Mark C.

It’s frustrating to see that the productivity gap between Canada and other advanced economies has widened in recent years. Meanwhile it’s inspirational seeing how advanced technology is being applied in other countries. While most Canadians are busy debating affordability, lowering taxes or increasing minimum wages, more attention can be paid on using technology to truly improve standard of living by increasing productivity. I don’t think there’s a shortage of talents or inventions coming from Canadians, but actual productization and commercialization of technology does not seem to occur frequently enough in Canada. What can individuals like myself do? Aside from working on products to help businesses identify and close productivity gaps, one thing I can think of is to bring back and share experience I have in the industry back to the university. Hopefully this could align students’ expectations and inspire better collaboration between academics and commercial application of technology. Do you agree? What would you suggest?

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I would rather leave a seat open than hire brilliance without humility. At Wealthsimple, an Engineering Manager candidate had Yes across the loop, including a Strong Yes. In the debrief, the team said “They knew a lot” and “They could do the job,” yet people were uneasy. I translated that discomfort into concrete behaviors and went into the final leadership interview to probe it. I came out a Strong No. We didn't hire them. “Culture add” is not vibes. It is observable behaviour tied to values. Patterns I watch for (ego tells): - Heavy “I” with little credit to others. Probing reveals they took credit for work they didn’t do. - How they frame partners and peers. I want to hear: “My PM partner was new, so we worked closely to scope well and keep stakeholders informed.” Not: “My PM was new, so I basically did their job too.” - Redirecting questions to flex unrelated knowledge instead of engaging with what was asked. From a colleague’s notes on a past candidate: - “They used questions as a segue into unrelated demonstrations of knowledge.” - “When I tried to collaborate and shift to go back to the question, they branched off again.” Bottom line: Hire for culture traits you value, like humility, with the same rigor you use for technical skill. Be specific. Train interviewers on what to listen for. Protect the team by holding the line. #hiring #leadership #engineeringmanagement #cultureadd #humility #ego #teambuilding

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Pull Requests shouldn’t feel like this. We’ve all opened a large PR review and thought: “Well... this is going to hurt.” Sure, small PRs are great, but sometimes you need the full picture. That’s where stacked PRs help (been using Graphite for that, a tool for managing PRs and code reviews). Stacked PRs treat your feature development as a chain of commits / PRs layered on top of each other. Think of it like a Jenga tower: each block (PR) builds on top of the previous one. pr1 → main pr2 → pr1 pr3 → pr2 Now it’s getting even better. I just got early access to Graphite Chat 👇 - I can literally ask it “what’s going on in this PR?” and it gives me the full story, codebase history, past PRs, even outside context. - I can just highlight it and ask “explain this”, instant breakdown. - Flags risks before reviewers even show up. - When someone leaves feedback, it helps me make sense of it and suggests fixes. - And the best part? When CI blows up, I can just ask “why did this break?” and actually get an answer. I’ll even be able to pop open the Graphite Editor right inside Chat to view and edit the codebase. Reviews feel lighter, more collaborative. Exactly how they should.

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Trying to process the past 72 hours, I can't help but think about this amazing post from Matt R. from a year ago. After all the announcements we saw from both the federal and provincial governments today and yesterday, I think it's important for our governments to ponder the importance of re-thinking how investments should be done in the country, and how/why it's more than critical to double down our investments in our economies, local companies and own ecosystem. https://lnkd.in/gEXB5qCW

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🔥 BREAKING: Microsoft is investing $19B into Canada’s AI infrastructure It’ll boost jobs, speed up innovation, and give our ecosystem a serious adrenaline shot. ... BUT here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: If Canada wants real digital sovereignty, we can’t rely on foreign giants forever. Microsoft’s commitment is great… but they can still walk away the moment the economics change. If we’re serious about leading in AI, then we need to: - Develop our own in-house AI talent - Scale Canadian models, Canadian infrastructure, and Canadian innovation - Retain and grow homegrown AI companies before they get acquired or outcompeted Big investments help. But ownership is what protects our future. What do you think? Is this good for Canadian AI leadership, or are we celebrating rented progress? ** Follow me for more spicy takes on IT, AI, and hiring in Canada.

