You Never Really Know Who You Work With
Professional competence is a narrow window into another person, and sometimes the window opens
You never really know who you work with. I've had a lot of different jobs, so I don't want anybody I work with now to assume I'm talking about them — I'm not. But over the years I've worked with some interesting people. I worked with an IT manager who once claimed to have invented fusion. I worked with somebody who told me he used to work for the CIA, when it was very clear that he had not. I've worked with people who turned out to be involved in militant organizations that I only found out about after the fact, and I never would have thought they were a danger.
Related stat? 13% of people tell at least 10 lies a day.
You might think that's an overestimate. I do too. But here's the somewhat disturbing observation: in my experience, 0.05% of people I've worked with suffered from an acute form of that pathology.
Here's the thing about work: you go to work and you don't talk about politics. You don't talk about anything that could be controversial. In some workplaces, that's actually the policy — and even when it isn't, you tend to find out who you can talk politics with before you start talking politics.
I'm saying that without giving away my own politics, but if you read my book, I think you'll probably be able to understand what my politics are not.
The point is, you live a life at work isolated from reality. The issue is that some of the things we're working with these days provoke very strong feelings, and one of them is AI. People have very strong feelings about AI. Some people are so against it that they're going to participate in militant movements against it, or resistance groups. And without giving anything away, I'll say that one of the books has a situation where it becomes clear that something very bad is happening because someone on the inside has turned. And what I tried to capture in Redundant is how a co-worker can often start to exhibit behavior that makes you start to wonder, "what's going on?"
But what I tried to capture is the dynamic when you work with somebody who might be a little crazy — somebody who's secretly a militant, who'll be a little off. They might say something over a lunch break or at a team offsite that raises people's eyebrows.
Wait, what were you doing up in Rockford during that Nazi rally last week? You were 'just watching?
Like most secrets in the workplace, there are signs. Nobody acts on them right away, because what are you going to do — report somebody to HR for being weird at lunch? But the signs are there, and in the book they accumulate until the truth becomes impossible to ignore.
The important takeaway I want people to get from the book is that work is a very separate place from reality, and there are often times when reality and work collide in ways that are unexpected. You see what people produce. You see what they choose to reveal. You see the version of themselves that fits inside the workday. The rest stays private until it doesn't.
You never really know who you work with.
HQ 8 — Authored. Drafted from dictated notes, revised by hand, AI used for grammar and polish only.