What's the opposite of mercenary?
Photo by Uyen Nguyen.
There's a stack of books on the coffee table. And another stack (well two) on the shelf that holds the record player. There are books piled up on the radiators, though this helps not at all with their stated job of heating the house. And there are so many books on the actual bookshelves that we've taken to tucking one row behind the other.
Once you get to a spot where there are more books than surfaces, you also start to run out of bookmarks. And you enter into the "anything can be a bookmark if you look at it right" phase. Scraps of paper, sure. Tissues (the unused variety, please and thank you). Business cards from a year of meetings, why not.
The sun has started to go down at 4pm. And the weather flips between gray and cold. A house full of books isn't a bad way to keep the dread and the boredom at bay. But if you look at the stacks, particularly the ones that are mid-read or recently thumbed, you'll notice a thing.
They are almost all dystopian.
This is a funny response to doomscrolling fatigue. Turn off the nonfictional dystopian hellscape on your phone and cozy up with a fictional dystopian hellscape. But the thing about dystopian writers is that it's not a good read if it's all doom and gloom. Dark times, end of world stuff, to be sure. But also humans coming together, building something better, fighting back, light in the darkness stuff.
That second part is the thing that makes dystopia a hopeful genre. We are writing to you at the close of 2024. The dark parts, as we type this, feel very dark. But that's not all of it.
A hopeful genre
We work on work, specifically on bosses. And there is no narrative arc more dystopian than insecure people with power and limited accountability. Our tiny headlamp in an otherwise pitch black situation starts with the idea that work can be better. That work doesn't have to be soulless or joyless or cynical. That you can get to something great. That people can come together in service of shared goals and a common purpose. And it can not only be not awful. It can actually be downright excellent.
The tiny light helps us spot movement in the dark. And friends, there's a shocking amount of movement right now. Shocking because, at least in tech, many folks are still trying to find their footing after two years of extensive layoffs. And even outside of tech, the general vibe has been "lucky to have a job," "don't make waves," "keep your head down," "no sudden movements." But that's not at all what we're seeing out here on Team Tiny Headlamp!
Not only are folks making moves but the moves they are making are wildly different than what was happening in the go-go ZIRP days only a few years ago. Back then, it was highest bidder wins. It was "fuck you, pay me." It was lucrative af, but also pretty mercenary.
In the past few months, we've seen leaders making big moves in service of doing great work, yes. But also aligned work. And that bit is interesting. Aligned work can sound sorta woo. Like a chiropractic adjustment for your vocation. But that's not really how we mean it. The adjustments people are making are about meaning and values and life and balance and clear articulation of their "most important things."
In practice, this looks like:
A globally sought-after AI leader quitting a rocket-ship company to spend more time with their kids and less time on airplanes
Multiple ascendant startup execs joining local, community nonprofits with missions that matter to them
Very senior ICs taking new roles (often with lower pay) in order to stay remote because they moved closer to family a few years ago and don't want to relocate again
Managers stepping out of the people leadership track and back onto the IC track because they really miss their flow state
Any time we see a few anecdotes that rhyme, we hold onto them. One of these alone might be interesting. But taken together? We've got the early rumblings of a trend.
In an age of layoffs and RIFs and RTO mandates, the thing these moves all have in common is that they are employee-initiated. People are taking power back from their employers. Deciding what's important to them. What is not. And making changes to harmonize their work and their values and their priorities.
CEOs really bringing their whole selves to work
Companies and their executives are getting louder about what's important to them, too. It's normal and appropriate for CEOs to be clear about how they see their prospects, and to talk about what matters for the org, of course. But we feel like our feeds have been full of this stuff lately in a different way, like something uncorked. Like a thousand voices who felt a need to hedge their bets and soft-pedal their opinions six months ago no longer feel that need. For whatever reason.
Sam Altman thinks maybe OpenAI doesn't need to be governed by a nonprofit board after all. Jeff Bezos is very proud of overruling his newspaper's presidential endorsement. The CEOs of private prison companies are assuring shareholders, and the US government, that they are ready and waiting for the opportunity to scale up to hundreds of thousands, or millions, of prisoners.
Last year, a DigitalOcean employee responded to their rainbow pride logo by calling LGBT identities a disease. Which is, you know, about as clear an invitation to a company values conversation as you're gonna get. Yancey Spruill, the CEO at the time, told the company during an all-hands that we all need to bend our personal beliefs in order to work together. To hammer home the point, he talked about his own experience, as a black man, working with a mentor he later discovered was a member of the KKK. And how it can all work out because we love the company, and come together for the opportunity.
Yes. Well. That's one way to approach it, for sure.
Whether you agree with them or not, these leaders are making their companies' positions clear. They aren't hiding it — they are unfettered. And if it's clear to us on the outside, it must be very very clear to their employees.
There is a moment here
Most leaders we work with have a list of dream candidates. People they'd love to work with, people whose work they've watched from a distance.
The challenge, historically, has been that your org can't get those people. The thing that makes you notice them makes other companies notice them, too. Companies with deeper pockets. Companies with more scale, cooler customers, more travel, less travel, or whatever other perk you can't compete with. (DigitalOcean has a monthly book program!)
But there is a thing happening right now. We are in a moment where values conversations, specifically, are very loud. Some folks, as we mentioned, are already calling the moment for themselves, and making moves. They are the earliest movers in a much larger trend. Because inside every organization right now, there are values conversations happening. Sometimes out loud in slack, and zoom, and townhalls. Sometimes in DMs. Sometimes turning over and over in someone's head who should have been asleep 20 minutes ago.
Your dream candidates are having these conversations, too. Some of them might be happy, and values-aligned, and firmly planted, to be clear. It can be really hard to tell from the outside, and pros always show up as pros regardless. But many of them — many more than usual — are what our friends in recruiting call "wobbly," or "passively looking," or "loose."
So what do you want to do with that information?
On the one hand, if you're in an org with values you're proud of, it's time to make a plan. Who are the people on your dream list, and what makes you think that they share your values? Do they know who your org is, and what you stand for? If you imagine that this is your best opportunity in a decade to recruit those people, what could you do to make it work?
On the other hand, if you're finding yourself out of alignment with the place you work, well. It might be time to make a different kind of plan. Values that drift apart don't tend to spontaneously drift back together.
Either way, the lesson from the fiction stacked around our living room is clear. If you find yourself in a dystopian timeline, you want to make damn sure you have a good crew. And you may need a tiny headlamp to find them.
— Melissa & Johnathan