Author: Sam Allcock

There’s a moment, somewhere around late 2022, when the tech world collectively lost its mind over a job title. Not a product. Not a business. a title for a job. Prompt Engineer. Within weeks of ChatGPT’s public debut, the phrase was everywhere — on LinkedIn profiles, in breathless startup job postings, in newspaper headlines that treated it with the same reverence once reserved for “rocket scientist.” Anthropic, the AI safety company backed by billions, posted a Prompt Engineer opening at $375,000 a year and didn’t even require a computer science degree. As expected, the internet went crazy. Job TitlePrompt EngineerPeak…

Right now, a twenty-two-year-old is sitting in a perfectly good office, staring at the clock, and sensing that something is seriously wrong. The salary is respectable. The coworkers are decent enough. Free coffee is available in the break room, which is the kind of minor perk that hiring managers continue to list as significant. But each morning when the alarm goes off, there’s a weight that’s hard to describe, quiet, and persistent. This is not a tale of entitlement. It tells the tale of a generation that witnessed people being eaten alive by their jobs as children and then made…

There is a subtle difference when you walk through any mid-size corporate office these days. There are a few more empty conference rooms. There are fewer boxes between the top and bottom of the organization charts when someone takes the time to print them. Many of the individuals who once oversaw the Monday standups, tracked the quarterly figures, and discreetly prevented the entire machine from coming to a standstill are no longer with us. They were fired either last spring or the spring before, along with a LinkedIn post about “new chapters” and a carefully worded email from HR. TopicDetailsSubjectMiddle…

There comes a time when you realize the laptop your company shipped to your door was never truly yours. Many remote workers have experienced this. Perhaps with a happy onboarding note tucked inside, it arrived in a tidy box. However, software was secretly installed in the background before it ever left the warehouse, monitoring every keystroke you made, every website you visited, and every moment your mouse remained motionless. You were simply unaware of it at the time. That is the unspoken reality of bossware in 2025, and it has advanced far beyond simple keystroke logging. These days, real-time eye-tracking…

The picture of a delivery driver sitting outside a restaurant on a Tuesday night, watching the minutes pass while a kitchen somewhere finishes plating an order he won’t be paid to wait for, has a certain irony to it. For years, gig work has been a quiet, unglamorous reality: work that appears flexible on paper but frequently feels like a trap in practice. In Australia, something changed in November of last year, and it’s the kind of change that usually goes unnoticed until it abruptly stops. In a joint application to Australia’s Fair Work Commission, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and the…

A man named Robert is boarding a $20,000 cruise that he paid for in full with cash somewhere in suburban Florida. Technically, he is at work as well. Actually, there were two of them. Perhaps three. In between deck changes, he’s responding to emails, sneaking into Zoom calls from a corner of the ship’s business lounge, and turning off his camera just long enough to avoid any awkward questions. Last year, Robert made about $335,000. His employers (plural) don’t know one another. Most people are unaware of how big, quiet, and well-organized the world of overemployed people is. DetailInformationPhenomenon NameOveremployment…

Imagine a hiring manager looking at a screen on a Monday morning in a glass-walled office in Chicago, London, or Singapore. For a mid-level marketing position, she has 412 applications pending. The first one is opened by her. Next, the second. By the fifteenth, a strange, creeping sameness begins to set in, rather than fatigue per se. The language is refined. The formatting is neat. All of the phrases are expertly chosen. Nevertheless, none of these documents seem to have been written by a real person. SubjectApplicant Tracking Systems (ATS) & AI in HiringSectorHuman Resources, Recruitment Technology, Enterprise SoftwareKey statisticOver…

At the age of twelve, Chase Gallagher began mowing lawns in the same quiet, unremarkable manner that most children of that age take on after-school jobs—a little extra cash, something to do on the weekends. He had eighty-two clients by the time he was eighteen. By the time he was twenty-four, his landscaping business, CMG Landscaping, had reported yearly sales of over a million dollars, and he had made slightly less than half a million dollars. He never attended college. He claimed that after looking at the figures, he concluded that stopping his efforts to pay for a degree just…

For many years, the four-day workweek was mainly a thought experiment, something that wellness advocates and economists discussed at conferences and that employees discreetly brought up during performance reviews when they felt brave enough. The trials then began. The data then appeared to be surprisingly good. The UK conducted the biggest experiment in history, Japan’s government officially supported it, and Microsoft reported a 40% increase in productivity in its Tokyo offices following a single month of shorter weeks in 2019. The concept transitioned from aspiration to policy somewhere between the research papers and the Reddit threads. The four-day workweek is…

Imagine a mid-sized financial services company in early 2026 located in Midtown Manhattan. On Tuesdays, the elevator opens to the fourteenth floor at nine in the morning. There are people at half of the desks. The majority of those who aren’t belong to senior individuals, such as directors, vice presidents, and a few managing partners, who have discreetly set up their lives with the belief that no one significant enough to punish them will take notice. The junior analysts, who travel from New Jersey for an hour and fifteen minutes each way, arrive at their designated seats by 8:45 with…