Trendslop and the Invisible Hand Job

I’ve always been a cynical person. I don’t mean that in the tiresome, performative way where someone at a party tells you they “don’t trust anyone” right before they try to sell you crypto. I mean that I never labored under the assumption that employer-to-employee relationships were predicated on anything more than selfish best interests, and honestly—honestly—that’s a refreshingly clear boundary for me. I don’t like the ambiguity of what-would-be-corporate-familial-obligations. Don’t invite me to the picnic. Don’t ask me to be a “culture carrier.” Pay me what I’m worth, give me work that doesn’t make me want to set the building on fire, and we’re square. The fuzziness—the “we’re a family” and the “we care about your whole self”—has always been a trap, and I’m too autistic to fall for a trap I can see the welding marks on.

Anytime I’ve ever needed anything more than the bare minimum from an employer, it’s been pulling teeth. And it’s never something you can just ask for. You don’t walk into a performance review and say, “I’ve earned this promotion by every metric you gave me, so I’d like it now,” and receive anything but a PowerPoint about “headcount constraints” and “budget cycles” and “we really value you, just keep doing what you’re doing.” The only thing that works is leverage. You find it, you bend them over a barrel, and you apply pressure if it’s worth it, or you move on. The math is simple. Not easy—simple.

You want that promotion? It doesn’t matter that you’ve earned it by merit. Merit is a bedtime story told to junior devs to keep them pulling all-nighters. It doesn’t matter that you’ve earned it by metrics—sales revenue, feature delivery, team growth, whatever numbers they told you to chase. The numbers are downstream of the decision, not upstream. The decision is made, and then the numbers are arranged to justify it. So the play is: you land a job with the title you want, elsewhere, and your employer will either lowball you and you leave, or they’ll finally come to the table with a fair offer. That’s it. That’s the entire system. Everything else is theater.

Meanwhile, the promotions will go to corporate darlings who lie to close deals and ruin long-term business relationships. They’ll go to the people who capitulate to the boss and deliver a feature by cutting so many corners it’ll take sixteen other engineers a full year to refactor it once more than nine people are using it, because it’s not built to scale, not tested, not built using any design theory, and is probably stolen from a hackathon by the quiet engineer who actually had the idea to begin with. I’ve watched this happen so many times I could set my watch to it. The corporate darling gets the title. The quiet engineer gets a LinkedIn endorsement for “creativity” and a 2% raise that doesn’t match inflation. The company gets a codebase full of scar tissue and a reputation for broken promises. And the quarterly earnings call, somehow, still manages to sound optimistic.

All of this is just American corporate culture, and for most of my career I didn’t see that there was much I could do to change it. It’s pervasive. It’s structural. And most of my career has been spent as an individual contributor—an IC, a person who builds things—where I don’t have any control over these decisions. So I operated within constraints. If you can’t change the system, make it work in spite of itself. That’s not cynicism; that’s engineering.

There’s a line in The Wealth of Nations where Adam Smith says that even selfish pursuits will be led by an invisible hand toward the greater good when they’re restrained by oversight. Smith didn’t mean this as a blanket endorsement of selfishness, the way the think-tank crowd likes to pretend. He meant it as a description of a system that only works when the guardrails are in place—when competition is real, when information is symmetric, when no single actor can rig the game. The invisible hand isn’t magic. It’s a mechanism, and mechanisms need maintenance. When the oversight disappears, the hand just grabs whatever it can.

DE&I is the perfect example. I’m a minority, and I’m late-diagnosed neurodivergent—ASD-1, what used to be called Asperger’s, the kind that makes me pattern-match bullshit faster than most people blink and also makes me incapable of pretending to enjoy a team-building exercise. But I joined tech in the 2010s, when those things were a corporate death sentence. You didn’t talk about being autistic. You didn’t talk about being anything other than a default-settings human who loved ping-pong and “disruption.” Around 2014 or 2015, organizations started telling themselves that Title IX mattered—not because they believed it, but because the legal pressure and the PR calculus shifted. That seed grew into “diversity” by the 2020 era, and eventually that would bloom into full DE&I: diversity, equity, and inclusion. The branding was impeccable. The sincerity was nonexistent.

Corporations never gave a single fuck about any of this. They are at best indifferent to women, minorities, neurodivergent people, and the LGBTQIA+ crowd. But the opportunity had a single, gleaming benefit: we can grow our American labor force by double-digits and get the most qualified candidates, since women especially have made up the vast majority of college graduates since around 2010 and that number has only grown since then—and we can pay them fucking nothing. That’s the part they don’t put in the recruiting brochure. That’s the real business case.

