Monthly Archives: December 2025

Wearing a suit doesn’t make you immune to peer pressure

Posted on by under Business, Tech

It seems to me that there is a point in a person’s life, career, and/or seniority, where following the crowd stops being called ‘peer pressure’ and starts being called things like, ‘reacting to market sentiment’.

Admittedly, I am a bit too young1 to remember the dot-com bubble popping. At the time, I was running around my primary school playing field, blissfully unaware of anything outside my little corner of the world. I have a vague memory of a school friend’s Dad losing their job2, but as my Dad worked for the Ministry of Defence, it didn’t really affect me. Actually, I was much more interested in the occasional rolling roadblock flanked by MoD Plod3 than anything even remotely compooterz related.

I say this to admit that I don’t know what it felt like in the run-up to that crash. Neither, really, what it was like in 2008. By that point I’d started at Uni, now more interested in computers than roadblocks, I was still too busy running around.

What I do know is what the industry has felt like since 2010, when I got my first tech job.

Smartphones, and Web2.0 fully usurping “the old internet”. The rise and domination of Facebook, and their purchase of Instagram. Twitter and The Arab Spring. Uber4, Silkroad and the first Bitcoin spike ($21 high!), and how Smart Contracts would change the world. The Gamification of everything. Silicon Valley’s brief flirtation with an abundance mindset. The release of Google Cardboard, Oculus, and the HTC Vive5, and how VR was going to change the world revolutionise global entertainment. The second, third, forth crypto spikes. Various rug pulls and straight up theft. Bitcoin ETFs, the Winklevii. Later, NFTs being a thing, and then very much not. Chatbots going from natural language search of dense knowledge bases, to the solution for every website.

The elevation of Will MacAskill6 from interesting philosophical curiosity, to the billionaires’ favourite guru. The release of GPT-3, the pandemic7 and remote work hiring boom. GPT-4, Claude, DeepSeek, and the positioning of LLMs as proto-AGI, and the ensuing arms race.

This period was full of useful progress.

For all their many, many, faults – Facebook was better social media than what came before. Uber did genuinely improve the experience of ordering taxis.8 Bitcoin, and crypto more broadly, was excellent for bypassing incredibly expensive money transfer systems like TransferWise. This is incredibly useful for migrant workers wanting to safely and reliably send money back home to their families. And, obviously, really useful as a pseudo-anonymous means of payment for a variety of things.

But something changed, and while I can’t really put my finger on when exactly that was, I feel it was around the time that ‘web3’ starting to be thrown around.

To me, Web3 has always felt like a random assortment of technologies, unified as technology-first tools, all looking for problems to solve. For me this is namely Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, VR, and AI. There may be others you include, or don’t.

VR is objectively cool, but severally limited in practical application. Even Apple, with all their billions, haven’t been able to make it useful9. Blockchain is terribly energy inefficient for transactions when done via Proof of Work, while Proof of Stake has serious trust problems for a supposed zero-trust decentralised network. Transaction costs are insanely high for everyday small purchases, leading to the minimal uptake we see in legit merchant contexts. The continued necessity to cash out into a local currency10, often in large increments to minimise the fee ratio, further compounds the problem.

And then we have LLMs.

LLMs are incredible. While I’ve always enjoyed writing, it’s never been something I’ve found particularly easy. Having what is in effect my own personal sub-Editor running in-browser11 helps me better structure my thoughts, and keep my phrasing clear and simple12. It’s not perfect, far from it, but it is very helpful.

The current generation of LLMs are incredibly sophisticated predictive text, and that is great. Friends of mine with dyslexia, or various other neuro-diversities, or normies who just appreciate a hint every now and again, have found it to be a complete game changer.

I’ve also had particularly positive experiences using Claude to help me think around some problems we’ve faced at the foodbank, such as safe loading procedures. It being able to provide direct links to legislation and best practice documentation is awesome. Natural language search is a hard problem, and these tools make significant improvements on what has come before.

A single technology being sufficiently adept at addressing both of these problems is really cool.

But, it’s also very clear that there is a genuine panic in the industry right now.

