Let's be honest, nobody gives a shit about you personally in any job, you either deliver what you're paid to deliver or they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after, even if they like you on a personal level. Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.

> they couldn't care less if you're gone the next day and forget about you completely the day after

This is a lesson I wish I learnt earlier.

I quit thinking I was irreplaceable based on the sheer urgent firefighting load they put on me. Once I quit, never heard from them again. All those urgent tasks that somehow only I got assigned "because there's nobody else", suddenly managed to get done by someone else or nobody because they weren't actually urgent.

"If you want something done, give it to a busy person" - Benjamin Franklin

At every job I’ve had, across all the managers I’ve had, my immediate manager (and usually their manager as well) genuinely cared about me and my team and our well being as well as our careers. My _company_ and its executives surely didn’t give a damn if they even knew our names, but the actual humans I work face to face with definitely do.

People! They’re the worst!

Kidding aside, I am quite introverted and also quite happy alone. Not all the time, but more often than not.

If I had a business idea that i was passionate about and could do it with just AI and avoid hiring people? Yeah, I might do that.

On the other hand ideas are cheap and it seems to me a key differentiator between success and failure is marketing/sales, and execution that others can’t match.

I might be suffering a lack of imagination but I don’t see public models as an execution differentiator. If one person can do it so can another. Having an excellent team of people that know how to work well together and can execute is a differentiator. Enigibeers might be a dime a dozen. But great teams are not.

Marketing/sales. That might be getting a bite taken out by ai but it’s at the spam level of marketing and sales. Solid marketing and sales are the life blood of many successful orgs.

I think for AI to be a differentiator, it would have to be your own model, or your own dataset that elevates your model above others in execution.

I think this is too harsh. Generally yes, but there are good people like myself who do care. Yes we are rare but we do exist and more than 'nobody'.

And AI is coming or has already arrived, so everybody better have a plan B.

This is certainly the most risk averse, conventional take on the topic to keep you safe and avoid vulnerability.

That said, if you bring this opinion to your next job then you also won't really leave much room to build these connections at a personal level. My one suggestion would be to leave a BIT of room for vulnerability and caring about folks at a personal level - even if the company is secondary here. In the end, people matter and the relationships you build will be the thing that sustains you in your career.

I gave a lot of shit about my employees the first time I was a manager. It burned me out, but it made for an amazing team.

I don't think any of my managers has ever been directly involved with having to deal with business expenses, so I don't think that's really a thing that they think about when managing me.

Also, for what it's worth, when I was let go from my previous job, my former manager actually kept checking my LinkedIn profile on a weekly basis, presumably to see if I'd landed a job. I think that might count as "giving a shit".

> Employees are an unpleasent expanse that the business must incur and if AI will make it feasible to replace all emloyees to save money, nobody will even blink an eye, just count the money saved.

This is why many companies have already "achieved AGI internally". Just ask Block, Meta (x4), Amazon, xAI, JP Morgan, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, Morgan Stanley and so on.

A few years from now, do you think, will anyone notice that all the customers who used to be able to afford the product have starved to death and sales are plummeting? Will they be sad or confused by this mystery?

That's one way to look at employment in a purely capitalist manner. Doesn't mean it's the only way. If the capitalists intend for AI to take all our jobs, perhaps we should entertain alternatives?