The Madness of Now

The problem is that AI isn’t magic. It will not save your product from mediocrity. Try explaining that to leadership looking to score a quick fix of relevance. They want AI the way they wanted websites back in 1999. Loud. Shiny. Completely disconnected from whether or not it solves a real problem.

This creates a bizarre paradox. You are damned if you do, damned if you do not. Ignore AI and you are dismissed like the dinosaurs while the meteor came crashing down. Jump in too fast and you are drowning in shallow water, wasting millions on features that do not matter and chasing novelties that never deliver.

I have heard the directives myself. “Add AI to all our products.” Not “solve this user pain point with AI.” Not “test where it makes sense.” Just blanket coverage. As if stapling machine learning onto every workflow would make us modern and unstoppable. The absurdity is enough to make you laugh and cry at the same time.

The Job Market: Welcome to the Circus

The labor market has gone fully off the rails. In the dot-com era, companies were desperate for “webmasters,” “HTML coders,” “e-commerce gurus.” Most recruiters didn’t know what those roles actually did, but the buzzwords looked good in a job posting. Sound familiar?

Today it’s “AI strategist,” “prompt engineer,” “AI ethicist.” Hell, half of these titles sound like they were made up by copywriters after a few rounds. And the best part? Nobody has a clear definition of what success even looks like in these jobs. But slapping “AI” on a LinkedIn title makes leadership feel they’re on the right side of history.

Meanwhile, desperate candidates are feeding their resumes into AI engines, hoping the machine will spit out something irresistible to recruiters. The results are insulting and confusing. I tested a few of these platforms myself. They padded my resumes with fake degrees, mysterious certifications, and metrics made up on the spot. Suddenly, I’d become a top graduate from universities I never set foot in, armed with certifications I’d never heard of. When I flagged it, the platform shrugged: “AI makes mistakes.” Perfect. Responsibility outsourced to an algorithm, with no one left holding the bag.

Another platform, more ambitious, began applying to roles for me without my input. If a posting had the word “experience” in it, the AI assumed I was qualified. Suddenly I was “in the running” for roles that made no sense, even senior positions requiring 15+ years in fields I’d never touched. Not surprisingly, silence followed. Shocker.

And then there were the fabricated metrics. Everyone tells us we need measurable impacts on our resumes. “Show how you increased revenue by 20%, reduced churn by 30%.” AI happily invented those numbers for me, writing generic bullets to make recruiters salivate over me.