The busiest person on the team
Nobody gets pulled aside for being too diligent.
There’s someone on a team I know who is very good at their job. Ten-odd years in, knows the technical side better than anyone else in the building, the sort of person who will happily spend a day and a half building a spreadsheet that answers a question nobody else knew how to ask. Genuinely good. I want that on the record before I say the rest of it.
Their employer bought the whole team access to one of the AI tools a few weeks back. They haven’t logged in. Every time it comes up, they say they haven’t got the time to learn it.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.
Then last week they posted in the team chat asking if anyone could help with a piece of work a customer wanted answered by end of day. And they’d laid the whole thing out. Here’s what we suggested, here’s what they came back with, here’s what they’re actually asking for. Fully structured, all the context, nothing missing.
Which is a prompt. That message was already the prompt. Their manager copied it, pasted it into the tool, and had the answer inside a minute.
Their response to that was: right, but now I have to check all of it is correct.
Which is true, and fair, and they should. But notice that it arrived second. The first objection was time. When time got disproved in front of them, the objection became verification. Which reads less like someone worried about accuracy and more like someone quietly moving the fence.
The easy read here is technophobe, or lazy. They’re neither. Their manager can see the usage stats and they’re mid-table for the team, so they’re poking at it. And this is someone who, handed a genuinely clever new thing, would normally be all over it. It’s a sweet shop for a person like them. They should be delighted that the monster spreadsheet doesn’t need building any more.
They aren’t delighted. Which means that something else is going on.
Here’s what I think it is, and it travels a long way outside this particular job. Most people’s work is two things bolted together. There’s the judgement, which is the part you’d describe if someone asked you what you do. Then there’s the production, which is where the hours actually go: pulling the numbers together, formatting them, chasing the right version, making the deck, writing it up, sending it round, and so on. The judgement is real. The judgement is maybe a fifth of the day.
If you sit down with one of these tools for a full afternoon, you find out what that fraction is. Not roughly. Actually. And the reason people don’t sit down with it isn’t the afternoon. They can already feel roughly what the answer is, and a feeling is survivable in a way that a number isn’t.
I’ve seen the louder version of this too. Someone on LinkedIn told me the content from my book was AI slop, which was decent going given the book isn’t out until January. Their profile headline said they cracked PageRank in 2008. PageRank stopped being a thing anyone could crack around 2010. Fifteen years of a professional identity built on a signal that isn’t there any more, and what comes out is anger at whoever points at the ground.
Same fear. Two exits. One shouts, and one is very, very busy.
The busy one is harder to help, because busyness is respectable. Nobody in the history of work has been pulled aside for being too diligent. You can go years flat out on things that quietly stopped mattering, and everyone around you will describe you as hard-working right up until the restructure.
So if any of that landed uncomfortably, the bit worth sitting with is this. The audit isn’t the threat. The audit is the thing that buys you time. Run it in a normal week, still employed, salary landing on the 28th, nothing on fire, and you get to make choices about what happens next. Everyone runs the same audit eventually. Most people run it the week after somebody else has made the decision for them, which is a considerably worse week to be finding things out.
I don’t know what they’ll do. My guess is they’ll be the busiest person on that team for another six or nine months, and then something will shift around them and it’ll be the tool’s fault, or the manager’s, or the market. It usually is.
The question, if you’re going to ask yourself one: last Tuesday, how many of your hours went on the judgement and how many went on producing things. Not a guess. Go and count.