VER-XIV-0037
“Leadership wants me to gut my team with AI and dress it up as innovation.”
The deck calls it efficiency, but the ask is to treat the people who trusted you as line items to delete. That is building under the machine, using humans only until a tool is cheaper. You may not be able to save every role. But you can refuse to pretend it's painless, and fight for the human use.
Your Practice
- Get the real numbers and the real plan. Don't argue against a vague mandate, argue against the specifics.
- Make the human case in their language: judgment, trust, and risk the tool can't carry.
- If cuts are truly unavoidable, fight for dignity in how, notice, severance, honesty, time.
- Do not put your name on a lie that calls gutting people 'progress.' Say what it actually is.
The Architects
“Lack of tools: find a way to do it.”
Steve Wozniak, Interview with Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work (2007), closing advice-to-hackers answer