jgilbertson47

Great call-out: "Some may interpret your degree pursuit as dissatisfaction with management and a wish to return to individual contributor roles." Thank you!

Good call out on (2). The credential itself is more important to me than I initially thought. I did a full-time MBA at a young age and have always regretted not doing a technical master's.

I appreciate the thoughts on self-motivation and demonstrable projects. I'm already doing this, although I find myself wanting to learn too many things, which can cause me to lose focus. The structure helps here. I'm familiar with initiatives like the Open Source Society University, but I am not interested as it's nice to do these classes with other folks.

The program would be the Stanford Honors Cooperative Program or something similar where there isn't an oversized part-time/remote cohort.

It does! Thank you.

Hah, truth for larger orgs: "major in psych-* or whatever." I'm at a mid-size company now and have done both the large company and start-up world.

AI can enhance the Zettelkasten method, transforming learning into a more engaging, interactive, and highly productive process. This article is a step-by-step guide for users of Obsidian and ChatGPT.

Follow me on a fun thought experiment where I show how the risk of decision-making is cut in half merely by reducing the correlation of inputs into a decision. And a great way to reduce the correlation of inputs on a team is by hiring more diverse people with various life experiences.

Hi, the author here. Thank you for reading! And yes, it is tough to prove increased inclusion. I used the results from quarterly team and company surveys to test and learn what seemed to increase management trust, clarity of expectations, and inclusion in my organization. (We did ask about inclusion.) I can't share the exact numbers, and there isn't enough sample to make any statistically rigorous conclusions even if I could.

Anecdotally, I monitored the frequency of when people spoke up, and I tried during discussions to ask for someone's opinion if I felt like they had something to contribute but weren't speaking up. Over time, as I increased trust with my team, they were proactive in raising instances where it felt like they were excluded. The best part was when they started giving each other feedback. Those six words were the most frequent offenders in my experience.

My primary reason for writing the article is to hear about others' experiences. For context, my organization was composed of machine learning and analytics folks. Thanks again, and I'm looking forward to hearing what works for others!