00:43:07 · Michelle Gilmore
[00:43:07] S1: I think that... I mean, Juno is my fifth company. Right? So I I think that I've employed... I haven't worked for anyone else for twenty years. So it's it's hard for me to think about the kind of employee perspective, but I can talk with experience to the employer experience and hiring more traditional developers and engineers and be... Building, like, traditional software versus what we're doing now. I mean, one of my most talented engineers is self taught. And he's brilliant because he's an incredible philosophical thinker. Like, he can understand relationships and object definition, and distinction, and actually all the things that make a great engineer an engineer, like high IQ, mental acuity, being nimble, being adaptive. And I I do think that traditional engineers that are rigid in their thinking are actually not as good in the current space that we're working in, which is why places like SF are going to see a little bit of a ripple, I think, because what's been successful there and what's been rewarded there is not necessarily what we're talking about. And so I'm really excited by people that are really great at critical thinking, problem solving, people that can do debate really well, people that are interested in, creativity and philosophy. Yes. There needs to be an expertise, obviously. I need them to be able to do something in my company. But I am thinking very differently about talent and the results and the value that you can generate in my company Yep. Which I don't think is what we were thinking about ten years ago. It's it's absolutely not how we were thinking about technical talent nor how we were thinking about, you know, that wage that I was applying to that human and what I was gonna get out of them. It's it's a... It's almost kind of created this horizontal notion as opposed to this vertical notion that we were working on before, which is why I think things like institutions and universities are over the next decades going to become less and less important, which will hurt places like SF, right? Because they've leaned on that as opposed to other places that don't necessarily have that branding of the institution, but don't necessarily have to compete with that anymore.
00:45:33 · Xharmagne Carandang, Michelle Gilmore
[00:45:33] S0: There's this concept of... Because I used to work in tech consulting, ThoughtWorks, and I feel like that's what they already had going there. We didn't go, oh, are you an expert in Java? It's the critical thinking skills. It's the foundational problem solving skills that we look for. And there's this term that... I don't know who came up with it. Martin Fowler or something. The term called expert generalist [00:45:56] S1: Yes. [00:45:57] S0: Which is basically you've got these tech consulting companies. They were already indexing for, are you good at the basics so we can chuck you at any company with any tech stack, and you just go. And now that we've got Gen AI augmenting that, there's that whole new type of talent where you just need to know the foundations, and you can be augmented so much more. [00:46:17] S1: Yeah. And in fact, they're very valuable if you can jump around.
00:46:20 · Daniel Palmer
[00:46:20] S3: Yes. I think a keyword you mentioned earlier was creativity. And I've been reflecting on this a lot, because I've been thinking a lot about, okay, what are agentic automation good at, what is traditional automation software good at, what are humans good at. And I realise that humans are like, in a theoretical sense, are very good at low scale but high creativity work. Agents are pretty good at high scale mid creativity work, and then software is really good at low creativity, deterministic high scale work. And I think thinking about creativity in that sense, I think one thing that at Relevance, we've always, always taken big bets on folks who come from maybe non traditional backgrounds in terms of any factor really, but have showed that element of determination and particularly creativity. And I think we've seen some really great success stories now, but in the last couple of months in particular, lot of those folks in our company have just taken this next step of amplifying themselves into absolute superstars. Both our platforms have gotten better but other platforms like Cursor, Lovable, all of these very democratizing Gen AI platforms have gotten better. That breed of person that we, you know, just happen to fill our company with, have just turned into these incredible superstars who are now like, despite whatever background they have, building internal applications with Cursor, or automating whole parts of our company with our own platform for example. And starting to emerge as just like potentially, you can kind of see them as the sort of leading people in our company. And I think that's a little glimpse to me of what, I cause think it's hard to answer the question of what will humans still do, that will always move and evolve, and it's really hard to answer that. I've started to see a glimpse of what humans are succeeding in the world we're about to of enter, what they look a bit like. And I think creativity is one of the key things
