Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast, it’s the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software, and jeez, is it. But it’s changing other things, too, Richard.

Rich: Like humans!

Paul: It really is. It’s changing our behavior. In just a minute, I’m gonna start spamming you and that’s gonna be really exciting.

Rich: Very much looking forward to it. Play that theme!

[intro music]

Paul: Richard.

Rich: Yo.

Paul: Why are we here?

Rich: On the Earth?

Paul: At this company, on this podcast, at this moment.

Rich: We work at Aboard.

Paul: Nice company. A-B-O-A-R-D dot com. Go to it right now.

Rich: Yes. And if you go to it right now, you’ll see the second version of our world-class leading software-building engine. We built the best vibe coding tool in the world—by accident.

Paul: It’s real. Nobody can quite figure that out yet. People keep coming to us and going like, “Why did you do this, instead of a bunch of Nordic 22 year olds.”

Rich: Nothing against Nordic-Land.

Paul: No, that’s… [laughing] One of many countries.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That’s exciting. Check it out, because what you do is you type in the box and you say what kind of software you need? Business software, not like a game, like, don’t clone Temple Run.

Rich: That was part—one of our secret moves was narrowing what it can do.

Paul: And then it builds you a prototype right there. But prototype is, like, the wrong word. It builds you a whole full-stack software application.

Rich: It does. It’s not done. It’s close to done. And you can iterate on it, and you can tell it to revise things, and it doesn’t throw errors, and it doesn’t need a half an hour.

Paul: No, it’s pretty cool. This is free.

Rich: It’s real cool. Check it out at aboard.com.

Paul: Oh, wait, one thing before we move on to the actual podcast. What if I like it and I want to do something with it?

Rich: You should get in touch with us. We have not made the tool publicly available to everyone. We may do that one day. What we do is we get you going. Pretty much you’re well into spec and build and you’re on your way, and then we help you get it done.

Paul: That’s right. We will actually provide the service for you. Why would we do that in a world of AI?

Rich: Because we like money!

Paul: [laughing] No, because the technology isn’t—AI in general isn’t ready to build a full-stack software solution with migrations, integrations, so on and so forth.

Rich: Also, Paul, let’s talk to each other.

Paul: Aw, no—

Rich: Let’s look into each other’s eyes.

Paul: Well, that’s what we’re gonna talk about today on the podcast.

Rich: Oh, boy.

Paul: So, look, let me send you some messages right now.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Hey, Rich.

Rich: Hello.

Paul: Really loved what you said about that sweater in your recent blog post and have been checking things out. Wanna send you my resume right now. Here it is.

Rich: I’m almost flattered and happy to have the attention. Go on.

Paul: Hey, Rich. Just like you, I have a real interest in business-process analysis, and I would love to share with you all the things about me. Here they are.

Rich: Wow, it’s really nice to meet you.

Paul: Hey, Rich. I see you live in Brooklyn. What a cool place. Would love to be there with you soon to share my resume and show you all about myself.

Rich: Great.

Paul: This is, honestly, if you’re at the end of an email inbox these days and you have a position of some authority, like, you run a company?

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It’s really bad.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: It’s really, really bad. It’s really exhausting because everyone is using AI to fake a connection in order to get past your threshold.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And you read an article. Tell me about it.

Rich: Yeah. So the article is about the job market. The title is, “Te Job Search Has Become a Humiliation Ritual.”

Paul: Well, that’s not different than it ever used to be.

Rich: [laughing] Sarah Thankham Matthews wrote it for The Cut, New York Magazine.

Paul: Oh, okay.

Rich: The article is first off, the job market, even though, on its surface, the economy seems to be booming—asterisk.

Paul: There are weird signals out there where it’s like—

Rich: It’s mixed signals, right? There’s a lot of mixed signals.

Paul: Market goes up, but nobody gets jobs.

