I thought about these headlines yesterday. Maybe we shouldn’t consider X-Twitter’s market-value collapse a horrendous business decision. Perhaps this was always a $44 billion donation in kind to the Trump campaign in exchange for an oversized level of power and influence. Musk turned Twitter into X – a right-wing propaganda machine.
I’ve heard a few folks in the legal industry talking about how much more expensive renewals are becoming because every tech tool is adding AI, and as we know, AI isn’t cheap. Someone has to pay for it, and it looks like that’ll be all of us, in the form of higher prices for the tools we use to get our work done just fine the way they are now.
Not because we need it. They need it to show growth and satisfy investors. The fact they are likely creating a bubble that will burst and end dozens of perfectly profitable companies will be chalked up to bad luck.
Now, before you start with “they work in IT so that they don’t have to do public speaking,” I am going to argue that even if you’ve never wanted to present to a large conference audience or be asked to present webinars, etc., you would do well to learn how to do it anyway. You will need to tell a compelling story about what you do at some point in your career. Whether it be to defend your budget, ask for headcount, or explain your role on the team, being able to present your ideas well will go a long way. But, it’s not something we train for with many of our technical employees.
Well-being programs place the responsibility for managing employee mental health in the hands of the employees, who have no power to change the things causing the problem.
That seems to be what happens in the tech journalism space. We have a list of people who’ve created successful companies and made a ton of money doing it, and everyone is supposed to assume that they are so bright they can do it over and over again. Then we are surprised when Elon buys Twitter and runs it into the ground or when Meta can’t find a market for the Metaverse. Microsoft spends billions upon billions of dollars on AI without any hope of making a profit for years while conducting rounds of layoffs to offset those costs. We assume they know what they’re doing because they’ve succeeded in other markets before, and the press doesn’t challenge them when they say provably false things.
It’s the Halo Effect. We assume that successful people are smart and kind and live healthy lives, especially if they are white men. When they contradict this picture we’ve painted, we loathe to admit it, let alone call it out in an interview. It’s more cognitively comfortable for us to continue believing they are competent and will figure it out.
It’s great that someone is putting it all in writing with research. Still, until the collective response to our stories about dropping out of a wedding to pop open our laptop is “that’s not acceptable,” we will have this issue. We should reconsider the tales of all-nighters, working from vacations, and extraordinary efforts to get eDiscovery work done in time. Instead of wearing them like badges of honor, we should think of them as exploitation. What else would you call the expectation that you are available to respond 24/7, and when you sacrifice much of your personal and family life to meet that expectation, you are rewarded with a 2% raise at the end of the year?
Because as long as that is the job, mental health is going to be an issue.