There was an engineer I worked with on a project about 18 months ago. Absolutely brilliant man, Partner-level (I'd guess maybe 1 in 200 engineers reach that level), super heavy Russian accent, and he talked like there was absolutely no tomorrow. Every single conversation. You'd think the world was on the cusp of discontinuing oxygen the way he just had so much to say constantly all the time. Mostly this was fun. Occasionally this was a problem if you needed to get in a word more important than "yeah" or "uh-huh" while he was talking. Highly accomplished. He'd done a lot.
He retired last year, but really he "retired" to go on and create a one-man engineering endeavor. Power to him, very on brand. I know it's AI-related, which is miserably unavoidable right now. I only know a few tiny details from his LinkedIn.
I opened LinkedIn now because I've been doing nothing all day and I've run out of websites to click on. First post in my feed is from him. About two paragraphs talking about progress, but immediately something is wrong because this is not how he talks. It's very obviously how AI talks.
Heavy Russian affectation gone. Long passionate rambling gone. Full of em-dashes, triplicate clauses, all deeply not how he speaks. I've spent so many hours on Teams calls with this man and this is not how he speaks. It feels like he's been bodysnatched but the real explanation is so much more stupid and banal and fucking tired. I feel like I'm reading an account that's trying to scam me. I hate it here man.
This probably doesn't apply to the whole world but actually I love internalizing my coworkers' speech patterns. I love hearing in my head how they'd say things. I love reading text-based messages from them and knowing exactly how they'd say that out loud. I love accents. I love speech quirks. I love dialects. I hate AI that sells itself on taking this over. If my coworkers start sending AI-generated emails to me I'm reporting them missing.
I scroll a few posts further and it's an auto-generated "[Coworker] has completed 21 years at [our company]!" post for my coworker who got laid off last year.
He was laid off when the stock price was at an all-time high, but someone needed to be on the chopping block to offset the company's meteoric investment in AI data centers.
Blind is chattering about another massive round of layoffs coming next month. I hate it here man.


























