If your “database ticket” says “it’s slow” or “it timed out,” you’re not asking for help … you’re asking someone else to guess. I’ve watched good database engineers lose days to vague reports that are basically “something happened” with a request for help. Not because teams are careless, but because nobody taught them what DBAs actually need to investigate: the query, the error, the timing, and the context. Database engineers want to be helpful. But their expertise is best used when developers can solve common issues independently and escalate the non-obvious ones with enough evidence to act. ...

What if an AI monitored whether you followed all rules and laws that applied to you … and then acted on what it found? Not flagged for review. Acted. Put you on a no-fly list. Accused you of fraud. No human involved. That scenario is the subject of Jon Penney’s guest post on Bruce Schneier’s blog, AI and Micro-directives. Penney focuses on the legal risks to the targets of AI-based decisions, but the legal exposure cuts both directions. ...

I once came back from a week off to find that a time-sensitive task had simply waited for me. Nobody dropped the ball … the ball was never passed. The team didn’t lack talent. They lacked the setup to succeed without me, and that was my fault. Your vacation is a stress test for your team’s resilience. If work piles up like garbage during a sanitation strike every time someone is out, the problem isn’t their absence … it’s that you didn’t give your team the tools they needed before a coworker left. ...