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Silicon Valley keeps producing billion-dollar 💰 startups while Canada 🇨🇦 falls behind.  ❌ No real network exists to maximize the success of our entrepreneurs ❌ Corporate Canada is asleep at the wheel, and is completely detached from our startup networks ❌ When threatened with tariffs, our government touts lumber and aluminum as our key advantage in the global economy instead of our innovation. For the past 4 years, I've been at the heart of Silicon Valley. Its success is fuelled by one critical ingredient: **compounding**. In Silicon Valley: ✅ Startups don’t just succeed—they build ecosystems. ✅ Powerful founder networks mentor and invest in the next generation. ✅ Employees spin off and create their own companies. Canada has world-class talent, yet we struggle to build a tech ecosystem that compounds its wins. In this piece, I lay out what I’ve learned from working in both Canada and Silicon Valley: 🚀 What Silicon Valley gets right about startups. 🚫 How Canada’s corporate giants are failing to invest in innovation. 🦾 Concrete actions our government, corporate sector and universities can take to change the game. Read the (short) article here: https://lnkd.in/ePAjB7sS 💬 My network is full of entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate leaders - do you agree, or do you see it differently? Drop your thoughts below. 👇

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Graham 📊 Dobbs and my report on Canadian AI compute capacity was cited in Mark Carney’s “New Approach to Fiscal Management and Growth for Canada — We need a government that spends less, so Canada can invest more": "Canada's available compute resources—including its data centres, cloud, AI systems and supercomputers—are notably behind leaders such as the United States, Japan, and China, constraining the critical computing power essential for driving innovation. [...] To build more competitive manufacturing and services sectors, Canada must invest to become a clean energy superpower in nuclear, hydro power, wind, hydrogen, battery storage and carbon capture. To lead the AI revolution, we need to capitalise on our unique opportunity to build competitive data centres and intelligence infrastructure that are wired into the largest AI market in the world." Our report preceded the previously announced $2 billion federal AI investment and the Government of Canada’s proposed $15-billion to match $30 billion in pension fund investment in green data centres is far more important. Combined with Pierre Poilievre’s support for leveraging Canada’s energy sector to increase our data centres, Carney’s proposal captures a bi-partisan consensus that we need to invest more in public energy and data infrastructure. Canada’s greatest opportunity for overcoming our reliance on resources is building a sustainable and independent innovation sector with AI at its core. Our unique access to clean energy and land and history of AI leadership presents an opportunity to convert these resources into a data and tech advantage. Ensuring our data centres remain in the public interest will be crucial including local resource governance, social economic and labour market benefits; open and equitable access; and ethical data governance and stewardship. Thanks to The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University for the collaboration across their ongoing AI research spanning: infrastructure, skills and jobs, governance, and adoption. Marium Hamid Viet Vu Mark Hazelden Thanks to those who’ve supported our work on AI compute and governance including Henri Vilandré Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute; Marc Andrew IREN Daniel Brock Hon. David Lametti Alex Steinhouse Fasken Aftab Erfan Fergus Linley-Mota SFU's Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue Brandon Jackson Joshua Tan Public AI Matthew Victor Elissa Strome Tibor Turi, PhD P.Eng. CIFAR Tony Douglas, Jr. OECD.AI Akbar Nurlybayev CentML Nish Sinnadurai Cerebras Systems Artem Mamzhiev Ben Davies Vector Institute Colin McKay Waabi Tagging Honourable Michelle Rempel Garner, P.C., M.P. Nathaniel Erskine-Smith for their awareness. See below my recent photograph of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center housed in a former church.

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Google’s new developer verification policy could block independent and open-source apps from running freely on Android, even outside the Play Store. I wrote about what this means for Canada’s digital sovereignty, and why we need a right to install, not just a right to repair. Would love to hear your thoughts. https://lnkd.in/e7Y83VWX

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Uno Platform of Montreal just landed $3.5 million in convertible note funding for its enterprise developer platform. The platform boosts productivity by allowing developers to "code once," then publish across operating systems, IDEs, and form factors. It also includes an integration with popular design platform Figma, as well as "theming" and security tools. In a world of "adequate" vibe coding apps that "anyone" can develop, there is a need to support enterprise-grade developers and their productivity. Toyota, TradeZero, Cineplex, Air Canada, and others are on board. Uno is on to something.

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