Tag / cal newport

by Nathan Coumbe

AI isn’t taking your job

…at least not yet.

I use AI almost every day to assist with work and learn new topics (as part of my job) that I’m unfamiliar with. I read diligently to stay up-to-date on the latest developments, so I can learn how to use it more effectively.

AI will become (if it hasn’t already), and continue to be, a large portion of all of our lives.

However, we’re receiving a significant amount of misinformation about what’s happening and the effects it’s having on workers. Some of it is outright deception, while some is simply lazy reporting.

First, the deception.

The CEOs of these massive tech companies (e.g., Dario Amodei, Sam Altman) are brilliant business people who’ve created mind-boggling products. But they’re hemorrhaging cash trying to make their programs more powerful…

And after years of unbelievable growth and progress, they’re failing. The scaling law on which they used to project LLM growth is slowing down, and the improvements are now incremental, rather than exponential.

This is a serious financial problem for them. They need to keep their current investors engaged, and they need new investors to infuse them with additional capital. So what do they do?

They go on cable news shows or podcasts and claim that their AI software will replace all entry-level workers (10-20% of the workforce) within a matter of months.1 It just isn’t true.

But you wouldn’t know that from the news you’re consuming. They’ve bought into this story hook, line, and sinker.

Which brings me to my accusation of lazy reporting. Headlines like “Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs” and “AI is Replacing 10 million Workers” (I made that one up) are attention-grabbing… But untrue.

These media companies, like the AI companies they write about, need to make money. They do that by getting as many eyes on their work as possible. And the best way to do that is to scare people into giving them attention… Even if the claims are untrue or misleading.

To paraphrase Ryan Holiday, who warned us about this years ago: “Trust them… They’re lying.”

It is true that computer science graduates are having a much harder time finding jobs at the moment. And it’s true that there have been massive layoffs in the tech sector.

It’s also true that the companies doing these layoffs are investing more of their money and efforts in AI. But AI is not the cause of this, nor is it replacing those who’ve been laid off.

Here’s what’s actually happening:

During the pandemic, these tech companies went on a massive hiring spree—they simply overhired. Now they’re bloated, and the quickest way to reduce the bloat and (temporarily) increase shareholder value is to shed programmers left and right.

At the same time, the tech sector itself is contracting, which means there are fewer jobs for all the newly minted computer science graduates.

This has historical precedence. The same thing happened in 2008 during the financial crisis. And it happened before that during the dot-com bust at the turn of the century.

The number of people entering the computer science field fluctuates in response to the economy. There’s a tech boom, prompting more people to enter the field. Then the sector contracts, and all those people get laid off, which in turn reduces the number of people entering the field.

Until the next boom.

Contrary to what many journalists have written, these people aren’t being replaced by AI. They’re simply being let go because companies overhired during the pandemic or because the companies are refocusing on AI.

However, that refocus, coupled with layoffs and fewer job openings, has led them to conflate the two, concluding that these computer science graduates are being replaced by AI.

This simply isn’t true. That may happen in the 2030s, but it’s not happening right now.

I’ve been guilty of buying into this hysteria too, as you can see in my piece on job hunting in 2025. And I’m here to tell you I was wrong in what I wrote about AI replacing workers in that piece.

All that to say this: Read AI journalism with a healthy dose of skepticism right now. And take any apocalyptic predictions with a grain of salt.

  1. Dario Amodei actually said this in an interview with Anderson Cooper and, ironically, claimed to be worried about it… Which begs the question: if you’re worried about it, why do you continue to do it?

    Why doesn’t he just stop if it actually worries him? It’s his company. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

Leaders must let workers work

The most beneficial thing a leader can do in 21st-century knowledge work is to allow employees to spend most of their working hours applying the high-value, high-return skills for which they were hired.

They should be allowed to do this without being encumbered or distracted by the “busy work” of modern knowledge work, such as email, Slack messages, and administrative overhead.

Imagine if it had been necessary for Charles Darwin to respond to 40 letters a day. How long would it have taken him to publish On the Origin of Species?

Or what if Mozart had to deal with five unplanned visits from other musicians every hour? Would he have become the musical genius we now know him to be?

Yet, between instant messaging software, email, and open-office pop-ins (for those not working remotely), these hypothetical scenarios are everyday occurrences for most of us.

It’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed, overworked, and chronically unproductive, even with all the stuff we’re doing.

