It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager, featuring updates from people who had their letters answered in the past.
Remember the letter-writer whose company’s highly-paid, overworked junior staff kept leaving just as they got them fully trained? Here’s the update.
I wrote in about the bourgeois nightmare of [redacted industry]. We depend on the frenzied efforts of recent graduates looking to one day bestride the world like a colossus. Or get some carry. The challenge we had — especially in the post-Covid whirlwind of 2021, when I wrote in — was that too many of our recruits were using us as a booster rocket. They came in uncouth and degenerate (I know, it’s a joke) and learned to add and subtract and perhaps to answer (dear god!) the phone. And no sooner had they gained mastery of their cubicle than they would depart, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull ascending to the higher plane (tongue here firmly in cheek — and yes I’m aware of the expertly mixed metaphors).
I proposed a sort of indentured servitude, for which I was unjustly pilloried. Now that I think of it, pillories would have been a reasonable solution. Tough to move when you’re chained to the wall. I’d say the advice was modestly helpful, at least in part because it confirmed my own sense that I live on the edge of the abyss.
I left that firm. I made a ton of money. But the company owner was Gordon Gecko with a side of Tom Joad. Dust bowl suffering aesthetic and $1,000 bottles of wine. So I left. I’m at a new firm. Same broad issues with the junior team have now started to lessen as we will cover below. But also, I’ve tried to distance or at least disassociate. We’ve had turnover, but three changes have arisen:
The market has turned. It’s no longer so easy to jump to a larger competitor. And as I had predicted, many of those who did are at least as unhappy as they were before. They took an extra $20k and a prestige firm and found life was worse. They blew the incremental pay on depreciating assets. And found that the job security was lower (because, you know, pricing to perfection and all that).
AI! Frankly it may very well be that we don’t even hire analysts again. And thus my generation may be that of Solomon.
I don’t care anymore. I’ve made enough and could retire tomorrow. I work much more reasonable hours and have been the best advocate the company has for selecting the work we do and maintaining what balance exists in n-dimensional hyperspace. The deal worked out for me, and I may be the last person on earth who can say that.
I think there is a very real probability that the post-Covid experience played a role in senior services executives concluding that AI should replace a significant portion of the entry-level workforce. Then again, knowing my industry, despite the tenor of apprenticeship, ultimately we would likely have chosen the robot slaves over the university graduates. 2022 perhaps marked a brief moment where the latter had unusual bargaining power. Good on them for using it. Après nous, le déluge.
