Is "jobs" a four-letter word? - by Benn Stancil

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Is "jobs" a four-letter word?<br>The invisible id.<br>Jul 17, 2026

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An office, 2026.<br>When three of us started a startup thirteen years ago, our first office was in a sublet of a sublet. The full office has space for about 70 people; we took a back room off to the side, among a scrum of unused desks and Aeron chairs. It was a good temporary spot, we told ourselves, until we hired more people and moved into something bigger.<br>Our direct landlords offered us the room because they only had about ten employees themselves. But they wouldn’t be that small for long. They recently raised $15 million, were making bold plans for what to do with it, and had a warning for us: They would be hiring aggressively, and would soon need the room back.<br>Thanks for reading benn.substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Similarly, the office’s original tenants—the grandparents of our lease—moved out a few months ago, into a new “crib” down the street, so that their company could grow from 68 employees to more than 450. To celebrate the upgrade, their CEO gave a tour of the new office to TechCrunch. The video is an eight-minute time capsule of 2010s’ tech culture: An open bullpen of desks, game rooms, beer fridges, office birthday parties,1 corporate rap songs, and unburdened optimism about the world-eating potential for enterprise cloud software. At one point in the interview, the CEO looks out at a construction site across the street: “And as we expand and fill up this building,” he says, “maybe we’ll expand over there as well.”<br>A decade ago, that was what ambition meant in Silicon Valley: Hiring. Companies wanted to fill twinkling offices; CEOs wanted to command bustling swarms of eager employees. “How big is your startup?,” people might ask. You couldn’t tell people how much money you made because most of us didn’t make any, so most of us talked about how much we’d raised and how many people we planned to hire with it. In every compressed social ecosystem, there are always social scoreboards and seating charts. In Silicon Valley, headcount was one of ours.<br>It was, obviously, a bad measuring stick. It inverted our ends—make good software? Delight customers? Make the world a better place?—with our means; it amplified the boom and bust cycles that technology companies are already prone to follow. And when a founder or CEO flew their legions too close to the sun, it was often the laid-off employees who fell the hardest.<br>Still, the compulsion to hire wasn’t all bad. For every CEO or VP that wanted to hire an army, an army of people got hired. It was, in an odd and indirect way, distributive and democratic. Yes, the capital C-Capital—the young Stanford founders raising millions, and the venture capitalists who gave it to them—needed the Labor to build their widgets, but they also needed the Labor to impress their friends. They needed the Labor to get invited on the best podcasts. They needed the Labor to fuel the economic machinery of their enterprises, and they needed it for their egos. It was a form of social symbiosis: Even in cases when the invisible hand might want to turn a company into a gutted husk like those that private equity firms often leave behind, the invisible id gives it pause—big layoffs are embarrassing.2<br>In other words, headcount might be our bleakest scoreboard, except for all the others.

Artificial intelligence is remaking the world, but nobody knows how. AI will annihilate millions of jobs, some say; no, it won’t, argue others. It will launch a handful of people into a tiny cloister of obscene wealth and bury everyone else in a permanent underclass. No, that theory is a fallacy, and doomerism is wrong. Recent computer science graduates can’t find jobs and are working at Chipotle; demand for tech talent is rising. AI-native startups are smaller and hire fewer people; or, companies that spend more on AI actually hire more people.3 Oracle, like many other tech firms, says the “adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce;” the Wall Street Journal wonders if the cuts are “efforts to correct for past overhiring simply to come into line with industry norms.” Pick your narrative, and you can find evidence for it. The Jevons paradox comes up a lot.<br>But at least one thing has clearly changed: The scoreboard. Tech startups no longer brag about how many employees that they have. Instead, they now celebrate how few they need.<br>According to the Wall Street Journal, staying small is the tech industry’s newest flex. Business Insider reports that revenue per employee has become the most popular metric in Silicon Valley; Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, the powerful startup incubator, says that it’s the most important metric for building a hardcore [laudatory] culture. And engineer who works at Anthropic...