2025-10-08 19:54:00
IT’S ANNUAL REVIEW SEASON in a lot of workplaces, which means there’s a range of anxieties surfacing, both about completing the reviews themselves (which always takes way too long) and about the consequences that come with them: bonuses, warnings, raises, improvement plans—a bundle of precarity and coercive praise wrapped up with capriciousness and barely contained threats. That the ritual so often arrives at the same time as the holiday season and that most horrible of American traditions—open enrollment—is no coincidence: comply! or we will ruin your kids’ Christmas and cancel your blood pressure prescription! is as unsubtle as it is occasionally effective.
Review styles trend with the boom and bust cycle. In boom times, they become more casual, less formal. There’s an emphasis on employee growth, how a manager can help their reports succeed, on delivering feedback up the ladder. In bust times—and we are in a bust now as far as management’s attitude to labor goes, never mind what the stock market says—we see the pendulum swing back the other way. Ratings return in force and are parceled out like rations in a famine, managers made to understand that no matter how effective their team is, very few of them are fives. Quantitative measures drown out the qualitative ones, both managers’ and workers’ observations subsumed to supposedly more reliable metrics like the number of deploys. Disciplinary factors multiply, with managers asked to enforce card swipes into the office, hours spent using AI, training modules completed—all of which has the effect of saying, you’re here to do what you’re told. So do it.
Obviously, I have a preference for the boom-time style (as, I imagine, do you). But the thing I come back to here is that neither way puts people first. Companies adopt and enforce review processes not because they care about humans—whatever our wanton Supreme Court says, companies are not beings that can care—but because they need to maximize the outputs they get from their workers. They can, and will, deploy both carrot and stick in doing so, and the times when they have preferred the carrot have come about because labor conditions made the stick unlikely to succeed. When those conditions have changed—as they have, abruptly, this year—they pick up the stick with no concern for the bruises and broken bones that inevitably follow.
But we care about those bones, and we are in a position to act on that care. And there’s only one way to do that, and it’s to organize. The review itself is a chore you have to complete, an administrative burden, a kind of work requirement that must be performed in order to maintain access to your healthcare (such as it is). But you needn’t squash your working relationships into that trapped and dark little box. Fill out the paperwork, show your documents, click through the training module: this is the price of water and we are all parched. But then go talk to your peers and comrades like you are both actual humans—because you are. Ask them what they need, share your needs with them, and get creative about how you might meet some of those needs together. Tell them what you’re seeing and hearing and ask for their insights; remember that you are compatriots not competitors. Move at the speed of trust and make trust the truth you come back to.
One of the roots of the word “review” refers to reconsideration, to look at something anew. We needn’t be beholden to the received ways these processes show up; we have it within our power to reconsider how we show up in relation to them.
Because the worst effect of reviews isn’t the way they make it easier to target people for the next round of layoffs, or the slashing of confidence, or the rewarding of sycophancy. No, the worst effect is the way they come between colleagues, the wedge they drive between erstwhile collaborators. The directives to assess and evaluate, to compete with each other, are like landmines in a relationship, tools designed to make you defensive, more likely to stab a colleague in the back than lend a hand. Don’t fall for it. Whatever your company’s rating systems, you and your colleagues are all five out of fives at being human. Act like you remember that and your actions will make it true.
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2025-09-26 20:08:00
Jason Koebler reports on a study that defines “work slop” (truly a cursed phrase) as work that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” Predictably, the study shows that the prevalence of work slop is a torpedo to collaboration and trust: if you have to hunt around for hallucinations in your colleague’s work, how can you trust anything they say or do? And perhaps that is actually the point of this whole phenomena: in the same way that slop across our social networks makes it impossible to believe in even a semblance of reality, work slop makes it unwise to treat your coworkers as human. But who wins when we see each other as little more than faulty tools? Not us.
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2025-09-23 22:12:00
Virginia Valian has a work problem: she struggles to do the work she wants to do. In this essay from 1977 (PDF), she describes how she identified the problem and the program she used to address it—one that involves very short periods of work alongside a deepening awareness that good work is its own reward. Her program isn’t a means of doing more work for other people, but for herself; and it isn’t a productivity hack so much as a means of becoming attuned with what your work means to you and why it matters. Importantly, what she describes involves being able to do the work that matters to you even when times are difficult—the work becomes a salve, not an obligation. “For me, there are two main rewards for working,” she writes. “One is the continual discovery within myself of new ideas; the other is deeper understanding of a problem.” (Stay for the kicker.)
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2025-09-16 22:26:00
IN THE CARTOON, two frogs lounge in a cauldron, fire building below, elbows perched over the edge like they’re at the pool. If the cartoon is from the previous century, one of them is smoking a cigarette. If it’s more recent, the cigarette is swapped out for a cocktail glass with a paper umbrella, a cherry resting heavily at the bottom. The other frog is wearing shades. A speech bubble rises from their heads with words about enjoying the water, or what a nice hot day it is.
I’ve come to think there’s something fundamentally wrong about this image, about the notion that when faced with an existential threat we lounge and numb ourselves, pretending that the water getting warmer is nice, actually. But we’re much more likely to cooperate with our end than to sit idly and watch it pass. A more realistic image would show the shades-wearing frog turned around, reaching over the edge of the cauldron, piling more wood on the fire below, building it up, the other frog sipping while egging them on.