Rich: It is October 2025, if you’re listening to this amazing podcast at the National Archives. But it’s October 2025—

Paul: [laughing] There’s not gonna be a National Archives. You just—that’s nice. That’s great. Good for you.

Rich: [laughing] Well, it’s called a Sandisk hard drive, is what it is.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right.

Rich: We are at the crest of, like, an absolute boom in the stock market.

Paul: We’ve talked about this on recent episodes.

Rich: It’s booming. It’s booming, right?

Paul: And everybody is saying, “Bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble.”

Rich: So people are starting to talk. Bubble rumblings. AI. The amount of spend around essentially putting servers in kiddie pools with ice cubes in them— [Paul sighs] —is a thing now. And so there’s this incredible amount of investment in spending going on.

Paul: Unlike crypto, this one is truly locked into the “real economy.”

Rich: Yes, it’s a massive boom right now.

Paul: Here we are.

Rich: But at the same time, there’s an undertow of Gen Z, millennials, I bet even Gen X, I would say, getting put back out into this job market and really having a hard time, like, searching for months and months and months.

Paul: No, wait. Just to be clear with everyone, do you think this is truly AI-connected or are we going in a different direction?

Rich: I think it’s a few things. I think it’s a few things. One is we went through it, because we had a company during the pandemic, and during the pandemic, this rush of cash came at all these companies, and there was this—

Paul: They literally gave you a million dollars just for existing from the government.

Rich: Which was incredibly nice.

Paul: Yeah, it was good. You had to pay it back in some cases. But like, for the most part they’re like, “Just please stay in business.”

Rich: Correct. So this, this absolutely, like, 1 in 100 year event occurred. The markets kind of cratered for a minute, and then there’s just this massive spend kicked in. It was like the equivalent of being dumped by your boyfriend and deciding you’re gonna eat six tubs of ice cream.

Paul: Yeah, it was—

Rich: We were real confused.

Paul: Well, we were also a digital services firm. I remember watching, there was one company that, like, planned events.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They had a real bad year, right?

Rich: They tried to become virtual. It was just a lot of confusion. But what ended up happening was on the upswing was massive amounts of hiring. Everybody was hiring like crazy, especially in tech. About a year later—forget, it’s 2025 right now, in 2023, people like, “What the hell was that? Who are all these people?” And so massive layoffs actually started to happen. Like, tens of thousands were let go by Google. I know someone who was part of that, and I know a few people actually who were let go, and they were like, I was like, “Do you think they’re going to notice?” He’s like, “I don’t think they’re going to notice that my boss’s boss’s boss was removed.” Like, it got so out of hand.

Paul: And this is someone who was let go saying that to you?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: They didn’t feel special on the other side of that letting go.

Paul: I can’t decide which is better, the person who isn’t really doing anything telling you how important their job is, or the person who isn’t really doing anything telling you that they just burned everybody else’s time for five years and oh well.

Rich: Well, it’s a hell of a thing. And this person was there for years, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Okay, so you got that. You got employers, especially in tech and in professional…

Paul: But that was understood, that’s understood as, like, a correction. That’s not a crash.

Rich: Yeah, but the thing is though, those people got put in the market.

Paul: Yeah, they sure did.

Rich: And they’re in the market. Right? And some got jobs and some are still in the market. And so you got that. And then you have, frankly, this sort of ominous threat about how AI should inform how you hire. Will the robot replace you yet? No, but employers are sort of like, “Eh, this is pretty wicked stuff. Should I really rush to hire?” So there’s that. That’s hanging out.

Paul: I think there’s another element, too, which is people are hesitant to invest in growth if they think that growth is going to come automatically from a prompt.

Rich: They think there’s going to be a shortcut so they’re hanging back.

Paul: Most companies are, you know, they’re either growing or shrinking.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Or there’s—very few are staying still. It’s really hard to see.

Rich: It’s a wild time.

Paul: I think what’s happening is people, I mean, the stories I’m hearing, this is very anecdotal, but people are just sort of like, “Yeah, you know, we’re going to figure that out. Maybe we can do that with AI.” Well, what that means—

Rich: We’re going to hang back.

