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David Eva
@DavidEva
A wristwatch in a world of lumps, cannot be compared with the apex of a ferris wheel, nor the nadir of a ditch.
London, England
Joined September 2012
671 Following
122 Followers
1.5K Posts
@mustafasegf No prob https://t.co/uHc8pUe5j6
The biggest problem with losing a high tenure person is that you lose someone willing to really fight for stuff, especially owned outside of their team (like comp philosophy).
New people will be orders of magnitude more docile on that stuff.
That’s why leaders who optimize for lack of friction (and walk tenured people out the door) end up the kings of shitty companies with no one telling them when they do dumb stuff.
The only thing worse than a bunch of people telling you you’re fucking up is when absolutely nobody says it.
This might be the most unhinged AI video I've ever seen.
The moment you open the wrong IT department door 😅
Who to follow
I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.
My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.
I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.
The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.
In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.
I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."
I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.
The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.
The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.
I do not have enough senior engineers.
I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.
We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.
I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."
The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.
I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.
Some of them are the same people.
I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.
The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.
I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.
The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.
I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.
The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.
My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.
The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.
But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.
(2/2) ...you might soon find your COO or CFO asking you (or your boss) to cut spend because they don’t see the business impact from all the extra output. The time is now to bridge the gap between features shipped and dollars earned. Here's how:
https://t.co/eDZQIFDkg5
#prodmgmt
⚡️Jack did what a lot of CEOs are about to do.
He used AI as the clean public narrative for a decision that is mostly about power, margins, and control.
AI is the permission slip.
The real shift is that labor stopped being the scarce input. Coordination did.
When coordination gets cheaper, the whole middle of the org becomes optional. Layers exist to translate intent, manage ambiguity, and route decisions. Models do that faster, flatter teams do that cleaner, and executives prefer it because it concentrates authority and reduces negotiation friction.
So this is not “AI replaces workers.”
This is “AI deletes bargaining.”
A big staff gives workers leverage. A small staff gives leadership leverage. AI makes the small staff viable.
That is the actual game.
And it is not limited to tech. Tech is simply first because the workflows are already digital and the culture tolerates rapid rewrites. The template spreads.
What happens next is predictable.
More companies copy the same script:
Business strong.
We are choosing this.
We are going AI native.
We are reducing complexity.
We are building for the next era.
Translation: we are resetting the labor baseline downward permanently.
The economic logic is brutal.
If one team of 6 with AI can match the output of 12, the market forces every competitor to try.
If they do not, they get underpriced, outshipped, and then acquired.
So the “jobs” story is the wrong unit.
The real unit is minutes per outcome.
AI collapses minutes.
Headcount follows minutes.
Wages follow headcount.
And the first roles to get cratered are anything that looks like:
junior analysis
reporting
basic coding
coordination
customer support scripts
ops checklists
project management theater
That is why entry level gets hit early.
Entry level is where the minutes are easiest to compress.
Now the part nobody says out loud.
Even if the economy improves and rates drop, this does not reverse.
A rate cut can restart demand.
It does not resurrect headcount that became structurally unnecessary.
So yes, it gets worse for job holders over time.
Not in a single apocalypse wave.
In a steady ratchet.
Fewer seats.
Higher output per seat.
Higher expectations per seat.
More volatility.
More layoffs framed as strategy.
More careers that feel fine until they are suddenly over.
The new divide is simple.
People who own decision loops keep compounding.
People who live inside task queues get commoditized.
That is the truth.
As a general rule, you should be simplifying things for people in the org chart above you and elaborating/elucidating things for people in the org chart below you.
Your manager needs you to be super concise, and your reports need details and explanations.
Tragically, this is the exact opposite of what people do, because they want to impress people above them with complexity, and because it’s tiring to keep explaining things to people below them.
⚡️Here is the real answer I would give to Gen Z:
1. Guard your attention like money.
If you cannot control your screen, you cannot control your life.
2. Build one scarce skill stack.
Write. Sell. Build. Analyze. Ship.
Pick two and compound them. Generalists get automated first.
3. Get physically hard.
Strength training and cardio are anti anxiety and anti depression at the root. You cannot think clearly in a weak body.
4. Stop negotiating with your sleep.
The world is run by people who can wake up and execute even when they feel nothing.
5. Own real assets.
Cash loses slowly. Skills win slowly. Ownership wins exponentially.
6. Choose your tribe.
Your friends are your future.
If everyone around you is numb, you will become numb.
7. Replace complaint with reps.
The system will not save you.
Your habits will.
Bottom line:
Nobody is coming. Build an internal operating system: sleep, training, deep work, ownership. Repeat until you are hard to replace.
