I Became a Manager to Help People. AI Incentives Are Turning Collaboration Into Competition
I went into management because I experienced my own share of terrible managers. I told myself I would break that cycle. I wanted to become the kind of manager I wished I had: someone who protects people, helps them grow, shapes strong teams, and still moves the business forward.
And honestly, for almost ten years, I loved it.
I cared about my people. I still do.
But lately I feel like I can no longer fulfill that role. My big tech corporation recently made the message painfully clear during performance reviews: not everyone can receive good ratings anymore. Some people must fall below expectations. It is no longer a guideline. It is mandatory. The process no longer feels like fair evaluation and calibration. It feels like forced ranking.
At the same time, I tried to promote the most junior person on my team. A hardworking person with a salary so small compared to the overall organization that it should barely register financially. Yet that single promotion affected the budget significantly by several percents.
That was the moment something in my head broke.
So what exactly is the message here? That in order to help one person grow, I effectively need to push somebody else out? That development is now a zero-sum game?
And all of this is happening under the banner of AI investment.
Everybody must “do AI” now. Managers must do AI. Engineers must do AI. Entire role expectations are being rewritten around AI adoption and visibility. If you are not visibly participating, you are quietly pushed toward lower evaluations and lower rewards.
Except there are no real “low rewards” anymore. “Below expectations” simply means marked.
And everybody understands what happens to marked people once layoffs begin floating through hallway conversations.
The rumors are everywhere now. One manager for fifty people. A return to old-school industrial management where personal connection disappears entirely and the manager becomes little more than a task dispatcher with spreadsheets and status reports.
But the thing that honestly worries me the most is what this kind of system does to people over time.
The moment people truly internalize that rewards are zero-sum, collaboration starts dying. Helping others becomes risky. Mentoring someone stops feeling noble when their success can directly reduce your own security. Every strong performer starts looking less like a teammate and more like competition.
And people have families. Mortgages. Children. Responsibilities.
Once survival enters the equation, culture changes very quickly.
The helping culture that so many companies proudly advertise begins slowly transforming into self-protection. Information gets hoarded. Visibility becomes more important than usefulness. Cooperation becomes performative. People stop asking how to build great teams and start asking how to avoid becoming the person marked as expendable.
Ironically, the thing that hurts me most is not even the pressure itself. It is the forced dishonesty around it.
I wanted to explain the situation honestly to my team. HR stopped me. Instead, I was handed sanitized corporate language and reward explanations so inhuman and abstract that even I struggled to understand them. And somehow I am expected to translate that into motivation, trust, and morale for actual human beings.
How am I supposed to sell something I no longer believe in myself?
The atmosphere in the office has changed. You can feel it in the hallways now. People speak more quietly. Everybody is trying to look useful, adaptable, irreplaceable. Everybody is trying to survive the next reorganization before the one after that arrives.
And yet, despite all of this, I still genuinely love AI.
That is the uncomfortable part.
I use it daily. I help build it. I believe it can become one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever created. I truly believe it can enrich lives, reduce suffering, accelerate learning, and help people create things they otherwise never could.
But I also think the next decade or two are going to be brutal.
Because technology itself is not what scares me. Incentives do.
Right now we are building AI inside systems optimized almost entirely for short-term shareholder value, workforce reduction, and endless growth expectations. We tell ourselves we are building the future while quietly wondering whether we are automating away the very stability that allowed us to build lives in the first place.
Sometimes it feels less like we are saving for retirement and more like we are simply buying time.
And maybe that is the strangest feeling of all: helping build something I genuinely believe in while simultaneously fearing what the systems around it will do with it.
I still want to believe this leads somewhere better eventually.
But the road there is going to be rough capitalism at its absolute finest.
Yours, - 9i7wo2 -
June 2026