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Artificial Intelligence | Career

Worth Reading – U.S. Employee Engagement Below 30% for First Time in 15 Years
ByMike McBride November 10, 2026November 9, 2026 Reading Time: 1 minute

So, what you’re telling me is that managers who can’t do more than say “use AI” to their employees are making them feel uncared for and disengaged, and that is particularly true for remote and hybrid employees, who, in my opinion, already don’t feel like anyone cares about them at work?

This tracks. It’s also one of the biggest issues I see with AI rollouts: the lack of direction, planning, or even the faintest acknowledgment of the fear of being replaced by AI by the same people who will likely tell you about the company being like family when they need something from employees.

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Artificial Intelligence | Blogging

Sign of the Internet Times – The End of Salon.com
ByMike McBride November 5, 2026 Reading Time: 2 minutes

This makes sense. I can’t speak for a news site like Salon, but I can tell you that AI is killing search; it’s killing views, and scrapers run up the traffic bill for most sites. My saving grace is being small enough that I don’t attract that many bots, and I take some action to block some of the worst, but for a large site like Salon, that’s a nightmarish amount of effort to make money in a dwindling advertising market.

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Artificial Intelligence

Worth Reading – AI Not Only Failed To Kill The Billable Hour, It’s Looking Like Its Bodyguard
ByMike McBride November 5, 2026 Reading Time: 1 minute

As someone who has heard people talk about spending 30-45 minutes with AI crafting an email response, I think this might apply outside law firms. I think using AI may be paralyzing us. There’s always another tweak, a different way to say something, another item we hadn’t thought of and need to discuss with our agent.

We’ve turned basic communication into committee work and, in the process, turned a tool designed to save us time into one that makes everything take longer.

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Career

Worth Reading – How to avoid the wear and tear of working hard
ByMike McBride November 3, 2026November 5, 2026 Reading Time: 1 minute

This is the reality few people in management seem to understand. There is absolutely a point of diminishing returns when it comes to hours worked. And that point is usually not where you think it is. It’s not at 16-hour days; it’s probably less than eight hours. You probably get the highest-quality output from your team for a few hours each day, and even that depends on how many meetings and interruptions their brains have to deal with.

Read More Worth Reading – How to avoid the wear and tear of working hard
Career

Worth Reading – Microsoft gives voluntary buyout offer to about 60,000 employees
ByMike McBride October 27, 2026 Reading Time: 1 minute

It’s not a layoff, but it’s the next best thing: telling over 25% of your workforce their jobs are so unimportant you’ll pay them to leave.

The tech job market is toast. There’s no other way to put it.

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Uncategorized

Be Careful with Those AI Note-takers
ByMike McBride October 22, 2026 Reading Time: 1 minute

This is dumb on so many levels. Having a meeting assistant in such a personal meeting was probably rude and dangerous from the start. Forgetting it was there while you talked about replacing the former employee was even stupider. Maybe the icing on the cake for me is another question. If she was terminated, why did the email with the transcript still get to her? Why was her email account still accessible?

This might be a really good example of AI use making your systemic failures even more obvious, and faster.

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