Across the board, every sector within the industry is trying to shoehorn “AI” in to their products. I’ve been told stories where devs have been directed to replace existing traceable algorithmic decisions for things like financial eligibility, with a GPT call. That 30% of code must be “AI written” by the end of the year. That all customer service enquiries will be answered by an LLM driven chat bot, with no human approval13. And even that user-provided content should be modified, without their knowledge or approval, before being displayed to other users.

The message I take from this is simple – it’s FOMO.

Companies are looking, top down, at what everyone else is claiming, but knowing that they themselves are struggling to make this work. So surely they must be missing something.

What they’ve done so far isn’t something they particularly confident is right for their business, but because their peers are doing it, they must have found the secret sauce.

Every CEO of every FTSE and Fortune business is singling AI out as the gaming changing tech, so it has to be…

Right?

Back in 2000, if I’d’ve done something I didn’t agree with, just because my friends in the playground did, my teacher would have called that peer pressure. She would have reminded me that just because others are doing something, it doesn’t mean I have to.

That desire to fit in, to not miss out, that if others are doing it surely it makes sense to do it too, doesn’t automatically go away when you leave school.

While part of maturing and ageing is learning how to better handle your emotions, fears, and impulses, periods of high stress can resort to us taking shortcuts.

And having shareholders, pension funds, VC, and big equity firms on your neck is rather stressful indeed.

Building sustainable, deep value businesses requires addressing human-level problems. FOMO doesn’t lead to reasoned responses, it instead prioritises reactive, knee-jerk, responses.

So, remember to take a breath, and remind yourself; “What is the problem I want to solve?”.

I promise you the answer isn’t, “I haven’t spent enough GPT credits”.

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  1. Although, the increasing grey in my hair and speed I’m approaching 40 may suggest otherwise ↩︎
  2. Also the first person I knew who had a PC at home – and introduced me to Tomb Raider ↩︎
  3. From AWE Aldermaston, carrying surprising little, all under a black tarp ↩︎
  4. I was once asked to provide a cost quote for “the uber of social care”; they didn’t appreciate being sent a link to Uber’s crunchbase page which, iirc, said they’d had over 50bn in funding already. ↩︎
  5. And punching my friend’s ceiling after getting very disorientated trying to stroke a whale ↩︎
  6. No relation ↩︎
  7. No relation… ↩︎
  8. Now if only they treated their employees correctly ↩︎
  9. I do feel there is a genuinely viable usage for Augmented Reality – as a HUD for directions, etc – but all concepts seem to be based around forcing yet more advertising in to your eyes, which, well, who actually wants that? – beyond the people funding the development and paying for the ads of course ↩︎
  10. Or other coins, putting it well above the typical tech literacy of ‘normal’ people ↩︎
  11. I use LanguageTool, and highly recommend it ↩︎
  12. Or, at least as best it can dealing with the chaos that is my brain ↩︎
  13. And this is years after this has already blown up in company’s faces see Air Canada ↩︎

The choices we make, and the results we get

Posted on by under Charity

A point I make to teams I work with is that what we do affects real people. It doesn’t matter whether that person is buying a Christmas present1, reporting workplace negligence2, or making sure they and their kids don’t go hungry3, making that experience easier or harder has an impact.

The reason for this reminder is that we4 often abstract ‘People who use our products’ in to the much easier and less clunky term ‘users’. And yes, while this is done for reasons of convenience rather than anything nefarious, it can still lead to us forgetting that there is a real person at the sharp end of the decisions we make.

In turn, this impact is regularly referred to in other terms, such as ‘pain point’ or ‘nudge’5. Again, while done with no negative intent, this can further separate ‘us’ and ‘them’. After a while, ‘them’ almost become ‘things’ we act as if we have dominion over.

At this stage, it becomes very easy to believe your assumptions are actually facts. Assumptions in and of themselves are not objectively good, or bad, but they do need validating. It’s a very helpful shortcut to jump over validation, especially if you already – sincerely – believe you know the result.6 It’s exactly here where our biases can wreak havoc, and do serious damage.

