AI Would Have Replaced 2001 Me

I would get invited to meetings because I was a good listener and effective note taker.

I'd say almost nothing, but, after an hour of discussion, hand over a set of agreements and action items.

It was a Fire, Fire, Fire culture that needed a little touch of Ready and Aim. Or maybe just some names and dates next to action items to satisfy the desire for accountability. I could translate unstructured discussion into something people perceived as useful.

Right place, right time.

After a few such meetings, leaders asked me to help them prep for future discussions. We'd establish an agenda and talk about the flow of the meeting.

Eventually, they asked me to facilitate the discussions.

I had no business being in those rooms. I didn't oversee relevant functions, and I didn't have domain expertise. But someone saw something in me. Curiosity? Listening? Empathy? Whatever it was, those opportunities allowed me to build new muscles. Gain confidence.

Today, Copilot does that work. Or whatever LLM companies are testing. Born twenty-five years later and I wouldn't have had the same access or opportunity. I never would have built those skills. Never would have established that trust.

Extrapolating that out, when the economy took a dot-com-bust nosedive, and the staffing industry felt the brunt of it, I would have been expendable.

Or maybe I never would have been hired. 

It's a scary thought looking in the rear-view mirror, but an even scarier one when we're looking through the windshield, hurtling down the highway at breakneck speed.

No brakes. No exit ramp. Just relentless AI acceleration.

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The most effective way to build a winning culture? Promote from within.

You make decisions based on real accomplishments and real values, not what someone tells you in an interview. You infuse the culture with a development ethos and you reward the people who have gone above and beyond, not just in terms of performance but in helping those around them.

On the flip-side, lateral hires can work out great… but they already have a way of doing things and have figured out how to function with a different set of unwritten rules. There's re-programming to do. Or the dance to determine if your culture should adapt. That takes a long time.

Those lateral hires have also demonstrated that they'll jump if the grass looks greener.

But what happens when "promote from within" is no longer an option?

What happens when you don't have anyone to promote? What happens to your culture? And what happens to society when that becomes the rule more than the exception?

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I spent a few years in a CIO role. We were making a lot of lateral hires and trying to integrate them. This was unique to the technology team. Every other part of the company almost exclusively promoted from within.

Some of these hires worked out great. Others didn't.

I scratched my head. Why did we have to go outside so often?

I talked to some of our tenured leaders about their career paths. Most of them had started on the Service Desk or as a PC Technician. A light bulb went off. We (and everyone else) had outsourced those functions. Tickets were handled by a partner with a team in India.

When we outsourced entry-level roles, we inadvertently cut off our pipeline for future leaders. We gained efficiency but lost future talent development.

In the end, many jobs will go away and more will be created through AI. I get that. We can't hold onto less optimal ways of doing things. The luddite strategy is not a winning strategy.

But let's be clear. The Luddites were right about disruption. They were left behind. They resisted inevitable change, and we need to learn from them.

The labor market is dynamic and resilient. Over time, we'll adjust. People will migrate to in-demand jobs. But I fear too many of those jobs could look more like a treadmill than an escalator. And this dynamic, resilient labor market will take its time reallocating the workforce. It took nearly a century to redeploy farmers into the broader economy.

We don't have a century. In fact, we're already in the early days of this shift.

This isn’t just an organizational issue. It’s personal. It’s about how you’ll grow, learn, and find opportunities.

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A few days ago, technology reporter Kevin Roose wrote, "This month, millions of young people will graduate from college and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence."

Unemployment for recent college graduates (5.8%) is considerably higher than the national unemployment rate (4.0%), and it's on the rise.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, sees this as just the tip of the iceberg. He believes half of all entry level jobs will be gone in five years.

AI predictions have one common thread. They're wrong. Or at least the timing is wrong (see self-driving cars). But if Amodei and Roose are directionally right, it's hard to say whether this will happen sooner or later.

These are credible perspectives from insiders, and I feel confident in saying we're ill-prepared.

Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, recently penned a guest essay for the New York Times. In it, he said, "Fixing entry-level work is the first step to fixing all work. Because all our jobs are going to come up against this same wave of change sooner or later. It will feel slow, until it’s sudden. We know there’s a generation of talent waiting in the wings for their big break. The question is whether we’ll give them a real chance to begin. 

He's right. But his prescription isn't particularly helpful. Companies are operating from a position of fear. They're going to automate and optimize anything they can to stay competitive. That's what it means to be part of this capitalist system.

And I'm not holding my breath that Washington DC has this figured out. Not sure if you've noticed, but there's a bit of dysfunction there.

Oh, and that generation of talent waiting in the wings for their big break? We've also saddled them with historic levels of debt. This wasn't the case when we were converting from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing and then knowledge economy. We passed a GI Bill, subsidized higher education, offered Pell Grants.

So where does that leave us? Paralyzed?

We don't have to be. We need to sezie control of our careers. Re-imagine success.

Most of today's career advice sits on shaky ground. It presumes that we actually know what hard skills will be relevant in the future. That you should have a long-term career plan. That you should pick a profession and attach that to your identity.

We need to stop skating where the puck is and stop trying to skate to where the puck is going to be.

We. Don't. Know.

My conclusion: The best long-term career plan is no long-term career plan.

We need to be rabid, relentless learners-- sampling opportunities, finding purpose, and adding value wherever and whenever we can. We need to be bold in our attempts, unafraid to fail, and focused on our learning potential more than our earning potential.

It's time for a new set of metaphors to shape our career journey.

Stop trying to climb some mythical career ladder. It might have existed in a different time with a different employment contract. What we have left is rickety at best-- and our economy is taking out the bottom rungs.

No, you're on a jungle gym, moving sideways, finding purchase. The joy isn't in getting to the top, but in realizing your potential while you navigate that jungle gym. The joy is in helping those around you navigate with you.

You are not the captain of your career ship, setting sail for some distant port with dreams of a gold watch and a fully funded 401k on the other side.

You're a surfer, not shying away from the turbulence, reading conditions, catching waves and learning with every attempt.

I'm nervous for our future.

I'm nervous for your future.

It's time to see the world differently, and it's time to act.

Act your way into a new way of thinking. Commit to trying something new today, and every day. You (and we) don't have a lot of time.

The future favors those brave enough to grab a surfboard and paddle toward the turbulence. That approach might have even saved 2001 me.