Something Strange is Happening At Work…

This is a video about the most important and most ignored form of unemployment in the world right now. It explains why some people keep getting ahead while others become quietly irrelevant. And a few days ago, one of the most respected voices in technology put a name to what a lot of people are already feeling, invisible layoffs. And they're being driven by a single variable that's reshaping how work actually happens, [music] which is replaceability. And the reason this is happening now isn't layoffs. It's that AI is quietly lowering the cost of replacing people long before companies actually do it. So if we want to understand what's happening, we have to stop looking at layoffs themselves [music] and start looking at the phenomenon of replaceability. This video is sponsored by the positioning sprint. More on that later. Right now, US unemployment is around 4.6%. Which is not great, but that is not what you'd historically associated with a collapsing labor market. For example, during the financial crisis, unemployment went past 10%. And in the early 1980s recession, it was also above 10%. And when you analyze sentiment historically, what we see is that people start feeling insecure after major job losses begin and not usually when unemployment is still at reasonable levels like it is right now. So, what Jason is hinting at in his post is something new. The order is usually financial catastrophe, then reduction in demand, and then layoffs, which is to say that people feel anxiety about their jobs after the numbers actually start to show it. But today, something strange is happening. Replaceability happens when work is redesigned so that no single person is structurally necessary. And while this is not a new phenomenon, what is new is that knowledge work used to be heavily dependent on individual judgment and context, which is things that were hard to document and hard to standardize and hard to transfer. And that constraint is now disappearing. Now, we can think about this in these terms. If you think about unemployment, it's an obvious condition, right? you lose your job and then your badge stops working or your login stops working, your role goes away and that's it, right? But replaceability is something different. It looks like a lot of things that we're experiencing right now. It looks like uh your team stays the same size, but then nobody backfills the role when it leaves. It looks like your role doesn't get eliminated. You just start absorbing other people's jobs, right? It looks like maybe you're still needed, but now they want you to do 10x more work in half the time. The truth of our system today is this. The world wants to make you a commodity. And it's not because the system is evil, but it's because people always respond to incentives, which means they're going to push to reduce risk in their systems, which means standardizing. Standardization lowers risks and it reduces costs. This is why now we see so many AI systems as like firstline screeners in job applications because the more they can streamline that application process and turn it into a commodity buying process, the less power you have as a seller of your expertise, your time, your labor. And what you want is the opposite of what they want. You want the opposite of commoditization. What you want is differentiation. Invisible layoff. When you look under the hood, invisible layoffs are being driven by one thing. AI has dramatically lowered the perceived cost of making people interchangeable. And when the cost of substituting one worker for another goes down, employers don't need to then fire anyone to gain leverage. They can start to gain leverage automatically. Because once your work can be documented and standardized and systematized and made to seem like it can be done at a good enough level at a lower cost, then they automatically are injecting their own leverage into that system. What happens then is no single person is structurally necessary, right? AI doesn't need to do your job. It just needs to make it seem like your job is easier to hand to someone else. So commoditization in any market is the enemy of high prices because when substitution is perceived as easier, what that means is rates go down. I've spent my entire career in rooms with companies working to help them answer one single question, which is how are we different than everyone else? And they want to answer that question because they understand that if their brand doesn't stand out, they lose pricing power. And that is what invisible unemployment is. You are being compared like a commodity. you're compared to a salary band or a role description or a market hourly rate rather than your unique set of skills and expertise and you'll feel that back to you with things like you know people saying well this is what your role plays or this is what the market supports or that's the level we can justify. Now your output might be higher or better than most other people but in a market where you are positioned as a commodity you don't matter. It's only the label on you that matters. And the harsh truth of our environment is you cannot outwork commoditization. Here's what usually happens. So when people feel their job is getting squeezed, they respond in predictable ways. They take on more tasks or they'll expand the scope of their job, right? They'll just do more and more to try to be helpful. They work longer. They try to be the one who never drops the ball and so forth, right? And this all makes sense. If you're