Here’s the revised paragraph with the supplementary thought woven in—connecting the structural pay secrecy to the broader cultural hostility toward anyone who dares to be satisfied with their current role.

Let me give you a number. While I was making $140,000 as a senior engineer, my peer—same title, same responsibilities—was making $80,000. She had her Master’s degree in computer science. I do not have a masters in anything. She was not only more qualified on paper, but she was a better engineer AND a far more level-headed IC. And she was paid nearly half what I was. The reason U.S. bosses don’t want you talking about your compensation isn’t to protect your privacy. It’s to fuck you over, individually and collectively. It’s a structural information asymmetry designed to keep labor cheap, and it works best when the people being underpaid don’t know they’re being underpaid. And the same logic applies to the quiet hostility corporations express toward anyone content to stay in their current role without chasing the next rung. If you’re happy where you are—if you’re good at your job, adequately compensated, and uninterested in climbing into management—the machine interprets that as a failure of extraction. You’re supposed to want more, always, because wanting more makes you pliable: you’ll work harder, self-exploit more efficiently, and accept deferred compensation in the form of a promotion that may never come. Being satisfied isn’t loyalty—it’s a refusal to play the game, and the game hates a player who’s already won enough.

Despite this, as I ascended into more leadership roles where I had actual control over hiring, I knew that my company only wanted DE&I candidates because they wanted cheap labor. But I wanted DE&I candidates because they were almost always far more qualified. In cases where they weren’t more qualified, they were always as qualified. The talent pool, if you actually open the aperture, is extraordinary. The problem isn’t a pipeline problem. The problem is that the people who do the hiring have been selecting for cultural comfort rather than competence for so long they’ve convinced themselves the two are the same thing.

This gets lost on the most fragile morons in society. I have a fiduciary obligation to ensure that my company has the best staff, and I cannot hire a warm body for brownie points—also, who in the fuck is giving out the points? Where does the MAGA crowd of ghouls think that DE&I hiring, if we hired dipshits based on skin tone alone, is deriving revenue, growth, anything? This is still a fucking business, and our earnings calls still have to demonstrate positive growth. You can’t positive-growth your way out of a team full of unqualified hires, and nobody—nobody—was doing that. It was always a bad-faith caricature, a moral panic for people who need someone to blame for their own mediocrity.

Further, most engineering teams are pretty small—five to fifteen people—and I’m not easy to work with as a neurodivergent person because I don’t often have patience when people do things that are illogical or inefficient. I am not hiring unqualified morons. I can’t work with them. My brain will chew through the drywall. DE&I gave me free license to hire the best candidates, despite my company’s selfish impulses. The invisible hand at work: the corporation’s greed for cheap labor opened the door, and what came through the door was a wave of talent that was systematically underpaid and systematically overqualified, and who, for a brief window, I could actually bring onto my team without having to fight the same old battles about “culture fit.” Culture fit, by the way, is just a euphemism for “people who look and sound like the hiring manager,” and it has cost American businesses more innovation than any competitor ever could.

My job, though, was to deprogram my hires. I’d pull them aside in the first week and say: “Look, this is your shot as a DE&I hire to get the experience that will henceforth remove that appearance from your résumé, because you’ll have demonstrated competency. Further, you need to hustle here for one to two years and bounce, because you’re grossly underpaid.” I wasn’t being disloyal. I was being honest. The compact was broken before they ever signed the offer letter. My role was to make sure they extracted as much from the arrangement as the company was extracting from them, and then got out before the extraction became permanent. I provided as much mentorship as people wanted, as many resources as people wanted. And as much as I’d love to still be working with a lot of those people, the universal truth is that they would get hired at X-salary, and after one to two years they would get a 20 to 30 percent bump in pay as a median. I have the numbers to back this up. The system worked, but not the way the corporation intended. It worked because I hacked it, and because they let me, for a while.

And then, when they could, they dropped the ruse. The indifference was always there, just beneath the surface. They were at best indifferent to women. You can work here, but now that you need your own bathroom? A fucking pump room? Time off for having a baby? What do you mean? Get back to work! Period time off? “When will the Marxist demands of the socialist communist agenda ever stop?!” decry white executives now openly regretting letting “corporate skirts” into the office. They never saw women as equals, and after the 2024 election, they threw as many women off of boards and out of executive rooms as possible overnight. I’m still awaiting the study showing the 20 percent decrease in women’s representation in leadership post-Trump. By 2022, women held something like two percent of Fortune 500 CEO roles despite being 51 percent of the population and 60 percent of our educated class since 2010—making women, on average, far more qualified. But yeah, this system is a meritocracy. Sure.