Paul: Is we’re not going to hire five young people to figure it out and sort of do the research reports or whatever.

Rich: That’s right. That’s right.

Paul: I would also add to this, too, like, it’s just a shaky time in the economy, like, with the tariffs and the Trump administration.

Rich: That was the last point I was going to make.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And the last one I was going to make was it’s not that people are making decisions based on the policy they see and disagreeing with them or it being informed. It’s that they don’t know. It’s a very uncertain time.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s, like, blowing in the wind right now. Like, the mood of the president and other people and Xi, like, also being in a bad mood literally turn things sideways.

Paul: We keep talking—so there’s all this talk of a bubble. I’ll just bring people inside of our world for a minute. We keep talking to people, kind of West Coast types, who just are really confused by aspects of our business.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Flat out, they’re like, “Well wait, people are your last mile? Like, what? Humans? No. No!”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And the thing that’s going on there, we are designing a business. It’s a very New York business. We’re going to automate more and more as time goes on. But we’re keeping that human layer in kind of because that’s crash-proof. Pure technology just goes up in smoke. Humans, relationships, building a company where people know they can call you?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Is one of our ways of sort of buffering ourselves against what’s coming.

Rich: Yeah. And I think there’s more, I think that is a component of it, but I actually think there’s—

Paul: Also the technology doesn’t really support what people say it does.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, I think, and I want to bring this all together with Sarah’s article.

Paul: Okay, so tell me about the article. Let’s just jump.

Rich: Well, the article essentially acknowledges everything we just talked about, which is it’s a wacky job market, there’s a lot of applications out, and also the economy, quote unquote, is booming at the same time. So it’s weird.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But what she zooms in on is that the application process, this sort of mating ritual between recruiters and HR and companies and applicants, has sort of drifted into this highly transactional sort of volume-driven process that is melting everybody. Like, the—

Paul: Give me an example. So I’m applying for a job as a, I don’t know, I’m going to write JavaScript at a bank.

Rich: Yeah. And so LinkedIn has a tool now called Easy Apply.

Paul: [laughing] You said the word: LinkedIn. There it is.

Rich: Yeah. And what it is, apparently, is it’s a spray-and-pray AI-powered tool to effectively just throw your resume into all these applications—

Paul: LinkedIn makes this available. This isn’t like, a—

Rich: I don’t know a lot about this tool. I’m sure, by the way, if I searched for AI application tools?

Paul: There’s tons.

Rich: There’s probably tons. There’s probably tons of HR vetting tools. In the article she mentions this sort of automated call that the applicants were getting about getting them to the next stage. But it was clearly, like, an AI robot thing going on.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Like, all this craziness is happening. And the net outcome is that everybody’s annoyed. The HR recruiters, and he’s like, “I don’t know what to do with 700 resumes for essentially one position.”

Paul: This is how LinkedIn solves things. [laughter] LinkedIn loves—

Rich: They love a good volume.

Paul: Yeah, they really do. Okay, so—

Rich: And then the applicants are like, “I’m actually kind of depressed and anxious because this is the 9,000th job I’m applying to.”

Paul: Right. And nobody’s calling back.

Rich: Nobody’s calling back because they have 900 resumes. And also, how are you going to be distinguishable if you are one of 900 resumes, right?

Paul: Let’s be clear. We all knew this was going to happen.

Rich: It’s gonna happen.

Paul: This one was, yeah, yeah.

Rich: But there is something particular about getting a job. It is different—

Paul: Well, you haven’t done in a while, but, man, is it depressing.

Rich: Well, no, I have done it as a person hiring, and we were a tough interview for years, and I understand it and I sympathize with it. I’m not gonna lie and say I empathize with it, because I haven’t been in it in a long time. But I can sympathize and I can see the anxiety and difficulty of someone trying to get a job.

Paul: It’s institutionalized rejection.

