Sam Schillace: evaluation

Transcript context

…we are. Yeah. The intermixing of code and, and LMS is, is a lot of the role of the AI engineer. And I, I, I think in a very real way, you were one of the first to, because obviously you had early access. Honestly, I'm surprised. How are you so hands on? How do you choose to, to dedicate your time? How do you advise other tech leaders? Right. You know, you, you are. You have people working for you, you could not be hands on, but you seem to be hands on. What's the allocation that people should have, especially if they're senior tech leaders? It's mostly just fun. Like, I'm a maker, and I like to build stuff. I'm a little bit idiosyncratic. I I've got ADHD, and so I won't build anything. I won't work on anything I'm bored with. So I have no discipline. If I'm not actually interested in the thing, I can't just, like, do it, force myself to do it. But, I mean, if you're not interested in what's going on right now in the industry, like, go find a different industry, honestly. Like, I seriously, like, this is, I, well, it's funny, like, I don't mean to be snarky, but, like, I was at a dinner, like, a, I don't know, six months ago or something, And I was sitting next to a CTO of a large, I won't name the corporation because it would name the person, but I was sitting next to the CTO of a very large Japanese technical company, and he was like, like, nothing has been interesting since the internet, and this is interesting now, like, this is fun again. And I'm like, yeah, totally, like this is like, the most interesting thing that's happened in 35 years of my career, like, we can play with semantics and natural language, and we can have these things that are like sort of active, can kind of be independent in certain ways and can do stuff for us and can like, reach all of these interesting problems. So like that's part of it of it's just kind of fun to, to do stuff and to build stuff. I, I just can't, can't resist. I'm not crazy hands-on, like, I have an eng like my engineering team's listening right now. They're like probably laughing 'cause they, I never, I, I don't really touch code directly 'cause I'm so obsessive. I told them like, if I start writing code, that's all I'm gonna do. And it's probably better if I stay a little bit high level and like, think about. I've got a really great couple of engineers, a bunch of engineers underneath me, a bunch of designers underneath me that are really good folks that we just bounce ideas off of back and forth and it's just really fun. That's the role I came to Microsoft to do, really, was to just kind of bring some energy around innovation, some energy around consumer, We didn't know that this was coming when I joined. I joined like eight months before it hit us, but I think Kevin might've had an idea it was coming. And and then when it hit, I just kind of dove in with both feet cause it's just so much fun to do. Just to tie it back a little bit to the, the Google Docs stuff. When we did rightly originally the world it's not like I built rightly in jQuery or anything. Like I built that thing on bare metal back before there were decent JavaScript VMs. I was just telling somebody today, like you were rate limited. So like just computing the diff when you type something like doing the string diff, I had to write like a binary search on each end of the string diff because like you didn't have enough iterations of a for loop to search character by character. something like doing the string diff, I had to write like a binary search on each end of the string diff because like you didn't have enough iterations of a for loop to search character by character. I mean, like that's how rough it was none of the browsers implemented stuff directly, whatever. It's like, just really messy. And like, that's. Like, as somebody who's been doing this for a long time, like, that's the place where you want to engage, right? If things are easy, and it's easy to go do something, it's too late. Even if it's not too late, it's going to be crowded, but like the right time to do something new and disruptive and technical is, first of all, still when it's controversial, but second of all, when you have this, like, you can see the future, you ask this, like, what if question, and you can see where it's going, But you have this, like, pit in your stomach as an engineer as to, like, how crappy this is going to be to do. Like, that's really the right moment to engage with stuff. We're just like, this is going to suck, it's going to be messy, I don't know what the path is, I'm going to get sticks and thorns in my hair, like I, I, it's going to have false starts, and I don't really, I'm going to This is why those skeletchae laws are kind of funny, because, like, I, I, like You know, I wrote them down at one point because they were like my best guess, but I'm like half of these are probably wrong, and I think they've all held up pretty well, but I'm just like guessing along with everybody else, we're just trying to figure this thing out still, right, and like, and I think the only way to do that is to just engage with it. You just have to like, build stuff. If you're, I can't tell you the number of execs I've talked to who have opinions about AI and have not sat down with anything for more than 10 minutes to like actually try to get anything done. You know, it's just like, it's incomprehensible to me that you can watch this stuff through the lens of like the press and forgive me, podcasts and feel like you actually know what you're talking about. Like, you have to like build stuff. Like, break your nose on stuff and like figure out what doesn't work.…

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