04/11/2025

The Difference in Working and Pretending to Work

The harder it is to decipher what someone does, the easier they can fake it

How can you measure productivity you can’t see? When we try to evaluate whether someone is “killing it” in their role simply by hearing them mansplain their digital transformation strategy or their AI-powered journey of innovation, it’s hard to disentangle facts from fiction, competence from confidence and talent from, well, BS.

The harder it is to decipher what someone is doing, the easier it is to fake it. Ironically, this means that the more you get paid for doing what you do—because specialized skills and in-demand jobs tend to involve operating in abstract, intellectual and symbolic processes rather than visible, tangible, observable work—the harder it is to know if you are any good at it.

Welcome to the modern workplace, where the line between working and pretending to work is not just thin, it's vanishing. This is particularly true with the advent of AI, which produces content indistinguishable from what humans produce, if not better. If knowledge workers are merely promptly AI and instructing the AI agents to work for them, are humans still working?

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.