Friday unlocked. Let's go.

Today's vittles:

THIS WHOLE COMPUTER THING? IDK MAN

In a recent New York Times interview with Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, illuminated for us that the digital workplace world wasn't really designed to be intentionally malevolent towards workers: it just wasn't designed at all.

Newport describes just how new all of these digital workplace tools are and how few coping mechanisms we have to deal with the changes. When computers made it to the back office they increased productivity by quite a bit: inventory software was a big thumbs up in making work life better.

But the front office? Total productivity — and knowledge worker happiness — has only gone spiraling downward in the last few decades due to the ceaseless demands of endless communication.

Technology trends over the last hundred years have taken a similar slump after adoption. It took us 20 to 30 years to get our arms around how to best use electric motors in the workplace. Chaotic tools like always-on Slack chat may just be an early -- but ultimate incorrect -- manifestation of our newfound telecommunication magic.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF QUITTING A HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR

Trigger warning: If you're feeling you're on the edge of quitting your well-paid tech job but you still owe 6 digits to Sallie Mae, maybe skip this next one.

Former highly-paid Netflix engineer Michael Lin just wrote a great piece on how he decided to quit his $450,000/year job back in 2021 for a handful of reasons.

Chiefly among those reasons? He felt like he stopped learning. Lin looked at his peers in senior engineering and realized that exactly zero of them ever successfully made the switch to product management where he really wanted to be.

As motivation fell, so did his performance. The final straw was the experience of going through COVID and watching millions of lives cut short. He didn't want his legacy to be working at a job only for the money.

I'm going to stop paraphrasing the guy, just go read the thing. Don't blame me if you quit your job and can't afford your expensive lotions any longer.

BOOMERS AND GEN X FINALLY AGREE: BEEN THERE, GOT FIRED FROM THAT, NO BIG DEAL

I asked Dall-E what that would look like and it was too creepy not to share. You're welcome.

While my fellow Millennials and Gen Z peers are having a total cat over being laid off en masse from their comfy tech jobs on the other side of the coin Boomers and Gen X'ers can't be assed to care.

Look at it this way: if you started your career in the last 12 years you've been riding a wave of unmitigated growth. Names like Apple and Amazon exist for these new workers like unassailable titans of wealth-creation. With literally free lunches pouring out of every corporate campus from Palo Alto to San Diego the thought of layoffs was inconceivable; that was something that happened at normal companies. NOT US! So when tens of thousands of layoffs hit younger workers there was much strife and consternation.

Not so with the Boomers. Those who joined the workplace in the 70's entered into a malaise-era shitstorm of low wages, high fuel prices, and generally nothing to be happy about in the 'ole money arena. These workers came up cautious and hesitant and didn't like to invest in risky assets like the stocks.

Already well-seasoned by mass layoffs in the 90's -- and even bigger layoffs in the dot-com crash of the 2000s -- these workers entered the most recent round of firings fully "over it." The NYT also reports lots of these recently unemployed older workers are using this time as a season of change and starting their own small businesses.

Etsy ain't gonna know what hit 'em.

WEB SNACKS

A brief manifesto on shower temperature control.

A surprise in the flight path of the last Boeing 747 delivery flight ever.

ChatGPT is out. ChatGPT Plus is in (your wallet).

AI-generated Seinfeld that never stops broadcasting.

Why did Jimmy Carter save the Space Shuttle?

TWEET OF THE WEEK

Remote-remote.

That's it for this issue.

See ya in a week,

— 💬 The EiT Crew at Status Hero