Lock your doors, hide your high-yield coffee beans, and delete your search history for “how to explain a 4% raise during 8% inflation.” It’s that magical time of year again: The Annual Appraisal Cycle.
Forget The Last of Us or Squid Game; those are rom-coms compared to the psychological warfare of the Corporate Finance Bell Curve.
The Epilogue to the Rainy Tuesday: 2027 Edition Let’s fast forward to that same rainy Tuesday in November 2027. The bus shelter hasn’t moved, but the brain inside it has been lobotomized and replaced.
The rain starts falling. The crowd gathers. This time, the screen doesn’t play a perfume ad.
The Pre-CES Hype vs. The Rainy Tuesday Reality Next week, Las Vegas will turn into a neon shrine for CES 2026. You’re going to see “Agentic AI” that can order groceries for you, holographic displays that float in mid-air, and transparent OLEDs that look like something out of Minority Report.
The “Oh S**t” Moment I was sitting in Zus Coffee in Kuala Lumpur —or maybe it was a Third Wave Coffee in Bangalore or a Blue Bottle in San Francisco; the scent of venture capital desperation smells the same everywhere—listening to a pitch. The founder, let’s call him “Prompty Paul,” was sweating through his sustainable Allbirds.
Inspired by: Shreyas Doshi’s Deep Dive on Micromanagement. Listen here before you rage-quit: Understanding Micromanagement: A Deep Dive
There is a moment in Shreyas Doshi’s brilliant analysis where he drops a truth bomb that usually sends “visionary” Product Managers scrambling for their noise-canceling headphones. He essentially argues that micromanagement is not a binary evil; it is a situational necessity.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” — Bill Gates
This is Part 3 of my series on the collapse of the traditional software industry.