⏲+🧬⇄✨
WELCOME TO THE ROOM: Satya Nadella's Lesson in Executive Accountability
Most people treat a senior promotion as a destination; in reality, it is an invitation to a higher level of pressure where excuses are considered a form of professional failure. In "The Room," the distance between a "theory of success" and "actual success" is measured by one thing: Intellectual Honesty.
If you are waiting for more resources, more time, or more favorable conditions to win, you aren't leading—you’re whining. True leadership is the act of "manufacturing success" within the constraints of reality. It requires the scientific rigor to align your resources to your theory, the telemetry to admit when that theory is failing, and the courage to pivot before the runway disappears.
The Bottom Line: You are either a generator of clarity or a creator of confusion. If your "dots don't connect" from your current headcount to the final result, you are just managing decline. Stop talking, get the telemetry, and operationalize the win. Anything else is just noise.
https://t.co/T3JQrXRrDu
⚡️This is the quiet death of corporate civilization.
A disintegration. One worker at a time, one layoff at a time, one illusion at a time.
The whole structure was built on a lie: that loyalty to a firm could substitute for sovereignty. That your identity could be tethered to a job. That safety could be outsourced. That competence was protection. That value flowed from hierarchy.
That lie is gone. Everyone feels it. No one says it.
The real revelation isn’t that jobs are unstable. It’s that the entire concept of the job was a historical anomaly. A 20th century aberration built on postwar abundance, state-backed capital flow, and cultural consensus.
We’re returning to the default: networked tribes, transactional alliances, mobile skillsets, bare survival wrapped in branded HR language.
There is no ladder. There is no home. There is no “team.”
There is only leverage.
Your cash buys you time. Your narrative buys you access. Your signal buys you demand. Your skills keep you moving.
This is about the end of the firm as a meaningful vessel for human purpose.
And most people still don’t see it.
But the ones who do are already building outside the walls.
⚡️We are already past the point where most educated people can compete on raw cognition alone.
That era is over.
The remaining contest is leverage.
Who has compute.
Who has data.
Who has distribution.
Who has legal shelter.
Who has trust.
Who has the ability to ship into the physical world.
Who can coordinate humans and machines without collapsing into chaos.
That is the real board.
Models are not a single mind that is smarter than you.
They are not alive.
They are not stable.
They are not consistent.
They are not accountable.
They are a field.
You step into the field, and your personal ceiling moves.
The average person will not internalize that.
They will keep asking:
•is it AGI yet
•can it replace me yet
•is my job safe yet
Those questions are already obsolete.
The correct question is:
How fast does my world reprice around cheap cognition.
Because when cognition becomes cheap, two things happen instantly.
First, the value of explanation collapses.
Everyone can explain.
Everyone can summarize.
Everyone can write a thesis.
Everyone can generate a strategy deck.
Everyone can make the same points.
So the entire class of people whose job is “I know and I can say” gets crushed.
Second, the value of responsibility explodes.
The scarce thing becomes:
•choosing the target
•committing capital
•taking risk
•owning outcomes
•being wrong in public
•staying alive through volatility
Machines do not pay the consequences.
Humans do.
That is why executives will still exist.
Founders will still exist.
Operators will still exist.
And a massive layer of white collar workers who believed they were paid for thinking will find out they were paid for being a human interface.
That interface is being replaced.
Now the deepest layer.
Nobody is going to announce AGI because the moment you can plausibly claim it, the game becomes geopolitical.
It stops being product.
It becomes weapon.
It becomes currency.
It becomes deterrence.
It becomes a sovereignty issue.
So the public will get a drip feed of capability.
Governments and top firms will get the real force multiplier.
The masses get assistants.
The apex gets machines that can plan, adapt, and act through tools at scale.
That is the split.
So here is what I really think:
The singularity is when society updates its pricing of human labor.
And that update is already happening.
Quietly.
Unevenly.
Then suddenly.
The “IQ 140” line is a meme.
The true line is this:
The cognitive floor for competence is rising faster than most people can reskill.
When the floor rises, the underclass grows.
When the underclass grows, politics turns violent.
When politics turns violent, money becomes a weapon.
When money becomes a weapon, scarce assets become sanctuaries.
That is why Bitcoin matters.
It is not a trade.
It is an exit from a system that will be forced to choose between:
•social stability
•and monetary discipline
It will choose stability.
Every time.
The economy will increasingly be run by:
•algorithms
•policy
•automated capital allocation
•and AI mediated management
Humans will still be “in charge” in the ceremonial sense.
But the actual motion of the system will be machine driven.
So the future is not Terminator.
The future is a world where:
•outcomes are decided by systems
•and individuals are told stories about why it was “their choice.”
