We're not ready for the year ahead
The hell of online dating is coming to the jobs market/pick your lane in the AI wars
Welcome to Q2 of the twenty-first century.
Thank you for joining us, we’ll jump right in.
I started the week stranded in Puerto Rico. All flights cancelled due to some local skirmish in Venezuela. You won’t have heard about it. What was interesting was that for the first 48 hours airlines just left the desk staff to deal with the chaos. My flight home was moved back a week, and no additional planes were added to deal with it. In the end some extra flights arrived and some well-timed tears by a member of my travel party secured the goodies.
While I’ve not delved into predictions for the year ahead as I’ve been going through the big stories from the last few weeks there are two themes that really stand out:
a reflection on the grimness of the job market
a change of tone on AI
Horrors of the job market
Many people start the new year with a resolve to find a new job. The old truism of jobs is that we join for money, leave because of culture. It’s often the glimpse of our lives without daily contact with our boss over Christmas that reminds us that life actually could be happy. ‘I’ll pull that CV together and get out there’. According to LinkedIn research released this week 53% of Brits say they’re looking for a new role in 2026.
To those people I’m sorry to report that the job market is utterly gruesome for candidates right now. Either candidates are finding it hard to get human eyes on their applications or when the hiring process starts it seems to go on forever.
LinkedIn’s research says that three-quarter of Brits feel unprepared for the realities of job hunting in 2026. There’s reason to be fearful, AI slop has hit the application process. Since the start of 2022 the number of applicants per open role has more than doubled in the UK. The vast majority (79%) of recruiters say it’s become harder over the last year to find qualified talent. This Business Insider piece articulates a job market where candidates apply for hundreds of jobs, each with a single click. (Archive version includes slightly more of it). Those hopeful applicants are promptly rejected by a black box algorithm somewhere on the internet. The article mentions candidates who have unsuccessfully applied for a thousand jobs.
The worst part of this scenario is that employers aren’t enjoying it at all. The surge in applicants means that they feel ‘swamped’ with candidates. The challenge is similar to the dystopian mess of the online dating scene, where users are very keen to date the hottest people on apps but hesitate to consider someone from the mid-market looks range. One jobs website, Greenhouse, has responded by adopting some of the features of dating apps, allowing candidates to highlight one opportunity a month as their ‘Dream Job’ as a way of standing out.
If online dating is a sign of the direction of travel, strap in because things are about to get a lot, lot worse.
A year of reckoning on AI
A lot of organisations have reached the stage of AI implementation where they’re wondering when a benefit is going to hit the bottom line. It’s worth clicking to expand this workplace parable from Peter Girnus (full version on X here) about organisations dashing to equip their teams with off the shelf AI tools under the guise of a vacuous ‘digital transformation’ program: (He also did one about RTO, very funny)
There’s a stark bifurcation in the AI chat at the moment and whatever lane you’ve taken you’ll find plenty of voices that will back up your views.
Amongst the AI boosters there’s a sense that the latest models are reaching a dazzling level of capability. There’s even talk of AGI being in sight.
On the other hand Yann LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta, gave a fabulously indiscrete interview with the FT where he describes large language models as ‘a dead end when it comes to superintelligence’ and that he won’t change his mind ‘because some dude thinks I’m wrong’. I’ve certainly heard similar from senior people at Google Deep Mind and having spent all day replying to AI generated emails from a company I have a contract with the singularity feels a long way off right now.
A good bit of sober system thinking perspective came in the form of an interview with economist Erik Brynjolfsson. Brynjolfsson is a legendary voice in the field of workplace productivity and he was certainly confident about the imminent uplift that AI was going to deliver to workplace efficiency.
He took a surprising strong stance on the mistakes that firms are making, saying that using AI to replace workers is destined to fail.
He said the current mistake of AI is that organisations are using it as a tool to automate and replace workers rather than augment employees. ‘Augmentation is the norm,’ he says, ‘I think a lot of people have this intuition that you need to replace workers in order for productivity to grow. Nothing could be further from the truth,’ he says. There’s good news in his predictions, he thinks productivity is going to start trending strongly upwards over the next five years
(On a personal level I am a (self paid) premium subscriber to three AI services and get fantastic value from them on a daily basis, I’m into it).
74% of single people find themselves working on Sundays to stay busy
The CEO of South West Airlines takes a stand declaring that ‘meetings aren’t work’. He blocks his calendar every afternoon from Wednesday to Friday to interact with employees
The Guardian did a brilliant analysis of UK businesses rolling back their commitments to LGBT rights, observing that social media posts by big firms have dropped by 92% since 2023. The only company bucking the trend was Apple, their public posts actually went up. Poses the question, what’s the value of a fair-weather ally? I posted this on X and there was something of a co-ordinated pile on from anti-trans voices. I’m fortunate social media criticism is harmless to me (King Knobhead himself set a legion of them on me last year, he was replying to a Guardian article that I wrote about him but I cleared all of my tweets since). But others aren’t so fortunate. Count me as very vocally supportive of the trans community. I find the idea that we can’t allow people to live their lives with dignity as inhuman. I love organisations defending our right to live a free and happy life. If you can’t allow others to choose how they to live their own lives then it says more about you than about them. There’s no LGB without the T
FYI I still have calendar availability for the Fred Again dates at Alexandra Palace. It’s a whole thing. I registered and never got a code. Looks incredible
Going back to work - the video game:
Maybe you missed it? The idea that Gen Z workers are entitled is one of the biggest misconceptions of work, they’re merely keen to understand why they are being asked to do things. Edelman’s Jackie Cooper says this is ‘down to their visceral need for safety’. Listen to the discussion
I know you haven’t made predictions for the year but would you? Just one - will the AI bubble burst in 2026? A number of economists have predicted it might.
I agree that the reckoning feels inevitable, but for me there is a real sense of hope in that necessity.
While the term "reckoning" often sounds ominous, it actually offers a vital opportunity for a reset. By stripping away the performative layers of the modern office that have clearly stopped working, we can finally clear the path for more intentional, grounded ways of connecting.
This period of disruption could represent a much-needed decluttering of the professional world rather than a simple collapse.