Cubicle Confessions

Discussions

• Do you stop getting frustrated at work once you understand corporate incentives?

  There is a status deck somewhere in your company that nobody reads. It gets updated every few weeks, shown in a meeting, and forgotten. Your manager knows this too. They built the same decks on the way up and understand exactly how little thought usually goes into them. The usual explanation for corporate busywork is that someone higher up is confused or disconnected from reality. That's comforting, but mostly wrong. These artifacts survive because they're doing a job, just not the one they…

• Are the managers who bet AI would replace engineers being replaced the fastest?

  Last year my LinkedIn feed had a genre. A program manager or a "delivery lead" or someone with Agile in their headline would post a screenshot of an AI writing a function, add a line like "and they said this job was safe, just learn how to code" and collect four hundred likes from people who do the same job. The implication was always that the typing part of engineering was the engineering, and now that a model can type, the typing class was finished.

• Do you have to miss your goals to get promoted?

  Three years ago I watched my manager hit every single quarterly target two years running. Clean dashboards. Green everywhere, all the time. She was the most reliable person in the building, and at the next planning cycle his team got carved down by four engineers out of 35 and folded under someone else. Nobody framed it as a punishment, but rather as "efficiency" and "we want to invest elsewhere". The lesson landed anyway, and not just on me. Sadly, never on my manager.

• Do private coaches hold you back more often than they help?

  Something I see in the gym every day are private coaches (usually from the gym itself) being paid to walk around and give some basic exercises to the trainee. Most people walk into coaching with a simple assumption: I have a goal, and the coach is paid to get me there. But that is not true. The coach is also running a business, and businesses respond to incentives whether the owner is transparent about them or not.

• Does stack ranking turn coworkers into enemies?

  Stack ranking always ends in politics because it changes what competence means inside an organization. Once employees are judged relative to each other instead of against a stable standard or objective, your smartest coworker stops being an asset that you can learn from and collaborate with, and starts becoming competition. Their success can lower your standing. Their visibility can cost you promotion space. Their expertise becomes a threat to your own security.

• Will incentivizing engineers to use AI backfire?

  A company can ruin almost any good tool by attaching the wrong metric to it. Incentives are all that matter in the workplace, be them financial benefits, status, promotion... Workers work with incentives. You and me too. Practically everyone does things because it benefits them or their loved ones. Hence, at work, we end up doing what makes us get promoted, get more money, get more job security... We're not the owners of the company, we're an employee. We look out for ourselves. That's ok.

• Is the Rolex Submariner really a dive watch, or an office master?

  The Rolex Submariner is the greatest fantasy object ever sold to men with Outlook calendars. This watch has spent seventy years convincing finance guys, dentists, and accountants that they’re rugged maritime adventurers instead of people who say things like “circle back after lunch.” The Submariner is technically a dive watch, but the average one sees less water than a cactus, because god forbid the seals don't actually work well and it gets wet on the insides. These things spend their lives…

• Does your personality matter far less than you think?

  I realize, interacting with students, teenagers and younger co-workers peers that many believe that their personality traits are a leading factor in deciding what do to or how to tackle their own career. Although younger people ask these questions more explicitly, older adults also seem to think along the same lines. I personally find it to be far more irrelevant than most people think. Besides my job, where I observe successful people doing the same role with drastically...

• Is AI driving managers medically insane?

  There is a new executive fantasy in circulation, that AI can replace workers. Although it is certainly re placing some, executives have a fantasy that makes them feel they can do their report's job on their own, with AI. That they can code! Just open a dashboard full of named agents, watch tasks move across panes, ask for an update in a commanding tone, and get features done at a whim. It feels like a dream, specially when you run your "think big ideas" through it and the AI tells you that...

• Does AI make it impossible to tell great engineers from noisy ones?

  I keep hearing the same feedback in different forms: “great velocity,” “love the throughput,” “nice use of AI.” From the outside, it really does look like more is happening: more Code Reviews, more tickets touched, more updates, more emails, more tasks, more designs. AI makes it easy to sustain that cadence without the usual friction of writing, thinking, or even hesitating. But inside the work, there’s a dilemma that keeps getting bigger.

