If a company can employ five people, and they’ll feel pressured to do the work of eight to ten people, that sure sounds like a good deal for the company. Is it?

We know that an athlete, a teacher, or a doctor won’t perform well if they are hungry, tired, stressed, and have been working without a break for eight or more hours already. So why do we believe that knowledge workers will perform well in those same conditions?

Last I saw, tech workers were skipping meals and breaks. We would stay late or work weekends. We were responding to work messages at all hours. Vacations, if they happened, were sometimes used for getting “caught up.” Ever not have time to go to the restroom or refill your water bottle between meetings? And many of us would start and end our days with the stress of an hour or more of traffic or public transit.

Take a water break. (Getty Images for Unsplash)

All of this while in a state of anxiety and fear for our jobs. Tech layoffs were a common occurrence before the executives could blame AI for their decisions. AI has only increased the uncertainty and the threat.

If AI is making everyone so much more productive, why am I not hearing about how tech workers finally have room to breathe in their schedules, time for a full lunch break, and relief from staying late or working on days off?

Who benefits from the productivity gains we keep hearing about from AI? It doesn’t seem to be the worker.

Is it the employer? Are the overworked humans really getting more done for them? Even then, the employer is missing out on human potential by seeing their people only as “human resources” from which labor can be extracted more efficiently thanks to AI.

I also wonder if we’re solving the right problems by using AI to squeeze more code out of fewer people. Many leaders have never attempted to map the flow of work and have no idea where the bottlenecks were. Many bottlenecks aren’t from the developers. And what slows down developers is not made better by writing code faster.

Performance and productivity isn’t the ultimate goal of our lives. Tech workers aren’t part of an assembly line. The value of our work isn’t about how fast we can go or how many widgets we churn out in a 24 hour period. It’s about outcomes, not output.

But beyond that, the value of a person isn’t measured by how much work they produce. The value of an evening, a weekend, or a vacation isn’t in how much more productive we’ll be when we come back.

My Unsplash search for "freedom" turned up lots of people standing in nature with their arms outstretched. Isn't that interesting. (Photo by Fuu J on Unsplash)

Humanity matters beyond our productivity at work. Your life means so much more than how much you get done on the job.

It’s been more than a year since I left the corporate world. I’d love to talk to you and learn what you’re seeing in the tech world today.

What are the pain points now? Are you shooting for peak performance while also running on empty? Where does that pressure come from, and who does it serve? What would happen if you declined to accept it? What would need to be true for that to be feasible for you?

I have so many questions. Come talk to me. Calendar here.

And let’s all go stand in nature with our arms outstretched.

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