Meet Evan
An illustrative story
Evan’s manager asks him to document how he does his job so the team can automate parts of it. He’s spent twenty years getting good at spotting the things the written procedure misses. He says he’ll have something by Friday.
That night he opens his résumé, then a thread about whether anyone will have a job in five years. By midnight he hasn’t changed a line. He hasn’t told his partner about the meeting either.
The next morning he starts writing the procedure. He still doesn’t know what his manager expects his job to look like next year, and the people online can’t answer that for him.
It’s hard to hear a forecast when it sounds like a verdict
Evan hears a request to write down his process and imagines the meeting where they tell him he’s no longer needed. Part of what hurts is how quickly twenty years of good work begins to look, in his own mind, like time spent learning the wrong things.
Predictions give him something definite to argue with or prepare for. The trouble is that an evening spent trying to settle the future of work leaves him with the same unanswered questions about his own work.