The Job I Stopped Sending Overseas

Not a guy exactly. A profile with a star rating and a turnaround time, somewhere in the Philippines or India, and I’m embarrassed to say I never knew which. Forty dollars, sometimes sixty. He’d come back in two days with three options and I’d pick one.

I don’t send him work anymore.

Now I open Gemini or ChatGPT and describe what I want. It’s not instant. It takes me ten minutes to explain the thing, and then the model forgets half of it, and I paste my examples back in and try again, and somewhere around the fifth pass it hands me something I’d actually use. So it costs me something. Just not forty dollars, and not two days, and there’s nobody on the other end waiting to hear back.

I know what that means. It has to be hurting him. It’s hurting a lot of people whose whole business was being competent, cheap, and far away. I can’t see a single one of them. That’s the part I keep chewing on — the transaction used to have a person in it, and now it doesn’t, and I didn’t feel anything when it changed.

In the Marine Corps you hear a line about how you don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to your level of training.

Being a Marine I hated training. Everybody hates the training. Same thing over and over in the heat, when you already know how to do it, when it’s obviously pointless because you’ve done it four hundred times and nothing has ever happened. Then war happens and your hands are shaking and you’re fumbling for a magazine, and the only reason it seats at all is that you did it four hundred times.

Nobody remembers the four hundredth rep. It shows up anyway.

That forty-dollar graphic job was somebody’s rep. So was the first spreadsheet nobody important would ever see. The first client email you were allowed to send without someone checking it. The deck that got made and then died in a folder. That work was cheap because it wasn’t worth much, and it was also the only place anybody ever learned anything.

Companies are cutting all of it right now. The math is clean. I ran the same math myself and I got the same answer.

There’s an old argument in economics, from a Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Say, usually flattened into “supply creates its own demand.” What he actually meant is simpler and harder to argue with: you get to buy things because you made things. Production is where purchasing power comes from. The farmer sells wheat and buys a plow. The man who made the plow buys a coat.

For nearly everybody alive, that connection has run through a wage. You worked, they paid you, you spent it, and what you spent was somebody else’s revenue.

That still holds under AI. What changes is where the money lands. When I paid the guy forty dollars, forty dollars entered a household. When I pay a subscription instead, it goes to a software company, a data center somewhere in Virginia, a chip manufacturer, shareholders. The graphic still got made. Production still happened. I’m not forecasting anything here — it’s on my card statement, thirty dollars a month, and it replaced a person.

The standard answer is that he should learn to use AI too.

I’ve said it. I believe some version of it. If somebody works for me now and refuses to touch these tools, that’s a real problem, because the person sitting next to them is about to do five times the work. I’m not going to be soft about that.

But it doesn’t save him. He wasn’t hired because he was better at design than I am. He was hired because he was eight thousand miles away and cost forty dollars. Whatever he learns, the thing that made him worth hiring was the price, and the price is what collapsed. You can hand a man the same tool that replaced him and he is still replaced.

The other thing I keep hearing, and I’ve said this one too, is that we’re headed for a four-hour workday where all we do is supervise the machines. There’s a clip going around from one of the Chinese labs — a woman playing tennis while her agents work in the background on a laptop. It’s an ad. I still want it to be true.

Here’s what my week actually looks like. I run software that publishes for me. It doesn’t publish well without me. Most days I’m in there fixing the way it writes, killing a phrase it won’t stop repeating, checking whether it invented a statistic. The machine didn’t hand me my afternoons. It handed me a second job supervising a worker with no memory who never gets any better.

Keynes wrote in 1930 that his grandchildren would be working fifteen-hour weeks. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t wrong about the productivity — the productivity showed up, more of it than he guessed. He was wrong about what we’d do with it. We took every bit of it as more. More output, more competition, more things we didn’t know we needed.

I don’t know why this time would be different. I want it to be. It isn’t showing up on my calendar.

Not the jobs. The reps.

If the junior work disappears, the junior people lose more than income. A company saves real money this year by not hiring the analyst who would have spent eighteen months doing work a model now does in four seconds. Five years out, that same company goes looking for somebody with judgment and finds out it doesn’t have anyone, because it quietly stopped making them.

You can’t download four hundred reps. There’s no prompt for having been wrong in front of a client and having to sit there while somebody senior cleaned it up. Judgment is scar tissue — it comes from doing the thing badly, at low stakes, with somebody watching who could catch it.

Most companies won’t notice until the bench is empty. It doesn’t show up in a quarter. It shows up in about six years, and by then whoever made the call has moved on and gotten promoted for the savings.

So before you cut the entry-level work, there’s one question worth sitting with, and it isn’t a hard one: is this job producing output, or is it producing a person? Some of them are only output. Cut those, and don’t feel bad about it — keeping people you don’t need isn’t kindness, it’s theater, and everybody in the building can tell. But some of that work is the only machinery you have for turning a smart twenty-four-year-old into someone you’d trust with your biggest account in 2031. Cut that and you’ve sold something you can’t buy back.

Then there’s the harder part, which is what you do with the room you just made. Most companies will take the gain and put it straight into the margin. That’s the easy version and it’s what I’d expect. Almost nobody in those meetings is asking whether the capacity gets spent making something people couldn’t get before, or just making the same mediocre thing with fewer people in the room.

I think everyone who works for me should be using these tools, and I’ll say that to anybody’s face.

I also stopped paying a man forty dollars because a machine got good enough. I never learned his name. I’ve thought about him more in the last month than I did in the two years I was hiring him.

Both of those are true at the same time, and I haven’t found a way to make them not be.

We’re going to make more of everything. That part I believe. I just keep thinking about how nobody remembers the four hundredth rep, and what happens to somebody who never got to make one.