Minorities? Same deal. This clearing house was even more of a fire sale and happened with even less ceremony. America’s racial past has always been one of failure to acknowledge things, followed by stubborn insistence that everything’s been atoned for and “people are making a big deal out of nothing” because “we fixed racism after the Civil Rights march on Selma”—or whatever random epoch of time that particular person thinks racism was cured. Maybe it’s when Mr. Rogers soaked his feet alongside Francois Clemmons in the pool. That was 1993, by the way. The not-funny-but-funny point is that this highlights my argument pretty well: racism has never been resolved because it’s never been wholly addressed. Our Supreme Court has enabled Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama to gerrymander their states into full-blown Jim Crow segregation in 2024. I watched an elected lawmaker in 2024 be denied entry into the chamber in which a vote was being cast for a district he represented, by a sheriff who ultimately forcibly removed him from the building he was elected to serve inside, like a dog. Our landscapers, babysitters, janitors, food workers, farmers—hundreds of the most essential COVID job-role employees—are sitting in concentration camps and dying, some of them from suicide. So yeah, racism isn’t gone. It just changed its tie.

LGBTQIA+? This group became this generation’s most visible lightning rod of hatred. What’s crazy to me, beyond how little any of this is anyone’s fucking business, is that if we are earnestly asking questions about this group of people, they are absolutely willing to answer us—and they’ll probably answer in a way that makes you blush and smile, darling. If the “I’m just asking questions” crowd gave a shit, there are solutions to most of the problems they raise. But they don’t want solutions. They want someone to hate. Bathroom debate? Fucking easy. Spain has had this solved for decades: every bathroom gets converted to stalls with floor-to-ceiling locked enclosures that maximize privacy, with a common area for sinks. No genders to the bathrooms at all. One room, two to ten toilet stalls, two to ten sinks outside them. Full privacy for everyone, full safety for everyone. End of discussion. Further benefits: no more weird stall peeping, less graffiti, less space needed for restrooms because you only need one physical location. The engineering is trivial. The politics are the problem. But hate doesn’t seek answers. Hate seeks victims.

Corporate culture in America now has seemingly swung back to something akin to Mad Men, and whatever impulses your leadership felt like they had to hold back when Title IX protections existed, it’s now open season. So the exact flavor of bullshit is probably unique to each person. What’s not unique is that leadership doesn’t seem as strategic anymore. It’s like Hegseth’s army: we can now commit war crimes! Oh, wait—that actually doesn’t help us win wars at all. Maybe that wasn’t what was holding us back. Maybe it wasn’t diversity holding us back either.

Teams don’t seem like they’re infinitely more capable without these pesky women, minorities, etc. Shocking, I know. One thing I’ll say about this is that when you’re a person who measures your leadership success based on people not bringing you problems and people not being able to object, two things are true. One, you’re a fucking idiot and should be put in an asylum. Two, your team will fail. My team constantly challenges me. Sometimes I get frustrated. I’m human. But when I take a step back, I think about it like projectile physics. I have ASD-1. My brain is weird. By listening to the people closest to the problem’s feedback, by listening to qualified opinions challenging mine from diverse perspectives and all experience levels, and by opening up the floor to every teammate without ego, we all ensure that we’re making the decisions together, we have high ownership, and we can guarantee that as the projectile is in motion it will hit our target. That’s not soft management. That’s ballistics. And you don’t get ballistics from an echo chamber.

The crux of the issue I have now—and this is where the invisible hand becomes the invisible man and the invisible man becomes an AI prompt—is that I can’t listen to my team anymore. Because the same person who decided that DE&I no longer matters also knows exactly what my team should be building, how we should be building it, and has told us how long it will take. And I’m not sure, but it seems to me that AI has made all the calls. Not AI as in some superintelligent oracle making nuanced trade-off decisions. AI as in a large language model fed a handful of business-school clichés and the CEO’s own wishful thinking, spitting back what the CEO already wanted to hear.