The solution, then, is to build workflows and processes so that your teams can spend less time discussing tasks that need to be done and actually complete those tasks (while also having the slack necessary to think and rest).

by Nathan Coumbe

The “Slip Box” method for career planning

Modern science texts tell high school students that they must first formulate a hypothesis and then conduct experiments to determine whether or not that hypothesis is true.

But that’s the opposite of what Charles Darwin did. He didn’t start out with a developed idea for the theory of natural selection. When he set out aboard the S.S. Beagle and traveled to the Galapagos Islands, he had no hypothesis.

Instead, Darwin set out to observe and collect notes and ideas.

The accumulation of these observations, learnings, ideas, and notes led to the formulation of a hypothesis and the subsequent development of the theory. He worked from the ground up, not from a hypothesis backward, like the “slip box” note-taking approach explained by Sönke Ahrens in How to Take Smart Notes.*

Cal Newport’s advice in So Good They Can’t Ignore You seems similar in this regard. Common career advice is to find something you’re “passionate” about and find a way to make that passion fit a job or career. But he argues the opposite—passion comes after someone develops experience in a job, skill, or career path. It’s not the catalyst (at least not in most cases).

One could argue that the “Slip Box” approach taken by researchers and scientists—gathering lots of ideas first, then developing an argument—would similarly benefit career planning.

Don’t start with a predetermined passion or career path. Instead, begin with exploration, discovery, and experimentation.

The result will be a fully fleshed-out and rewarding career with passion as the byproduct.

*Ahrens’s book is one of my favorites and directly responsible for my ability to write as much as I do.

The premise is simple to understand: collect ideas and write notes to yourself about your thoughts when reading, studying, or observing without worrying about “what it’s for. Over time, you’ll have collected so many ideas and come up with so many original ideas that different arguments and hypotheses will form almost of their own accord.

by Nathan Coumbe

Don’t go to college (maybe)

As I look into graduate degree programs, a couple of voices are bouncing around in my head.

One belongs to Cal Newport, who regularly advises knowledge workers not to get graduate degrees with two exceptions:

  1. You want an academic career and are therefore required to have a doctorate
  2. The specific job you’re trying to obtain requires a certain degree or a graduate degree (e.g., engineering, law, medicine, other professional fields, etc.)

Then there’s the advice from my late mentor Dan Miller:

If you are going to get a degree so you can get a better job – you’re likely to be disappointed. If you are going for the personal development, the social connections, and the broadening of your options, you’ll always see yourself as more prepared and having more options.

What both of these thinkers agree on is that there must be clarity about your end goal.

If you’re going to school (or back to school, in my case) because you’re bored, miserable, burnt out, or feeling lost, it’s quite likely you’ll still be all those things after you get the degree. And if you aren’t careful, you’ll have a mountain of debt added to your list of problems.

Begin with the end in mind. Know what you’re trying to achieve and what’s required to get there. Have an idea for your life planned out before you make a major decision like this.

And if you aren’t sure what you need for the career you want or the lifestyle you have in mind, start asking people who are already doing it.

Subscribe to receive the blog directly in your inbox!

by Nathan Coumbe

A fun-filling (rather than fulfilling) career

Starting in the late 1970s, the idea of “passion” entered our discussions about work. 

The goal became to find work that aligned with pre-existing interests, rather than pursuing mastery of a difficult craft (which had been our way of doing things for hundreds of years).

Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely must be interested in what you do. That’s vital to persevere through the difficulties that arise in learning anything new and worthwhile.

But I’m coming to find that our obsession with trying to align work with things we already like is sapping us of our ability to enjoy (or at least be satisfied with) most any type of work available to us.

We’re asking our jobs what they can do for us, rather than focusing on what we can offer the world by engaging in those jobs.

Satisfaction and enjoyment in our work is a lot like motivation. We think we have to wait for motivation to hit before we act on something (like getting in a workout or finishing a difficult project). But that motivation only comes after we’ve taken the action.

Action precedes motivation, not the other way around. And happiness in our work often comes AFTER we do the difficult work itself.

It’s probably not what you want to hear… But that doesn’t make it untrue.

For more daily musings like this, subscribe below:

by Nathan Coumbe

Never be in a hurry

I’ve been on a Cal Newport Deep Work/Digital Minimalism kick for the last few weeks.

Here’s a quote from Saint Francis de Sales that seems particularly apt to my current way of thinking:

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”

For more daily musings like this, subscribe below: