Upon leaving my company, I want to answer 3 questions:

  1. What was happening (with the company)?
  2. What happened (with me)?
  3. What is happening (with me) now? This post covers the first question.

As a company grows, people have less visibility into each other's work, so optics becomes more and more important. Previously I've defined optics in contrast to substance. While some optics can create value for the group, e.g. providing public project updates can keep the group on track, I find optics generally creates value for the individual over the group, e.g.

  1. counting code changes diverts effort away from adding functionality instead toward splitting changes and making incremental changes
  2. stuffing promo packets shifts the focus from building for user impact to checking the boxes and filling the blanks
  3. hosting all-hands meetings often wastes people's time with overly sanitized talking points around irrelevant topics

I could probably play a bit more into optics and get a good amount of individual value out of it. However, I find myself mildly allergic to what I consider playing into optics.

✨AI✨ is having a real moment right now. Against the strong confidence from investors and other technologists that ✨AI✨ will transform every industry, I have the relatively moderate position that ✨AI✨ will disproportionately reshape work closer to text, away from pace more toward judgement. Even though ✨AI✨ generalizes well over text-based issues, it does not solve all issues. However, the temptation to treat ✨AI✨ as a silver bullet remains strong.

I saw they were scoring people by their measured usage of ✨AI✨ tools, and that score would factor into people's performance reviews. Some more senior engineers pushed back on scoring people by their usage of tools, emphasizing that we should instead evaluate people on their output. However, the temptation was too strong, and leadership kept usage of ✨AI✨ tools an explicit part of the criteria. We've now instituted a game where people have scripted useless calls to ✨AI✨ tools.

With the growing emphasis on optics and ✨AI✨ tool usage as a measure in itself, I found myself less of a fit with the company, or perhaps the company less of a fit with me.