You may know that I’ve been involved with Gateshead Foodbank since 2018 in various roles, and/or that for the last 18 months or so I’ve been spending a lot more time there as part of a career break.7 A year ago, I was invited on to the Board of Trustees, with a focus on Data/IT, and to support efforts in reshaping the charity so that we can continue to support those who need us, for as long as we are needed.

Since being founded in 2012, we’ve fed over 100k people. While the vast majority are in receipt of Universal Credit, that doesn’t mean they are out of work. A good chunk of the people we feed live in households where one or more adults are working, but their wages still need to be topped up by UC.8

We provide a week’s worth of food, per person, plus toiletries, and our typical visit rate is ~1.5 times. That means that over 80% of people we feed only need to visit us once or twice. We work closely with Citizen’s Advice to identify and solve underlying financial issues people may be facing; the most common cause being that they are not receiving benefits which they are entitled to. I have enough fingers to count those who have needed us more than ten times.

About one third of the people we feed are children.

Of the families we feed, 60% of them have three or more children, and whatever assumptive rhetoric people may wish to throw at adults, these kids have no choice, no power, and no agency.

They are going hungry because of the decisions made by others.

Trussell9 have done extensive research to uncover the main causes of people using foodbanks, and say the following:

The design and delivery of the social security system remained the most significant driver of low income for people referred to food banks. The vast majority (87%) were in receipt of a means-tested social security payment, including three quarters of people (75%) in receipt of Universal Credit. In the general population fewer than one in 10 people (9%) were in receipt of Universal Credit.
—Trussell – Hunger in the UK, September 2025, p.76

In my professional life, this sort of research result would be clear-cut – this process causes problems, and we need to fix them. No amount of “the user’s an idiot and is doing it wrong!” can hand wave away 87%. When I talk about systemic issues, this is the sort of thing I mean.

The correlation between the two-child limit, and the demographic of people relying on us, is strong and clear. I hope that it goes without saying that a family of five requires more food, more soap, and more loo roll, than a family of three. It should be a profound embarrassment to the country that this continued for eight long years after George Osborne made the decision to enact the limit on the users of benefits.

In the budget last week, it was announced that the two-child limit will be removed in April 2026. During the announcement, I was at the foodbank giving food to people who needed it. When we found out, the relief in the air was palpable. A few people cried.

It is projected that 450,000 kids will be lifted out of poverty through this choice, and will stop going hungry through no fault of their own.

There are always choices which can be made. Some good, some bad. Some outcomes can be foreseen, others cannot. Sometimes there are compounding factors and emergent behaviours, or there aren’t, and it’s pretty straight forward. Maybe the impact is so tiny no one notices, or so large that it feels trite to describe.

If the result of your choice is not what you intended, you can choose to change it.

Fingers crossed, we see double-digit reductions in people visiting the foodbank, and the kids of Gateshead stop going hungry due to the decisions of others. It also reminds me that…

[E]conomic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner
–George Orwell – The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937, p.139

—

While not the purpose of this post, if it has given you pause for thought, please set up a regular cash donation to your local foodbank. Cash is best because we can use it to pay for fuel, leccy, and buying in items we don’t get enough of.10 While need hopefully reduces with the removal of the two-child limit, we’re a long away from that celebratory day that we’re no longer needed and can close.

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  1. Fruugo (2022-2024) ↩︎
  2. Safecall (2018-2021) ↩︎
  3. Gateshead Foodbank (2018-Present) ↩︎
  4. read: software people ↩︎
  5. The latter I particularly enjoy, as it just reminds me of that Monty Python sketch; know what I mean? ↩︎
  6. Or, if you really don’t want to be proven wrong ↩︎
  7. The TL;DR being that I wanted to do something more visibly and immediately rewarding – and stopping people from going hungry is very immediate indeed. ↩︎
  8. That is to say, their employer does not give them enough hours and/or pay to feed themselves ↩︎
  9. fka ‘The Trussell Trust’ ↩︎
  10. There is always enough pasta – and beans. There are never enough sanitary products, or pet food, or cereals. ↩︎