The Guest – Richard Bell, Head of Engineering at CoinShares
Richard Bell is a seasoned technology leader with deep experience in financial services and large-scale transformations. Over his career, he has led major projects in organisations such as large international banks, building and scaling teams across geographies while tackling some of the toughest technology and organisational challenges.
Richard joins us to talk to us about how to successfully lead large-scale transformations and build motivated teams.
Some highlights of this episode include:
- What makes large-scale transformations succeed or fail
- How to build and motivate teams over long, tough programs
- The mix of personalities and skills needed for big transformations
- Leadership philosophy and hard choices as a manager
- The impact of AI on software work and careers
Q: Obviously AI is huge in software development and it looks like it’s gonna really take hold and drive a lot of change. What changes do you think are going to happen given the rise in AI-driven coding, platform engineering, changing talent models, etc.?
“So I enjoy the fact that AI is reducing toil. I really like that. I’ve embraced it in my own work. I’m looking for ways to optimize all the parts of my work, not just where I occasionally have to dip into code and look at things like [..] But I’d like it to help me with my presentation. I’d like it to help me with project management. And I do enjoy that. [..]
So I like it for repetitive tasks, the kind of thing – which throughout the history of mankind – we’ve always used new technology to do, whether it’s been through the Industrial Revolution or something. So I see it as just a natural next step to that.
On the flip side, I am concerned long-term for what it will do for our general capabilities. So, there’s already talk of the fact that some junior development posts are not being advertised or aren’t going out there because AI can do that sort of initial setup. But in a few years time, we’re going to need mid-level coders and where will they be? Or we’re going to need senior leaders and where will they be? So that is the concern and I don’t have a simple answer to that one. But the concern is that the skills will be reduced.
My bigger concern from a moral perspective is that when AI becomes sort of circular and starts finding that the corpus of knowledge that it has to draw from is stuff that it generated itself or previous generations of AI generated itself, I’m concerned about erosion of useful knowledge and truthful knowledge and especially in the media sense, I’m very, very concerned about the erosion of objective truth.”
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