Rich: It’s hard.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So what’s going on is this: We live in an amazing time. I can have Pad Thai in my mouth in, like, 18 minutes.

Paul: You can. [laughing] You can.

Rich: I can have a car, and when he drops off the Pad Thai, I can add on that he has to take two UPS boxes for me back to the UPS Store and send me a picture of the tracking numbers. I can do that.

Paul: You, you can do that.

Rich: I can do that.

Paul: Yeah. Right now, humans are involved, but in the future they may not be.

Rich: I can go on and on about all the incredible conveniences.

Paul: Everybody lives in the same world who’s listening to this.

Rich: Exactly. Now, the idea of getting a job, the idea of getting a job in sort of a classic sense, in a low-volume sense, was you looked at job applications and opportunities and then you sent a resume through.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: The idea of layering on an automated transaction to an experience of literally joining a place where you are going to interact—when that guy leaves with my boxes, I’m never seeing him again. He may show up again in the algorithm, but I’ve never seen him again. It is a pure transaction. Takes about 16 minutes. He brings me my food, I ask him where the sauce is—

Paul: I thought for a minute you were talking about employees. I’m like, oh, no. Okay, good.

Rich: How the idea,  it’s a—

Paul: You know what’s a weird one that, that thing I use, Lyft, you know, because I’m a good man.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And there’s an option to reconnect to the driver, like to like, get that driver back some day.

Rich: Is that true?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That’s nice.

Paul: Yeah. “If you want to ever use this driver again, we’ll, we’ll make them your preference.”

Rich: That’s nice.

Paul: It is. But I’m never going to do that, because I really like the anonymity of the transaction.

Rich: A little bit, yeah.

Paul: I just, I don’t want to make any new friends.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, there are articles about how, like, depressing Tinder and Hinge are. Like, there’s articles about that, too, because you’re just transacting, right? You’re flipping left and right. You’re swiping left, swiping right. Imagine you have decided to apply that same sort of quick transactional experience that is going to establish a relationship that could go on for years between you and other humans. Like, if you really pause—

Paul: It is madness, right? Because it’s almost, it points to this future where, “Okay, we’re going to automate this part of the relationship. Then we’ll automate all the other parts of the relationships. And what value are you saying you bring?”

Rich: Let me let all the applicants feel a little better here.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: You didn’t get rejected. Nobody decided you weren’t good enough. They just didn’t. There’s too many applications flowing through. You’re using the same template as everyone else, probably. You know, I can see them in my head right now. They are, like, three types of templates. There’s the serif one and the sans serif one. And the truth is, nobody decided you’re not good enough. They actually didn’t give you the time of day. They didn’t give you any real attention.

And that’s because of the sheer volume of what’s going on right now and how everyone’s trying to automate it away. You’re not ordering Pad Thai. They want to see—everyone on both sides wants to see effort, energy, and connection. And right now, what’s happened, it’s been crowded out by tools. And that is insane. That is actually fully insane.

And the article talks about how, like, “I think I need to go out and go to, like, mixers and events and connect with people,” and yeah, you should do that. It’s a good thing. It is how people connect. People connecting is going to still matter, because we’re a little depressed right now. Everything is crowding out all sorts of things that sort of build relationships and turning them into transactions.

Paul: I think what’s rough here is if you are applying for a job right now and dealing with processes like this, so it means, that tends to mean your relatively earlier career because you’re not able to focus on a particular space, you kind of got to go broad.

Rich: Yeah. And this is part of the sympathy you’re talking about from before. We saw these technologies come up and eat into how humans interact. There are young people who have no idea there’s another way.

Paul: I have bad news and I have good news.

Rich: Start with the bad news.

Paul: The bad news is that from my understanding of the tech industry and the way things go with platforms like this, we’re not done with this process yet. There’s going to be more and more AI automation, not less, for quite a while.

Rich: It’s going to get goofier.

