Junaid Zahid

awesomeness personified!

[Junaid Zahid @47_JT]

@SahilBloom Fine line between deliberating and dawdling

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

a key takeaway from Margin Call

[Maurizio @themgmtconsult]

If you think a $300K corporate salary is payment for 40 hours of weekly labor, I've got news for you...

There is a persistent cynical narrative that large enterprises are bloated engines of inefficiency, filled with overpaid professionals who spend their days looking at slides and doing "nothing."

I mean, it's a comforting myth for critics, but I think it fundamentally misunderstands modern knowledge work.

That $300K salary (or $400K, or $500K) isn't a reward for linear effort but an option premium on high-leverage thinking.

We are still haunted by the ghost of the assembly line, ie, the outdated idea that compensation must directly correlate with time spent + physical output.

In the factory world, if you leave your station, production stops, but in the knowledge economy, value is almost totally decoupled from time.

Folks... An enterprise paying a senior leader or specialist $25K a month is not buying 160 hours of typing, they are buying *insurance* against catastrophic errors and positioning themselves for asymmetric upside.

I'll try to make it tangible with an example...

Consider a complex matrix organization busy with a $40M product migration. In this environment, the value distribution of a worker's is heavily spiked.

Most days look like nothing... alignment meetings, reading documentation, maintaining steady state. Yes, to an outsider, it looks like "doing nothing."

But then a critical day arrives. A vendor fails, a timeline slips, a crossroads appears, whatever... If that $300K professional has the institutional memory and capability to make just 4 or 5 correct decisions during those critical moments, the ROI is staggering! A single right call can avert a $5M problem.

Suddenly, that $300K salary doesn't look like bloat but, to me, seems like the cheapest asset on the p&l.

These days we are bombarded by tech CEOs promising fully autonomous, AI-driven organizations and I keep saying these pitches miss the entire point of how complex enterprises actually move.

Data computation can be outsourced to an LLM but going through the decision fabric of an enterprise cannot. You need people for:

> Knowing *how* to build consensus across disconnected departments with competing incentives;

> Understanding the unspoken history of why past projects failed, and how to position a new initiative so it doesn't trigger corporate antibodies;

> When a multi-million-dollar decision goes sideways, an algorithm cannot stand before a board of directors or regulators and take ownership of the corrective action.

An AI can give you a pristine strategic framework with nice and difficult sounding words, but it cannot navigate the human matrix required to execute it.

The ability to be effective inside a complex enterprise is a rare AND expensive skillset precisely because it cannot be automated or easily replicated.

My point is you aren't paying for the 9-to-5 "grind", but more for the readiness.

Like an elite surgeon or an expert technician, you pay for the decades of accumulated knowledge that allow them to fix a crisis in 5 minutes, not the 5 minutes itself....

Leverage, not labor.

[Nick Huber @sweatystartup]

The people using AI really heavy think they are 100x more productive.

In reality they are a bit more productive but making 10x more work for other people.

More contract comments. More bullets. More observations. Longer interview processes. Longer emails. More asks. More distraction and more work.

They think they're getting more work done.

In reality you are driving your employees, coworkers, partners, vendors nuts.

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Situation 1: dev A thinks approach X is correct, dev B thinks Y is the right way. They argue and try to convince each other.

Situation 2: dev A thinks approach X is correct, tells the LLM to implement it.

There is SO MUCH learning in Situation 1, lost when using LLMs....

[Sven @SvenSchnieders]

In the age of AI, the reader struggles because the writer doesn't have to.

[Junaid Zahid @47_JT]

@lennysan See also: any marketing copy.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

One of the biggest anit-ai stances I have is that resilience is becoming a lost art.

Learned helplessness on full display regularly

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Idea: An anonymous “vote to end meeting” button on Teams where if 50% of people press it, the meeting ends immediately.

[Junaid Zahid @47_JT]

@levie Yes but how can someone become an expert given firms aren't hiring juniors anymore? How can someone build up the necessary judgement & xp to assess AI output in a professional context when they can't get those jobs in the first place because firms are asking seniors to do more?

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

There is a certain side of running a business that these AI hypes are missing.

Always running at capacity leaves no room for really thinking about what is important

Sure the AI is "letting you do more than ever," but those same people stopped dreaming and are always executing.

Feels like a tragedy

[keshav @keshavchan]

pick a lane before it's too late

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Dear Microsoft, when I hit the Windows Start menu key and start typing a word to autocomplete a search, I never, ever, EVER want it to return results of something not on my computer. Ever. Like, ever, ever, never.

[Junaid Zahid @47_JT]

@andruyeung How do you avoid becoming a feature factory that's beholden to the requests of your customers? How do you also avoid a frankenstein product consisting of multiple (potentially conflicting) features?

[Simons @Simon_Ingari]

we are living in a time where being silent in meetings is a career suicide

[Junaid Zahid @47_JT]

@stevesi @petergyang How are meetings bad processes for decisions? If the meeting is poorly planned (don't have the right stakeholders, don't have the right data etc) then sure, waste of time. But do all the necessary legwork and meetings are a great way to reach a decision. what's the alternative?

[Felix Angelov 💙 @felangelov]

As an engineer, I’d much rather write every line of code myself than review every line of code generated by an LLM

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

The fastest learners have the fewest excuses between thought and action.

They do the thing. Then they study what happened.

That loop beats almost every form of preparation.

At some point, more input becomes avoidance that feels productive.

[Junaid Zahid @47_JT]

@rajsinghchohan Most clubs in Europe play entirely different XI until semis anyway.

The bigger issue is international football - where more players are dropping out with mysterious 2 week injuries to get a break.

Then there's the general increase in intensity in the modern game- more sprints

[oliverb @oliverbrocato]

The B+ employee pandemic is real.

Always "on it." Calendar blocked. Slack green. Never misses a deadline.

Company still not moving.

Bc they're all professional seat warmers.

No edge. No urgency. Never fixing any gaps.

They won't push back on anything.

Just smile, execute, cash checks.

Founders love them because they're "low maintenance."

But what they actually are is low impact.

U can have an entire team of B+ employees and wake up a year later in the exact same spot.

Congrats, you’ve officially normalized mediocrity.