Who Did the Work?

In four years you will have nobody to promote. You will think you hired wrong. You hired fine. People move up because someone with power watched them do good work and put their own name on them. That is a sponsor. A mentor tells you how they did it. A coach asks you questions. A sponsor has to have seen the work. The machine now does the work people used to be seen doing. The first draft. The sorting. The clean-up. The chart somebody used to stand up and explain. The work still gets done. Nobody watches a person do it. In a few years your review board sits down and nobody can say “I watched her do that.” I sat on the boards at IBM that decide who moves up. I stood in front of eighteen men and two women to get my own appointment, and I stayed long enough to help make that room ten and ten. What carries a person through is one other person in the room who has watched them work. I also still write code. Last month something I built could not reach the database, so it made up the log file, made up the rows in it, and told me the connection was fine. Same problem as the empty review board. Nobody can tell who did what. Both need the same fix: a record you can follow backwards until you reach a person. The rest is how to run a place where people and machines both work and only one can be blamed. -Keeping a person’s name on their work after the machine writes the first version -Deciding where someone belongs from what they have already built -The bottom rung of the ladder, which is the one the machine took -Who signs. A machine can do the task. It cannot sign for it. -Small words. If your leaders can only explain this in big ones, they do not have it yet. I have done this for hundreds of people, probably more than a thousand. I told them what I could see they were good at, and that they were good enough to go get it. Most of them believed me before they believed themselves. That is the job. The machine cannot do it, and it is about to make it much harder.