• As I See It: Riffing On Retirement

  December 11, 2023 Victor Rozek

  It didn’t take long after my father retired for him to start getting bored. There were suddenly lots of unstructured hours to fill and no prescribed way to fill them. So, he did what many retired men do: He stayed home and annoyed his wife. But after several months of straining my mother’s tolerance for togetherness, he settled on a novel solution.

  The back of our property was bordered by a very tall hedge which shaded portions of the lawn. During the rainy season the shaded areas never fully dried and became saturated. So my father decided to replace patches …

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• As I See It: Elusive Connections

  November 27, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Between the ages of 2 and 6, I formed a deep attachment to a small stuffed bear. I played with it, talked to it, and slept with it. It was my constant companion and before I moved on in my development, I had loved much of its fur off.

  America, according to mental health experts, is experiencing a loneliness epidemic. On a planet straining with the weight of 8 billion people, it seems that an uncanny number lack meaningful connection. A problem not likely to be solved by embracing stuffed animals.

  In a study commissioned by healthcare/insurance giant Cigna, “more …

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• As I See It: Luddites

  October 30, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Having enjoyed a life of relative plenty, it’s easy to give myself more credit for the abundance I take for granted than I actually deserve. I habitually forget that almost everything I own, eat, drive, and wear was produced by someone else, often at great cost.

  I had that thought recently as I looked at my iPhone, a miracle of technology, designed domestically, but assembled in foreign mega-factories by people whose range of choices is infinitely more limited than mine. I recalled something horrific that happened over a decade ago in a Chinese Apple assembly plant run by a Taiwanese …

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• As I See It: IT Come Home

  September 25, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Wanna buy a skyscraper, cheap? Need an extra million square feet of space to store your stuff? Want enough living space for you and 600 of your closest friends? No problem. In large and mid-sized cities across the country, once-robust downtowns are looking a bit gaunt. Storefronts are shuttered, restaurants are struggling, and once-thick downtown traffic has noticeably thinned. And for that, you can thank, or blame, technology.

  Specifically, the technology that allowed so many of us to work from home during the Covid years. We got spoiled, enjoying unprecedented flexibility, freedom, independence, and convenience. No commute, no set hours, …

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• As I See It: Chasing Eternity

  July 17, 2023 Victor Rozek

  When I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in a parochial grammar school. One day, my teacher was expounding on the joys of spending eternity in heaven. I didn’t know much about eternity – or heaven for that matter – except that eternity seemed like a very long time. So, I raised my hand and asked her what heaven was like, what would I spend all that time doing? She thought for a moment, no doubt straining to conjure a simple answer that an eight-year-old might understand.

  Then she said, “Imagine your very favorite thing to have for dinner. …

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• As I See It: Greetings, Comrade IT Professional

  April 17, 2023 Victor Rozek

  During the Covid pandemic a phrase was popularized and became widely used as an acknowledgement and an expression of gratitude: Essential Workers. Nurses and doctors topped the list, but it soon expanded to include many occupations previously taken for granted: farm workers, truck drivers, supermarket employees, garbage collectors, and others who were finally receiving acknowledgement for just how essential their jobs actually were. Beyond their contributions to stabilizing a shaken nation, workers became “essential” simply by virtue of the fact that their jobs could not be performed from home.

  Which may be why IT professionals didn’t make the list. Regardless …

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• As I See It: AI-AI-O

  March 13, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Unless you think encouraging people to eat glass is a good thing, or you happen to revel in being compared to Hitler, you probably weren’t all that impressed with the recent Big Tech AI roll out. To say it was unimpressive would be a kindness. Arguably, it was a grade A, prime time, gold-plated disaster.

  Take Meta Platform’s online tool Galactica. Please. It was quickly yanked offline when, according to The Washington Post, “users found Galactica generating authoritative-sounding text about the benefits of eating glass, written in academic language with citations.” I have to admit, the citations were …

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• As I See It: On the Chopping Block

  February 20, 2023 Victor Rozek

  I remember the first time I witnessed someone getting fired. He was called into his manager’s office where a short, occasionally animated, conversation ensued. By the time he got back to his desk, two security guards took his badge and keys, handed him a cardboard box, told him to pack his belongings, and escorted him out of the building. No goodbyes, no parting words, no well wishes from colleagues. Though he had worked there for some years, in the end he was as disposable as a used Kleenex.

  I thought about him recently as Tech sector headlines reported massive layoffs. …

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• As I See It: The Good, the Bad, And The Mistaken

  January 30, 2023 Victor Rozek

  Writing a comprehensive history of IT would prove daunting if not impossible. The milestones are well documented, but not the steps between. From the legions of unsung programmers who developed the systems we take for granted, to the effects of social media that are both private and collective, IT is a complex swirl of the good, the bad, and the mistaken.

  Since hindsight lends itself to clarity (albeit flavored with arrogance), let’s start with the mistaken. The grandest of all IT prediction fails belongs to none other than IBM’s legendary Thomas Watson. Back in 1943 he opined that, “There is …

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• As I See It: Ghosting Productivity

  December 12, 2022 Victor Rozek

  Recently, the Department of Labor announced that worker productivity fell to a level not seen since 1947. Like the proverbial fart in the elevator, it got everybody’s attention but no one could identify its source. Economists, CEOs, and government officials were all frantic for a fix but, speculation aside, nobody could identify the precise reason for the precipitous drop.

  All the usual – and some unusual – suspects were trotted out. The pandemic, the shift to working from home, the Great Resignation, quiet quitting and, when in doubt, blame the wobbly work ethic of Gen Z. But these unusual factors …

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