worried about being replaced, the thought is, I'm going to become indispensable through effort. But in a market where substitution becomes easier, then that response backfires because the more your value is just tied to getting stuff done, the more they can price you like a task doer. And AI is lowering the cost of getting stuff done every single day. So this is why you can feel like you are high performing. You have a ton of value and you can feel your leverage shrinking. That is invisible unemployment. You're employed but you're asked to do more and more and more for less and less and less. So what is the antidote to all this? In every market there are only two directions. Things either become easier to substitute or they become harder to substitute. And when something is easy to substitute, buyers will push price down and make terms worse. You can think about this in these terms. Brand named Tylenol versus acetaminophen. It's the exact same functional thing, but people will pay 10x more for the Tylenol because the perceived value is different. So when something is hard to substitute, the seller has leverage. And that is how markets works. And in this metaphor, you are the seller, right? So the antidote to replaceability is very simple. We have to become hard to substitute. And in modern white color work, there are three ways that that practically happens. The first is that you own a result. Not you do tasks. It's a result. You own revenue or you own retention or pipeline or risk or something, right? And when you're directly tied to a result, the replacement carries risk. Now the upside of that is when you're winning, you are irreplaceable. The downside of that is you are the one who owns it. And what happens when a company's macro forces start to work against that business? It was your fault. Right? Any executive watching this has sat in a room where you ran sales and sales dropped for two quarters. It had absolutely nothing to do with what you were doing. Everything to do with the macro environment, but the easiest way was to point to you, right? You're the problem. The second is you own the way the result gets produced. This is not about I help with the process, but you own a process to create a result, which means you design it, you run it, and you're the person that other people depend on to operate the machine. And that then becomes replacement isn't just hiring somebody new. You have to rebuild the machine. This is one of the most defensible ways to build moat in a modern employment environment. And the third way is in my mind the most powerful. You have a narrow reputation for a specific problem. Said plainly, you are the brand. So when people know you for one specific thing, you stop competing with everybody who can just get a task done and you now compete with a much smaller set. And the rule of thumb that I think about here is how can I narrow down a specialization to where there's a thousand companies that would see you as the default choice above all others to solve an expensive problem. This is a market that you can reasonably own and allows you to get massive leverage over your pricing and in a smaller set right now leverage exists on your side. Again, this is why I built my career the way that I did and I'll share more about that in other videos if you'd like to go deeper at the end. But this is what a brand is, right? It's a reputation that creates scarcity and gets rid of perceived replaceability. So everything else, right? Everything else being eager or reliable or helpful or all of these things may be useful early in your career, but they increase your commoditization. They don't get rid of it. All right? This is why invisible layoffs matter. Replaceability rises first, right? And then your leverage shrinks and then layoffs show up after all of that. So the big message here becomes this. If you wait for unemployment or to lose the client or whatever it is, you've waited too long. The correct move to guard against what is happening in this environment is to move to take action while you still have options and time and negotiating room. I've spent years in executive conversations listening to how leaders think about cost and risk and dependence and the pattern is always the same. Nobody wakes up with the idea of ruining someone's life. What they're trying to do is make the business less dependent on any single person. And AI is making this easier and easier. So if you take one thing from this video, tape this. Stop measuring your safety by whether you still have a job. Measure it by whether your leverage is growing or shrinking. That is where you will get your freedom. So if you want help building something that's harder to substitute, I run something. It's called the positioning sprint. It's application only and it's designed for mid-career professionals and proven freelancers. No pressure. It's below. And with that, I'll see you in the next one.

You worked hard. You hit the goals. So why does it still feel like you’re stuck? The reason is Invisible Layoffs. _____ Apply for the Positioning Sprint https://www.brendandell.com/positioning-sprint ⸻ This video explores the concept of "invisible layoffs" and the rise of unemployment, particularly in the tech layoffs sector, driven by artificial intelligence. We discuss how ai automation is reshaping the workforce automation landscape, leading to a significant job impact on the current job market and the broader economy. It's time to understand why some people keep getting ahead while others become quietly irrelevant.