The flip side of my most recent post was covered by the WSJ (again, paywall) in an article from about Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who thinks that AI will wipe out tons of jobs–a prospect he seems quite happy about–joining the ranks of Mark Benioff in celebrating putting millions of people out of work. Since I like to tell stories, this reminds me of one.
Perhaps I shouldn’t tell this story. I had a girlfriend (long before I was married, thank you), after a rather (really, really, REALLY) extended period of non-dating. I had stopped dating in part because I hated the games, and I resolved to play no head-games with the new lady friend. At one point, after being totally open about what I thought of her and where we were going, she got an exasperated look and said, “I don’t know what I think about this honesty thing!!”
Well, here goes the honesty thing again. At one point in my ten years at Cisco, we had a layoff. Actually, at a lot of points in my career here we had layoffs, but I’m referring to a specific one. I had a large team and was told to lay off five people. At Cisco, it’s up to the manager to make the phone calls, and I was the direct manager of four out of the five. The planning for these “LRs”, as we call them (limited restructuring) starts well in advance. The affected employees are not terminated for cause–rather, their roles are eliminated as redundant or not necessary. Still, I was horrified having to “impact” five people. One of them I even hired myself, but senior leaders felt his role was not needed and left me to do the dirty work.
I try not to complain about the effect doing LRs has on me. After all, I still have a job at the end of it. But I hate doing it, more than anything. Stress effects people differently, and in my case, it most commonly causes me insomnia. Crazy insomnia. Like 2-3 hours of sleep a night for a week or more. It’s brutal. (Not as brutal as losing your job, of course.) It’s always astounding to me when, after several nights of sleeping 2-3 hours, I manage to stay awake until 11pm, and then bolt upright at 1am and…just…can’t…sleep.
So this was happening to me that time as I faced the prospect of upending the lives of five colleagues. Layoffs are serious business. I’ve LRd people years ago who still don’t have jobs. I’ve LRd people who’ve worked at Cisco so long it’s the only job they know. I’ve seen people’s marriages ruined by layoffs. It’s a terrible thing to do to someone. (And, for the record, I’ve been on the receiving end of one.)
At one point this week, my wife and I had taken a drive up the road about 20 minutes and were headed back home on California’s 680 freeway. After years of drought we were having torrential rain, of the sort we almost never see here. The road was soaked. My wife looked over at me and said, “maybe I shouldn’t have let you drive given the rain.” Typical male, I had insisted on it with very little sleep. I steered carefully going about 60 mph (97 km/h for my non-American readers), slow enough but probably still a bit too fast. I was in the number two lane (second from the left.)
In my rearview mirror, I saw a California Highway Patrol police SUV barreling down the road, going way too fast, with no lights or sirens. He passed me in the number one (leftmost) lane. Right as I thought “that’s not safe” I saw him hit a huge puddle, hydroplane, lose control of his car, ricochet and almost flip over the center divider, before coming to a stop in the #1 lane facing the wrong way, with his hood partly in the #2 lane. The CHP are well-trained drivers, but they’re not invincible, as he found out.
My bleary head became surprisingly focused. I put on my hazard lights and stopped about 100 ft (whatever in meters) away and jumped out of the car. I ran up the rain-soaked freeway, up to my ankles in water. I walked around the front of the car (in the #2 lane), walked up to the window, and shouted to the cop, “are you alright?” He was talking on his radio, then looked up at me and cracked his window. “I’m alright, thank you for your concern, NOW GET OFF THE FREEWAY IMMEDIATELY!” I walked back to my car, happy he seemed in good shape.
When I got in my car my wife was shrieking at me and crying simultaneously. Apparently as I walked around his front bumper, a car in the #2 lane was inches from hitting me. Poor visibility, bad drivers going too fast, and my own stupidity nearly cost me my life. If you believe in guardian angels then mine was looking out for me. If you don’t, I had some really good luck.
I’m not a particularly physically courageous man, and dashing out onto an active freeway in the rain is not really in character for me. I believe that I was operating in a kind of disassociated stupor induced by nearly a week with only a few hours of sleep. In other words, the layoffs nearly cost me my life.
Shortly after this, the manager who reported to me, and had just done his own layoff, was walking around the office looking ashen. A senior leader looked at him and said, “you shouldn’t take it so personally, it’s just a job you have to do.” My reply was this: The second you stop feeling that way about layoffs is the second you should leave management. You should always care about your employees and their lives. If you don’t, then you shouldn’t be managing them.
Corporate executives generally don’t worry much about layoffs. They rarely have to lay someone off themselves, and if they do, it’s usually another executive who will be taking home a severance that they could buy a private jet with. EVPs and SVPs (or CVPs) don’t layoff people who won’t be able to send their kids to school or pay their mortgage. To execs at this level, it’s just OpEx on a spreadsheet. I personally think they should be required to call 5-10% of the people they lay off themselves.
Thus, for execs like McMillon and Benioff, the prospect of AI reducing jobs is a thrill. The more they can automate, the more they can do without humans, the better the OpEx, and the better their bottom line. They’ll be fine. Who cares about the little people?
While I do think AI will reduce quite a few jobs, I’m on the record as thinking it’s overrated. But if it does have the effect these guys want, why is this something we are celebrating? Don’t we care about people anymore? Or are we so stupid that we think we can just replace everyone with machines and then hand people a no-strings-attached paycheck and have a functioning society?
At the end of the day, there is one thing we can laugh about. The MBA-types who are so positively giddy about AI taking jobs will soon find that AI has one surefire use case–cranking out the same slop that they spent 2 years in business school learning how to create. They may soon see their own jobs on the chopping block. And if that happens, I’ll sleep just fine.