Everything That Is Visible
René Magritte | Amazon’s Two-Faced on AI | How To Get the Right People To Resign, With Science | Loyalty Programs at Work? Pay for RTO?
Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.
| René Magritte
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The global chaos — as the old world order falls — reveals the fault lines underneath what we took as the firmament on which everything resides.
And below those revealed weaknesses lie deeper and greater discontinuities, like a fractured mirror, showing both the breaks in the glass and the immediate flaws in the world being reflected. But breaking a mirror doesn’t reveal what is hidden from its reflection.
Amazon’s Two-Faced on AI
In a ‘one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing’ moment, Amazon — who plans to invest $100B in 2025 to capture ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’ — doesn’t want job candidates to use AI in interviews:
Generative AI tools like coding assistants and "teleprompter" apps feed people live answers during job interviews, giving a leg up to candidates looking for an edge.
Amazon, one of the largest employers in the world, wants to curb this growing trend.
Recent Amazon guidelines shared with internal recruiters at the company say that job applicants can be disqualified from the hiring process if they are found to have used an AI tool during job interviews.
Amazon believes the use of AI tools in interviews gives candidates an "unfair advantage" and prevents the company from evaluating their "authentic" skills and experiences, the guidelines, which were obtained by Business Insider, say.
"To ensure a fair and transparent recruitment process, please do not use GenAl tools during your interview unless explicitly permitted," the guidelines say. "Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in disqualification from the recruitment process."
The incongruity is stark. Amazon is attempting to make a fortune with AI tools that will be — wait for it — be applied in every niche of businesses. One of the most important skills of the future is learning ‘how to dance with robots’: how to use AI effectively.
So it’s really dumb to prohibit its use in job interviews. Once hire, will some sort of filter be applied to employees’ performance to eliminate the leverage they gained by AI?
This reminds me of my first year in college, when I was taking first semester inorganic chemistry, and we were required to use slide rules (an analog mechanical calculator) — and prohibited from using digital calculators. The argument was that calculators were more expensive and therefore gave an unfair advantage to those that acquired them. The second semester, the school revised its policy and all were required to use a specific HP digital calculator and slide rules were disallowed.
We can expect all companies to quite quickly allow AI tools in job interviews. The genie is out of the bottle.
How To Get the Right People To Resign, With Science
Bartelby, The Economist’s anonymous business columnist, takes a scientific look at efforts to thin a company’s ranks. After a cursory and more-or-less dismissive acknowledgement of Musk’s DOGE rampage in the US government, he focuses on ‘deferred resignation’:
On January 28th the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email to roughly 2m workers offering them “deferred resignation”, the chance to resign and get paid until the end of September. The legality of this offer is uncertain (on February 12th a judge allowed it to proceed). So is the end-goal: bosses often use voluntary redundancy as a consensual way to cut headcount but the assumption is usually that they want the organisation itself to survive. Still, the episode raises an interesting question: is there a good way to get workers to resign?
Bartleby asks the difficult question re: Musk’s actions: do they want the federal government to survive? Questionable.
The second question may be more relevant to organizations which want to survive, but need to make cuts.
In a recent study by Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, some employees of a consumer-goods firm were asked to reflect on what mattered to them and whether their jobs fulfilled their individual sense of purpose. In the months following these workshops exits from the company increased substantially among participants, compared with employees who did not take part, and did so particularly among lower performers. Productivity rose.
Encouraging reflection by workers about what they want to gain from their work, personally, leads to a triage, where those who come to see they can’t find their goals met in their current circumstances decide to exit, and try their luck elsewhere. And it feels ethical, as opposed to other ways, such as across the board cuts.
And those that choose to stay raise productivity, influenced in part by the cultural impact of lower performers and the dissatisfied leaving.
Bartleby offers other insights:
The success of a resignation offer depends partly on what kind of future awaits people who stay.
Although the future is unknowable, those that are more certain of making a transition in the face of ongoing instability may be ‘the smartest rats leaving the sinking ship first’.
The OPM email [from Musk] warns government employees that there is more downsizing and restructuring to come. The people most likely to take the money in these circumstances are often strong performers, who have the best chance of landing a new job.
There is some indirect evidence for this effect in a recent paper by Yuye Ding of the University of Pittsburgh and her co-authors, which looks at the effect of return-to-office (RTO) mandates on employee churn. Plenty of people suspect that bosses require people to come back into the office partly in order to prompt resignations, and the evidence from the LinkedIn profiles of workers at financial and technology firms in the S&P 500 is that RTO mandates do cause turnover to spike. The authors also find that churn is greatest among women and among more experienced and skilled workers, and that firms subsequently have more trouble filling vacancies.
Such considerations may not matter much to the DOGE folk, whose primary aim seems to be evisceration. But if you want to encourage resignations and end up with more wheat than chaff, it helps to have a compelling vision of the future.
But I think Musk and Trump aren’t offering a compelling vision of the future, just a foreshadowing of more chaos.
Loyalty Programs at Work? Pay for RTO?
What if an organization wants people to stay? There is an alternative trend to traditional inducements — pay raises, benefits, etc. — that repurposes loyalty programs from airlines, hotels, credit card companies, and other consumer-facing businesses.
Jill Barth starts at exploration of the idea by telling us that holding on to employees is good business:
Employee turnover is expensive. Gallup estimates that replacing leaders costs 200% of their salary, technical employees 80%, and frontline workers 40%—not including losses in morale and expertise.
How to get them to stick? Frequent worker miles:
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