There’s a reason this is happening in Europe, and I have no doubt you’d find the same thing in the US. Our Employee Assistance programs try to help the individual when it’s the system that is the problem. You can’t solve the problem if you don’t identify it.
Maybe those easy-to-spot ones are lulling us into a sense of overconfidence. What will we do when something is done with more effort and better quality? Heck, enough folks are being fooled by the poor ones because they display something they want to believe. None of us should assume we’d always know.
I am honored to have been asked, and I had a lot of fun chatting with Doug Austin and Tom O’Connor from the eDiscovery Channel about Teams, M365, and eDiscovery and trying to make sense of it all. Check it out below, and if you want to stay in touch on the topic, consider subscribing…
I’ve mentioned before that in some of the worst of my mental health struggles, I had a manager who helped me manage the process and was incredibly supportive of me doing what I needed to do, and I later had a manager who made the entire thing awkward and unbearable for me. This was at the same company. Nothing about the rules or the program changed, but my manager did. That made all the difference between me staying and being productive and walking out the door.
Most managers and even former peers are under strict orders never to say anything, positive or negative, when contacted as a reference for a former coworker.
To paraphrase, HR and legal folks know that if the former employee doesn’t get that position, everything they say will be used against them in a future legal claim that they harmed the job prospects of a former employee unfairly.
So it was somewhat shocking to see the CEO of Intuit not only say this but put it in writing:
The job market for people who can write code has fallen apart. Partly because of AI and partly because companies over-invested in engineers and tools that never could be as successful as they thought. (Remember when we were all going to be hanging out in the metaverse?) Of course, the people running these companies weren’t held accountable for those choices, but I’m past hoping that will ever happen.
So, now the mantra will be “learn AI,” at least until that market isn’t everything companies are currently promising and we go through this whole thing again.
It’s best not to get comfortable with anything in the current tech marketplace. The skills in high demand today won’t be those in high demand five years from now. If you’re entering college and embarking on a technology major, the tech will be changed by the time you graduate.