No hiring unless necessary. Not cold-blooded—just did the math.
The Math
An employee with 10K monthly salary—how much does the company actually spend?
10K pre-tax, plus 4K in employer contributions, plus recruiting costs, training costs, office space, equipment—
Real cost approaches 20K.
You think you hired one person. You actually hired one and a half.
Shopify's Choice
End of 2022: 11,600 people.
End of 2024: 8,100 people.
Cut 30% in two years.
Did business collapse? No. Did stock crash? No. It went up.
CEO wrote it into policy: Want to hire? First prove AI can't do this job.
Butter-Cutting Work
Clear process, highly repetitive, minimal judgment needed.
Data entry, report compilation, basic customer service, simple copywriting.
Exhausting for humans, but low barrier.
E-commerce client: 6-person support team, 300 tickets daily.
After AI: 1 person monitoring, 2,000 tickets daily.
Tools changed. Roles must follow.
Executors vs Drivers
Executors: Get assigned → Follow instructions → Ask when stuck → Wait for next task
Drivers: Find problems → Define problems → Find solutions → Run without pushing
After AI, most "execution" can be done by machines.
What's left: work that requires "defining problems" and "making decisions."
One driver using AI can output 20x an executor who doesn't.
Even at 3x the salary, ROI is much higher.
The Way Out
Ask yourself two questions daily:
- What problem did I proactively solve today?
- What did I accomplish with AI that I couldn't before?
Keep asking. Keep doing.
Go from "being selected" to "doing the selecting."
That's real security in the AI era.
Is your work butter-cutting work?
