can apply the idea of defining terms we don’t know to consulting by making sure we understand what people mean when they use specific terms like “cloud,” for example. It’s a way to prevent making false assumptions and to get the full context.
  • Knowledge of tools we may not use at work today (i.e. like low code and no code solutions) can help us be ready to solve problems in interesting ways should the need arise. This is why it’s important to stay on top of technological trends.
    • Nick would also caution listeners to use generative AI tools only within their company’s policy for it and be mindful of data privacy / confidentiality.
  • There were some undertones of an identity crisis in becoming an entrepreneuer after starting as a technologist, especially when you had off things you used to do.
    • Erik had to focus on the marketing, sales, and business growth and understood he needed to hire people to do development.

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