I got fired

Agency in the age of AI

It’s ok, I had a good run — I’ll explain later. But it got me thinking — the job market feels different then when I left my corporate gig nearly five years ago.

The world feels a little wobbly, and so does the job market. AI is a big part of that.

Up until now I got by on my spidey-sense. I always got out before the company went down, or the bad boss imploded.

Often, just in the nick of time.

Dysfunction junction? Plan your exit, pick a better boss, get a mentor, find some allies.

Ego-maniacal boss? Toxic workplace? Manage up, channel that anger energy into finding a greener pasture. You can’t get out of this one fast enough.

Company struggling? Work connections, build bridges. Get out before the ship goes down.

One rule covers all of it: keep your head up. There are always clues but you have to be looking for them.

What’s going on with staff, co-workers, management? Are good people leaving? Managers/Leaders leaving or playing an odd game of musical chairs? Is the company in a hiring freeze or not attracting strong talent?

Time to look elsewhere.

Re-orgs are great — full of clues — who got promoted, who got a larger remit, who got a bigger budget? Go work for that group. Network like crazy on the inside.

Same with products — what’s making money for the company? What’s not doing so well or getting de-prioritized? Go work on the hot stuff. Better to be in the hot seat than no seat.

Getting fired is plenty unpleasant. I’ve had brushes with it one way or another and while there are plenty of euphemisms — it’s always personal — even if your company or your boss tries to make it impersonal.

Take RIF for example — Reduction In Force. The Force made me do it.

Here’s another awful acronym: DNM (Did Not Meet). Get one of those on a performance review, turn the networking dial up to 11, start looking outside the company at least a little bit every single day. Start hoarding office supplies.

It isn’t you. It’s one of the above things, but none of that matters if you’re out of a job. To keep your agency — your ability to navigate and manage the ever changing tides without becoming a victim — develop that spidey-sense.

So how did I get fired? By taking an emergency job in a public High School in a district, in a county — in a state — where public education is under duress post COVID along with a myriad of other issues I don’t pretend to understand.

You can read about what’s happening at my high school here. This cut: Information & Communications Technologies - Computer Science .2 FTE ¹ — is the position I’m filling through the end of the year.

I won’t have a job come summer, but I’ll always have this.

I’ve been whining about how much work this .2 FTE is, so while I’m having fun (mostly) it’s messing with my semi-retired vanlife, so it’s all good.

Reading the workplace was tricky enough and then AI entered the picture.

I may be off the career hamster wheel, but I’m still survival-coded to try and figure out the next thing. So, while my livelihood no longer depends on it, I’m intensely AI-curious.

I happily jumped into this teaching job even thought I’d never done it, knowing Claude² had my back. A couple weeks ago I wrote about using all the AI Google offers in the classroom in AI High.

Last week we finished our big coding project so it’s time to pack the next six weeks with all the knowledge they need to kill it come AP test day.

Saturday I spent some quality time with Claude to figure that out.

I fed Claude the school calendar, my M/W/F schedule, teaching styles that land with the kids, what they theoretically covered before I took over ³, what the AP College Board says they have to cover, and what’s actually on the test. We went back and forth until we landed on a plan I like.

I won’t go back to the online course (which the kids hate), so now Claude (along with Gemini/Google Classroom) works with me to build lesson plans grounded in this larger plan on the daily.

If you look at AI as just the latest tech, it’s not so different from picking up on the next hot thing. But AI isn’t just the latest tech. This cognitive layer we’ve built with a natural language interface is quite different from everything it’s built on top of lower in the stack.

A constant through every job I’ve had — including my current HS teacher stint — is I never have enough time to do all the things I want. The more engaging the job, the more I’ve found this to be true. If you can compartmentalize AI to take on the stuff in your job you hate — the grunt work — well that’s one way to get to know it and make it work for you.

One gauge of the impact AI might have on jobs is the first industry it’s completely upended: software development.

Anthropic (makers of Claude) says AI now writes 90% of new code. But they’re still hiring software engineers, including entry level. They look for ‘AI natives’ that have embraced AI from the outset and consequently have a feel for how to work with it, imposing judgement, taste and design skills to build great software not slop.

They’re preaching — AI hasn’t killed the job of a software engineer (yet) but it has fundamentally changed what the job is.

My HS kids will soon be out in the wild dealing with this uncertainty. I feel for them. My own kids are challenged on the daily by their companies to use more and more AI which is another level of overhead when you’re already busy. I don’t envy my buddies still at Microsoft refactoring their jobs around AI while the tech stack constantly changes along with the work flow.

Every tech company in the world lives in this pressure cooker, fighting to stay relevant in a world getting eaten by AI. There will be winners and losers.

But that’s the deal, so better run towards it, spidey-sense ready, rather than run away.

1. FTE stands for Full Time Equivalent or a full time employee - teacher in this case.

2. Claude is a leading AI model that I’ve started using more and more versus ChatGPT. For classwork specifically, I use Google’s Gemini model that’s integrated into the school’s Google Classroom.

3. They followed an online course that’s impossible to extract details from, so I just gave it screenshots of each unit and activity they did.