What I'm Grateful For

Happy Thanksgiving to you if you’re in the US or in other countries which celebrate this tradition! It’s one of my favorite times of the year to reconnect with people.

I miss you, my readers! I realize it’s been about a month since my last newsletter. You probably haven’t seen me online as much as well. Where have I been?

• Supporting relatives with medical care, including one who needed emergency room care 3 times in 2 weeks (typically requiring unplanned all-nighters from my family and me, plus recovery time).
• Equipping a company to set up its data strategy and data team to launch new monetization products to millions of users this quarter.
• Wrapping up our recent cohort of Data Leaders Community of Practice, and preparing for the next cohort (accepting signups now for 2025).
• Attending or running several other events.

I plan to resume more engagement with my readers in December, but feel free to reach out to me any time.

In the meantime, I want to stick to my commitment to you, my dear reader, to provide you actionable tips to thrive in business and life in the age of AI. Here are several things below that I’m grateful for this month, with tips to also help you.

1. Grateful for People and Partnerships

I’m grateful for various partnerships in business, community service, and life in general. I’m grateful for my readers and clients. Relationships matter.

Tips: November is the best time to reconnect with people in the US, before people get super-busy at the end of the year. Even if it’s just a light touch, send a quick note of appreciation by private message on LinkedIn or other means to your connections. Keep your network warm proactively and at least annually, rather than when you need something from your network. This advice is one of the 5 tips I gave in my interview with Authority Magazine:

• YouTube: 5 Strategies for Successful Networking Both Online and Offline from Jimmy Wong​

2. Grateful for Cloudflare for Internet Security

I’m grateful that the Cloudflare company provides free services for websites to stay safe and secure. This is especially helpful for small businesses with emerging web traffic, and who can’t afford a full IT network cybersecurity team yet.

I’ve been managing several sites for myself and others. All sites continuously get attacked by bots and crawlers for probing vulnerabilities, scraping content, and uploading spam and malware.

In the past year, the bot and crawler traffic have gotten a lot worse, especially as more people incorporate AI without ethics. (50% of all internet traffic is from bots)

Sometimes the sites get hammered by bots even hundreds or thousands of times per minute. I’m grateful that Cloudflare provides free internet services for DNS proxy, web application firewall, and CDN to make the internet safer and faster for everyone.

Tips: If you start your own business website, be sure to get proper tools for configuring and monitoring online security. You can prepare now and research options before launching your new business in 2025. BTW, I also think it’s generally more beneficial for accounting and tax purposes to start a new business in January than in December (your situation may vary—consult a qualified professional to be sure).

3. Grateful for the Ability to Hire People

I’m grateful for being entrusted to recruit a data team.

For data professionals, take-home assignments are common during the interview process.

I designed my latest take-home assignment so that the candidate can optionally use AI assistance, like with ChatGPT. My evaluation of the candidate is based on criteria outside of typical SQL-writing. I’d rather hire a data professional for the long run who can think holistically, communicate clearly, and demonstrate agility to handle ambiguous situations.

SQL and Python? They’re table stakes. Generative AI will assist with a lot of the code generation anyway, but the tools need to be directed to be applied in the best way possible in behalf of the business.

Tip for hiring managers: Consider updating your interviewing criteria to match closer to what you expect employees to actually do, including the use of AI chatbots.

Tips for job candidates: Be ready to learn fast and be flexible—use AI chatbots to help you stay agile. In interviews (and probably also in annual performance reviews), demonstrate your abilities beyond what AI chatbots can churn out.

Contact Me

If you or your business want help with data strategy and leadership, contact me to find out how I can help. I also welcome folks to just reach out to me for an introductory meeting or simply to catch up.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Jimmy Wong

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Jimmy Wong Coach, speaker, and entrepreneur enabling people to thrive in the age of AI. Data science leader with 12 years experience at the LinkedIn company and 27 years in the industry. Visit aijimmy.com​ ​​​​​​

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