There’s a story doing the rounds online at the moment. A team member gets a redundancy email. Manager fights up the chain, gets nowhere, then goes straight to the Chair of the Board, five layers above their pay grade. The GM’s decision gets overturned. Role is saved. Everyone breathes out.

The comments are predictably split between “what a legend” and “that manager is cooked.”

Both takes are probably right.

The thing that got me wasn’t the heroics. It was the detail buried in the middle: the GM hadn’t even looked at the numbers. A role with two years of work locked in, a critical skillset, a team that can’t function without it, and someone senior enough to make the call just… didn’t bother checking. That’s the part that should be making everyone uneasy. Not the manager’s escalation. The fact that the escalation revealed something that should have been caught three floors earlier.

There’s a particular kind of workplace theatre that never quite makes it into the onboarding materials. You learn it the hard way, usually while standing in a corridor holding a laptop, watching people who absolutely know what time it is pretend they don’t.

Someone posted about this recently and it landed with me. They had a room booked, a presentation to give, twenty people waiting. The room was occupied past the hour by a group of executives who had seen them, knew the time, and just… didn’t move. Eventually they knocked. The room cleared. And then, because the universe has a sense of humour, the executives complained about their attitude.

I’ve been watching the AI layoff theatre with growing frustration, and there’s something fundamentally broken about how this whole thing is playing out.

Block cuts 4,000 people and blames AI. Atlassian drops 1,600. Shopify literally tells employees to prove AI can’t do their job before they can get more headcount. The CEO makes the announcement, the stock price nudges upward, and everyone nods along like this makes perfect sense. Except it doesn’t, because six months later, 55% of those same CEOs admit they regret the cuts, and companies like Klarna are quietly rehiring the humans they replaced after their AI-driven customer service quality went off a cliff.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what really makes a job worth having. Sure, the pay packet matters – we all have bills to pay and teenagers to feed – but there’s something else that’s been nagging at me: freedom. Not the existential kind, but the day-to-day autonomy we have (or don’t have) in our working lives.

It started with a discussion I stumbled across recently where someone posed a simple question: how “free” are you at work? The responses were fascinating and, frankly, a bit depressing. It got me reflecting on my own journey through the IT world, from junior developer frantically trying to look busy whenever a manager walked by, to now where I can theoretically take a two-hour lunch break without anyone batting an eyelid.

There’s a discussion doing the rounds in corporate circles that’s got me thinking about something we’ve all probably encountered but rarely talk about openly: the high-performing employee who also happens to be a bit of a bigot.

The scenario is frustratingly familiar. You’ve got this junior team member who’s technically brilliant, delivers results, and has the seniors singing their praises. The catch? They regularly drop comments like “girls have no dignity these days” and question why there’s “all the rainbow stuff” at company events. The kicker is that this person belongs to a minority group themselves, which somehow makes the whole situation feel even more complex to navigate.

The other day, I stumbled across an online discussion about management that really resonated with me. Someone shared their experience of receiving high engagement scores from their team, and their “secret” was refreshingly simple: treat people well and give them autonomy. It brought back memories of my early days in tech leadership, where I encountered both brilliant mentors and, well, absolute dropkicks.

The discussion took a humorous turn when they suggested writing a straightforward management book with a rather colorful Australian title that basically amounted to “don’t be a terrible person.” While the language might have been a bit crude, the sentiment hit the nail on the head.