Is AI changing hiring for better or worse? Yes.

Should AI Be Allowed In School? We’re asking the wrong question. (Substack preview)

In this episode, Josh challenges the question everyone keeps asking about AI in school — and makes the case that it's exactly the wrong one to be asking. The yes-no binary is a dead end. AI in school: allowed or banned. AI in writing: authentic or cheating. These are crude frames for a genuinely complicated problem. And the institutions drawing the hardest lines — the grad school deans, the publishers who pulled Mia Ballard's horror novel Shy Girl over AI accusations her author denied — aren't protecting learning. They're avoiding the harder conversation about where the guardrails actually belong. Anne figured out her own. Research, yes. Writing, no. Checking a paper for errors, yes. She named her AI Otis. And by semester two, she'd built a working relationship with it that her distributed, at-times-lackluster teachers couldn't come close to matching. The question was never should AI be allowed. It's where do we install the guardrails — and who gets to decide. Josh shares a framework for developing your own boundaries around AI use, for yourself and your team. The full essay and the framework are on The Sh*t List at https://joshlevine.substack.com [https://joshlevine.substack.com/] 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.

Is AI changing hiring for better or worse? Yes.

In this episode, Josh weaves together three stories about where AI-driven hiring is actually headed — and why the answer to whether it's making things better or worse is: yes. The first is a conversation with someone building a high-volume AI hiring tool for a major tech company. The premise is simple: skip the resume, go straight to an AI-hosted interview. Everyone gets to speak. Everyone gets the same questions. No primacy bias, no 4pm fatigue, no inconsistency. Done well, it might actually be fairer than what we have now. The second is a Stanford study on algorithmic bias that found 26% of Black applicants and 15% of Asian applicants applied to positions where AI discriminated against their racial group. Over 60% of Fortune 100 companies use the same third-party hiring algorithm. When one vendor mediates hiring at that scale, bias doesn't just exist — it compounds. Quietly. Invisibly. Across every company using the same tool. The third is what happens when candidates stop trusting the process. They go around it. Build something. Show up with proof of work instead of a resume. It's smart. And it's also a signal. Because if it's a process people don't trust, it will become a process people game. And a process people game stops working for everyone. The question in the future isn't whether AI should be involved in hiring. It's what kind of AI, built by whom, and accountable to who. Nobody's answered that yet. But at least now we're asking. 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.

Has Scarcity Mindset Already Won?

Josh hit a Claude Design usage limit this week. Four hours locked out of a presentation he was mid-build on. The feeling that came with it — that he didn't own it, couldn't just keep going — told him something about the moment we're all in. In this episode, Josh argues that scarcity thinking isn't just a feeling. It's becoming a leadership strategy. And it's contagious. Jack Dorsey cut 40% of Block's workforce and then told the world most companies would follow within a year. That's not a prediction — it's a frame that spreads. The story of not enough jobs, not enough capital, not enough time is landing in boardrooms and news feeds and heads at 11pm. And if you're a leader absorbing it, it is reaching your team whether you mean it to or not. But at a roller derby match in Portland, Josh met a software engineer from Stripe. Same industry. Same moment. Completely different tone. Cautious. Deliberate. Not panicking. And $2.2 billion in free cash flow. The difference isn't resources. It's the mindset behind the decisions. Josh introduces a new framework — the panic trap — a two-by-two that helps leaders identify what kind of decision they're actually making before they make moves that can't be undone. Because some decisions you can walk back. And some you can't. 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 Your New Competition One Person and Four Mac Minis? AI is Making Company Size a Liability.

This week Josh covers why AI is doing something economists didn't see coming — collapsing the coordination costs that made large firms powerful in the first place. It starts with a 1937 paper by economist Ronald Coase called The Nature of the Firm. His argument: companies exist because coordinating through the market is expensive. Search, negotiate, contract, repeat. It's cheaper to just put it all inside one organization. That logic built every large firm you've ever worked at. AI is now dismantling it from the outside. A lawyer profiled in the New York Times mounted four Mac minis under his desk and runs five AI agents simultaneously — reading court notices, messaging clients in Spanish, drafting counter proposals. No firm. No overhead. No coordination tax. The same lift that solopreneurs and small teams are feeling right now? Large organizations aren't getting it. Not because AI doesn't work — but because the friction that protects big companies from chaos is the same friction preventing AI from doing anything remarkable inside them. The capability ceiling just got very crowded. And the large firms that built their advantage on scale are now finding out that scale might be the vulnerability. 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. Correction: In this episode Josh refers to "Robert Coase." The economist's name is Ronald Coase. Apologies for the error.

AI Leadership Skill 4: Do You See Your People—Or Just Their Output? (Substack Preview)

If a person produces X and AI produces X faster and cheaper, the math is simple. Replace people with AI. Except the equation isn't true. This week Josh covers AI Leadership Skill #4: Know the Value of Your People — the latest entry in The Sh*t List [https://joshlevine.substack.com/], the paid Substack companion to The Job Sh*t Show. It starts with a simple question: what does a doorman actually do? Holding the door is the job description. But anyone who's worked with a good one knows it's wayfinding, security, recognition, relationship. The job description captures maybe 20% of the value. The same is true for almost everyone on your team. Klarna learned this the hard way. They cut 700 customer service jobs in 2023, started rehiring in 2024, and their CEO admitted they moved too fast. Forrester's 2026 Future of Work report found that 55% of employers regretted AI-driven layoffs — and one in three spent more on rehiring than they saved from the cuts. The value was there. It just wasn't on the dashboard. AI might finally be forcing businesses to see what was always true: people are relational, contextual, and accountable in ways that don't show up in any metric. And the leaders who figure that out first won't be the ones scrambling to rehire. The full piece on The Sht List includes three principles Josh is urging every leader to understand right now — and five questions that will help you see your people beyond the spreadsheet. Link in the description. If you're not on The Sht 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.