Once upon a time, I worked at a pizza restaurant. One of my first tasks there was to sweep and mop the walk-in. The first time I did it, it took me almost an hour. I had no idea what I was doing, and I was slow. By the time I left that job a few years later, I could do it in about ten minutes.

I don’t think anyone ever really trained me or taught me. I just…leveled up. Got better. Figured out the best way to do it, and how to effectively use the tools and equipment.

There’s two topics I’ve talked about before, both related to this: Upskilling, and also time/effort estimation and how that ties to business financials. Because here’s the thing, I was paid by the hour. Which means by getting the walk-in mopped in ten minutes instead of forty-five, I was literally sort of taking money out of my own pocket.

This gets even more complicated with salaried workers. The classic example is, of course, sprint planning. If person A can do four times as much work as person B, should they get paid four times as much? Or maybe they should work half as fast, especially if they’re not going to actually GET anything for working four times as fast.

Take a look around today. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

This is super prevalent right now with the overwhelming rollout of AI, everywhere. The expectation, if you’re a knowledge worker, is that you are now X times more efficient because “AI can help you”. What I’m trying to point out is this isn’t a new problem, but it is now at a scale of orders of magnitude on par with only a few other keystone moments in history: the steam engine, the printing press, the Internet, etc.

As an employee or worker, this can be difficult to navigate (which is an understatement of ridiculous proportions). We’re in an age of hypercapitalism where the messaging you get from your business leadership is along the lines of, those efficiency and cost gains aren’t going to you, the worker. They’re going to “the business”, whatever that means (shareholders, stock price, the owner’s new yacht, whatever). So why should you care about any of this?

I don’t have the answer. But I know this: the answer is not going to be “ban AI” and “just keep doing things the same way”. It’s probably to go read how we handled the last times this happened. And I think the key lies around this space:

What are you REALLY being paid to do?

(One of my favorite analogies: If you were disrupted because your horse-and-buggy was replaced by the car, its because you thought your job was “horse-and-buggy driver” and not “move people and things from point A to point B”.)

Because if the answer is “write code”, then you’d better figure out how to reframe it to something more like “solves problems”. And quickly.