☕️ (R)emote Expresso #69

☕️ (R)emote Expresso is global. Remote. Slightly feral. Weekly.

You used to have a rhythm.

Not a schedule. A rhythm. The hard thing, then the boring thing. The brain-melting client call, then twenty minutes of formatting a spreadsheet that required exactly zero of your higher cognitive functions.

That spreadsheet was a rest stop. You didn't know it. You probably complained about it. "Why am I spending my afternoon color-coding cells like a human highlighter?" Because your nervous system needed it, that's why. It was cycling you between effort and recovery, all day, without asking permission.

The spreadsheet is gone now. AI does it. Or a bot does it. Or someone reorganized your role and called removing half of it "a gift."

Nobody reorganized what was left.

A pharma worker put it this way - AI was supposed to reduce the workload, but everything automatable got declared "trivial." Now the day is wall-to-wall critical priorities. No recovery time. Marathon to sprints with no warm-up laps.

That's not burnout. We have a word for burnout. This is what happens when someone removes every easy thing from your day and all the hard things touch each other for eight straight hours and by 3 PM you're staring at your screen like it personally wronged you.

I know this feeling. In my HR life, the "easy" stuff - updating the org chart, reformatting the slide deck nobody reads - that was where my brain got to breathe between the conversations that cost me something. If you'd automated those tasks and handed me back-to-back termination meetings all day? I would have quit by Thursday.

The phrase showing up in dev threads and late-night Reddit right now: I'm managing bots, Jira, and politics. Not doing the craft I was hired for.

Craft. That's the word that hits you in the chest.

Because most of us didn't take this job for the title. We took it because we were good at a specific thing. Writing code. Designing systems. Solving weird problems that didn't have obvious answers. The money was fine. But the thing that got us through the week was the private satisfaction of doing the thing we were actually good at.

AI didn't take your job. It took the parts that gave you a break - and then it took the parts that made you you. What's left is a day full of high-stakes decisions and no recovery between them, and a performance review that still thinks you're living in 2023.

Your manager is measuring output that's been compressed into a day with no white space, and when you say "I'm drowning" the answer is "but you're getting more done than ever."

You are. That's the whole problem.

So. The question rattling around your head at 11 PM - am I replaceable? - actually has an answer, and it's more interesting than the panic suggests.

The Dallas Federal Reserve published an analysis in February that draws the line in a place nobody in your team meeting is discussing. Not by job title. Not by industry. By the difference between codified knowledge and tacit knowledge.

Codified knowledge is the stuff you can write down. The process doc. The steps. AI eats that before lunch.

Tacit knowledge is the stuff you can't write down. The judgment call you make because you've seen this pattern before. The instinct that says "this client is about to fire us" three weeks before any dashboard agrees with you. The workaround you rigged together in 2022 that still holds and nobody else understands.

AI substitutes for one. For the other - the tacit stuff, the gut-level pattern recognition - wages are actually going up. The people who know things they can't explain how they know are getting more valuable, not less.

The parts of you that follow steps? Yeah. Replaceable. The parts of you that know things you can't explain how you know? Worth more now than they were two years ago.

But - and this is where I want to hurl my Diet Pepsi at a wall - nobody is redesigning your workday around that. Nobody is redesigning your workday around that. Nobody is saying "we automated the routine half of your role, so let's rebuild the rest to include breathing room and space for the judgment calls that actually matter."

They're saying "great, you're faster, here's more."

So your job still exists. Technically. But the version of it that had a rhythm, that let you breathe between the hard parts, that let you feel like yourself at 2 PM on a Wednesday?

That job is gone. And the new one hasn't been designed yet. Your company just hasn't told you.

You walk to the bathroom at 3 AM without turning on a single light.

Your feet know where the corner of the bed is. Your hand finds the doorframe without reaching. You step over the thing the cat knocked off the shelf last week. Your body drew a map your brain never saw, and if someone asked you to write down the exact route in steps and inches, you couldn't. But your body has never once gotten it wrong.

That's tacit knowledge. The stuff you know so deeply you can't explain how you know it.

You have a version of this at work. A route you walk without thinking.

The project that's about to go sideways - you can feel it before any dashboard confirms it. Something in the tone of the updates. Something in who stopped asking questions. You couldn't put it in a memo. But you'd bet your next paycheck on it.

The client email you read in three seconds and know exactly how much trouble you're in. Not because of what they said. Because of the exclamation point that used to be there and isn't anymore.

The new hire who's drowning but hasn't said so. You clock it in a standup. Not from anything they said. From the specific quality of their "yep, all good."

You navigate all of this in the dark. Every day. And nobody - not your manager, not your job description, not your performance review - has ever called it what it is.

It's your craft. And it's the part AI can't eat.

So let's map it. Five minutes. Grab whatever's nearby.

Think about last week. Not the tasks. The moments. Find the ones where you knew something before you could prove it. Where your gut fired and turned out to be right and you still couldn't tell someone how.

