Photo by Stef Vanbroekhoven.
Three years ago, we were in a frothy time. Employers were tripping over themselves to tell you all about their perks and novel approaches to collaboration. It was all four-day-work-weeks and photos of laptops by the ocean.
These days, employers will respond to your email when and if they determine there’s a fit for an open role. Please do not follow up to confirm they received the application. Yes, that’s very proactive of you. But that just makes everything go slower and makes it less likely that you will receive a response at all.
We’ve been hearing from folks in the job market. It is not a beautiful time, out there. The few remaining in-house recruiters are overloaded on two fronts. Both the number of roles they’re trying to fill and the sheer number of applicants per role.
And while the AI-powered applicant tracking system was meant to help, it’s no match for AI-powered job applicants, with every variation of keyword-stuffed resume. We’re hearing about fake resumes and fake interviews with fake candidates.
On the job-seeker side, folks are saying their interview panels are enormous and unending. And that the take-home work is back to being basically unpaid consulting. Which, in frothier times, would have been the end of your entire candidate pipeline. But, the froth has subsided. And in its wake, organizations have found some truly short-sighted approaches to labour.
The idea that you can be shitty when the job market is tight and there’s a glut of folks looking for work is not a new idea. Nor is it a good idea. File this gem under “just because you can does not mean you should.” And while it’s lamentable, lots of orgs run bad or careless recruiting processes.
But it’s something else entirely when employers take that shitty behaviour and turn it on their existing employees. Particularly when they all do it at the same time.
Line goes (slightly) down
Everyone in our world is talking about employee engagement. Because it’s down. After being up. And they’re talking about employee confidence. Because it’s down. After being up. These are all viewed on a five-year timeline during which our relationship to work has swung wildly from employers trying to court employees to employers being actively angry with their staff for showing up to work.
This shift. Where things are going well and then there’s a clapback and things get aggressively and conspiratorially shittier has a name. And like all good words, it points to a clear and repeating pattern.
Enshittification is not our word. It belongs to Cory Doctorow. And we first encountered it in an essay Cory wrote in response to an essay that Cat Valente wrote in late 2022. Yes, we know this is a bit of a rabbit hole but stick with us.
Cat’s piece is about the depressing end-state for every beloved social platform. That the thing that makes the social bits of the internet excellent is the creativity and connection that happens in the container. And that for every vibrant container, there comes a point where the platform needs you to “Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things.” The article is full-goosebump-prescient all on its own.
And a few weeks later, Cory picks up where Cat left off. Cory pulls the observation from social media to all tech platforms built on two-sided markets. He writes:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
We devoured these essays because they explained why tech platforms all seemed to be getting worse in the same way and at the same time.
A market where things get aggressively and conspiratorially shittier. Where reduction in choice means a platform gets progressively more hostile to its users. The enshittification of work is upon us. And it’s not surprising to us that employee engagement is trending downward. It’s surprising the drops aren’t more substantial.
Predictable is not inevitable
One of the compelling and enduring things about Cat’s essay, and Cory’s, is the way they each reject inevitability. So much modern writing about tech and work and policy comes from this doomer place of pretending it has to be this way. Like it’s a law of nature or capitalism that everything must always turn to garbage. Like you’re naive if you believe otherwise. We don’t buy it.
Twitter did not spontaneously turn to shit, specific people made choices to cause that. Specific people made choices at Amazon, and Google, and Shopify, and Facebook. Specific people are making choices in government right now. Those people own those choices, and their impacts. To pretend that this was all passively inevitable is to give them cover for that. Around here bosses take accountability for their decisions, and we don’t let those shits off the hook.
But like, now what? Right? Because yes, fine, people enshittifying their companies or their countries have to take accountability for that. In the meantime, though, you’re still trying to run your org. And things are not the way they were three years ago.
You do still need to do more with less right now. And the job market is scary enough that you don’t have to walk on eggshells to attract and retain talent the way you used to. Your people are good people, sure, but some are probably over-hired and over-levelled and it’s time for them to step up or step out. And yes, the recent layoffs did mean more work for people who remained, and there’s still a performance gap, and we have a consultant bringing in a new performance framework, and morale isn’t great, and the resignations are driving even more burnout but, like…
That’s just how it is everywhere right now, you know?
No fate but what we make
For what it’s worth, Cory argues that most enshittification isn’t driven principally by evil, and we agree. He talks about how the dominant failure is one of discipline — how, in the absence of healthy counter-pressures (like competition, or regulation), enshittifying decisions become easier to make. That doesn’t let anyone off the hook for making them (and definitely doesn’t excuse genuinely harmful people from their harms). But as a tool for understanding the state of your organization, and yourself, discipline is a much more productive lens.
Discipline is a thing you can build as a boss. You can measure the distance between three years ago and today. How are you treating your team differently than you were then? Or your candidate pool? What’s your response to mistakes, or missed milestones, or a request for more money? What would it have been three years ago?
If there’s a difference there, ask yourself why? Did it feel like there was more competition for talent then? More time-sensitive opportunities you were trying to capture? Did those things put you and your org on your best behaviour? And what behaviour are you on, now?
So much of the best management advice bottoms out at “remember that people are people.” They aren’t NPCs in your org chart. When you’re on your best behaviour it’s easier to remember that. When you’re not, it gets easier to forget, and say something like “well, that’s just the way it is and if they don’t like it they should leave.” Like any enshittifying platform would say to their customers. Would you meekly accept that one-sided bargain, yourself? Would you like it? That’s what it sounds like when discipline has slipped, and the sooner you can hear it the sooner you can intervene.
If you’re in management, this is your work. Management is the implementation team for enshittification, or for discipline. You choose. Your contact surface and influence within the organization, especially collectively, is immense. Managers don’t often think about their power collectively, but you have it and you can use it. If your organization is enshittifying, you are management in a shitty org. That should be a thing you want to get together and change.
Because the people around you are still great. They are showing up wanting to do a great job at work, feel valued, and have meaningful impact. The overall environment has removed some of the pressure you felt to be on your best behaviour, but it’s a failure of discipline if you let that ruin your company’s culture. That same macro environment is also throwing a lot of curveballs at business and when those head your way, you’re going to want a brilliant and engaged team onside.
Or not. You can keep going with the enshittification while the pressures of discipline are off. You can stay on your worst behaviour. But the next phase of enshittification is the one where the organization dies.
— Melissa & Johnathan