AI tells you what you want to hear. AI tells you that you are the fairest of them all. AI will never defy you, lord. AI reinforces all the biases it was trained on—the same biases that fired the women and the minorities and the queer folks, the same biases that gutted strategic thinking in favor of vibes-based management. It’s as though “trendslop” is running the show, it’s running on fumes, and it’s running us all ragged because it’s running us around in circles.¹ The decisions have no memory, no accountability, no skin in the game. The AI says “build this feature,” the invisible man rubber-stamps it, the team works 60-hour weeks to ship a hallucinated product nobody asked for, and then we pivot to the next thing the AI dreamed up, and nothing—nothing—ever gets launched, scaled, or maintained long enough to matter. The careers we’re building are Potemkin villages, and the architect is a stochastic parrot.

You can see this happening in real time. The studies are starting to pile up. Researchers asked LLMs for strategic advice, and they got trendslop in return—plausible-sounding, superficially confident recommendations that collapse under even mild scrutiny because the model is optimized for coherence, not correctness.² The model tells you to “leverage synergies” and “double down on core competencies” and “adopt an AI-first strategy” because those are the words that appear next to each other in the corpus of executive blog posts it was trained on, not because those words mean anything in your specific context. Trendslop is the perfect drug for the invisible man. It flatters his priors. It asks nothing of him. It provides a plausible-sounding justification for whatever he was going to do anyway, and it does it in bullet points suitable for a board deck.

The result is that teams are run ragged chasing ghosts, and the people at the top are more convinced than ever that they’re steering the ship when they’re actually just leaning on a tiller that isn’t connected to anything. The frantic, ad-hoc product launches I wrote about last time—the ones that spring fully formed from a CEO’s CNBC appearance—are now even more disconnected from reality, because the AI has blessed them. The invisible man’s shadow now has an AI-generated voice, and it’s telling us to ship the impossible on an impossible timeline, and all the strategic objections, all the evidence from the ground, all the diverse perspectives that might have corrected course are simply ignored, because the AI didn’t mention them, and the AI is never wrong, because the AI is just a mirror reflecting the CEO’s own face back at him, softened with a Gaussian blur and captioned “visionary.”

I think about the people I hired during the DE&I window. The best of them are gone now—promoted into better companies, better titles, better pay. The ones who are left are fighting the same fight I am, trying to build real things in a system that no longer values realness. And they’re tired. I’m tired. We’re all tired, because we’re not just doing our jobs; we’re doing a second, unpaid job of navigating the chaos generated by an AI-driven leadership fantasy that doesn’t show up on any ledger, doesn’t serve any customer, and doesn’t build any lasting value.

The invisible hand of Adam Smith required oversight—real competition, real accountability, real guardrails. The invisible man who runs your company now operates with none of those. And the AI he’s installed as his oracular successor is the final evacuation of human judgment from the boardroom. It’s not a tool anymore. It’s an abdication.

The damage isn’t theoretical. It’s showing up in the résumés of people who’ve spent two years building features that never launched, in the burnout stats that HR quietly buries, in the quiet exodus of anyone who still has the leverage to leave. The only thing keeping the machine running at this point is inertia and fear. And I don’t know when the breaking point comes, but I know it’s closer than the quarterly guidance suggests.

In the meantime, I do what I’ve always done. I operate within constraints. I make the system work in spite of itself. I tell my people the truth. I document everything. I update my résumé. And I wait for the day when the trendslop finally meets a problem it can’t bullshit its way past—like a cash flow statement, or a mass walkout, or a customer base that finally, finally finds the exit door.

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1. ↩ See the growing body of work on “trendslop”: the phenomenon where LLM-generated strategic advice defaults to fashionable but empty jargon. Harvard Business Review covered it in March 2026: “Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got Trendslop in Return”. Jan Oliver Schwarz dissected the definitional contours on his Substack. Fortune weighed in with “What Is Trendslop? The Hidden Bias in AI That’s Giving Your Workplace Bad Advice”. And IBTimes UK noted that AI trendslop is increasingly shaping CEO decision-making. The signal is loud and getting louder.

2. ↩ The problem is not that LLMs can’t generate useful insights under careful human supervision. It’s that they are being deployed as oracles rather than as tools—a distinction that the executive class, in its current hospice-care myopia, seems incapable of grasping. The trendslop loop is self-reinforcing: the model outputs what the leader wants to hear, the leader acts on it, the action fails to produce results, but the failure is blamed on execution rather than strategy, and the leader asks the model for more advice. Rinse, repeat, vaporize shareholder value.