Paul: Because people just choose to believe—and they’re wrong. I’m telling them straight up, they’re wrong.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’m telling them that as a person who uses this technology all day and you and I put some pretty big bets on where it’s going to land.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s not going to work.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What they’re doing is bad.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Don’t do it. But they’re not going to listen to me. That team at LinkedIn is nowhere near done with you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay. So that’s the bad news. Like, if you’re here and you’re competing with a bunch of AI, you’re going to have to find another strategy to stand out, because we can’t stop it. But the good news is that relatively soon, and I’m going to tell you, let me just take a step back. We have a podcast. We’re on it right now.

Rich: Yeah, we are!

Paul: I keep getting emails from people who want to, like, help me market the podcast or put guests on or all sorts of stuff.

Rich: Uh huh.

Paul: And they keep doing these really sharp, bright summaries of the most recent episodes. Like, “Hey, Paul, really liked what you had to say about—”

Rich: Oh no.

Paul: “Hey, Rich.” And like, the first one, I’m like, “Wow, that’s cool. They paid attention.”

Rich: And then you start to sniff it out.

Paul: But the 35th one.

Rich: [laughing] You’re not that popular?

Paul: No, I’m not. Right? And so, like, but here’s. Here’s what happened.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So two things happened. One is straight to the garbage, straight to spam. I’m blocking more now, because AI just makes it impossible.

Rich: So are HR recruiters.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Number two is the person who is sincere and real about this, who does listen to the podcast? Very, very hard for them to break through.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So we’re entering this world, and I know this is the good news part, we’re entering this world of essentially total distrust.

Rich: Yeah. Well, you’re going to call it distrust. Yeah. It’s non-trust.

Paul: You are going to attempt to build a relationship with me automatically.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You are going to have absolutely no respect for my time. You might think that that’s not a big deal, but times 30, times 40, times 100? It’s a really big deal. And my solution is always going to be as follows: Slice. You’re going to go away.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I’m going to block you, and I’m going to change my email address if it gets bad enough.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You can’t get through. And what’s happening is that the sort of downward pressure of this kind of communication and marketing?

Rich: Mmm hmm?

Paul: It’s always been there. There’s always been some automation since the web has been around. Right?

Rich: It’s just getting slyer.

Paul: And faster.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So that you see this take off. This is now a national or global story.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s only really been happening for a minute.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: This used to take years for people to kind of like—so what happens is we’re all building a much better immune system. And just what I’m starting to do, I’m seeing images, I’m seeing stuff, and I’m like, I can’t believe anything is real. I have to actually know the source, know it’s vetted, use my judgment.

Rich: An introduction by someone else.

Paul: There we are.

Rich: I mean, essentially, it’s not that we need human connection, just, like, in a sort of touchy-feely way. Here’s the thing. We can’t distinguish effort. How do I know you put a little bit of effort in?

Paul: I’m going to state the—and that’s, and everybody, you know, and we’re also coming out of this, like, phase of culture where everybody’s like, “I shouldn’t have to put effort in. You should acknowledge that I’ve done the work.” And so—

Rich: Like, talk about that for a second.

Paul: Well—

Rich: It’s a—that is, especially for young people, and I don’t mean this as a put-down. The idea of having to put that effort in is new.

Paul: Well, because what happened during boom times with zero interest rate was you, essentially job hunting became customer service.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? I have needs and wants.

Rich: Coming out of college into a six-figure salary.

Paul: That’s right. And so like, there was that assumption. You and I didn’t. We came out of college around the era, like, it was Clinton era. And then it went [recession noise].

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it was bad. It was, like, five bad years. I had one year, I made like, you know, $12,000. It was grim.

Rich: Well, I never went that bad, but—

Paul: Well, you’re more successful than me. [laughter] But like, no, it was right after, it was right after the crash. Yeah.

Rich: ’08?

Paul: No, no, no, ’08 was fine.

Rich: Oh, ’01. Yeah.