• Do billionaires want more money, or a bigger share of the whole economy?

  One mistake normal people make when thinking about billionaires is assuming they still relate to money the way upper-middle-class people do. They do not. For a household making $90k, another $50k changes life materially. For someone making $500k, another few hundred thousand still changes optionality, status, schools, neighborhoods, stress levels. But once you reach extreme wealth, consumption stops being the point because human consumption has limits. There's only so much you can buy and you…

• Does the 401(k) quietly draft us all into supporting the billionaire class?

  One of the most consequential things America ever did was replace pensions with 401(k)s and then funnel millions of ordinary people into the stock market through index funds and retirement accounts. Not because it turned most Americans into capital owners in any sense. Stock ownership is still overwhelmingly concentrated at the top 0.1%. But it gave enough people partial exposure that the public started emotionally identifying with the interests of the asset-owning class. That changed the…

• Why do managers want everyone else to use AI but themselves?

  The thing that’s starting to irritate me is not the AI push itself. Some of the tools are genuinely useful. I use them every day now. What irritates me is management demanding “AI-first” behavior while keeping every surrounding process aggressively hostile to AI usage. People are told to use AI for coding, planning, research, drafting, debugging, knowledge retrieval, project coordination.. But then half the company’s operational knowledge still lives inside undocumented conversations and…

• Will AI replace you, or will a coworker using AI replace several of you?

  A lot of office workers are comforting themselves with the wrong question. They keep asking whether AI can do their whole job. That is not the threshold their employer will use. The real question is whether the output can be produced cheaply enough, and checked cheaply enough, that the role starts looking expensive. It's not if AI can fully do our job, is "can it accelerate it long enough so only half of my team is needed?". Because the answer to that, sadly, is yes.

• Can AI make you lose your mind, and are you more at risk if you doubt it?

  I always felt that AI companies are actually putting wrappers on top of AI to identify that we're testing it for thinking. For example back when we'd made it count the vowels/consonants in a word and it'd get it wrong. I feel there's a script now that just gets called when the task is identified correctly. I also feel that it gets trained on these memes. Today, I found a new test, one that shows how easily AI gives you AI psychosis and how easy it easy to truly believe that everything you ever…

• Is a high salary ever really enough?

  Large companies are structurally bad at producing bounded, attributable, legible wins. Part of the salary is payment for living without them.

• Should you really emulate famous tech CEOs, or did they just get lucky?

  I think a lot of famous tech-management advice only looked wise because of the environment around it. Rising stock prices, captive talent, and equity upside made a lot of bad management survivable. Most organizations do not have those shock absorbers, which is why I think people should stop treating founder mythology as management advice.

• Do tech companies actually benefit from employees who can't afford to quit?

  I've been moving through tech orgs long enough to recognize a pattern that many of you will recognize as well. Some teams are passive, they ship on time, hit targets, run clean processes, and yet nobody ever kills a bad idea in the meeting. Nobody says this is the wrong thing to build. The roadmap has a thing, or six, on it that three people privately talk about how it won't work, but it moves through planning without a word, with smiles even. You watch the lead engineers nod at something...

• Does splitting 'hard' and 'soft' skills make people worse at both?

  Hard skills are measurable, specific, and teachable abilities or technical knowledge gained through education, training, or experience, which is often directly related to a particular job or industry. Examples include data analysis, programming, graphic design, accounting, dancing, painting… They are usually the core of a profession, particularly the part of it excluding interaction with other people. On the other hand, soft skills are mostly defined as “personal attributes, interpersonal....

• Do people who eat together fight harder for each other?

  Strong groups do not become strong only because they agree on a mission. They become strong because people stop feeling abstract to one another, they see each other as people and friends. That is one reason shared meals matter more than most official culture programs. You don't need expensive workshops and getaways to build a team culture. You just need to be present. Have lunch with your team, have them eat together. Have coffee together...