Is It Worth It?

We’re not in the same boat. We’re not family.

The last few months have been incredible, in a bad way. I haven’t been let go, not yet. Nevertheless, I have heard a lot, seen a lot, and experienced a lot. I’m heartbroken.

For many of us, the disheartening events of the last couple of months have led to an epiphany: in the eyes of the corporate world, we are fungible. We will never forget that, given the opportunity, companies will replace us the moment they believe they can.

But believing something doesn’t make it true.

In order to produce great products, you first need to build great teams. The foundation of every great team is trust. You cannot build trust by lying to people. I am a human first, then an engineer, and finally a manager, or at least I was. I was asked to lie to the team I had built, a team whose foundation was trust. That moral conflict had a devastating effect on me.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg complained that Meta’s AI efforts weren’t progressing at the pace he expected. That comes as no surprise. You no longer have great teams because they no longer trust you. And they don’t trust you because you lied to them.

I admire how clearly the young Steve Jobs articulated his thoughts. I keep going back to his early interviews on YouTube. One of the most important things he realized early on was that, once you’ve built great teams, all they need is a vision. The rest is history.

Steve also emphasized that A-players want to work with other A-players. Humans are not fungible because each of us is unique. When you lose a great engineer, you don’t just lose a role. You lose a unique human being, someone you can never truly replace.