Paul: This is kind of normal stuff. It’s not a judgment on you. It was gravy train. It was gravy train for me for, like, the first year out of college because I could build webpages.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then kaboom.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? This isn’t your fault. You thought that—

Rich: I mean, we’re talking about 20 years of straight prosperity.

Paul: The problem is that everybody assumed that the arrow goes up, the line goes up. Bitcoin, everything, everything is a narrative of infinite growth.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And that’s because for a very few number of people, if they keep that narrative going, they’re really good at getting in and out and tapping, you know—but you’re kind of a cog in the machine? And now you got to go get a job. And I’m going to tell you just straight-up. Let’s fast forward, okay?

There’s all this mess. Everybody’s getting there. It’s just slop world all day. Here’s the simplest way to offer advice and counsel to people who are trying to figure this out. And this is executives and everybody else. You have to start building trust because we’re entering this incredibly low-trust environment.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: I don’t trust the resumes. I don’t, I know they’re going to be rewritten. I don’t know, honestly, there are all those, like, funny little stories of people who are working for companies, like, five companies at a time. There’s AI sort of coming in and doing the coding for you. There’s remote work. You know, there’s conversations about, like, are we going to observe people via camera while they’re programming so we know they’re not using AI?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? For better or for worse, large organizations—small organizations have to have trust because they’re small. Large organizations are going to start to build in all these new trust metrics because it’s so easy to get scammed in so many directions.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So how do you build trust so that you can go get a job?

Rich: Well, I mean… Good advice.

Paul: No, no, but that’s not advice yet, because nobody knows how to build trust right now.

Rich: I mean, that’s the problem. I was gonna throw it back to you. Let me be one of these job applicants.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I mean, I’m with you. I wrote it myself.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: My resume? I designed it. I designed it. It has, like, these cool, like, these bar charts about my different facets and skills.

Paul: Aw, man.

Rich: Have you ever seen that, Paul?

Paul: Do you know what an employer—

Rich: And the color scheme!

Paul: Yes.

Rich: It’s to die for.

Paul: You want to know what an employer wants to hear?

Rich: What?

Paul: “I will work really hard, and you can pay me less until I get good, and then I would hope you would pay me more.”

Rich: No one writes that.

Paul: No, but that’s actually the, like, I’m thinking of signals that cut through.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “Here is my portfolio. It’s on the web. I used AI here, but not here. I’d love to work with you.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “Hey, I know that it’s awkward to meet people in person, but I’d love to sit down and talk with you.”

Rich: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: “I can’t attend your event next Thursday, but could I come by some other time?”

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Over and over—

Rich: You’re telling people to put their pants on.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: This is radical.

Paul: The other thing, too, is duration, which is, you know, somebody recently reached out, and we’ll see how it goes, because it’s just a resume, but they’ve pinged me, like, three or four times over the last year.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They’ve said, “Hey, your company looks interesting.” And I was like, “We’re not really ready for you yet, but we are more ready for product managers right now.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so I was like, “Hey, that’s great. Send your resume over and I’ll forward it to the right person.” And then it’s up in the air. But, like, boy, did they get through.

Rich: You’re making a great point. Which is, first off, it’s still hard, because it’s so noisy out there. Like, even if you did write a good note and put together a good resume, it’s still going into the pile of 900. So there’s a different challenge there.

Paul: There’s also people—

Rich: I don’t want to tell people not to use Easy Apply or whatever it is, but it feels like maybe you shouldn’t. I don’t know.

Paul: You’re not getting a job with that. They’re just gonna—LinkedIn’s gonna waste your time and upsell you.

Rich: One of the things I look for when I meet someone for an interview—I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. I’ve hired hundreds of people. Is you can tell the effort they put into those 30 minutes is the effort you’re gonna get when they come on. Right? You can sort of get a sense of what they’re about and the level of energy and how leaned in they are just by—I’ve met brilliant people who were just so passively uninterested in the conversation, but, and I was like, “Wow, you don’t care. And you don’t, you’re not that interested.” And it wasn’t hurt feelings, like, “Wow, I’m gonna sign up for that long-term?”

