The fluorescent hum of the conference room was a physical weight. David’s eyes burned, not from fatigue, but from the sheer alien nature of the spreadsheet glowing on the 63-inch monitor. Each cell contained a number that felt both monumentally important and utterly meaningless. He was staring at a projected Q3 budget variance of negative $43,273, and the only thought in his head was about the elegant simplicity of a recursive function he’d been sketching out before this meeting was forced upon him. For 13 years, David wrote code. Not just code, but the kind of clean, efficient, almost poetic architecture that other engineers studied. He solved impossible problems. He was the go-to, the wizard, the one who could untangle any knot. So they gave him a team of 13 people, a budget, and a title: Engineering Manager. And in doing so, they had taken the one thing he was brilliant at and replaced it with a dozen things he was terrible at.

We are obsessed with a deeply flawed idea: that the reward for being good at a job is to stop doing that job. We take our best violinist and make them the conductor. We take our best chef and make them a restaurant administrator. We take our best salesperson and chain them to a desk to approve expense reports. Then we act surprised when the music

Trapped in the Digital Amber

The presenter’s voice is a low, hypnotic hum, the kind of sound you’d use to sedate a nervous animal. His name is Todd and he’s been talking for 26 minutes straight. The blue circle with his initials, TS, is the only sign of life from his end. On my screen, there are 46 black squares, each with a white name typed neatly at the bottom. Cameras off. Mics muted. This is the mandatory 6-hour training for ‘Project Synergy,’ a platform that promises to revolutionize how we collaborate. It looks exactly like the old platform, but the logo is a different shade of blue and now every action requires at least two extra clicks.

We’ve all been here. Trapped in the digital amber of a webinar, a silent hostage to progress. You feel the weight of your own skull, the slight ache behind your eyes. Your real work, the work that actually requires your brain, is piling up in another tab. You’re not learning; you’re enduring. This isn’t a workshop. It’s a compliance ritual.

Beyond the ‘Solution’ Facade