The Job Sh*t Show

Are CEOs Lying About AI?

Mark Zuckerberg called it a budget trade-off. Jack Dorsey cut 4,000 jobs. Salesforce slashed its support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000. ServiceNow's CEO celebrated agents that don't need lunch or healthcare. The story these CEOs are telling is that AI made the cuts necessary. But the productivity numbers don't show it — and the pattern of how new technology actually gets adopted suggests we've been here before. In this episode, Josh argues that CEOs aren't lying about where AI is going. They're lying about where it is right now. Drawing on research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the San Francisco Fed, and a pattern that goes back to electric motors in the 1880s, he makes the case that every general purpose technology produces a dip before it produces a gain. The companies cutting the deepest aren't building toward an upswing — they're funding data centers, telling a story to Wall Street, and quietly eliminating the institutional knowledge, domain expertise, and human judgment that would have gotten them through the dip in the first place. The J-curve doesn't care about earnings calls. And the people who would have led the transformation won't be there when the curve finally turns up. You can't cut your way to the future. About The Job Market Sh*t Show The Job Market Sh*t Show: How AI Broke Hiring and What Might Be Next [https://joshlevine.substack.com/] is an investigation into how hiring actually works now, how AI and automation have upended the process, and why the old rules no longer apply. It blends reporting, analysis, and firsthand stories from inside a labor market that’s increasingly algorithmic, opaque, and indifferent to the people moving through it—while asking what, if anything, might replace a system that no longer seems to work for humans on either side of the process.

Is This the End of Work as We Know It?

For 50 years, organizations have chased one thing: efficiency. More output, less friction, faster everything. And it worked — until it didn't. In this episode, Josh sits down with organizational change expert Josh Allen Dykstra at a live conference to trace how we got here: from Milton Friedman's 1970s shareholder mandate to a workplace so optimized for productivity that there's no room left to think, experiment, or breathe. Then AI showed up — not as the cause of the crisis, but as the thing that finally makes it impossible to ignore. Because you cannot out-efficiency the machine. The conversation gets practical fast: what leaders can actually do inside broken systems right now, why restraint is the skill no AI can replicate, and why the real move isn't to work more like a robot — it's to stop. The organizations that figure that out first won't just survive this moment. They'll be the ones who define what work looks like next. About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show [https://joshlevine.substack.com/] is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

What Will Finally Replace the Resume?

The résumé was already broken before AI showed up. Now it might actually be on its way out. In this episode, Josh looks at the first viable replacement he's seen — not a shinier LinkedIn profile or a better-optimized PDF, but something closer to a behavioral fingerprint. A system that stays with you across your career, learns how you actually work, and advocates for you to employers using verified evidence instead of bullet points you stretched to fit a job description. Drawing on a lecture from the founder of Inspire AI, Josh explores what longitudinal profiling could mean for candidates, why the two-sided market problem is the real obstacle, and what you can start doing right now before the technology catches up. The résumé isn't just a formatting problem. It's a representation problem. And for the first time, there's a hint of something better. About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show [https://joshlevine.substack.com/] is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

AI Leadership Skill #2: Let Your Team Lead (Substack preview)

The last thing your people need is another training. This week Josh previews AI Leadership Skill #2: Let Your Team Lead [https://joshlevine.substack.com/publish/post/196039282?r=71glot&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true], the latest entry in The Sh*t List, the paid Substack companion to The Job Sh*t Show. It's built around a conversation with Jeffrey Roach, SVP of Healthcare Solutions at RisePoint, where he helps colleges and universities modernize for the real world. When Jeffrey asks leaders how often they're actually teaching AI, the answer is almost always the same: "Well, we talk about it." Talking about AI and actually learning it together are not the same thing. And the gap between them is bigger than most leaders realize. His advice? Ask your team. Not a survey — a real conversation. Jeffrey did exactly that with his own team of 13 and discovered some of them had access to a resource he didn't even know existed. He'd been managing them for months. Your team already knows more than you think. You just don't know who's ahead and who's stuck — because you haven't made it something you do together. The full piece on The Sh*t List walks through three specific moves to turn your team from an audience into co-designers of their own AI fluency. Link in the description. If you're not on The Sh*t List yet, this is a good week to start. About The Job Sh*t Show The Job Sh*t Show [https://joshlevine.substack.com/] is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.

Are We All Art Directors Now? What Anthropic’s New Release Means for Creatives

When Anthropic dropped Claude Design and OpenAI released Images 2.0, something shifted. The ability to create professional-grade visuals — the kind that used to require years of training and hard-won expertise — got handed to everyone. In this episode, Josh argues that AI isn't replacing creative experts. It's promoting them. The people with real taste, real vision, and the language to describe what they want are about to have a very good 12 to 18 months. After that, the tools catch up. And the only thing left that can't be automated is the ability to imagine something that doesn't exist yet. The new currency isn't who can use the tools best. It's who can see what hasn't been made. About The Job Market Sh*t Show The Job Market Sh*t Show: How AI Broke Hiring and What Might Be Next [https://joshlevine.substack.com/] is an investigation into how hiring actually works now, how AI and automation have upended the process, and why the old rules no longer apply. It blends reporting, analysis, and firsthand stories from inside a labor market that’s increasingly algorithmic, opaque, and indifferent to the people moving through it—while asking what, if anything, might replace a system that no longer seems to work for humans on either side of the process.