LinkedIn is usually not the place to go to find a balanced argument. However it is the place where many of us in IT and software development find interesting technical and leadership discussion. It is often the most useful of the social media. We find jobs there, we discover ideas on it, we connect with people. It has its uses and it’s generally either benign or positive.
However, we don’t live in a bubble. As software people, as writers, as thinkers, we should try and be aware of where things are going.
COVID-19 decimated our lives for two years with an estimated seven million people dying globally. Over the last few years, our employers have put us under pressure through restructures, sackings, forcing us back into the empty offices and generally holding the upper hand. After witnessing the collapse of VC investment in startups and subsequent large scale sackings, the larger corporations, once safe havens for responsibility and respect in the workplace, have turned to similar methods to marginalise and dehumanise the employee experience.
A Changing Industry
During that time, an ostensibly, skilled, “white collar” industry is now being rushed towards obsolescence by ChatGPT, LLMs and the continuous pressure of big business. Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, the FAANG and more are pushing our corporate executives to keep buying their expensive LLM solutions to justify their costly investments and yet the jury is still out on what performance gains we actually see.
However, the technology is almost immaterial. New and so-called game changing technologies are always appearing in our business. Worringly, though, now we are seeing a shift in the way we treat each other at work because of impact of AI. The very fabric of our human experience is degrading on an almost daily basis and this is now reaching dangerous proportions. Managers in corporate jobs are not innocent bystanders here. They are becoming increasingly complicit mouthpieces for spreading dangerous ideas about how we interact at work.
The Evidence is Everywhere
How does this show up? We see it in the everyday corporate communications. Emails about taking ownership for our own career paths, or framing the situation for us to expect redundancy. This puts individuals under a huge amount of silent pressure. Being on the lookout for signals that could mean the end of our careers is exhausting. We are continuously in fear, in fight or flight.
This was emphasised for me after reading the content of this Business Insider interview. I initially thought it was a parody, but when the subject of it posted excitedly about it on LinkedIn it only shows the visceral disconnect between some how work in West Coast US/big tech and the rest of “the IT world”.
The article is about a person quitting a $700k a year manager job to return to the ‘coalface’ with $350k compensation. The truly scary part is that they actually see this as a personal success story rather than a tale of needless excess and privilege that is only available to an elite. It is a story that very few, if any of us, can relate to. Having said that, I wanted to check my perspective and after posting about it on a Slack found that there was genuine perplexity from some as to why this would make me angry.
I see this story as symptomatic of a wider problem. It’s not that I blame the individual who was the subject of the article, or his questionably naive LinkedIn post about it. He was celebrating his success, however I do find it shocking that there is more generally a lack of empathy to our current global situation and the situation of our colleagues and friends.
Boasting about success when so many are still being laid off or have been out of work for so long is not where we should be.
Outsourcing Our Thinking
I was inspired to reflect on my feelings. I was angry about this. Really angry. What was the root of my concern? Why was I moved to write about it?
I’m angry about inequality. I’m angry about our indifference changing working conditions. We work in systems where people have no say in what merits a good employee. We rely on systems and not enough on our human intuition. Often, we are scared for our own jobs and pass on that fear through our behaviours.
Increasingly, the machines are doing our thinking. Hardly a day goes by without using ChatGPT to decide things for us, or help us decide. And it’s the decision making which is vital when it comes to how we treat each other.
Therefore, use LLMs and AI, sure, but be aware that it doesn’t absolve you – any of you – from the decision making process. We are complicit if we just shrug our shoulders and say, even metaphorically, too bad, it can’t be helped.
Is this just Human Nature?
In our modern society, we all seem to want short cuts. Technology helps us do this, but it comes at the cost of us forgetting about our relationships. We are starting to care about each other less.
So, I write about this. I connect it to my experiences on a daily basis of the dangerous use of language in our workplaces, the disconnect between work and humanity.
Yes, you can certainly file this under “Old Man Yells at Cloud”, sure. But realise this, that there is a whole industry that is fracturing, rich versus poor, AI vs Non-AI, cloud vs on-prem, not because the technology matter, but because we’re not looking out for each other. We’re still celebrating our personal successes like it’s 2016. It’s almost 2026 and time for us to remember to be respectful and alert and diligent to our interpersonal relationships. Our human relationships are the most important aspect of our working lives.
It’s time to be thoughtful about what we say and why we say it. We should care for each other and not care for excess or success or needless amounts of money.