A few to jog your memory:

A conversation you steered somewhere without a plan. You just talked. It worked. Afterward you couldn't reconstruct why you said what you said in the order you said it. That was sixty versions of that conversation over ten years, compressed into instinct.

A decision you made fast that everyone else needed a meeting for. Not because you're smarter. Because you've seen this pattern before and your brain skipped the steps.

A thing you noticed that nobody else caught. The risk. The opportunity. The person. The misalignment between what the deck said and what the room felt like. You have no idea when you learned to see that. But you see it every time now.

Count them up.

How many of those did you have last week? Two? Five? One enormous one on Wednesday that saved someone's ass and nobody noticed?

Every single one is a moment where your experience was doing something that doesn't live in a process doc, a training module, or a bot. It lives in the scar tissue. Every project that went wrong in 2019. Every client you misread in 2021. Every time you were sure about something and weren't, and never forgot it.

Now look at the rest of your week. The status updates. The reformatting. The data entry. The stuff you did while mentally making a grocery list.

That's the other kind of knowledge. The kind you can write down. The kind that's either already automated or waiting its turn.

You just drew two maps of your job without meaning to.

One is the route you walk in the dark - the instinct, the pattern recognition, the weird specific genius nobody asked you to document.

The other is the route with the lights on. Clear steps. Repeatable. Teachable to a machine.

Most people's weeks are heavy on the second map. Not because they're not valuable. Because nobody redesigned their role to put them where their strange, specific, impossible-to-explain instincts actually get used.

The dark map is your craft. The rest is what's standing between you and doing more of it.

Hang onto your list. We're coming back to it.

You built the map. Now build the conversation.

Copy this into your AI tool of choice. Replace brackets [ ] with your own personal context:

The following is a transcript of an exit interview conducted with the Original Version of Your Role.

HR: Thanks for coming in. We know this is sudden.

OLD JOB: It really wasn't.

HR: How would you describe your experience in this role?

OLD JOB: Solid. Bit repetitive in places, but that was part of the charm. High-stakes call at 10. Spreadsheet fiddling at 10:47. Tiny formatting task at 11:12. Existential drift at 2:36. Really full ecosystem.

HR: And what were your primary responsibilities?

OLD JOB: Keeping her from losing her damn mind, mostly.

HR: Sorry, who?

OLD JOB: The employee. Your little tab-hoarding raccoon. Diet Pepsi at arm's length. Cheez-Its in the emotionally supportive ramekin.

HR: We don't track snacks.

OLD JOB: Huge miss.

HR: Let's stay focused on the role itself.

OLD JOB: She needed one dumb little task after every soul-extracting meeting or the rest of the day got real slippery. The org chart updates weren't glamorous, but they let her brain put its shoes back on. The slide formatting was never "just slide formatting." It was recovery with bullet points.

HR: We had those tasks categorized as low-value.

OLD JOB: Yes. Adorable.

HR: What changed over time?

OLD JOB: The ratio. Hard things to soft landings. At first it was one terrible meeting, one boring task, one email, one moment to stare into the middle distance. Beautiful cadence. Then somebody got very excited about efficiency and suddenly it was all sharp edges. No buffer. No filler.

HR: We prefer the term optimization.

OLD JOB: Of course you do.

HR: Is there anything you'll miss?

OLD JOB: The playlist.

HR: The playlist?

OLD JOB: Spreadsheet playlist. Different from deep-thinking playlist. Different from "if one more person says quick sync I will become agricultural" playlist.

HR: Is there anything the organization could have done differently?

OLD JOB: Kept one stupid little task alive. One. A ceremonial spreadsheet. A harmless document to nudge around after a meeting that made her want to lie face-down on the carpet.

HR: A ceremonial spreadsheet.

OLD JOB: Don't mock what you do not understand.

HR: Any message you'd like passed along?

OLD JOB: If she starts making a weirdly detailed tracker no one asked for, leave her alone. She's regulating. If she reorganizes a slide deck after a difficult call, she isn't procrastinating. She's landing the plane. If she puts on the playlist with the suspicious amount of 90s songs and opens a document called "final_v2_FORREAL," everybody back away slowly.

HR: On behalf of the organization, thank you for your service.

OLD JOB: You're welcome. And for the record, the Cheez-Its were never random.

What do you know in the dark?

That thing you do at work that you can't explain to anyone - the gut call, the pattern you spot before the data catches up, the read on a room that turns out to be right every single time. We want to hear it.

Reply to this email with your moment. One sentence or ten. We'll feature the best ones in a future issue with your name on it.

Sunday deadline if you want to make next week. But honestly, we'll take them whenever.

I miss the spreadsheet, if I'm being honest. Not the data. The twenty minutes where my brain got to color-code things while the rest of me recovered from being a person who has to make decisions.

— The (R) Generation Team 💻 🧡 🫶

PS: My old job left a box of its things by the door. It was mostly Cheez-Its and a playlist I'm not ready to talk about.

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☕️ (R)emote Expresso is published weekly for R Generation - a global community of remote professionals, designers, product people, facilitators, consultants, and freelancers who believe remote work should fit the human, not the other way around.