There’s something delightfully ridiculous about a major Australian bank charging its own staff $10 for a sausage sizzle. When I first heard about ANZ’s “silly sausage” incident, I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. A sausage sizzle – that quintessential Aussie institution usually reserved for Bunnings fundraisers and school fetes – being monetized at $10 a pop for employees at a corporate event? It’s almost too perfect a metaphor for modern corporate culture.

Been scrolling through some discussions about Microsoft’s CEO expressing concerns that AI might destroy the entire company, and honestly, it’s got me thinking about the bizarre state of corporate anxiety we’re living through right now. Here’s a bloke running one of the world’s largest tech companies, worth hundreds of billions, and he’s kept awake at night worrying about being made obsolete by the very technology his company is aggressively pushing.

I’ve been noticing something increasingly frustrating in my corner of the IT world lately. Every job posting I come across, even for the most mundane technical roles, seems to have “AI experience” slapped on as a requirement. It’s like someone in HR discovered a new magic word and decided to sprinkle it on everything like fairy dust.

The whole situation reminds me of those early 2000s job ads that demanded “5 years of experience in a technology that had only existed for 2 years.” Except now it’s worse, because at least back then people generally understood what they were asking for, even if the timeline was unrealistic.