Paul: You know, it’s one of the ones—that was also during the zero-interest-rate era. Like, people were just so confident.

Rich: Oh, my gosh!

Paul: And then you would realize, like, they don’t understand their craft or domain in any way.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They have a solid resume—

Rich: Look, people, look, I think ultimately, and this is, I’m going to go even more fundamental than getting a job. People like to feel important. Employers like to feel important. Just as applicants like to feel important and wanted and desired. “And I think what you’re doing is interesting, company.” Don’t pretend and kiss up, but, boy, it matters.

Paul: I tell you what, man, you know, we—you and I hire vendors. PR, recruiters, things like that.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And we also open our doors a lot. We have a lot of events. When those people come to the office.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Sometimes without a professional context, just to kind of check in.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That increases our estimation of them, like, 5x.

Rich: I used to have a rule. I was in sales—I’m not going to call it anything else—for many years. If you’re in the same town, you got to go. Don’t Zoom in across town. If you’re in the same town, go!

Paul: I gotta say, people have negotiated with us as to why that is not necessary.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I get it, and I get we went through the pandemic and so on and so forth, but the reality is that, and look, if you can go get a job without talking to anybody, God bless. Good for you. [laughter] But I will say, if you’re finding yourself at sea and finding yourself exhausted and overwhelmed by all these systems, the thing that’s missing is that connection. That’s why—and it just, everyone is like, “No, I just want to be here with my dogs. I don’t want to move to New York City or some other city. I don’t, blah, blah.” There’s a million reasons. I get it, and I hope it really works for you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But as far as I can tell, we’re entering into a world of pure slop where there’s incredibly low trust. And so you have to be in environments in which you can earn trust, show effort, and get people to commit to you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then you commit back. And that’s old-school. And I’m sorry. And it sucks, too, because it’s not like big companies are gonna be super loyal to you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, you’re still a cog in the machine.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But at least you can start to get some territory of your own.

Rich: Totally. There’s a theme that’s emerging here, which is, we have been calling it slop, but what it is is the commoditization of everything, right?

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Of images, of essays, of resumes, and the commoditization of you, and the relationships you have and the companies you could work for is lethal. Right? For everyone.

Paul: You need to, you need to reject it as soon as possible and figure out where your value is.

Rich: It’s your angle. It’s your angle.

Paul: It’s hard. This part’s hard.

Rich: It’s worth noting, Paul, we are in New York City. We like to throw events, so follow our newsletter. We often announce events where you can come and network, whatever the topic may be, other people show up, and it’s a cool, it’s a cool thing. We used to do it all the time at the old agency, and we’re gonna do it a lot here at Aboard.

Paul: No, and we’re building and growing, even though the West Coast keeps rolling its eyes at us. We are actually kind of on a little bit of a tear right now, so we’d love to hear from product managers, engineers, and designers from all over.

Rich: Yeah. And, I mean, we have a new role called Solution Engineer, but what it is is someone that’s taking that first call.

Paul: Yeah. That’s the product manager. That’s actually what I’m talking about.

Rich: Yeah. So hang in there.

Paul: Yeah. And just, like, it’s going to be okay. It’s just going to be another wild ride followed by more wild rides. That’s the life we’re in.

Rich: Yes. Paul?

Paul: Yes, Richard?

Rich: When you have a chance, give me five stars on your favorite podcasting app, please.

Paul: Absolutely.

Rich: I didn’t want that to sound too transactional.

Paul: No, it’s not transactional at all. It’s a relationship.

Rich: It is a relationship.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Sign up to the newsletter. Check out Aboard at aboard.com. And reach out. We’d love to talk. We like to talk.

Paul: You said everything. Try it. Go to aboard.com and send us an email at hello@aboard.com.

Rich: Have a wonderful week.

Paul: Building relationships.

Rich: Bye.

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