00:48:27 · Sachin, Adam Miller, Michelle Gilmore, Xharmagne Carandang
[00:48:27] S2: I What's sort interesting to [00:48:28] S5: me there is like, you know, all the way growing up, [00:48:31] S2: was always told like, oh, C students are the A students. And I feel like it's almost that distracted kid in the back of the classroom that gets like, fails all their tests, but is daydreaming all the time. That person has an opportunity now, like, you know, unlike anything ever before, right? You know, because what is a tertiary education system reward, road learning and memorising specific things, right? Those are literally the things that are not valuable at all in the AI world. And I'm [00:49:00] S1: literally thinking about not sending my kid to school. Yeah. Like, I've... What are we doing to them? How is it helpful to put a child right now through Australia's traditional education system? [00:49:14] S0: Yeah. I feel like that would completely change. Because, I mean, the the distracted kid at the back of the room. Right? Yes. They... They're more empowered to just try all these random different things. But I think then the other skill, apart from creativity and coming up with all these ideas, is knowing which ones are working. Mhmm. [00:49:30] S1: Yeah. [00:49:30] S0: Because especially now that we're empowered to do so much, how do you recognize what is quality, as you were saying earlier? And I I overheard someone saying how now reading comprehension is such an important skill, especially with Gen AI. [00:49:45] S5: Yeah.
00:49:45 · Adam Miller, Xharmagne Carandang, Michelle Gilmore
[00:49:45] S5: Yeah. [00:49:45] S0: The engineer prompt to be able to recognize if it's good or just BS that sounds so legit or even code or whatever expertise. Being able to recognize what is quality and then iterating on that and focusing on what actually is moving the needle would be so important now that we can [00:50:01] S5: do so much. So something like that. [00:50:02] S1: Craft in that is is the difference between something landing and something not out in market. Yep. And there's a a certain quality which is absolutely about the craft of, like, the written word coming back. But being able to understand language and distinction, being able to communicate really well, being able to clearly get your point across but rapidly. Yep. Like, there's something about, like, being able to be succinct and move quickly and be nimble and adapt. I think, like, emotional awareness is more powerful than ever. Mhmm. And being able to just try something without being scared of failing. So, like, scientific theory, prototyping, experimenting is so important. But, I mean, philosophy, those kinds of... The things that requires of us is incredibly powerful right now. [00:51:02] S5: Something I find quite ironic is that a lot of the things you said, things like writing, comprehension, like grammar, logic, all that stuff, we're not going to be learning that stuff as much because we're just outsourcing it to chat GPT. Like a lot of young people will be getting, you know, GPT to write their essays and stuff. And so a lot of what you said, that craft, like, kids by default won't be spending as
00:51:02 · Adam Miller, Michelle Gilmore, Sachin, Daniel Palmer
[00:51:02] S5: Something I find quite ironic is that a lot of the things you said, things like writing, comprehension, like grammar, logic, all that stuff, we're not going to be learning that stuff as much because we're just outsourcing it to chat GPT. Like a lot of young people will be getting, you know, GPT to write their essays and stuff. And so a lot of what you said, that craft, like, kids by default won't be spending as [00:51:24] S1: much time. Yeah. But my counter to that is though, most people are not good writers now, even the ones that are coming out of Theotry. I mean, I've I remember having 70, 80 engineers, and none of them could ride. Right? Like, they would they would try to communicate the outcome of something they'd built, and it was terrible. Yet the thing was brilliant. Mhmm. But they couldn't communicate it. There was no narrative. There was no use case. They hadn't tested it. Like, they... So that was traditional education. Mhmm. You know, I I read creative writing from, you know, late teens, early twenties. It's not like we've got a whole bunch of Shakespeare's kicking about, so I'm not sure. [00:52:10] S2: Interesting. There's a study that came out, I think it was the first one, about how cognition has dropped significantly from people that use ChatGPT. Ability I think it was literally function of the brain has dropped. [00:52:23] S1: But is that really using it as a search engine? Sorry? [00:52:26] S3: Yeah.