Howdy, picknickers!

This week has been a rough one for a lot of people, so we’re starting off the issue with an important reminder:

And the circumstances this week terrible.

The Timeline

Usman Sheikh puts it well: fear is now the primary corporate motivator. Major employers have continued to torpedo the organizational knowledge they’ve curated over the years. Notably, the rhetoric coming from their leaders bears no connection to the facts on the ground. Intel’s layoffs come after a promise to “invest” in their engineering talent and Microsoft is shedding money-making units in favor of money-losing ones, laying off industry giants like 35-year industry veteran Gregg Mayles who has been designing games since Battletoads (1991!).

Indeed is also appealing to AI as the reasoning behind its layoffs; however Rebecca Murphey (comment on this post) rightfully notes that we only have the CEO’s word for this. Other commenters in that thread call out the layers of nonsense behind the announcement:

• using “AI” to justify reducing R&D investment (Katie Achille)

• the hypocrisy of a company dedicated to supporting employees failing to invest in its own employees (Michael Schlager)

• the brutal heartlessness of “you will be informed within the next hour” (Katrina Kibben)

This is far from the first time that companies have straight-up lied about their reasoning for layoffs (recall Meta’s transparently bullshit claim that its layoffs were performance-related).

Ultimately, AI is just an excuse. These companies wanted to do layoffs, and did it. And now they’re gaslighting you about the reason why.

Reading Material

This is a good opportunity to read a 2023 essay by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, documenting this trend long before Sam Altman escalated his claims about AI from “it’s a tool that does things” to “it will save and/or destroy humanity.”

Don’t be tricked into taking CEO soundbites at face value. They are performing thought leadership for shareholders. Some of them are even outsourcing that job to AI, telling their employees to read books that don’t exist because they can’t be bothered to fact check their own advice.

Predictably, we see LinkedIn (as a microcosm of the industry at-large) trying to just post through it, with inauthentic toxic positivity at an all-time high. But it’s plain for anyone to see that the last vestiges of the contract between employees and employers has been shattered, and the numbers show it. Corporate America has passed the trust thermocline and it is not clear if it will ever recover. Employees are making their own space for mental health as best they can. Micro-retirement is supplementing their scant PTO, and AI tools are (incompetently) filling the role of therapists.

It is understandable that employees stop emotionally investing into their work after being treated so heartlessly. But it leaves UX and Product in an awkward place. Because design is the rendering of care, and if no one cares, then you can’t do design. Trying to rush through the process makes it fail most of the time. As Joe Wintergreen puts it, "the encroachment of investment-style thinking onto the creative process” ends up destroying any chance of that process producing investment-worthy value.

Great software requires continuous transgression. Transgression requires a sense of ownership proportional to the size of the risk. And as companies have been showing us on a monthly schedule since 2022, we have no ownership.

But it doesn’t stop the joint forces of CEOs and LinkedIn influencers from selling the lie that all things are possible through the combined powers of individual responsibility and large language models.

If you are still telling yourself that you can Just Power Through it, if only you work hard enough — you can’t. You can turn to AI if you like, but watch out. According to a recent study, those perceived productivity gains are actually productivity losses. In the meantime, growing reliance on AI will only sap your motivation further.

On the Bright Side

(Over the past few issues, I’ve trended towards including some actionable advice towards the bottom of the newsletter. Perhaps it’s time to make it an official section. This is On the Bright Side: the place where we stop talking about the doom and start highlighting how people are pushing back against it.)

What you need to take ownership of is not your volume of outputs, but your relationship to those outputs. Resist the lure of the productivity anglerfish, and listen to what your exhaustion and burnout are telling you: it’s time to rest and reflect before you can move on.

The rise of AI has put the authenticity of any digital expression into question. People have already gone after authors, myself included, for using em-dashes (I will never stop). To my delight, people have responded by turning to physical media. Zines are back, baby! Reject the pressure to churn out identically polished prestige content, and embrace the messiness of authentic self-expression.

Of course, zines are not the only place for authenticity. Matt Jukes recently shared the script for his talk on working in the open, along with the motivation behind it: not for publicity or the illusory gains of crowd-sourcing, but for community.

And finally — despite repeated promises that AI is here to stay — the pendulum is swinging the other way, and humans are raking in the dough fixing the damage done by “cost-saving” agentic systems. A big part of this change is a reversal of a tax code change, which Bob Goodman explains here (it’s a lot less boring than it sounds).