In Let This Radicalize You, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write,
Governed by fear, people are largely cooperative with systems that produce torture, mass death, and annihilation. That is the greatest danger that fear poses: not panic amid disorder, but cooperation with an order that we ought to find unspeakable—one that is actually poised to bring about our own extinction.
We are awash in cooperation with these days: hospitals abandon trans people, universities capitulate to extortion, corporations ditch their DEI commitments so fast you’d think they couldn’t wait to do it. Senior leaders at seemingly every tech company commit to AI benchmarks they know they cannot hit, while their engineers and designers execute one anti-pattern after another in order to juke the stats. The worst social media network fills up with “How I used AI to supercharge my productivity” posts, as people go about avoiding their own mortality by forgetting how to live. Meanwhile, the story goes that this is all inevitable, because that’s how the story always goes when there’s no other justification for harm done: “it cannot be prevented” is both the watchword of the AI is coming for your job crowd and the people peddling thoughts and prayers after every mass shooting. Often, these are the same people.
We may not have any clear paths out of the cauldron. It’s wide, and deep, and the exits are trapped. But neither do we need to feed the flames. In your work, you will be given a lot of orders. They may, more frequently now, be given in the tone of an ultimatum, of something that brooks no dissent. But you are not a machine to be programmed; you are not an automaton, no matter how convenient it would be for others if you were. You get to choose to do, or not do, everything you bring your hands to. You get to choose how to do it, and who to do it with.
And you can say no. You can refuse to follow an order. You can say why an order is wrong, or call attention to the harm it will bring. You can propose alternatives. You can gather with others and make your own demands, or strategize together about how to break out of this particular eddy. You can do this with people in your organization as well as with those elsewhere, many of whom are dealing with the same challenges in their orgs. You can share your wisdom and observations, letting them out into the world where they can do work, instead of letting them burn you up inside.
I’ve had countless conversations this year with people at their wits’ end with nonsense edicts: to use AI in work where it isn’t even remotely suited; to ship AI to people who do not want it; to performance manage good workers out the door simply because they won’t commute to an office to sit on video calls; to pretend that “race neutral” policies aren’t obviously the opposite; to enforce impossible metrics on arbitrary timelines, and so much more. This is gaslighting at an industrial scale. At some point, the only response that will save your sanity is a hell no.
There will be consequences, of course. But there will be consequences no matter what you do. That’s what it means to be alive and living—everything you do makes change in the world. The choices we make are never between safety and risk, because there is no truly safe path; as long as you are alive you are at risk of harm. The choice is, rather, between kinds of risk, between what it is you’re reaching for when you take the risks you do.
Most employment in the US is what is known as “at will.” Legally, that means both you and your employer can end the job at any moment, for any reason or for no reason at all. But to “will” something is to choose it, to exercise the mind and body towards an act. Every choice you make in your work is an act of will, an act of your will, and the collective will of the people you make those choices with. And will is a powerful thing! The story of inevitability is a story that wants you to forget that you have the will to change things; but the future remains, as ever, unwritten.
One word of caution: cynicism may seem like a useful weapon in times like these, but it cuts both ways. To follow orders cynically lets you off the hook: you can say, I know this is foolish, but I have to do it, so I will do it at arms length, my spirit stretching away from my hands. In that way, you can convince yourself you’re not really doing a thing even as you’re doing it. Often, the most cynical person on the team is also the most compliant. And over time, it’s corrosive; you’re trading your creativity and intellect for a resentful submission. When you spot the cynic surfacing within you, take a break, move your body, haul your spirit back into your bones. Ask yourself: how can I help the people I care about? Then go.
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2025-07-11 06:30:00
Brian Merchant asked workers what AI was doing to their jobs and got back loads of thoughtful, hilarious, at times desperate and at times righteous responses. In this post, he shares what he heard from tech workers as they deal with edicts to throw AI at everything, bottom lines be damned. The whole thing is long, but it’s worth reading in full (and the kicker is its own reward); the stories make plain that AI is being used to deskill, de-spirit, and demean the work and craft that so many people have spent years developing, and that the promise of AI is the kind of promise wiser people have learned to expect from the emperor’s tailor. What I’ll call out here: if you’re one of the many, many workers who is angry, fearful, demoralized and worse about the AI sloppification of work, know that you are not alone, and you likely aren’t even in the minority.
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2025-05-28 23:23:00
Oliver Burkeman on the insufferable edicts to use AI in your work: “The obvious answer, of course, is that you might have no choice: that given what’s coming, anyone who wants to keep food on the table must give up their dreams of aliveness, and buckle down to placating the machines instead. I have two things to say about that, the first of which is that I don’t believe it: that aliveness is so central to meaningful human experience that there’ll always be a market for those who can cultivate it, embed it in what they create, foster it in institutions and organizations, and bring people together to experience it. But the second is that even if I’m hopelessly wrong about that, and the direst predictions about AI disruption come true, then navigating through life by aliveness is still the right choice, because that’s what makes life worth living.”
To put this another way: even if you believe that shackling yourself to the machines is the only way to keep food on the table, you’re still coming to harm. Any choice you make here isn’t between safety and harm but between different kinds of harm. And maybe the threats are just that—sneering words spit from the mouths of bullies. Maybe it’s time to call their bluff.
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