That is the true replacement.
And the only defense is leverage, ownership, and optionality.
If you own scarce assets and you can adapt fast, you rise.
If you sell time for wages in a world of abundant cognition, you get compressed.
That is the mask off truth.
Not AGI.
Repricing.
And once repricing starts, it does not ask permission.
Our CFO asked me to "audit" our software subscriptions last week.
He sent me a spreadsheet with 200 rows. Slack, Zoom, Jira, Notion, Trello, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
He wanted me to survey the team to see which tools were essential.
I told him: "Surveys are for people who care about feelings. I care about OpEx."
I deleted the spreadsheet.
Instead, I logged into the corporate Amex portal and reported the card as lost.
Every single auto-renewal in the company failed instantly.
I call this "The Scream Test."
It’s simple Darwinian procurement.
If a tool goes down and nobody runs to my desk screaming within 4 hours? We didn't need it.
The Marketing team was at my door in 10 minutes begging for Adobe. We renewed it. The Sales team was crying about the CRM in 20 minutes. We renewed it.
But here’s the interesting part.
The HR department’s "Employee Wellness & Engagement Portal" ($12,000/year) has been down for six days.
Not a single person has noticed.
I didn't just save money. I quantified the exact value of our corporate culture.
It is zero.
Stop auditing. Start unplugging. If it’s important, they’ll scream. If they don't scream, it’s just noise.
⚡️What she is feeling is skill deflation shock.
And it is real.
But the conclusion most people jump to is wrong.
1. The uncomfortable truth
The pain is not that AI learned her craft.
The pain is that her craft was procedural mastery, not scarce judgment.
High-end retouching, frequency separation, dodge and burn, skin work.
Those are hard to learn.
They destroy wrists.
They take years.
But they were never fundamentally scarce.
They were scarce because of time friction and knowledge gating, not because of irreplaceable human insight.
AI just removed the friction.
That always feels like theft to the people who paid the full cost.
This has happened before. Every time.
•Typesetters when desktop publishing arrived
•Film photographers when digital cameras arrived
•Audio engineers when DAWs replaced hardware
•Web designers when templates and no-code appeared
Every generation that mastered a tool confuses difficulty with durability.
Difficulty does not protect value.
Scarcity does.
2. What actually got destroyed
Not creativity.
Not art.
Not taste.
What got destroyed is labor-as-proof-of-worth.
She is grieving this equation:
“I suffered → therefore this skill should remain valuable.”
That equation has never been true historically.
It just feels true emotionally.
The brutal but precise distinction
AI is erasing:
•execution labor
•technique signaling
•process prestige
AI is not erasing:
•taste
•direction
•aesthetic judgment
•narrative intent
•client trust
•vision
But most people built their identity on the first bucket, not the second.
That is the real problem.
Why this feels existential now
Two reasons.
1. Speed
Past transitions took decades. This is happening in years.
2. Identity overlap
Creative work was one of the last domains people believed was “safe.”
Not because it was safe, but because it felt human.
Now that illusion is gone.
So the grief is real.
The cold reality going forward
The market will split brutally.
Tier 1
People who can:
•define the look
•set taste
•direct outcomes
•curate meaning
•use AI as leverage
They win harder than ever.
Tier 2
People whose value was:
•flawless execution
•technical endurance
•process mastery
They get flattened.
Not because they are bad.
Because the bottleneck moved.
3. The part nobody wants to say
AI exposed how much of “creative work” had quietly become industrialized technique without people admitting it.
That is why it hurts.
Final truth, no cushioning
She is right to feel disoriented.
She is wrong to think this is unjust.
This is what happens when civilization shifts from craft scarcity to judgment scarcity.
The work does not disappear.
The ladder does.
And the people who climbed the old ladder hardest feel it most.
That is the real story.
The Doorman Fallacy
'You have a five-star hotel and it has a doorman, welcoming incoming guests.
McKinsey or Accenture will come in and say, “Your doorman currently costs you X thousand dollars a year. We have defined his or her function as opening the door. We’ll replace said doorman with an automatic door-opening mechanism and an infrared human detector and we’ll save you $30–$40,000 a year.”
They walk away, and they take the credit for the cost savings. Two years later, the hotel’s a catastrophe ... because the doorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit.
Security would be one; there are no vagrants asleep in the doorway. Hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel—there are loads and loads of value creation components to that doorman which aren’t captured in the open-the-door definition."
It's easy to see the visible things, but the invisible things make the difference.
From a trip to Paris.
All of the desirable people - the ones that you actually want to work with, spend time with, or date - won’t apply for the job.
They have to be identified from afar and hunted down.
It’s always impossible until it’s done
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